Innovation Theater.
Have you ever been guilty of performing innovation theater?
My guest today, Tendayi Viki, is a partner at Strategyzer (the company behind the business model canvas and other innovation tools) and defines Innovation Theater simply as:
Activities that look like innovation but that create no value for companies
So:
A workshop that creates enthusiasm with no follow up.
A Hackathon that doesn’t solve real challenges.
Training everyone in Design Thinking but changing no internal policies to encourage experimentation and prototyping.
I’ve been guilty of it.
How can we all do better?
This is a delicate topic, because it’s not wrong to want more people in your organization to “get” innovation and the practices that drive innovation. Then we’ll have buy-in to do more, right?
Useful=valuable
Without delivering sustainable economic value for a company, we’re just cultivating creativity for creativity’s sake. Tendayi tries to make the distinction clear, as he says:
“Creativity is generating novel things that are interesting. Innovation is novel things that are interesting that are also useful…[and that] usefulness, especially for corporations, is usually customer value, improved efficiency in the organization, but even better, a new business model, new revenue, or entry into new markets.”
Moving the needle
We have to be able to measure the impact at some point. Otherwise, your innovation lab will get shut down….and as Tendayi says, your boss was likely right in doing so.
But how do you get the right to start making waves in an organization, to make a real impact?
Tendayi uses the delightful metaphor of a Pirate in the Navy. It’s a goofy premise, but winds up being a very helpful way to think about how to build transformational innovation in an organization. The navy is the organization. You are the pirate. You want to get to experiment, go on adventures...but bring back value for the mothership.
Getting a Charter
Tendayi’s book is a secret guide to building organizational change. He guides us through the process of getting started, finding early adopters in the organization to trust us and let us get moving - by delivering value and being able to tell stories of early success.
Getting People on Board (not a checkbox)
Tendayi points out that in order to make anything worthwhile or significant, you need to collaborate with many folks across the organization and bring them into the innovation conversation as soon as possible.
As he says:
Nothing can ever succeed without being touched by other people who are not in the innovation lab. You can't (create innovation) without the marketing people touching your thing. You can't without the brand people touching your thing. You can't launch without legal and compliance turning up and (buying in).
So you can't really do any work, you can't go to scale without including these enabling functions. And we treat them like a checkbox. We work on our innovation and then when we're done, we go, "All right. Here it is. Can you get it out, please?"
And then they go, "No. We're not getting that out."
And so the fundamental question is, you really need to know, if your goal is to build an authentically repeatable process, all you need to do is know what are the things that they need you to do before they allow your thing to leave the building”
Innovation is a Conversation
This is why conversations and collaborating are the antidote to innovation theater - designing your process for impact and stakeholder engagement from the beginning.
How can you clarify and define impact for your organization?
How can you bring stakeholders together to clarify the guiding principles for innovation sooner in the process instead of at the end?
Enjoy the show. And good luck on your pirate voyage!
Links and Resources
Tendayi on the web https://tendayiviki.com/
Tendayi at the Innov8ers Conference: https://innov8rs.co/beyond-the-sticky-notes-aligning-innovation-with-corporate-strategy-tendayi-viki/
Tendayi’s latest book: Pirates in the Navy
More About Tendayi
Tendayi Viki is an author and innovation consultant. He holds a PhD in Psychology and an MBA. As Associate Partner at Strategyzer, he helps large organizations innovate for the future while managing their core business. He has given keynotes, run workshops and worked as a consultant for several large organizations including Rabobank, American Express, Standard Bank, Unilever, Airbus, Pearson, Lufthansa-Airplus, The British Museum, Copenhagen Fintech and The Royal Academy of Engineers.
Tendayi co-designed Pearson’s Product Lifecycle which is an innovation framework that won the Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York. He has been shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award and was named on the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List for emerging management thinkers to watch.
Tendayi has written three books based on his research and consulting experience, Pirates In The Navy, The Corporate Startup and The Lean Product Lifecycle. The Corporate Startup was awarded the 2018 CMI Management Book Of The Year In Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He is currently working on another book, Right Question, Right Time. He is also a regular contributing writer for Forbes.
Tendayi spent over 12 years in academia during which time he taught at the University of Kent where he is now Honorary Senior Lecturer. He has also been a Research Fellow at Stanford University and Research Assistant at Harvard University.
Full Transcript
Daniel Stillman:
All right. Tendayi Viki, welcome to the Conversation Factory, officially. We're live.
Tendayi Viki:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Daniel Stillman:
Thanks for making the time to do this. This has been a long time coming.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. Back and forth, right? Trying to get slots in the calendar.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's a tough challenge. And so you've got a new book coming out and I really want to unpack it because you're trying to start a conversation, I feel like. There's a conversation you want to start about what a real pirate is and how to be an authentic innovator. What's important to you about starting this conversation?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. So I mean, the reason why this is so important is because I think that a lot of entrepreneurs, especially when you're working inside large companies, at least for the last kind of maybe five, six years as innovation has become kind of a buzz, right? People are talking about it a lot. I think a lot entrepreneurs or innovators are doing a disservice to the mission, if you want to call it that, right? They're kind of doing stuff that's got nothing to do with anything that's really useful because it's cool. So let's have a hackathon or let's have a sticky note thing or let's have an idea competition. And that kind of lack of substance ... If it was just harmless stuff, that would be okay. I wouldn't worry about that. But actually, it's quite harmful because it makes people jaded about what innovation can accomplish inside large companies, and so when you go into that large company, leaders are just like, "Yeah, we've already done the innovation thing. It doesn't work," right? So that's a real problem for me, yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
So you talked about innovation theater. And it's funny, I don't know where or when I first started using the term innovation theater. I thought I invented it. I was so excited to hear someone else use the term innovation theater. So the flip side of authenticity, it seems like you're saying is innovation theater. What would you classify as this inauthentic theatrical innovation theater. And I love that you were on the stage at the Innovators Conference basically just blazing every ... You were just spitting fire at everyone. You were like, "Y'all are fakers."
Tendayi Viki:
That's not what I said. Don't be putting words in my mouth! No, no. Yeah. So, Steve [inaudible 00:02:37] at AV and he'd probably claim that he coined the term. He speaks a lot about innovation theater. Steve Blank would probably also claim that he coined the term innovation theater. Innovation theater is basically a bunch of activities that looks like innovation but creates no value for companies. The only reason we want to invest in innovation is so that we create, eventually, at some point, new growth and revenue. New products, new business models, the company expands, gets new divisions, gets more efficient, gets more digitized. The company has to get some value from all this innovation and so it's hard to see innovation theater.
Tendayi Viki:
Innovation theater is like a camouflaged movement, right? Because on the surface it looks like innovation until you dig deep. It takes all these practices of using sticky notes, design thinking, all these, they have a value, right? They didn't just come out of nowhere. They came out of an understanding that you have to work in this dynamic, flexible way to create something meaningful. But a lot of people don't understand the philosophy that drives the practice. They can only see the practice on the surface. So what they end up doing is engaging in the practice on the surface and then producing nothing of value in the end. Basically, I think they say in Texas, big hat, no cows. That's basically what it is, right? He's got a big hat but he doesn't have any cows. So that's, yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
I think it's a really interesting idea of the surface versus what's really going on. And how does somebody make sure that they are ... How do you define authentic innovation? Just to be really, really clear. It's creating real value for the company.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. Exactly. There's two parts to that, right? There is the only way we measure that an innovation has been successful ... Remember that innovation is slightly distinct from creativity. Right? Creativity is generating novel things that are interesting. Innovation is novel things that are interesting that are also useful. So the ultimate metric of whether something has succeeded as an innovation is how useful it's become. So usefulness, especially for corporations, is usually customer value, improved efficiency in the organization, but even better, a new business model, new revenue, or the [inaudible 00:04:53] into new markets. So an innovation succeeds only when it hits that high mark. Imagine if you're engaged in activities that don't even have that intention behind them. Right? Now that's a problem. You don't even intend ... That's not your play. Your play is to have an idea jam and then people will be inspired. And then that's what you've done and that's it. Right? And so that's a problem. That's where you need to see the innovation.
Daniel Stillman:
Right. Because I feel like you talk about this a lot. We often, in the innovation game, are like, "Well, we want to change the culture and we want to have a thousand flower bloom, we want everybody doing every day innovation all the time. And that I really hard to measure the output of that. It's very hard to measure the ROI of those kinds of efforts. They're facilitating design thinking workshops and leading start up workshops inside the organization and you talk about this, everyone feels totally energized in the workshop and they're high fiving you, they're high fiving me, and they're like, "Daniel, Tendayi, that was awesome." And then they go back to their regular jobs and then nothing happens.
Tendayi Viki:
Yep. They go back and sit right back at their desk and they can't apply what they learned. Right?
Daniel Stillman:
So I mean, I know for myself, it's interesting, you talk about the innovators who will fail and get fired in a couple of years are the ones that are angry, which I thought was really wonderful and I feel like, and I probably shouldn't be saying this out loud because this is being recorded, but I sometimes get angry and I'm wondering if the reason you wrote this book is because you also see frustrated with this arch of, "They're just going back to their desks and nothing is happening." How do you manage that experience for yourself because I imagine that has happened to you many a time?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. So that's the second piece of dealing with innovation theater. One piece is you have to be authentically interested in creating new growth. Now, one way to do this is to nurse one off innovation projects, hide them, protect them, make sure they're successful. There's people that are really good at doing that. But another way to do it is to go, "No, we actually need to have a bigger impact on our company and change it a little bit so that people can do these projects out in the open and do them in a really repeatable way so the company can do innovation in a repeatable fashion." And that's where leading Lean Startup training is just not enough. It's not enough to train people practices of business model design, experimentation, hypothesis testing, iteration, and all that. That's what they need to know in order to do innovation but what actually really matters is that they can then do it after the training.
Tendayi Viki:
And so we took focus on the training and we spent no time, zero time, on whether or not they can do it after the training. I mean, just an example, I'll just give you one example and everyone who listens to this will know because they've done this in their own organization. Accelerator programs inside large companies where we take people from their work, we bring them into the program for three months, they work on a business idea and then after three years of this you ask the guys who are running the program, "What happened to the teams after the three months?" And they have no idea. Right? So you just took people from their jobs for three months for what? It's like a holiday? Are they slumming it in the innovation ghetto? What are we doing? That's just insane.
Daniel Stillman:
But why do you think they're not tracking it? Is it lack of focus? Is it ... I won't prompt you with any other options. Why do you think that's happening?
Tendayi Viki:
I don't know. It's probably a mixture of a lack of knowledge, fear maybe, and also people probably don't feel that they have the power to change their organizations. So they feel quite blessed to have a little corner where they can do stuff for three months and then cross their fingers to see what happens after.
Daniel Stillman:
Again, you also talked about these multiple competing internal innovation ... Everyone is trying to carve out their circle of budget in a short win and yeah, maybe it's only for a year or two years and then they either flame out or they move on.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. There are companies where, there's one company that I'm working with at the moment where people get promoted for starting innovation projects but not making it successful. So you can always be the guy that's like, "Yeah, two years ago I did this appy thing. It's online now." They're like, "Oh, yeah. Great innovator. Here, you're now regional manager." And then that's it. The appy thing dies. You've leveraged it for your promotion. But it hasn't really created a value for the organization.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. So this is interesting and I wanted to make sure ... I'm knocking off our sticky notes as we go because we talked about before we started that the punchline of your book comes late, which is fine, I think. Defining-
Tendayi Viki:
I think it should come earlier, but yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
I don't disagree. Why are these three types of pirates ... Let's talk about the three types of pirates. Because I actually think this is a really interesting ... I love, as a conversation person, I love linguistic definitions. Why is it interesting and important to have people be aware of what type of a pirate are you? And are you really a pirate? And in fact, actually when I look at your definition, it sounds like you don't want people to actually be pirates because those are just lawless people just gallivanting about.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. Exactly. That's what's interesting. Right? Steve Jobs is the guy that said better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. But people don't really know that there's different kinds of pirates. Not all pirates are the same. And so just a regular pirate is just a criminal. They're probably in a gang. Okay. Maybe that's another-
Daniel Stillman:
They are a gang. They're a gang. They're a roving gang.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. A roving gang. They kind of own the east corner of the Atlantic Ocean.
Daniel Stillman:
They're red team.
Tendayi Viki:
But they're completely unattached to any legal institution, if you want to call it that.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Tendayi Viki:
They don't have an affiliation. So everything that they're doing can never be of value to any larger institution. They're just sort of living their own ... And that's a way to live, if that's what you want to do. That's a choice. But if you're working in a larger organization, to define yourself as that is totally counterproductive. That's never going to work because the moment you start becoming a pirate in that sense, you've basically defined yourself in opposition to the company you work for. You've basically positioned yourself to fight the company that you're working for. And I've never met a single innovator that successfully fought a company.
Daniel Stillman:
And won.
Tendayi Viki:
That they're working for.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. The company is bigger and stronger. The house wins.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. The only innovators who can fight the company are the people that founded the company. The rest of us, we can't really fight our own organization in that sense. So then you sort of start to dive deeper and I was having dinner with [inaudible 00:12:06], he's an Israeli innovator and I'd just gone to work with them in Tel Aviv and he just kept ranting of, "You don't want to be a pirate. You want to be an explorer." That's what he kept saying. "You want to be an explorer because at least explorers people care what they're doing." I was like, "That's a really interesting concept. Let me go look that up." The moment I went to look that up I was like, "Oh, man. There's actually a class of pirates called Privateers and Privateers are pirates that also roam the high sea but they do it on behalf of an institution. They're representing a government and their role is not just to raid any ship that's roaming the seas. Their role is to raid a specific ship from enemy countries. Right?
Daniel Stillman:
Right.
Tendayi Viki:
So when they come back with their loot, there's actually an institution ready to celebrate them. I mean, the most famous Privateers were knighted, Sir Francis Drake.
Daniel Stillman:
Sir Francis Drake, yeah.
Tendayi Viki:
Right? Sir Walter Riley. You know? These guys were pirates.
Daniel Stillman:
They were legitimate to England and they were illegitimate to everyone else.
Tendayi Viki:
To Spain, right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah.
Tendayi Viki:
And so that works in the sense that you want to be off somewhere doing something interesting that's not part of the main business but you want the main business to care about the outcome of what you're working on. Right? If people don't care about the outcome of what you're working on, you will find it very hard to scale innovation.
Daniel Stillman:
And there's this real ... This is what I think is interesting about this idea is that there's this fine line that people are walking between being lawless and being lawful and I have two sticky notes that I want to talk ... I want to talk about facilitating these enablers, second. But the first question is, it's interesting. There's this idea of how you obtain a commission and then there's this idea of how to facilitate innovation with resistors. You talk about, a lot of people ask you, and I I know people ask me, like, "Oh, how do I facilitate difficult people? These people who are haters about innovation, the resistors, the late majority, the lagers, they just don't get it." And it seems like your answer is, have some wins first. Don't actually try to facilitate them. So how do you win that commission to do your first win? How do you win to get the win?
Tendayi Viki:
How do you win to get the win? So, there's two parts to that, right? So there's the part where you're really lucky and your CEO gets it. Peter Mare in [inaudible 00:14:39] who was just like, "I'm going to appoint Co-CEO and the job of the Co-CEO is to drive innovation." So then you're lucky. You've got your commission, you've got your letter on the marquee, you're fine. You can start doing the pirate thing. It's legit. It's so legit, it's high ranking in the organization. Then you get the rest of us that are working in companies where we kind of have to slowly transform the company. We kind of have to be quiet revolutionaries, if you want to call it that. And so the only way to start a movement, is to have legitimacy. Right? If you really think about it, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, they had a strategy with that, which is they deliberately went to places where they would get beat up as a way ... They didn't go to friendly policemen.
Tendayi Viki:
Right? They deliberately went to places where they would get beat up because that visual of them getting beat up created the momentum for their movement. Inside large organizations, what creates the momentum for your movement is the legitimacy that you show that you can actually succeed with innovation inside that company. So what you want is the early win. The only way to get an early win is to work with early adopters. Now, it can happen but I've never been inside a company where there isn't one or two leaders that get it. One or two leaders that have been trying to build innovation practices, have been trying to find authentic innovators to work with.
Tendayi Viki:
Those are the people you want to find and help them succeed and help them tell their story throughout the organization. Because what you really want to do is, it's not a push thing. It's a gravity thing. You want people to actually be drawn to the movement rather than for you to try to push that out and so that is what we really recommend is find early adopters and in the book I really define what an early adopter is. It's based of Steve Blank's definition of an early adopter. They know the company needs to innovate, they understand the problem, they know we don't have it, they've been trying to hack innovation together. You'll always find people like that inside large companies. Those are the people you should try to work with.
Daniel Stillman:
They exist. And it's funny, I waned to ask you about early on in your book, I've actually never seen the four-way Vin diagram that you draw. I'm embarrassed to say because I feel like I should know it. It seems too good to not be famous. I mean, I've used viable, feasible. The second I came out of design school somebody drew the triple Vin diagram and they were like, "Oh, will people love it? Can we make it? Can we make money with it?" But there's this fourth circle which is adaptable. And when I first looked at it I was like, "Okay, that's interesting, Tendayi." But then it hit me that every company obviously has the current core that's working and then they should be working on a certain percentage of stuff that is adaptable to fundamental changes in the business environment, like the one we're having today. And so it seems like that's a great conversation to have with even people who are maybe not early adopters of what portion of what we're doing is adaptable.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. Absolutely. And so, and all this work emerges through the collaboration that I do with Alex [inaudible 00:18:15] and [inaudible 00:18:16] because I work as Strategizer and that's where this adaptability thing sort of comes together. And the concept there, and it's sort of featured in Alex's new book as well, The Invincible Company, and the concept there is that innovation works in two ways. There's invent innovation, which is you're inventing new things. And then there's also what we call shift, which is business model shift where you're improving, invent improve, where you're improving current business models. And the improvement of current business models is entirely focused on is this business model adaptive to this environment? Are there shifts that are happening around it that will cause it to become less adaptive? And so then you have to do the work to reinvent that business model and make it more adaptive. And that's where, actually, if you want to do early adaptive legitimacy work, that's the place to start. If you can show companies that you can reinvent stale brands and all that, it really builds up a nice momentum for the rest of the movement that you want to then take to the invent half of the portfolio.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. I think it's really cool. In one of your talks, you talk about facilitating the enablers. And I feel like this is something I really want to unpack because I'm a facilitator, you're a facilitator, everyone facilitates something and you broke down this process of, "Okay, get to know them, and then map their needs to the product of innovation process." And I was like, oh my god. So can you unpack this workshop you do with us? Because it seems like a blockbuster design for a very, very useful conversation.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. That's really interesting. Here's the thing that-
Daniel Stillman:
And who are these enablers when you ... Take us through, who are these people we have to get on our side?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. So remember the goal, right? Remember what we said at the beginning, which is, innovation is when something useful happens. So the product isn't revenue, right? Which means that innovation is the combination of really great ideas and a successful business model, a sustainably profitable business model with desirability, feasibility, viability, and adaptability in it. What that means then is there's nothing that can ever succeed without being touched by other people who are not in the innovation lab.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Tendayi Viki:
You can't without the marketing people touching your thing. You can't without the brand people touching your thing. You can't launch without legal and compliance turning up and going, "Sorry, but the data privacy, this, this does not fit." So you can't really do any work, you can't go to scale without including these enabling functions. And we treat them like a checkbox. We work on our innovation and then when we're done, we go, "All right. Here it is. Can you get it out, please?" And then they go, "No. We're not getting that out." And so the fundamental question is, you really need to know, if your goal is to build an authentically repeatable process, all you need to do is know what are the things that they need you to do before they allow your thing to leave the building? And so that's what the workshop does.
Tendayi Viki:
The workshop just says, if something is getting launched to scale in this organization, for you in legal and compliance, what are the things it needs to meet first? Then they'll list it for you. It needs to have this and this and this. It needs to meet this criteria and this law and stuff and they'll list those for you. And you go, "Okay, great. Well, here's our innovation framework. We start with discovery where we're just talking to customers, there's no product yet. Okay. Do any of this criteria apply?" "No, only this one." "Okay, so then we move that. Okay. Then we build the minimum viable product. We're not really selling it. It's just a prototype. Does this criteria apply? No? Okay. Which ones? These two. Okay." So after a while after having a conversation with them, they then start to see, "Oh, this is how these guys work. Now I don't have to be worried about them.
Tendayi Viki:
I know they're doing discovery, they'll follow these rules. I know that when they're doing their validation work, they follow these rules. And I know that when they start to accelerate their businesses and launch them to market, they'll follow these rules." And then we agree and that becomes the official playbook for legal and compliance. And now, innovators don't have to negotiate with legal and compliance every time they want to do something. They can just follow the agreed playbook and that makes it a repeatable process.
Daniel Stillman:
Is it hard to get those enablers into the room for that conversation, do you think?
Tendayi Viki:
Here's what's interesting. When they're invited, they're surprised. Because everybody is trying to avoid them. I remember in one workshop, the chief council of this large financial company says to me, "This is the first time that anybody working on anything in this company has brought us in early. Understand how we can make a contribution. They'd been treating us as a tick box before. And the conversations that happened in the background where people give each other advice about how to get things past us." Right?
Daniel Stillman:
Yes, no. There's an interesting parallel because design has craved a seat at the table my entire design career and designers hate being handed, "Here, design this, make it look pretty." And I feel like there's also a lack of empathy with engineers where they're like, "Well, we've designed something great and the engineers just, 'Blah, blah, blah.", they tell us no." It's like, "How early did you have your conversation with them?"
Tendayi Viki:
Exactly. Right? It's all part of the same thing and in those conversations, again, I'll just tell you, listen, this is a bank. There's no chance that you're ever going to run an experiment where you do X, Y, zed. And it's up to us as innovators to say, "Okay, that's a constraint and we use that constraint to design experiments that we can do." Right? And in that collaboration, you really start to see that you can really scale innovation and it's about building trust. We call it a bridge between innovation. That bridge is really important.
Daniel Stillman:
Let's talk about building more bridges because I feel like you also talk about ... And I've seen this so many times. Who owns the customer and who's allowed to talk to them? There's so many clients, big companies I've worked with, where they're like, "Well, we're just not allowed. We're literally not allowed to talk to customers. We're just not allowed. There's legal issues if we talk to them." And they're like, "Oh, well, there's ways around it." And this is especially at banks. There's laws that protect what you're allowed to tell people and what you're allowed to say to them and when.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. And pharmaceutical companies, they're not allowed to talk to patients directly because again, selling medicines. Right? So yeah. There are rules around that and you have to figure out a way to ... For every single one of these situations, by the way, every innovation team I've worked with has eventually figured out a hack.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes.
Tendayi Viki:
We can't talk to customers but we're allowed to use a proxy to talk to customers and that proxy can give us data. So that's a hack. Right? We can't talk to customers except if we go on a sales call with someone and maybe the sales guy, sales director, can plug in these two questions for us. And then you go out with the sales guy. So most people I've worked with have figured out a hack. It's just about figuring out those sort of ways to get into those situations. And I think it's reasonable. Can you imagine ... So this is a story, I need to tell you this story. I was working at this company once. A large company. A Fortune 100 company and one of the guys was launching a product and then he built a landing page to test where the customers would want the page. And then he launched the landing page with the company brand and everything. and then one client, one customer saw this and really loved it but rather than do the experiment, which was respond to the landing page, he called sales.
Daniel Stillman:
He was like, "This is great. I heard you're blanking this blank."
Tendayi Viki:
Exactly. I heard you guys are launching this thing. And sales is like, "I don't know anything about that. Where'd you see that?" And then the salesman goes, oh, and there was hell in the company. This guy was raked across the coals. That's why a bridge to call is really important because when you're doing that, other people need to know you're doing that.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. You can't just ask for forgiveness, which is instead of permission.
Tendayi Viki:
You can ask for forgiveness once but-
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. Not after.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
It's a pickle because navigating this bridge to the core and building that bridge to the core is not ... I'm sitting here wondering, we haven't really talked too much about you as a person, you and your origin story. Because it seems like you're bringing a very human and empathic side. Not for nothing. You have a background in studying humans.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. I have a PhD in psychology so I used to be, in the US they call them professors but here they just call them lecturers. I was a psychology professor for [inaudible 00:27:25] College. And then I got a fellowship at Stanford University and then I was living in Palo Alto and that's what got me into the innovation start up. It was in like 2009, 2010. Right at the peak, right at the beginning of [inaudible 00:27:40], Steve Blank. And so that was an interesting thing and that's how I ended up working in the movement and then just by chance getting asked to try and help large companies apply the principal. It was totally by chance. And then kind of just pattern recognition. Seeing things I kept seeing over and over and over and over. And that's what the book, Pirates or the Navy, is based off of that. A lived frustration.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. It's a real frustration and how did you sort of wind up in the Strategizer family? Everyone who's listening to this can't see behind you. There is a value proposition canvas on the wall below a business model canvas and underneath the value prop canvas, is that a lean experiment canvas? I can't tell from here.
Tendayi Viki:
That's a culture map.
Daniel Stillman:
That's a culture map curtesy of Alex and Dave Gray, one of my heroes.
Tendayi Viki:
You can see what I'm drawing on the wall there, those are the circles on the value prop.
Daniel Stillman:
There's a lot of value proposition canvases.
Tendayi Viki:
The customer profiles.
Daniel Stillman:
You're living the gospel over there, 100%.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. I'm emersed in it. I dream about it when I go to bed. Yeah. It's just through meeting at conferences and just talking and reading each other's books and just kind of collaborating. Then we just started talking about would we ever want to work together and then it morphed to would you join Strategizer? And then it morphed to, why not? And then it morphed to, this is great, I love it. And so that's how I ended up. I'm in my second year now. It's pretty cool.
Daniel Stillman:
Oh, wow. So it's kind of new. So I think this is actually a really interesting bridge to the innovation process as product because I found, it's really interesting, this idea of having a narrative and having a story. And I felt for a long time that the design thinking process is a story and companies tell the stories that we're using this process and we're making these wins and some companies want to build their own and some companies want to hack and munch what's out there and other people want to buy a name pair brand of designer jeans. They want to put on some nice Strategizer jeans and be like, have you checked out my new hot ... And not for nothing. There's trends and there's things that become hot and then not. Can you talk about these? If innovation process is a product, what does it mean to navigate the trends and the ebb and flow of one versus another?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. So that's interesting, right? Again, what I care about the most is the truth behind everything. What I care about is what works and what doesn't work. So that's the orthodoxy. The orthodoxy is that we understand from research and years of experience that you need to have developed deep empathy for customers before you design the product. If you understand that, regardless of where you start, you could start with a great technology, eventually just align with the customer needs. You could start with customer needs and eventually you have to ... We know that. So for me, as we design innovation frameworks, as long as there are really true expressions of the underlying principles, it doesn't really matter what you call them, right? And people are making their own things and renaming them and re-hacking them and giving them names but they all pretty much sometimes do the same things.
Tendayi Viki:
Some of them work, some of them don't work, so it's really just about choosing the things that are truly authentic. When you're leading a transformation movement inside the organization, the only reason why you need to name the innovation process is for storytelling. So some people can say, right now we're implementing X Process and the value of X Process is that it allows us to take these 10 ideas, test them, remain with five, test those, remain with three and scale those. And then you go, okay, that's a growth funnel or that's an accelerator. So you name it and then people can say, "What stage of the accelerator is thing thing in?" And so that becomes a way to shift hearts and minds. Right? And so because what people don't recognize is that even a religion of artifacts and practices. Right? If we don't ... Even Judaism, we will not build an alter.
Tendayi Viki:
You cannot build a statue of God and represent God, right? Even in that there are rituals and practices. There's the Torah, there's the Synagogue. So the way we feel that we're part of something is manifesting the way we embody that in our day to day work. And so all the stuff you see, the value proposition canvas, the business model canvas, the design thinking framework, all of these are just a way for people to embody abstract concepts and make them concrete. So we designed it in a way that allows them to do it physically. And then it allows them the thinking that underlies those two.
Daniel Stillman:
Let's dig into this. It's so interesting because I feel like we've definitely had an explosion of canvases. I'm sure you've seen the canvas canvas, which is amazing.
Tendayi Viki:
I have not. I'm going to Google it.
Daniel Stillman:
You can Google it. The Canvas Canvas. And I mean, I remember when the business model canvas book came out. It was a blockbuster and my fiance who just finished business school, today actually, she's in the other room finishing her business degree because everything is remote. I was like, she had no business background. She was coming in from sustainability and agriculture. I was like, just read ... Here's The Business Model Canvas book. This is the most simple, visual, straightforward way of understanding something. And that white on gray, Alex designed that canvas and what is the power of a canvas? To focus conversation. Let's unpack that. It's an artifact, it's this moment. It creates a space.
Tendayi Viki:
It creates a space. One of the principles of Strategizer artifact design is a space, right? A space to work. But not only a space to work but the space represents something specific. So you then get a shared language. So if I take a sticky, if I put it in one box, it represents a customer segment. If I move it and put it in another box, it represents value proposition. And so just that shared language is really important for focusing people and having them absorbed into the same design space and see the boundaries of their design space and then work within those things. Now, the hard thing about defining design spaces like that is that ... You know what they say about that. The map is not the territory-
Daniel Stillman:
My mom always says that. It's really true.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. But you need it to be representative enough that it allows you to navigate the territory in a sensible way. And so just understanding that the map is not the territory but still, you do need the map to navigate the territory and then you need to design your maps in such a way that once you put the boundaries on, you haven't excluded something that's really important that will them and sort of kill people if they don't figure it out.
Daniel Stillman:
What I'm absorbing and what I think one of the reasons why people should read your book is that stakeholder, people talk about stakeholder management but this is more about stakeholder empathy and stakeholder engagement because you really talk about crossing the chasm as an innovation ... I mean, you basically use it as a canvas. Right? The crossing the chasm of who's your early adopters? Who's your early, late, and laggard majority? What is your strategy for each one of those people? How do you facilitate innovation with those people effectively?
Tendayi Viki:
Exactly. I featured it in the book but it started off as an article on Forbes. My least clicked on article on Forbes.
Daniel Stillman:
I know. It's amazing.
Tendayi Viki:
In defense of middle managers who stifle innovation. That's my least popular article.
Daniel Stillman:
I haven't read that one yet and it sounds like it's about empathizing with the fact that they are stuck and pulled.
Tendayi Viki:
In the middle, right? They're stuck in this place where the CEO is asking them to deliver numbers. That's how they're measured and promoted. that's their career trajectory. And then the CEO is going over their heads and talking to the organization saying, "We need more innovation." And then the innovation teams are coming to the middle manager and going, "Hey, look at my crazy new idea." And the middle manager is never going to work on that because that shows up on my P&L as cost and I can't invest in anything that shows on my P&L as cost.
Daniel Stillman:
That's my bonus, yo. That's not okay.
Tendayi Viki:
Right. So this is all misaligned incentives. And then everyone is like, "The middle managers don't get it. The CEO wants innovation." It's like, that's not fair. The moment you start to empathize and really understand the context in which you're working, you're far more likely to be able to build great bridges and collaborate better with people.
Daniel Stillman:
I mean, we're talking about making space with canvases and you also talk about making space for innovation in the org chart, in the budget. Not just having a lab space. Can you talk a little bit about how we can make that space if we don't have the wins yet? How do we win that space to do all that stuff?
Tendayi Viki:
You can't. You can't make the space without the wins. The wins are the thing. Without an early win, you can't make the space. When you're doing the early win thing, it's a gorilla movement. You're not picking the fight with the organization yet. The early win is what gives you the legitimacy to start asking for space. And what we tend to do as innovators is we ask for space before we have legitimacy which make it easy for us to be dismissed. Right? Where if you're succeeding inside the company, it's very hard for you to be dismissed. I mean, innovators get dismissed by simple questions like, where have you seen this work? And they go, at Amazon. Right? It's like, well this is not Amazon. This is a pharmaceutical company. If you haven't done it, no. Have you ever done it here? No. Do you know anyone who has done it here? No. Okay, so what makes you different from the last consultant that was here two years ago that made us do this thing and it didn't work? And that's a legitimate question. They're not being unreasonable. There's money on the line, careers on the line, risks on the line. That's a legitimate question so we need to be authentic and humble enough to answer that question with data. Just like we ask startup teams to do.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. This idea that there should be space in the org chart, a career path for innovation, is a really great call to action but it does seem like a long way off.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. It is a long way off but it's also a long way off for a couple of other things. Right? For a couple of other reasons. And every reason in the startup way touches on something that's really fantastic that I kind of thought about and he calls it the missing function. Which is that most organizations don't have an entrepreneurship function just like a marketing function or an HR function or a finance function and so the reason why innovation struggles at the moment is because it's not yet professionalized in the same way that finance is. And in the same way that marketing is. Right? So you can imagine in the beginning, back in the day and 250 years ago or whatever when marketing wasn't a function, and it took people working in that discipline to develop it into a disciple, into a profession and give it legitimacy and that's what we're trying to do here. We're trying to do the same thing. We're trying to build tools and we're at the basement of all this. Some stuff is going to filter out and die and some stuff is going to survive because it's good. And then in the end we'll level out to this place where innovation is actually a function inside organizations, an entrepreneurship function, whose job is to create new growth.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, it seems like, I love that we're just getting to all my favorite topics because there's making it a legitimate part of the organization where there's people who are professionalized and then there's this idea of people who coach others on how to use it. And I'm wondering where, if you can talk to us a little bit about how we can develop our coaching mindset. How you've developed your coaching mindset because there's doing innovation on behalf of the company and then there's coaching people to come along and to start doing it all together.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. So that's interesting and that's kind of a terrible business model to have, right? Sort of design yourself our of consulting gigs. Help companies build their own coaching capabilities. But I think it's really important to be able to do that.
Daniel Stillman:
I find it very satisfying. It's much more satisfying than doing it all for them. Just me, personally.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes. Exactly. I think it's much more satisfying. It's also much more value for them, right? Because they can actually end up using it. And the thing I like this kind of idea of avoiding the advice trap if you're coaching. And so I've seen leaders do this to innovation teams, where innovation teams are pitching something and then they start giving advice. Have you thought about mobile? Now, the thing they forget is that when you're a leader, just saying that is not advice. It's an instruction. People experience that as an instruction. So now they go away and they think about, they start thinking about, what's our mobile strategy? Whereas for you, it was a throwaway comment. And so coaching is really about helping people, extracting the best out of people themselves and helping them find their own kind of rhythm and passion and knowledge and the things that interest them. Right?
Daniel Stillman:
How have you developed your own coaching capacity? Because that's not a natural approach to some people because we're generally paid to be smart and to be experts and to give advice. Right? And so how have you expanded your own coaching capacity in yourself for your clients.
Tendayi Viki:
I'm not very good by the way. I'll tell you right now. I always end up ... One girl was like, why do you always end up in a rabbit hole? Because I always end up getting dragged down some debate. It could be because I'm so passionate. So I'm not really that great but there's one thing that I do have, which is I do have an empathy with the notion that it's not unreasonable for reasonable people to disagree with me. Right? It's not that they're idiots and they don't get it. It's just that, there's nothing that I've done in the world that makes what I say make sense more than another person's thing. So being disagreed with is not a problem in the sense that that's how you start to build conversations. So some people are really nervous about it but I actively seek dissent.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. And creating that space for that is really powerful.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. Really, really powerful because sometimes people just want to get heard. They just want to rant. They just want to say I'm tired of all this innovation stuff. The last guy who came here made us do a design thinking workshop. We debated ideas and then nothing happened. So why it's going to be different about you? And that's all they want to say and then after that, they're an ally. Great. So just make space for that to happen. You know?
Daniel Stillman:
It's so funny because now we're getting into another one of my favorite topics, which is self management. Right? I think a lot of people say, how do I deal with these people who are pushing back against it? And it sounds like you're saying you just need to hear them.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. You just need to hear them. And that's fine. Some of them will never be early adopters. That's okay. And some of them will be early adopters. Here's what's interesting. Let me tell you this story, right? Just one last story for you. There was only one workshop in my life where after the workshop, I literally sat down, crouched over like this, really crouched over, just looking to the floor, and I was so tired and I felt like I had completely failed. In that workshop, pretty much everybody in the room had pushed back on one concept or another that I was trying to share with them. I was convinced that I had failed.
Tendayi Viki:
And while I looking down like this, people are crowding around me going, "Yo, man. That was the best workshop ever. I really enjoyed that. That was wonderful. I've never been to a better workshop than that." And what happened from that was that there was a lot of flow of work in the room, 50% were detractors, I never saw them again. They gave me the hardest time. The other 50% were like, I want to work with you. I want to bring you to my team. I want you to coach my team. I want to bring you to this. I want to ... And then a lot of work flowed from that hard situation. And so I learned that it's not personal. They don't live at my house. We're at work. People are trying to figure out how to make things work for them in their careers.
Daniel Stillman:
Yeah. And accepting that dissent is okay.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
If we create a safe space for it.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
Well, Tendayi, we're at the end of our time. I have one sticky note left that I want to ... What haven't we talked about that we should talk about? That's my favorite ending question. And then I have one more sticky note about facilitating iterative strategy that I feel like we have to talk about. Because it's a mystery but is there something that's on your to talk about list that we have not addressed yet?
Tendayi Viki:
No. Actually, I think we went through quite a bit. I think, yeah. We spoke about a lot of stuff so we're pretty cool, I think.
Daniel Stillman:
So what can you tell us about facilitating iterative strategy? Because I think this is one of the blocks in innovation is that we need the 35 page business plan, and we need to have a five year horizon, and sometimes we have to get that pretty early on. So what would it look like if we knew how to facilitate iterative strategy with our stakeholders?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. One of the conversations I have with stakeholders is, do you want somebody to make something up right now with no evidence? Or do you want to give them space to get you the evidence and it's almost like a trap question because the answer is always, I'd rather they had evidence. That's always the answer. That's a leading question. And then I go, okay, so rather than give them two million dollars right now, how much would you be willing to pay for to get the earliest evidence?
Daniel Stillman:
That's a great question.
Tendayi Viki:
Okay, I'll give you 25 grand to see what you come back with. That's it. You're already building an innovation framework. Right? And so there's 25 grand, what kind of evidence do you want for it? What are the answers you want to get from this? Well, I want to know what customers are willing to pay. I want to know the real problem is, is there a real market out there? Here's the 25 grand, you bring me that evidence, then we can talk. It's like verbal jujitsu, right? They've kind of told you what they want for their 25 grand and then you go get that for them and then they decide whether they're going to give you the next 500 grand. Whatever. Right? But that's really how you do iterative strategy. It's really just about deciding how much you're willing to invest to get the first steps of learning and then how you want to use those learnings to make the next set of decisions and make the next set of decisions and make the next set of decisions.
Daniel Stillman:
Those are great jujitsu questions. Would you like me to give you a made up answer now or would you like some real numbers?
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah.
Daniel Stillman:
That's great.
Tendayi Viki:
If that's the question, no give me the made up ... I don't have time for evidence. Give me the made up numbers. They're never going to tell you that, right? So that's really how you have these conversations and build these bridges.
Daniel Stillman:
Yes. And slowly pirate your way through the Navy.
Tendayi Viki:
Yes.
Daniel Stillman:
Tendayi, thank you so much for the time. I'm glad we made this happen. It's really great stuff and I think, I hope that people read your book and become less innovation theater and more authentic innovation. That would be great.
Tendayi Viki:
Yeah. Thank you, Daniel. Really, really enjoyed the conversation.
Daniel Stillman:
Thank you, man.
