The Innovation Misstep. Redirecting Focus for Meaningful Outcomes: Cris Beswick

Cris Beswick (00:00.00)

Senior leaders have to recognise, we all have to recognise that innovation isn't just about new products. It's not just about technology. The amount of companies that I go into where they say, Cris, you know, our innovation program is not working. We're not getting the return on the investment for innovation. And I sit down in the boardroom and they present me their digital transformation strategy. And I'm like, okay, what's this? Well, this is our innovation. And it's like, no, it’s not!

Or similarly, I'll get presented with an innovation strategy that's just not paying off and all it is a quest for new products. Leaders have to understand that innovation drives and enables every part of an organisation, not just R &D or new product development. It can solve complex challenges for every part of an organisation like HR, like sales, like efficiency, logistics. It's a capability. It's not a department. 

Siân Harrington (00:00.58)

Hey everyone. Welcome to Work’s Not Working, a show about forward thinking people leaders, innovators and academics and how they think we can fix work to make it more meaningful, healthy, inclusive and sustainable. Brought to you by The People Space. This month I'm speaking to innovation expert Cris Beswick about why we are approaching innovation all wrong and how if we focus on the right things, we can not only make our organisations more innovative but empower our people at the same time. 
 
 In a recent survey, there was near unanimous agreement amongst business leaders that innovation is urgent and critical to business success. But because of economic uncertainty, fear, and outdated business practices, few are able to capitalise on the opportunity innovation offers. Nearly two -thirds of leaders said fear gets in the way of pushing harder to innovate.

And 58 % said their company is afraid to prioritise innovation. Nearly a third of leaders worry about derailing their careers or damaging their reputations if innovation projects don't succeed. But the thing is that innovation is not just a nice -to -have, it's vital if a business is to thrive, let alone survive. So what is going wrong with the way innovation is being approached? 

My guest today, Cris Beswick, is well -placed to speak about this. Based in London but working internationally, Cris is a visiting Professor of Innovation at several of the world's leading business schools and a regular keynote speaker at Global Innovation Conferences. He is also co -founder of the boutique innovation advisory firm Outcome and co -author of the best -selling book, Building a Culture of Innovation. Cris sits on the advisory board of several organisations, including the Global Innovation Institute.

And he has helped some of the world's most ambitious CEOs, leaders, companies, and governments solve their most complex innovation challenges. He is also a pioneer in the field of measuring innovation maturity. So I began our discussion by asking Cris how exactly he defines innovation. 

Cris Beswick (00:03.13)

The definitions of innovation that we hear or that we see don't really, they're quite weak. One of the perspectives I've always had though is that the definition of innovation should 1) be really, really clear. So things like turning creativity into value. It's just, what does that mean? It might be great for the strategist sat around the table creating that phrase, but for every person in our organisation, how do they fathom out what that actually means? So for me, we've always worked on the basis that the definition should be a usable tool. For me, the definition is about four things.

So innovation is about and should be about the introduction of things that are new or different. Innovation isn't about putting another element on the periodic table. It's not about creating something that never ever existed before. So it can either be new and or it can be just something different or something applied in a different way. So that's the first thing, new or different. So it's got to be intriguing. It's got to be different. 

The second thing is it must solve a genuine problem. So there must be a problem, an opportunity, a pain. If we look at things like value proposition design, we talk about pains and gains. So the second component is it must solve a genuine problem. 

The third part is, and again, referring to value proposition design, I think innovation is about making things better. So it's not just about solving the problem. It's then about the third component. What else do we add? How cool, how great, how accessible, do we make it, et cetera. 

And then the fourth thing is, and I'm very, very careful with this definition, not to talk about ROI or money or something fiscal, which is always the thing that gets tagged to innovation. So the fourth component is, as the creator of the solution, what do we get? What's in it for us? So the definition for me is, we are innovating when we're creating solutions that are new and different, that solve genuine problems, that add value over and above the solution and that generate a return for us as the creator. 

Siân Harrington (00:05.23)

We hear about innovation a lot these days. Why is it so important to, for organisations to focus on it now? Is there anything that's changed? I think we're seeing increasingly short lifespan of businesses. We've seen obviously what people call disruptors, if you like that word or not, but people taking, changing the business model. There's a really big focus on innovation, but do you feel it is more important than ever? 

Cris Beswick (00:05.48)

There's a couple of angles to answer that. One of the things I'm quite well known for is my refreshed version, if you like, of Drucker's culture eats strategy for breakfast. In a linear world, which was, let's say pre-Lehmen Brothers, right? I think that quote, culture did eat strategy for breakfast. So with everything being equal and everything being linear, two companies doing the same thing with the same customers, same market, same price point, almost identical products. One company with an exceptional culture was more likely to outperform the other. Fast forward 10, 15 years, we now live in a demonstrably nonlinear world, more disruption, more turmoil, that VUCA world that people talk about, and therefore the need for greater creativity, the need for different business models, different perspectives, different ways of working. Yes, different products, services, experience way, way more important than ever before. And innovation, creativity, et cetera, they are the antidote to that challenge. So I just think it's become as a tool and a capability, it's become more important than it was say, you know, 10, 20 years ago. 

If I sit the global head of business growth and sales and growth down in a boardroom and say, right, Dave, what does innovation mean for you? If your organisation builds demonstrable capability to innovate, what does it mean for you? And Dave's going to say, well, sales growth, market share, we're going to hit our targets, et cetera. The typical metrics by which organisations say, this is why we need to innovate. 

Looking at your audience, if I then sit the global HR director down and say, Deborah, what does innovation mean for you? She's going to say, it's great that Dave wants to focus on product, but what innovation means for me is talent retention, higher engagement, more creativity, happier workforce, better wellbeing and talent acquisition, ie I am going to be able to recruit the best human people into our business. That's what having a culture of innovation means to me. 

Siân Harrington (00:08.06)

Picking up on the first element of that, do you think it's actually broken? We don't seem to have that much true innovation, not just on the product, but you also talk about innovation in leadership, strategy, management, culture, processes. Is it broken? Why is it not moving as much as it should do? 

Cris Beswick (00:08.25)

For me, a really efficient innovation system and ecosystem needs lots of ingredients, but there are five core pillars, strategy, processes – ie the tools that we use, governance and accounting –­ so how we fund it, how we measure it, what governs the decisions we make – culture and leadership. 

One of the challenges is leadership development is broken. Leadership development 20 years ago, might have been absolutely on the money. And I say that having taught at business schools around the world. Leadership development that I see senior execs being put on is still teaching them how to lead the business of yesterday and it's not teaching them how to shape the future. And that saddens me because in the components that innovation requires and the culture of innovation requires, leadership is arguably one of, if not the key component. So I think we have to teach leaders not how to become innovation leaders. It's not about them being innovators per se. 

The language I use is I teach leaders how to lead for innovation. And that narrative all comes from we view innovation as an outcome. We don't view it as a thing that you can have or buy more of or do. It's an outcome of lots and lots of different things. 

The other component that you mentioned is for the past decade, it's been a marketing person's dream. So we've bastardised the word, devalued it. Every man and his dog is now innovative. 50% of straplines on all corporate branding materials say they're innovative. So we've peppered every business report, every website, every strategy document with the word innovation. And what we need to do, the bit that's broken is we need to re-inject value back into the word by defining it properly and genuinely helping organisations innovate. 

The first step to that is the innovation is a badge that should only be bestowed upon us by our customers. What I mean by that is we cannot self profess to be innovative. The marketing department can't say, Hey, we're about to launch this new thing. Let's say here's our new innovative thing. Right. Its innovativeness is an outcome of whether that product is a success, whether it's taken up by the market, whether customers go, hey, wow, that thing that you've just done is phenomenal. They're flying off the shelves and we've lost sight of that. That's what we're all in business to do, right? To create great things, great experiences for customers where they vote with their purchasing power or they now vote on social media and they go that thing that that brands just done this phenomenal. I've just bought two, am telling all my friends about it. We're going to go back and do more. That is the outcome that we're looking for. Now, whether they label it what we do innovation on is irrelevant. The outcome is what we want as organisations. And we've lost sight of pursuing that because we just labelled everything innovative. 

Sian Harrington (00:11.44)

Yeah. And often innovation gets put in a little pigeonhole. It's in that R &D department. It's in its silo or maybe it's a venture that's been invested in that sits outside the business. And there's some very famous examples of that and that working well. Do you think that's the wrong approach or is it horses for courses? Is innovation everyone's job? 

Cris Beswick (00:12.03)

So let's take the R&D component. If you look at all, and don't quote me on the exact numbers, because I don't know what's on top of my head, but if anyone Googles the world's top R&D spenders compared to the world's most innovative companies, they don't correlate. The biggest R&D spenders in the world aren't even on the list of the most innovative companies. So there's a real disconnect there between the perception that innovation is about R&D and the reality, which is it's not. 

The question about is innovation everyone's job? My binary answer is no. And the reason that I say that is fundamentally innovation is about people. It's about culture and it's about what our people give us over and above what we can contractually make them do as part of their job. We can contractually make them turn up to work, perform to a certain standard, comply to regulations, all of those things. What we can't do is contractually make someone be creative. We can't contractually make someone be more innovative. Those are all, those are what I call the willing contribution. So we have to build environments where our people want to and are capable of and are enabled through upskilling and tools and things like that, where they're able to contribute to innovation. 

What you can't do is get to the end of the year and say to every employee in the organisation, we're going through your annual appraisal and we're now we've got to the bit about innovation. So, have you innovated this year? Not everyone's going to come up with amazing ideas. Not everyone's going to be able to solve problems. But what everyone can do is what we say, contribute to the innovation agenda. So they can support teams that work in innovation. I can say, I know my colleague is working on innovation team. They're really stretched at the minute. I'm going to say, look, I'll take an hour of your work this afternoon to enable you to spend an hour solving that problem. That's contributing to the innovation agenda. And that behaviour we can measure and incentivise and reward. So I don't think innovation is everyone's job, but I think contributing to the innovation agenda is everyone's job and we can reward and recognise that behaviour. 

Sian Harrington (00:14.22)

You mentioned the innovative companies or lists of innovative companies, and I'm sure we could guess some of the big names out there, a lot of techie ones, I'm sure. As you said, they aren't just innovative in product. They look at their processes, their leadership, the way they do everything from appraisals to hiring their talent. We tend to lionise these unicorn companies. Everyone's trying to disrupt and become one of them. What are the chances of that? I think pretty small. And secondly, where does the idea of this day-to-day incremental innovations sit in this? Is that meaningful at all? 

Cris Beswick (00:14.56)

The first question about the unicorns, they're sexy. It's amazing. A young 20 year old guy has an idea and within three months he's a trillionaire. It's great, but they are few and far between. The challenge is when we're talking about people, when you look at the first several years or even maybe decade of those organisations, culturally, they are horrendous, like tyrannical, like acidic, just horrible places to work. So if you're a leader, do you want to build a billion pound business, but it's horrendous? Or do you want to build a 150 million pound business with the potential to be a billion pound one but it's absolutely amazing and everyone wants to come work for you? 

The challenge then around those unicorns is we see organisations then looking at the Ubers and the Airbnbs and things, and the big corporates then go, well, we need to do that. But the dynamics that build a unicorn are completely different than a 25 ,000 employee, 100,000 employee global brand that's been around for 50 years. You cannot build those inside. You have to do it externally. There are very, very few organisations I've seen that have successfully said, go out and do that because what you're then doing is you're then looking for the end of the rainbow. The people that have built those unicorns didn't set out to say, we're going to build a unicorn, we're going to disrupt and we're going to be radical. They just set out to solve a problem as they saw it. 

Most corporates will say, well, we've been trying to innovate for a decade or however long, and we've done loads and loads of stuff, but we haven't shifted the needle. So what we're doing mustn't be good enough. It mustn't be right. It's just continuous improvement really, if we're being honest. So, we've now read all the books and we've listened to all the Harvard business professors and all the language we keep hearing is we must be radical and we must be disruptive. So the corporates that I've seen then set out on this quest to be radical and disruptive and they never, ever, ever find anything. They never do it because what they fail to understand is you've got the world's best venture capitalist firms are looking for the next unicorn. They live and breathe finding startups and finding tech entrepreneurs and seeking these people out and backing them. And they only find one every several years. So what makes corporates think that they can do a better job of the world's best venture capitalists, right? They just can't. 

So what happens is you end up with what I call innovation polarisation. You end up with an organisation that says, we're doing tons of work here on the left -hand side of the scale. And they call it continuous improvement. That in anyone's definition is incremental innovation. So they're already doing innovation, but they don't talk about it and they don't celebrate it. So the organisation itself thinks, well, we're not doing anything. And then what happens is you get polarised activity when it doesn't drive massive growth because typically it's internal. The quest to be radical or disruptive doesn't materialise every year, every month. It might be every two or three years. And also it doesn't change culture. You don't need a leadership change to do that because it's only five or six people at the top of the organisation. 

What I've helped companies do for the past 10 years is operate in the middle ground, which is what we call differentiated innovation. So it's more than incremental, but it's not radical. We're not trying to be radical or disruptive. What we're trying to do is teach organisations how to be absolutely customer centred to its customer driven innovation. We're not solving internal problems. We're solving customer problems. The caveat being you can have internal and external customers but the problems have to be of significant size to require a team, to require funding, budget, et cetera.

And that middle ground for us is generating solutions that are two to five X solutions as opposed to a 10 X solution, which is a billion dollar unicorn. You can't build a strategy and you can't scale to find that one unicorn. But you can build a strategy and capability to do multiple differentiated innovation projects at any one time. Five $200 million solutions is a billion dollar solution. It's the same as a unicorn, but it's achievable and it's scalable. And that's the bit that most companies miss. 

Sian Harrington (00:19:33)

It's an interesting gap that you're working in. How many times in the last whatever, five years, eight years have we heard, we are now the Netflix of - put in your industry here -  because everyone was trying to chase, as you said, that disruptive idea of what was innovative. But let's get to a bit of nitty-gritty here. If I could pick a couple of your pillars. So let's take leadership for innovation. What are the commonalities that you do need to shift in a lead in order for them to practically start looking at things differently? Given that they can't just take a blueprint and put it in, there must be some elements of leaders like mindset, for example, could you give some practical example there of what people could do to start doing? 

Cris Beswick (00:20:16)

So, so this constantly evolves, but it centres around a framework that I wrote about four or five years ago and it's called Own-Drive-Contribute. The Own part is for the leadership and senior execs and it centres around how do I as a leader genuinely own the innovation agenda? And what does ownership of that innovation agenda really, brutally honestly look and feel like. 

And there's three things. There's physically what does it look like? So what are the physical assets that I need in order for me as a senior leader to own the innovation agenda? So a binary example would be strategy. We have to have a clear strategy, right? It's a physical thing that I need. And then the second thing is mindset. So we've got physical, the second one is mental. So mindset, skills, behaviour, what's my approach, all of those things. And then the third component is psychological safety. 

One of the core things I see organisations doing wrong is they tend to say, here is the mindset of an innovator. Here is the innovator's DNA, because they've read the book. And they'll then roll that out across the organisation. Well, that's great, but mindset and skills and behaviour at leadership level in the same way as psychological safety at leadership level, then means something and looks and feels completely different when you then get down to middle management layer psychological safety as a middle manager, totally different. Psychological safety as a no -managerial employee, whereas the organisation's going wrong is they say, here's what psychological safety means inside our company. And they'll just push that through the whole workforce, but it's different. 

So Own, Drive and Contribute is leaders own the innovation agenda, middle managers drive the innovation agenda and non-managerial or investment players, how do they contribute to the innovation agenda? 

My personal view and all the empirical evidence I have of every organisation I've worked in where this stuff has worked, it's not top down and it's not bottom up, it's middle out. And this whole conversation around the permafrost, the frozen middle, I just can't engage with that. I saw a statistic the other day that said 54% of senior leaders say that one of the biggest barriers to driving innovation and building a culture of innovation in their organisation is the middle layer, the permafrost. And my answer to that is if middle management are the permafrost, if they're the frozen middle, who's frozen them? Because they don't get up in the morning and go, do you know what? I'm going to metaphorically freeze myself. I'm going to shackle myself from being able to do anything creative or different. I just don't buy that. Middle managers, when you look at a coach of innovation, they're frozen by leadership and they're frozen by the system that they are being asked to work inside of. And invariably the system isn't built for innovation. So they're being asked to innovate, but then forced to comply with the system that isn't built to innovate. And that's the challenge. 

To illustrate the point, how do we build more curiosity into our people? And curiosity for me is one of the key things that we need to teach leaders. So I talk about two things at leadership level, turning up the volume on purpose and turning up the volume on creativity. And I don't mean leaders having to be creative, but understanding the value of and how creativity works well in order to solve problems. And when you combine purpose and creativity, you breed curiosity and curiosity breeds a willingness to ask questions, to explore, to experiment, et cetera. Those are the precursor to starting to drive innovation. 

Sian Harrington (00:24:07)

Yeah. I can see how that fits into the cultural aspect as well. Again, we hear a lot about we've got a culture of innovation or we're trying to create a culture of innovation (Don’t get me started). Well, I'm going to get you started very briefly because there's so much to talk about here, but I'm interested in your thoughts on that cultural piece because you make that one of your five pillars. 

Cris Beswick (00:24:37)

Try having an argument with your publisher that your book shouldn't be called Building a Culture of Innovation because as one of the authors of the book, you fundamentally don't believe that you can build a culture of innovation. What I really mean by a culture of innovation is any organisation can innovate once. They can be lucky and a team just goes, oh, we've designed this thing and it's great. People love it. 

What we want is to build that as a repeatable capability. That is what we're talking about when we start to use the term a culture of innovation, where we're not just relying on one team to design new products, where we're actually saying innovation is, yes, is about new product development, but it's also about really creative business model. It's about completely different approaches to leadership and HR and how we onboard new talent or even search for them. It's about creative ways in terms of logistics or experience, all of those things. Therefore, when we package all of the habits, the behaviour, the values, the actions, the leadership, when we package all that together and the outcome of all of that combined, is we are repeatedly doing really new, different and creative stuff. Then when the outcome of all that is deemed to be innovative, when people start saying, wow, what they're doing, it's really innovative, it's great, whether they use the word or not, that is what I mean by a culture of innovation. 

And that's what many organisations lack. Most organisations are super efficient, the greater what they do and they bash product out that we all consume, me as well, but the next step in the evolution of organisations is how can they do more and how can they do all that better and how can they constantly evolve and iterate and be more creative and genuinely start to solve some of the wicked problems that they all need to solve. When they can do that, that's broadly what I talk about when I talk culture of innovation. 

Siân Harrington (00:26:50)

And have you come across any disastrous examples of innovation in companies. Is there anything that sticks out to you where they made a bit of a muck of the whole thing and a reason why? 

Cris Beswick (00:26:59) 

I won't name the company, but it's one of the big global banks. And so this isn't, if you like, an innovation per se that was disastrous. It was an approach to innovation, but this will resonate with everyone because there's probably people who go, yep, I've experienced that or I've heard about that. And this is a classic case of leaders getting starry -eyed by what innovation can deliver and then not realising that actually innovation should be spread across an organisation. 

I was brought into one of the big banks by the board and they said, look, we need to build innovation capability. We've got this team, we've assembled this team. We want you to work with them and we want to build a culture of innovation. So six months down the line, we'd done loads and loads of different stuff. We'd wrote strategies, we'd built frameworks and tools. We'd started to coach different people around the business and one of the things we always do, I will never work with hypothetical problems with a client. So we use live, genuine business problems. So over the course of six months, we built a couple of new products. So we put teams together, we taught them how to innovate, we taught them about design thinking and lots of different things. 

And the end result of that was because we used real problems, we ended up creating a couple of new solutions. And the team presented that back to the board. And we presented back the blueprint for scaling capability across the bank. And we proved it because we hadn't said, here's the theory. This is what we should do. We tried and tested it. We'd iterated it. There was the blueprint. All we now had to do was scale and roll it out. The board went, these new, this is amazing. I can't believe you literally built us two new products. Go away and bring us some more. And you know, there's that emoji where it's a monkey with the hand over its, yeah, and I just felt like that. It's like, Oh my Lord. You've just missed the whole point. You've sent six people off to spend another six months to bring you one new product. You could have the whole organisation within the next 12 or 18 months doing the same, bringing you 20 new products every year. But you've gone, Oh, money, money, turnover, product sales growth. Go and bring us some more. 

The whole of that team left. The whole of the team left because their passion was, we're going to build the capability for this organisation to shape the future, to really scale this. That's what they bought into. That's why they joined that team. And they all left. I see it happening so many times. The classic example is innovation labs. Corporates for the past decade have spun up innovation labs in the name of either finding a unicorn or building organisation wide capability. But the strategy and the requirement for those labs in essence, within the first six months has been, well, what have you got for us? And it's like, hang on, that was supposed to be scaling. Yeah, but we need new stuff though. And hence look at all the stats now, corporates are closing labs and accelerators down left, right and centre. Not because they don't work, because the strategy by which they were built was wrong.

Sian Harrington (00:30:10)

Very briefly, can you think of an example that's a positive one? What's been the secret sauce in a company for innovation apart from listening to you and putting your principles into place? 

Cris Beswick (00:30:21)

My way is, yes, you know, the things we teach clients are one way of doing it. There are other brilliant consultancies out there that have different approaches that are equally as successful. That demonstrates building a culture of innovation just isn't one size fits all. It's not a blueprint that you get in a box and you buy and you roll out. I think that there are lots of really good examples of new products that have come from innovation. People cite Google all the time, but Google's a classic example of not so much now, but when you build a culture and build a leadership response to innovation, which empowers people to come up with ideas, but then enables them to pursue those ideas by giving them time and space and resources. You see some of these things that we go, well, that must have been on their product development roadmap, surely? Nope. It came from an employee who just said, you know what, I've got an idea about this. And the company was brave enough to run with it. 

Again, a lot of new products from Amazon and AWS, they've come out of the bravery of the leadership approach to innovation. The one thing I have to stress is look at those as examples of best practice but don't try and adopt them. And so go really broad and genuinely go deep and genuinely empower people in the business, not just senior leaders, genuinely empower people to make changes as they go along on a day-to day basis. 

Sian Harrington (00:31:47)

Tech analyst Josh Bersin was talking about HR can be a centre of innovation that every single people practice out there is an opportunity to innovate. Do you agree with that? 

Cris Beswick (00:31:58) 

I have a lot of time for Josh, the stuff that he writes, but we collide in our perspective, what we've talked about is leadership, people and culture, which when you break it down again, people, people, people. HR should be right at the centre of this conversation. I think one of the challenges at the moment is that HR still doesn't have a seat at the innovation table. So when we're talking about conversations around innovation, we're talking to chief innovation officers and they're saying, Cris, could you come in and help us build a culture of innovation? And I said, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, where's HR? You're the chief innovation officer, so I can have a conversation with you about strategy and tactics and tools and approaches and frameworks and scaling capability. But we're now talking about culture, which is people and leadership and knowledge transfer and behaviour. And it's going to take two years. It's not three workshops. 

So where's HR? And they're not part of the conversation. Innovation is so crucial. HR needs to have a seat at the innovation agenda table. They are fundamental to it. And it's a massive issue because this is all about people. That's something that needs to be addressed. 

Sian Harrington (00:33:15)

So I'm going to argue that we've all become more innovative in the last couple of years. We're using new tools that we've never used before. And leaders have had to say, I don't know the answers. We've had to fail at things do you think we have or become more innovative and is it a shift or will it stick? 

Cris Beswick (00:33:32)

No, I don't agree. I don't agree that the majority of organisations have become more innovative per se. I don't believe that shifting to digital is innovation. I don't believe that just because we were forced to work from home because of COVID that every organisation that said, okay, we're now working from home, that was innovation. That was needs must. That was a classic example of how agile and how organisations can shift and change things when the proverbial hits the fan. When the burning platform is there, digital transformation in itself isn't innovation. It's just keeping up with technology and the sign of the times. If 10 years ago, when I went and upgraded my analogue TV to a flat screen digital one, they'd go, Oh God, bloody innovative. That was fantastic. Old technology, new technology, we change, we upgrade, we evolve. 

However, what I do concur with is that more organisations are now understanding the value and the vital need to build innovation as a core corporate capability and to embed that capability into culture. Ie. it's not just about new products, it's not just about that one team or department, it's about how we can creatively make the whole organisation better. So I do believe that the inflection point for many leaders is, okay, let's experiment a bit more and let's just try it because I'm now curious to find out, could it actually be different? Because we proved that we were capable of operating still at a high level and with a completely different dynamic when we're forced to. So I've noticed that from a coaching perspective that there's more willingness to try different things and do that at a faster pace. 

Sian Harrington (00:35:27)

I like to end on something a bit practical. So let's assume that people's interest in innovation has been piqued by this. So I'm not talking now about dedicated innovation leaders. I'm talking about other leaders within a business, be they the CEO, CFO, CHRO. If they want to start exploring this, start this journey, what are three practical steps they can take to get onto the innovation mindset?  

Cris Beswick (00:35:51)

The first thing is we built a tool to enable organisations to triangulate their start point on their innovation journey. And the reason we did that was what I've noticed over the past several years is senior people, whether it's CIOs, CEOs, whatever have said, right, we're going to now embark on this transformation journey around innovation. We're going to build a culture. And they would set off with this beautiful destination in mind. 

And I use the Sat Nav analogy. When I get in my car and I turn the ignition on, the first thing it does is it triangulates my start point and it triangulates it to within 10 feet, right? 15 feet, however accurate it is. What I see most organisations doing is using the same analogy, they get in their car, they turn the ignition, their sat nav's broken and it can't triangulate their start point, but they put the destination in and they press go. So they head off, they go, I want to go there. This beautiful vision of a future culture and a future state. And it's all going to be innovation. We've got these values and we're going to build this and build that. They don't know their start point. So the first bit of advice is build this picture of the future and however beautiful it is, recognise exactly where you're starting from so that you can plot the most efficient journey. 

The second thing is they need to ask themselves three questions. The first one is I believe innovation is fundamentally about the pursuit of better, better businesses, better business models, better leadership. Purpose is also about the pursuit of better. The whole concept of purpose is, I believe that there's something better and my purpose is trying to get there. Right. So the first thing is figure out has the organisation got a really, really clear purpose. And if it has, has it then got a very, very clear innovation strategy? Not is innovation as a word in the traditional corporate strategy. Do you have an innovation strategy? And then are they both absolutely aligned?

The second question is building a culture of innovation for me is conscious leadership decision. You have to choose as a leader that you want to pursue it because it's bloody hard work, right? It's not difficult, right? It's not rocket science, but it's hard work and it takes time. So you have to consciously pursue that as a leader. So the second question is figure out what decisions you're consciously making in pursuit of that innovation culture but also try and figure out what decisions you're subconsciously making that maybe are getting in the way of that. And that's about learning and unlearning just to some extent. 

And then the third and final thing is we can't influence results, right? We can influence behaviour, we can influence practices, processes, and those in turn deliver the outcomes we want. So ask the fundamental question, will the current processes, practices, behaviours and culture that we have today, will they enable us to shape the future? And if the answer to any of those three questions is no, then you have to go back and say, right, how do we answer that? How do we align those strategies? How do we figure out what conscious decisions we're making? And what does the culture need to look like for us to be able to shape the future? 

Sian Harrington (00:39:09)

That was Cris Beswick on innovation. Now here's a fun fact. 80% of founders have integrated AI into their creative and innovation processes. An article in Forbes last year declared that AI's latest job is to capture the X factor in business innovation. It asked whether artificial intelligence can help boost creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship in ways not possible before. The good news is that 55 % of founders still prefer human creativity over AI. But there's no doubt that AI will have a big impact on innovation as it's adopted more in organisations. 

So that's it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening to the show this month. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Follow me on LinkedIn at Sian Harrington, The People Space. And if you want more insights and resources on the changes in work, check out thepeoplespace .com. This episode was produced by Nigel Pritchard and you've been listening to Works Not Working, Let's Fix It. Goodbye.