S1 E1 | Unpacking "Innovation"

So what I would like people to do that don't want to go that far into interviewing or things like that is when you're in your next product meeting or you're in your next meeting with people and there's a word that is generally, commonly accepted as just a phrase that people just pass by, just runs right past. Take a minute, understand the context of the situation and then ask for verification. Because what happens a lot, and we see it a lot with developers. If I come from an engineering background and you say a word like frequency, it means something totally different. If I come back from a word, that word, if I'm a marketer, because frequency and marketing could be the amount of time someone buys something. Frequency to an engineer is what it.

Means a lot of things.

Welcome to the Circuit Breaker podcast where we challenge the status quo of innovation.

And new product development.

We'll talk about tools and skills and methodologies used to build better products and make you a better consumer.

I'm Bob Mesta and I'm the co.

Founder of the Rewired Group and I'm one of your co hosts and we're joined by Greg Engel, who is my.

Co founder and chief.

Bob Interpreter. Join us now as we trip the circuit and give you time to reset, reorganize and recharge your brain to build better products.

So today we're going to talk just a little bit about words and we like to unpack words here at Rewired. So I want to unpack the word innovation and I want to talk about the word innovation. Innovation is a word thrown around a lot. You hear people talk about it as interviewing people. You hear people saying, I want an innovative person to fill this role. You hear on the news, you hear, oh, this new innovation, this new, this, this new that's coming out. But what is innovation really?

Well, for us, we've tried to make innovation a very tangible thing, right? And so, for example, I can start, the way I would start the conversation is what? Like, let's talk about what innovation is not, right? So innovation is not invention. It's not the act of inventing something new. A patent is not innovative. It can turn into an innovation. But an innovation has to have wide from our definition. It has to have a wide adopting and has to actually help society be better. The fact is, I can have something that is an invention that's not an innovation and I can have something that's not an invention, but still an innovation. I think of the iPhone as an innovation, but the segue is an invention.

So the way I. The way I kind of look at it is.

We tend to look at a lot of words through the supply side or through the producer side. And innovation's a word, actually, we should be thinking about more from the demand side. And what I mean by that is we need to be looking at people's lives. And you said society. Right. So we tend to say, oh, this is an innovation when it's a new product, but a new product is just a new way to get something done. The innovation's done when the person picks it up and actually does something with it. That's where innovation lies. Innovation is not a product, is not a solution. It's a thing that people use to make their lives better, to get progress done better, faster, cheaper, whatever the things they're trying to get done in a better way.

And so I want to. Again, I'm going to contrast it with something which is this whole aspect of on the supply side. The fact is, as an engineer, I was taught that there was basically innovative ways of bringing new things to market.

Or there's technological innovation. What I would say is that there's actually more innovation than the market can consume.

True innovations have to have a market side to actually make it an innovation. Just because it's new doesn't make it an innovation. Just because it's actually technologically more advanced and it's faster doesn't make it necessarily an innovation. And so part of this is we have to be able to talk about kind of innovation from whose perspective? And innovation from. Like, how do we go after it?

But it comes down to a thing of. I just think the word's thrown around too much. Yeah, right. Like, even what you just said. Right. It resonates with me. But also, everything's got to be an innovation. Why. Why are we so worried about saying everything's innovative or everything's an innovation? Why aren't we just saying, I want to make people's lives better?

Well, I think. I don't know the answer to that question.

Right. But that's the thing is, I think we get stuck in these words, and the words then create different meanings in a bunch of different heads. Because I could tell you, Wall street, when they hear innovation, they're hearing dollar signs.

Yeah. And if it's not innovative, then it's not dollar signs. And so this is where it's almost defined correlatively around what it means as opposed to what it is or what it does.

So that gets us to our thing of. We always talk again about is something causal or is something an effect?

Yes.

And I think the way we look at it, innovation can only be an effect in hindsight.

I can only call something an innovation, usually in hindsight, not in foresight.

So I can't cause innovation. I could set the things up to allow people to do different things and then they'll do it. And then if it's something that helps people make progress, then it will be innovative. Then it will be innovative. That's right.

So like I said, it's an effect and I can cause the effect. But the fact is it's very much surrounded around the demand side and surrounded around being able to actually help people in struggling moments. And so most of the time, I would say innovation, to your point, is actually only defined from the supply side as an innovative way of folding paper, an innovative way of driving a car, an innovative way. And it's a new way of doing it. But does it actually address a struggle? Does it actually go after something on the demand side and does it actually make, as a whole, enable people to stop using something different, to use that new thing? Yes.

So I think what we're saying is innovation's a word, and we have that a lot in product development. Innovation is a word that's thrown around a lot. And all we're really saying is, can we take a step back and stop just throwing around the word and actually think of what it takes to cause people to use things in a way that is innovative or make a product that helps people make progress?

And this is where we talk about supply side innovation and demand side innovation. Right. And, and to me, supply side innovation is usually the technological piece of innovation that's out there. And demand side is the market or people, not the market. Individual people deciding to say, I'm not going to do this anymore or stand for that anymore. I'm going to now do something different. And I need as much demand side innovation to happen as I need supply side innovation.

Okay, so I hear you on that one, Bob, and I think we agree that innovation is a word that's overused. But I want to tackle another word.

Yeah.

And from what you've done lately in the last couple weeks, talking to people, what's a word you think has been overused or the word has lost its meaning because we use it in so many different ways.

I think one of the biggest words that I think is just way overused, and it's in some cases way overvalued, is the notion of loyalty, like customer loyalty, over the last couple of weeks or last couple of to be honest, for the last two years we've been hearing it where I feel like I've been loyal. Yeah, they won't do what I need to do. So for example, I'm going to change my cable provider, I'm going to go change my car. Is this brand. It's like, oh, I'm loyal to the brand. And it turns out that loyalty is actually caused and at the same time it can be broken. And it's an underlying understanding of kind of how it works, but it's like the accumulation of something. So it's almost like accumulated debt or accumulated.

Accrued interest on something. But we've turned it into a math problem and people are now saying, well, everybody who buys the same thing over and over again, that's loyalty. And we can use that to predict what's going to happen. But the fact is we know that if struggling moments happen to people and despite the fact that they might have 23 years with this one company in terms of loyalty towards.

Let'S say your cell phone provider, at some point 3 things can happen and that loyalty is gone.

So do you think loyalty, you think from the supply side, from the producer side or from the incumbent side, that's something that they've used and they've tried to put it down into a. That's our brand equity.

For them, it's a measure of the brand equity. And what it implies is like if some point, if somebody's been using us, they'll continue to use us in perpetuity. And so the fact is what it does is it actually. And to be honest, it's the things like when you see QuickBooks and all of a sudden QuickBooks comes and says, hey, if you want to be new, we'll give you a new rate for the first year at like $50 versus US paying 2 or $300 is like wait, no loyalty. Right. And so part of this is it's a two way street and it's one of those things where we have to be able to understand that loyalty is a factor, but it's not the factor. And if anything, and it can be broken, it's more fragile than anything else. I think AG Lafley has written a whole bunch of stuff around this. He was the president of P or CEO of P and G. And he really takes the fact that loyalty has to be earned and the fact is it has to be respected. And you have to understand it's not an automatic. And I think that's the thing where loyalty is like, we need to Somebody who keeps coming back over and over is loyal. I don't think that's true either.

Do you think it's a habit when we use loyal and we use that, and we use that term over and over again of we want to really treat our. We want to increase our loyalty? Is that a danger for companies to think that way?

I think the fact is that again, I think loyalty is an effect. It's not a cause. It's if anything, a feedback loop for people. But most people jump in the middle and say, well, we have this much loyalty or we have these best users or whatever, these people are loyal to us. But the thing is that the moment we use it, my belief is we overvalue it. And to be honest, there's things that we frame and things that we talk about to say is, like, if I have loyalty, great, but the fact is I can't count on loyalty to do anything more. And it's more like I said, we rather use it as a metric, as an outcome, as opposed to saying, boy, if I improve loyalty, it's going to actually make the business stronger.

Are all customers loyal for the same reasons?

No, never.

Is that the danger is we lump them all into an average of loyal and we don't actually know what causes loyalty.

Well, and I think there's two things, not only what causes them to be loyal, but the fact this is at some point in time what they expect from loyalty. Some people expect a little better service, some people expect a lower price. Some people expect. And so all of a sudden loyalty actually gets manifested or aggregated up into. Because you buy a lot and use it a lot, you must be loyal. But there's. The measure of loyal is actually when you actually have a conflict and they're willing to stay. And so loyalty in the wild can't be seen. It can only be seen when there's.

Some kind of struggle. Because at some point I'm willing to stay with you even though we had this problem. I'm willing to actually help you when you're down. That's what loyal think about what loyalty really means. Loyalty to a dog. Right. And people are now thinking about loyalty as just cash flow.

It's all determined by attributes of consumers and attributes, if you will, of behavior. But it doesn't actually define what loyalty is.

And in our work the last couple months that we've been doing some of this stuff and people have been talking about loyalty and I think what we've discovered is different function, even define it differently. Oh yeah, right. What someone thinks is loyal from a packaging engineer is even somewhat different than what the marketer thinks and how they talk about them is differently.

Well, here's the other part of loyalty that I think is a double edged sword is that when you have loyalty, it means people like what you already have, which makes it very hard to change what you have. And so it actually causes you to stop innovating. To go back to the other word. It's like, well, we can't change that because our loyal customers won't want that. Well, loyalty is really habit, Right. It's the fact that they've been able to ingrain it and help them make progress.

So this discussion we're having, and it kind of goes back to what I started the session with, which is I want to talk about words. Right?

Because. Because words, the unpacking session is what.

This one's called because words have meaning, but. But meaning is dependent on the person that's speaking and also hearing.

Well, so that's the thing, is that.

I'll say one thing we do here is we argue a lot. And we argue a lot because I'll say the standard definitions of words don't fit the things that we do. And so part of this is we wrestle with language a lot so we can actually understand what things mean to people in the context they're in. So healthy can mean 28 different things. But everybody, like I can get a thousand people to say they want to be healthy, but how they actually execute on it is so different. The other point is every word has to have a reference point. So it's not healthy, it's healthier than what. And what you find is that definition when the reference point changes is actually where you start to realize that at some point we need to have contextual definitions, not absolute definitions.

Yeah. So I think as you leave this podcast and as people that are listening listen to this and they reflect on this, I think the key takeaways we want them to take is when they hear these common words. And we just took two common words from what we've dealt with in the last few months. Right. And truly unpack them, truly understand them. Not from your perspective alone, but from everybody's perspective. Because if you do that and you understand the common definition, you have a common definition amongst the group you're trying to work with or trying to solve the problem for, you have a greater possibility of creating something that's worthwhile.

That's right. That's exactly right. And so if anything, my suggestion as we end the podcast is that the Assignment is for you to go off and think about words that people almost just use as a off the cuff. Boy, that was great. Oh, wow, that was a great meal. Why was it a great meal? What do you mean by a great meal? What was the context wrapped around that great meal? What made it great? What wasn't there? Like all that unpacking is so important. And so the fact is, just because everybody would love to have a great meal every night. But if you have a great meal every night, that almost makes it impossible to have a really great meal.

So you are on the 2.0 of the homework. And what I would say, because that's almost unpacking like a conversation.

Yes.

So what I would like people to do that don't want to go that far into interviewing or things like that. Is when you're in your next product meeting or you're in your next meeting with people and there's a word that is generally commonly accepted as just a phrase that people just pass by.

Yep. Just. Just runs right past.

Take a minute, understand the context of the situation and then ask for verification. Because what happens a lot, and we see it a lot with developers. If I come from an engineering background and you say a word like frequency, it means something totally different. If I come back from a word, that word, if I'm a marketer, because frequency in marketing could be the amount of time someone buys something. Frequency to an engineer is what it.

Means a lot of things. It could be the frequency in which I can actually make it. It could be the frequency in which again, people buy. But it would be, how long does it last? A whole bunch of things.

I think to end it with the story is I just remember being in a. In a meeting, it was quite a while ago at a consumer packaged goods company and we're doing a product meeting and the marketer turns to the engineer and says, I need to think about the roadmap. So could you actually give me what are the underlying technologies that you're working on so I can actually start to think about how we'd put them into the phases of what we're going to do next? Seems like a simple assignment. The engineer asks a few questions and they go back and forth. Finally, the engineer has almost this panic look on their face and the marketer has almost an urgent look on their face. And I go, timeout, stop. And when we go, okay, hold on a second. I think you guys actually don't even know what each other's talking about. And they go, what do you mean? I'M like, okay, so first of all, let's just talk about what's the assignment?

And the engineer goes, yeah, that assignment. They want it by next Friday.

That's like 300 pages. That's like, I'm going to tell you every detail of where we sit on every underlying technology, of what's going on. It's 40, 50 hours worth of work. I'm going to have to pull some people around to be able to do it. And the marketers look at him like, wait, what? Wait? I'm like, well, okay, stop. Tell me what you think it is, Ms. Marketer. And she's like, I just want a bullet point list of the five underlying technologies and when they'll be ready. And so all of a sudden, the engineer was going to run off and do this 40, 50 hours worth of work for a little assignment where the other person was almost like, I need the top line of what's going on. And then ultimately we. We took the time to kind of say, well, what do you need it for and who are you going to play it to and how's it going to play out? And ultimately it turned out to be like three hours worth of work. But the notion is that at some point, though they used all the same words, they agreed to what they were going to do. They were just talking past each other. And so this is where I think the whole notion of unpacking is so critical, even within yourself. When you start to think about how you're like, how you talk to other people and the words you use, it's one of those things where you start to realize, like, I'm using this word because I can get away with it. Gee, Greg, that was great. This is why we have debates, like, what do you mean? Why do you think it was great? Why wasn't it great? And I'm like, oh, shit.

So as you leave this podcast and you've go on the journey, I want to leave with one small assignment and I'm going to give a word, and I ask Bob his definition of the word. And I'm going to give a definition, definition of the word. And you'll see that we don't actually have common definitions. But then I want you to answer and define that word as well. And once you do that, I want you to go ask five other people. So you can see that a very simple word can have multiple different definitions and also different definitions based on the context. We're kind of cold right now, and we're not in a context. So it's Going to be a top of the mind definition where if we were in a different context, it might be a different definition. So, Bob, if I said the word feast, what does that mean to you?

So a feast is. So I just came from my farm in Wisconsin and one of the things we had is we had a boil and it was a feast. It was a feast.

But do you still haven't told me.

What it means, what I mean by that? Lots of people, 20 plus people. We did a boil, which we had clams and you know, different corn and sausage and scallops and all this stuff. And it was like, it was more food than anybody could eat. And it was very, very diverse. And it was a great time of being together and spending time together and great food.

And feast to me is when I hear the word, I always think of Thanksgiving. So it's family.

This was not family.

Right. So in my definition, it's family. It's having that and it's going to be food. Because we're talking generally brings up food. But in my case I'm thinking of a small but intimate group is a feast for me. Because that's what I envision when I hear the word feast. I hear Thanksgiving feast. And that's the image it brings up to me. So if someone said feast, I would think, oh, holiday, Thanksgiving, family, perfect. You're saying outdoor party, bunch of people, bunch of food, haphazard food, almost big boil, big thing. Where I'm thinking, no, a very traditional thing. So it's different. So if you put yours in front of me, I'm like, what the hell are you doing?

So if I asked you, hey, I need you to create a feast for me, we'd be on completely different pages.

Yeah. I'd wait till November and I would.

Be literally saying, this weekend we got to do a feast. And you're like, you can't do a feast until Thanksgiving. And this is the point is that a simple word like feast is actually, it sends you in a direction, but it's not clear enough to know what to go do. And so this is where we have to unpack these words and understand that we have to actually come to terms with your definition and my definition. There's no wrong in our definitions. But ultimately, if we're trying to do something together, we have to come to terms to the trade offs of can I have a feast that's not in Thanksgiving?

Yes. And we have to figure that out. And that's where context matters as well. If I put a context on the word before I said the word feast, it might have changed your definition.

That's correct. But if you just say, what's the word? Feast? Or like, boy, I want to plan a feast. I'm like, okay, I know what that is, I can go do it. But it would never turn out to meet your expectations. And that's the point.

So what I want people to do is now take that word and define it for themselves and you kind of got ours. So that's going to be in your head. But I want you to see if it's different. Same, similar. Where it's similar, where it's different because the differences is actually where the problems lie in developing product and actually miscommunications. It's because we all think we said a very clear word and clearly we would be on different pages. And I'm sure if we got 15 people in the room, it would be at least 10 different or five different occasions. So I want you to take that word, I want you to unpack the it for yourself, and then I want you to go ask other people, and then I want you to think about that and say, okay, what other words in my life am I doing that with?

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