In this episode of the Proteus Leader Show, host Erika Andersen interviews innovation expert Steven Shapiro. They debunk common myths that equate innovation with novelty, creativity, or sheer idea volume, arguing that true innovation requires high‑quality solutions to important problems. Shapiro stresses the need to focus innovation efforts on a company’s differentiator – the market‑driven reason customers choose you – and to avoid spending resources on “core” activities that don’t require breakthrough thinking. He identifies several innovation killers, including the over‑use of "thinking outside the box," hiring for sameness, and generating noisy idea pipelines. For leaders, the advice centers on training teams to ask better, more precise questions, granting them ownership and latitude, and running experiments designed to falsify hypotheses rather than confirm pre‑existing beliefs. Shapiro introduces the "Goldilocks principle" for crafting questions that are neither too abstract nor too solution‑oriented, and highlights the dangers of confirmation bias in the innovation process. The conversation concludes with practical take‑aways for leaders who want to embed disciplined, market‑focused innovation into their organizations.
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You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.
Hello everyone and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Steven Shapiro. Steven's passionate about innovation and his standard approach to innovation is to never take a standard approach. He's an award-winning international speaker and the author of 5 books on innovation. Steven helps people all over the world learn to innovate by focusing on solving real business challenges in new and unexpected ways. So welcome to the show.
Oh, it's great to be here, Erika. I'm very excited.
Yes, me too. I'm really glad you're here. So you and I have been kind of in each other's orbit for years as authors, and then earlier this year we were talking at a conference, and I thought it could be just extremely useful for my listeners to get some insight and some practical ideas from you about how to become actual innovators. So, um, Let me start with a question about misconceptions. So, what do you think are some of the most common misconceptions that people have about innovation?
Well, I think the most common misconceptions are related to it's about novelty. It's about creativity. It's about new products. It's actually not really about any of those things. It might be, but it's not necessarily. And in fact, I found in a lot of situations, Creativity has destroyed innovations 'cause we all of a sudden have this insatiable desire for quantity of ideas when we don't need more ideas. We actually need good solutions to important opportunities and problems. That is the key for driving innovation.
Ah, so people are thinking about innovation as just sort of random brainstorming in a way.
Yeah, I mean, in many cases it's brainstorming, it's suggestion boxes, it's idea management, it's hackathons, I mean, it's All these things that people tend to do in the name of innovation are designed to get as many people engaged, which is a good thing.
Mm-hmm.
But it's also designed to generate as much as you possibly can. And I don't think quantity is what we're striving for here. We're looking for quality. If I had an unlimited amount of time, money, or resources, that would be awesome. We don't. So how do we get laser-focused on what matters most, to me, is really one of the key things for driving innovation.
Hmm. Okay, so really getting people focused on things that are going to be sort of high impact as quickly as possible.
Absolutely. I mean, you don't want people innovating everywhere. You want everybody innovating, but if they're basically treating every opportunity equally, we're going to spend a lot of time on things which might give us a very low ROI. as opposed to things that'll give us a high ROI. And so what I encourage people to do is to figure out what is the reason people do business with you today and will continue to do business with you in the future, and define that as your differentiator, the thing that sets you apart in the market. And then you wanna innovate where you differentiate. You wanna spend most of your energy in the world of innovation on the areas which are actually going to help you propel forward and leapfrog the competition. And then for anything that is what I would call core, which your customers have an expectation that you deliver. You don't need to be the best in the world, so you don't need to apply innovation, but you should have good partnership strategies, good optimization strategies, good automation strategies for driving anything that's not a differentiator.
Hmm, I love that distinction, and I love the phrase innovate where you differentiate. So put your innovation energy in the areas where you're already— where you already have a competitive advantage and can make it even better.
Right, and the key thing is your differentiator is not something you get to go and declare. Your differentiator is a conversation in the market. And most people, most companies don't really know how they differentiate themselves because they tend to be inside the 4 walls of the company thinking about, you know, how do we want to stand out in the market as opposed to asking the market, why do you do business with us?
Right.
Why don't you do business with us? Why do you do business with a competitor? And then you can start to triangulate On that, recognizing that what's a differentiator today might become core tomorrow. Because whatever you're working on, other people may be trying to catch up to where you are. And in some cases, they may beat you at it. So you need to recognize that if you spend all of your time on differentiators that quickly go to the core, become market standards, industry standards, then you're wasting a lot of energy. So there's a lot of science and art to this whole process.
Oh, that's great. Wow, I can tell there's a whole much deeper conversation about that. I love the idea that you, that you're, what makes you different, what differentiates you, can only, you can only find that out by talking to the market, by talking to your customers, and you can't just make it up inside your own head. That's great too. I completely agree. So let's, let's go on the dark side a little bit more. So, you know, you work with lots of different organizations, lots of different kinds of organizations. What are the big not-to-dos? What do you see as key kind of innovation killers that leaders unintentionally practice?
Thinking outside the box. This whole concept of thinking outside the box is ridiculous. It's not even an innovation term. It came from a brain teaser with 9 dots, and that's how that concept of thinking outside the box came to be. It has nothing to do with the quality of an innovation program. In fact, one of the things which I strongly believe is that you don't want to think outside the box. You actually want to find a better box. The issue is not the expansiveness of our thinking. We're just looking in the wrong place. And so the key to powerful innovation is actually asking better questions. Now, we say that a lot, but it's a really, really important part, and there is a science to asking better questions.
Hmm.
Well, let's hold that thought for a minute because just in a minute, I'm going to ask you about how can leaders best support innovation. And I suspect that's one of the ways. But if I'm a leader and I'm trying to support innovation amongst my people in my team, what are some things I shouldn't do? What are some things you'd say, Erika, stay away from that?
Well, I would not spend a lot of time asking people for their opinions, suggestions, or ideas because that creates a lot of noise in the system. I would also not hire people who fit the mold. Now, maybe we're getting into the leadership thing here. But what happens is we have this belief because we've been told it, so we believe it, that opposites attract when it comes to relationships. But actually, the science tells us that opposites repel. It's our human instinct to want to have this tribalism mechanism. We want to be with people who are similar to us. And as a result, what happens is we hire people who fit the mold. And as a result, the company grows mold. Because when we don't have a lack of divergent thinking, we end up with a lot of common thinking. And what happens is our past success, our past experience leads to future failure because expertise is the enemy of innovation. And so we need to get people out of this mindset that there's a— our past was a good thing. Our past got to where you are today. That's it.
Hmm, I love that. If we fit the mold, we grow mold. That's a great quote. So then let's keep going to where I think you're wanting to take us, which is how can leaders support innovation in themselves and in their teams? What are some practical advice that you can share with us?
So I think the first thing is, as a leader, we want to train people how to ask better questions. We always say, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. But I think, I actually think that's bad advice. I don't want solutions, I want better problems. 'Cause if you bring me problems to unimportant, or solutions to unimportant problems, then basically all I have is something to implement that's gonna be of basically no value. So I want people to get better at asking questions.
Yeah.
And this is what we need to do as leaders, is it's not a natural act. I work with just leaders in so many companies and they find it very difficult. Intuitively, we say, okay, well, I got to ask questions, but my process is not something that's intuitive to most people because it's not how we're wired. So I would say that's first and foremost what leaders need to get better at. And then they need to get out of the way and let the organization actually drive things. You want to start treating everybody inside the organization as an owner of the business. It doesn't mean you give them complete freedom and complete autonomy, but we need to give them a little latitude more than we typically do.
To solve those problems once the good questions have been asked.
Exactly, to solve those problems and to experiment. So one of my favorite quotes, which really wasn't an innovation quote, but I use it this way, is from Scott Cook at Intuit. And he said, for each of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome. And I just think that's such a brilliant quote. Well, so what happens is when we have an idea, or we have a solution to a problem, what happens is there's a part of the brain which starts processing things called confirmation bias. And basically what it does is that means that any evidence that you get that supports your belief, you will process it and believe it and take it in. Anything that contradicts your belief, you tend to ignore at a very deep subconscious level. So compounding that with the fact that we tend to run experiments that only confirm what we believe to be true, as opposed to explicitly running experiments that are designed to prove our idea is bad. You put those 2 things together, and we end up in a situation where we're implementing a lot of bad solutions. So it's the divide and conquer, and it's about recognizing good experiments are the key to good innovation.
Yeah. Yes, it's the good old scientific method.
Totally.
Hypotheses versus conclusions. So I want to— I'm super curious now about this good question. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes a good question? What are the characteristics of a good question from your point of view?
At the simplest level, I use something I call the Goldilocks principle, and basically it's built on Goldilocks and the Three Bears. One bed's too soft, one bed's too hard, one's just right. Well, as a concept, When we ask questions, we tend to ask questions that fall into the too soft or too hard category. Too soft being too abstract. How do I increase revenues? How do I improve margins? How do I improve productivity? What are new products we should develop? Those are very abstract, and unfortunately, when we ask abstract questions, we get a lot of abstract, fluffy, and typically irrelevant solutions. Whereas on the flip side, we tend to ask questions that are just solutions masquerading as questions, or they're past-based, and therefore our past becomes our future. Neither of those work. So just right is the direction to go. Obviously, there's more to it than that, but that's at least a thumbnail sketch.
Gives people some guardrails. That's great. Oh, this is so helpful. I feel like you're kind of helping us demystify innovation and have given people some really practical things to think about. So listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about Steven and his work, you can just go to his website at stephenshapiro.com, S-T-E-P-H-E-N-shapiro.com. And again, Stephen, thank you so much for being here. I, I wish we had a whole other hour to talk, but I always promise that we'll keep this short and sweet. So thank you so much.
Oh, Erika, it was my pleasure. Thank you.
And thank you for listening, everybody. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.
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