#25: Innovation Made Clear

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Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Greg Sattell. He's a longtime entrepreneur and business builder who has now become a leading voice in innovation and thinks deeply about how innovation really works. And what I like a lot about Greg's approach to innovation is that it seamlessly combines inspiration and practicality. It's really about solving real problems. So welcome to the show, Greg. I'm so glad you could be with us.

Thanks for having me.

You know, as we've started to move in each other's orbit recently, I've become increasingly intrigued by your approach to innovation. I think it's really unique in a lot of ways and useful in a lot of ways. And I thought that our listeners would find your insights really valuable. So let's get started. I have some questions for you, as you know. So first question, in your book, Mapping Innovation, you talk about finding the best innovation strategy to solve a given problem. I'd love to hear more about that.

That really comes from the journey that, that took me to writing the book. I spent most of my adult life managing organizations, and I always felt an incredible pressure to innovate. As a CEO, you have to make decisions that affect a lot of people.

Hmm.

And you want to make the right decisions. With regards to innovation, I never really had a good handle on how to go about it. It wasn't that there weren't ideas about innovation. It seemed like everybody had an idea about innovation. And they were all pushing their own ideas. You know, Steve Jobs would say this, or Elon Musk would say this. You have design thinkers and open innovation people and lean startups and on and on and on. It's not like marketing or finance where you have pretty clear frameworks and pretty clear trade-offs. In innovation, it just seemed like everybody was kind of going their own direction. And many times the different advice would actually contradict each other.

Right.

So, for instance, design thinkers tell you it's all about the end user and you need to focus on the end user and work back. Clayton Christensen writes this great book, The Innovator's Dilemma and Disruptive Innovation. And he says, that's how you go out of business, by listening too much to your customers and you get caught up in old metrics and the basis of competition shifts and you get disrupted. So, what I set out to do was to start talking to every great innovator I could find, whether they were at some big corporation or a scientific lab or at a startup.

Hmm.

And eventually, what I realized was that innovation's really about solving problems. How a lot of organizations get stuck is they choose a particular innovation strategy because it worked for them before, or it worked at Apple, or some consultant told them that's what's, you know, that's how people get successful, or they read it in a book without really thinking about what kind of problem they have first. What kind of problem they're trying to solve. So what I developed in the framework that I first published in Harvard Business Review and then led to the book is basically a method of classifying problems.

Yeah.

In order to pick the right solution that fits the problem instead of picking the solution first and somehow trying to make the problem fit, which never turns out very well.

So rather than a kind of ad hoc, oh, let's just pick one out of the atmosphere, or a sort of one-size-fits-all, you recommend figuring out what kind of thing you're trying to do, what kind of problem you're trying to solve, and then making sure your innovation approach is appropriate for that problem.

Yeah, I don't think it's fair to say people are just picking them out of the air, but, you know, when you see some enormous success like Apple, You know, you want to know how they did it, right?

Right.

And you want to say, well, it worked for them. You know, I should try and inject some of that into my company. The issue is that the problems you need to solve in your company are probably very different than the problems that Apple needs to solve.

Yeah.

or Google needs to solve. So, and you'll have a, even within your industry, compared to competitors, you probably have a very different strategy, set of capabilities, and culture. And that's going to determine what problems you need to solve and what strategies you need to apply to solve them. So, I always favor, you know, the simplest, most down-to-earth approach that you can. So we encourage leaders to ask simple questions. For instance, can you come up with a technical specification for this problem? Can you come up with a job description or set of job descriptions to staff this project? And how well can you define those things? Because That, uh, that those types of questions, first of all, they're, they're, they're very clear. They're not open up to an enormous amount of, of interpretation, and they really help you classify the problem. Another filter we use is called the 3 horizons, and we ask whether this is, in terms of markets and capabilities, is this something you're doing now Is this something that's an adjacency that other organizations do but you're not doing yet? Or is this something completely new? And as we walk them through, we're able to help classify that problem and find a strategy that matches.

Oh, that's great. So, it sounds like the first approach, the first thing that you do with people is to try to help them get as clear as they can about what kind of problem it is, what the parameters of it are. So, when they start to innovate, they're looking in the right direction, I assume.

Yes. So those questions feed into this innovation matrix that was in that original Harvard Business Review article. And then there's sets of strategies that they can apply. So I think one of the things that always frustrated me about most innovation frameworks is that they were these kind of huge flowcharts where it's kind of step by step. I always feel that it's better to make things simple and clear and ask simple questions.

I really recommend that people read the book. And just as a kind of teaser and taster, I'd love for you to give us a highlight of the matrix or even some examples of particular strategies for particular kinds of problems.

Well, let's go back to this design thinking versus innovator's dilemma. So design thinking is, you know, it's been incredibly successful. You know, IDEO has built a great design practice based on it. Stanford has built an entire school devoted to it.

Uh-huh.

And it's all about Focusing on the end user and putting together a multidisciplinary team, and then going through this process of rapid prototyping and testing till you come to the conclusion. And that can be enormously powerful. The problem is, think about all the assumptions you're making. You're making the assumption that the problem can be defined, that you can come up with a clear technical specification. That you know the skills needed to solve this problem. So that if those things aren't true, if you can't clearly define the problem very well, and you're either you don't know or you're wrong about the skills needed to solve the problem, that process isn't going to work very well. And, you know, where if you look at Lean Startup or other disruptive innovation strategies, they're really— if you think about disruptive companies like an Airbnb or an Uber, you know, they're not coming up with real solutions to problems that we knew about, right? They're taking existing solutions and applying them to problems nobody really thought about. So sometimes you have problems looking for solutions. Sometimes you have a solution, and this is usually the case with a startup. You have a solution where people are looking— you have a solution and you have to find the problem for it. There's a very interesting program that the federal government runs for scientists who've received grants, commercialization grants called SBIR grants. And it's called I-Corps, and they run this Lean Startup process. And the first step is these scientists who've all discovered something important, they have to present what they, you know, what the application is and what's their target market. Every single one of them gets it wrong. Every single one of them gets it wrong. And they have to run and do customer interviews and Eventually, they find that there's another industry or another application that this technology is a great fit for. So that's a very, very different type of process, and design thinking isn't going to help you with that.

Right. Okay. That's a great discrimination between those 2 very different situations. All right. I always promise my listeners some practical advice. So what practical advice would you give leaders today if you wanted to help them be more effective innovators? What can they start doing differently or better right now?

I would say the one thing— well, I would say the one mistake leaders make is what they think an innovator looks like. Everybody's vision of an innovator is Steve Jobs, right? Very mercurial, probably difficult, spouting off lots of ideas. Where what you want to have is highly collaborative teams. who are focused on the same mission. So that means when you hire, you want— you don't need to necessarily go get the people with the most advanced degrees or the best resumes. It's really important to hire people who are passionate about the mission and who are passionate about solving the problems you need to solve. And one thing I always say is, you know, to innovate, you don't need a great idea. What you need is a good problem. If you find a good, meaningful problem, the ideas will come.

That's great. It sounds like a good, meaningful problem and a team of people who are really passionate and diverse and can come with different points of view to think about that problem.

Yes, and passionate, but also are collaborative, mutually respectful team players. You know, the lone genius thing is a myth. Nobody really makes any kind of impact on the world alone.

Thank you so much, Gregg. This has been really thought-provoking. And listeners, if you're interested in finding out more about Gregg and his work, including his book Mapping Innovation, you can just go to his website at digitaltonto.com. Thank you for listening. And until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

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