SBP 233: The PostPod - Lessons From Fiona Stevenson. Why Innovation Fails.

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Incremental innovation is, from what I can recall, like it is the vast majority of the kinds of innovation that happen, meaning people are iterating and slightly improving something that already exists. And I think a lot of times it's kind of like sequels in movies. People do them because they're low risk and, you know, they already made a whole bunch of money.

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Welcome to the Post Pod.

Time for the Post Pod. The Post Pod. The Post Pod. For Fiona Stevenson, I love the radio voice.

I love it. Innovation, V, it was kind of a throwback in a lot of ways.

It was, it was, I thoroughly enjoyed that conversation.

I love that chat for sure.

It was, yes, it was a throwback, I think, to our MBA, which was also a great, one of the great classes I think that we were able to take. I struggle with innovation and Not in the context of how, or how we're doing it or how we're building it. It's just the definition of always changes depending on who you, who you're talking to in organizations. Everybody wants it. Everybody wants it, but you know, it means different things for different people.

Yeah. Yeah. I had a boss before that kept talking about breakthrough innovation or no disruptive. That was the word. It was like, we're disruptive innovator. I'm like, what the fuck? What are you talking about?

Yeah.

And it meant something genuine to that person. And, but like, I didn't understand it the same way, which was radically different. I think innovation is also very personal. Like what's innovative for one company is not at all innovative for another.

Totally.

Which is why it's so tricky. It's so hard, which is Partly why I love the, like, looking at the 4 types of innovation with Fiona. I think that's a great step is to understand what kind of innovation are we talking about.

No, I couldn't agree more. And I think I remember we were talking about it at the preamble with Fiona and saying, like, I literally was using it in a meeting earlier this week because it is a reality because leader will say, You know, I, V, I need you to push further. I want to make sure that we're really being innovative. And respectfully, always be like, can you help me define what do you mean by innovation? Are you talking about a breakthrough innovation? Are you talking about a game changer innovation? Are you talking about being disruptive? Are you talking about something like drives incrementality? And once I started framing it that way, then he came back with like, oh, you know what? I think what I'm looking for is something that helps drive incremental. Now, all of a sudden, we have a shared understanding of what it is that he's looking for instead of it just being innovation. Then, as a marketing team, we would just go back and try to find something innovative. It could be a new tactic. It could be working with a new partner. All of that could be innovation. But I think what I love about Fiona and what she talked about is innovation is not the same as just ideas. An idea only became innovation when it creates value and it's implemented. And I think that's like the ding, ding, ding for me.

Yeah. Yeah. The definition for it is it creates value and is implemented is because, yeah, I'm trying to remember the exact example that she gave, um, rainbow ice cream or something like rainbow ice cream is just an idea. But it's not innovative as an idea on its own. It's only innovative if it gets built, implemented, and creates value for the people that are buying it and the value for the people that are using it.

Well, companies often mistake brainstorming and ideation for innovation. We've seen it. I've seen it.

Yeah.

It's always out there. Everyone has an idea. And I'm not saying don't have ideas. Yes, have ideas, but be careful what you're claiming they are.

I know I brought this up when we were in the call, but do you have any examples or have you seen this where, because I'm mostly looking for confirmation that I'm not just crazy. There's that comment about, I think it was Einstein said, if I had an hour to spend on solving a problem, I'd spend 95 Or so 95% of the time, or it's 50 minutes trying to understand the problem and then 5 minutes trying to solve it. Something like that. Do you see that in your office? Is there a leaning toward solving before understanding the problem?

I don't know if I have like a hard set example, At least not off the cuff like this. What we do often see is that we're trying to solution in the moment. Think about all the different meetings that you're going to have. You're going to have category-based meetings from a performance perspective. You're going to have meetings that you have all the different channels, owned and paid, coming together and trying to make decisions on how to drive more growth, but the problem in those scenarios are usually we're chasing one end of the outcome, so it could be like, say, just digital loads versus looking at—

Yeah.

What does a company need? How are we factoring in the foot traffic into the stores? How are we factoring in the sales calls that are happening? But we're solving for, say, one thing in the moment. And when we're solving for that one thing, it's like we're turning a blind eye to everything else that's happening to try to fixate on something that is today's problem.

Yeah.

And you do see that time and time again. And of course, the finger-pointing is constant. It's like, well, bounce rates are high. Well, it's not my traffic. It's your webpage. Make sure that you give people a reason to stick around as an example, right? So, start playing with all the modules inside the page. And that's the kind of thing that, are we even solving for the right thing at the end of the day in those moments? And I think a lot of organizations get stuck in those optimization cycles that are quite myopic.

Yeah, yeah. You're solving, like the innovation could be actually solving for the business problem in that case. That's what it should be doing. Yeah. Instead of the media metric, that's like blinking, flashing red at you.

Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. What were some of the other things that you really like, takeaways that you got from that V, from that conversation?

I'm going to call it fear.

Okay.

4 letters, fear. Innovation enters the unknown, you know, and while organizations are designed toward certainty, Think about this. We talked about it with Fiona, but you also cited some great examples from Roger Martin, Eddie Obeng, et cetera. Innovation, genuine innovation is uncharted territory. And usually that creates the sense of fear for companies really to create the conditions for you to really kind of build that muscle.

Yeah.

Which, again, it's hard for me to look at it and say, you can have these innovation teams. They're usually not really part of a core team, so they work outside. It's easy for the business to look at them as they're supposed to build these ideas and these infrastructures for genuine growth, but you're not funding them because they're not convincing you because innately there's fear involved because it's something that we've never done before. And Fiona talked about finding evidence along the way to help with that. But at the end of the day, I just think many organizations don't go down this path of genuine innovation because there's fear.

Yeah. And I think the incremental innovation, I remember from our course that we did, the MBA course a long time ago, That seems like forever ago, man.

It does. COVID, like forever.

Holy shit. Remember when we had to like wait for 2 weeks before anybody could come into our house?

Wow.

That's a flashback. Anyway, so yeah, that course—

But I'm so smart now though. I don't know about you, but I'm so smart. So smart.

Smart.

Smart. Smart.

Smart.

The incremental innovation is, is from what I can recall, like it is the vast majority of the kinds of innovation that happen, meaning people are iterating and slightly improving something that already exists. And I think a lot of times it's kind of like sequels in movies. Like people do them because they're low risk and, you know, they already made a whole lot of money. That's why there's 14 and 1,000 Avengers now. And I think so that formula, you take something that is working now and make it better is fearless, but going for something like a breakthrough or disruption is chock-full of fear.

Absolutely.

There's no guarantee. There's no certainty. There's none of that. Like the process is relatively new for a lot of people, like birthing something into the world that didn't exist before. Like that's a hard thing to do because you don't, like she said, you don't have proof that it's going to work, but you need to find evidence for it.

Yeah. And let's not forget, like fear creates that over-analysis, that premature rejection, and essentially that incrementalism, whereas it's very easy to poke holes into a new idea.

Yeah, yeah, totally. And I think there's the idea around like, so part of the 6 I's was, she mentioned it's like a form of design thinking, which It's probably pretty commonly understood by a lot of people. So I think one of the things that's great about it is that idea of rather than saying should, we should do this, we should do that. It should be like this. It should be like that.

Yeah.

If we think about like the, well, what would have to be true kind of comments or questions or like, how might we like it? opens up this idea of uncertainty, but also like it's okay to explore the options that are out here.

Yeah, I agree with that. I did want to spend just a quick minute. You talked about the 6 I's. So, just quickly for everyone listening, they were identify, insight, inspiration, ideation, iteration, and implementation. And the way that Fiona spoke about it, you almost have to think about innovation as a system And it's not a brainstorm. But she also added something that's really interesting is she said that they're all multipliers. It's not adding.

Yeah. I like that.

Yeah, I love that framing because it's like you can't really skip one of these steps because if you were to skip a step, then you get a zero. Then if you multiply anything by zero, it's a zero. So it's like you have to think about, you have to identify and then you multiply the insights against it. Then you multiply the inspiration against that, and that creates the system for genuine innovation, which I thought was a really great way of framing that. It's like you shouldn't skip any of these steps. You don't do 5 of the 6 or you don't do 2 of the 6. You do them all because they actually help multiply your effectiveness over time.

Yeah, it's really good. And I think it's so easy for us to skip over stuff because partially because of the time constraints. We want things done quicker, faster, bigger, stronger, all that kind of stuff. And like, the shortcut is obvious to just go, well, I already know this. Like, let's just skip this. But it's the, I think the process of going through it, you maybe speed up some things, but the process of following the path brings you to somewhere specific.

Yeah. And she did mention that there's a 7th eye that they're playing with intuition, which I don't see it as a separate part of the system. I think like intuition can fall into the 6 eyes really, like intuition and identifying, intuition and using and understanding the insights, using your intuition for the inspiration. Like I think it permeates everything there instead of it being a separated, a separate.

Mm-hmm. Um, I don't know. Yeah. Intuition. I want to kind of get your take on this too. Like what I do think there's a lot of similarities between innovation and marketing. Like our, our, um, opening for The Sleeping Barber is, um, the best insights on innovation strategy and marketing. So we've, we've kind of always had innovation in our, like, ethos, so to speak. But when I started thinking about it, I feel like there's a fair bit of, like, even the, in marketing, there's so much overlap between marketing and innovation in that marketing is bringing an idea to market. It's part of the implementation phase. And things like an insight, you know, or human truth, like the big idea, those kinds of things are Kind of rooted in the same process of, as you would, would have for building an innovation. But I don't, I want to just get your take on that. What do you think about the similarities or overlap between marketing and innovation?

Technically, I would argue that marketing is or should be innovation in the context of, and let me try to explain this. If we agree that marketing is a discipline that helps create value to an organization, I would argue that's similar to the way that we define innovation, which we said early on in this post-pod, where innovation only becomes innovation when it creates value for an organization or once you implement it. So, they're both creating value. Marketing also has this other lens where it's like trying to find and uncover something new constantly. Now, it could be a new medium, it could be a new creative journey. Think about now the evolution of creators and how they've become part of our media buys right now. That is innovating because it is, at the end of the day, creating value. So, I think innovation and marketing actually go hand in hand. And if there is a group that should be closest to a lot of these conversations on innovation, it should be marketing because I think we've naturally built muscles to constantly look at other options and other ideas as we continue to fine-tune whatever we're working on in that moment. So, I think there's a direct correlation between the two.

Yeah. Yeah. Like we're always in marketing, always looking at whether we know it or not, future customers who are not current customers, which is part of like the thing with innovation of like, how do we get more of them?

Yeah.

The certainty part is weirdly enough, the performance marketing part where you go, oh, we, you know, we just sell to our existing customers and things are going to be fine. That feels really good to expand the customer base. But yeah, there's so much there around the future side of the business. Like where do new customers come from that I think is so related to and intertwined with all the same steps of the marketing or of the innovation process. Yeah.

And like even the technology, like think about martech in isolation. Yes. Like I'm the first one that's going to poo-poo on martech and it's overstating what it does, et cetera. But there is just some genuine technology out there that can really help organizations. Marketing is the one that's closest to some of those things, right? So again, there's so much in our jobs today that do require a different level of thinking, if you will.

Yeah.

And I do believe that. We're one and the same.

Yeah. I don't disagree with you at all, V. I think that's, I think you're probably right there.

I'll take it.

I'll take that one.

Yeah.

Any other elements from the conversation that you think are worth exploring?

Yeah, I think the last one is, I guess if I had to put a header around it, it'd be protected time. For innovation. Innovation doesn't happen between back-to-back meetings. You need to make sure that you're creating a system or the space for these meetings with about, say, an innovation track that actually give you the space to think because focused teams outperform merely busy teams that are just like in back-to-back meetings. So, I think just making sure that you find a way to protect the time in your calendars, it does become like a— business objective that, guys, we need to really figure this out so people can protect their calendars in a way that allows them to be fully present in those meetings. So, I think sometimes that's understated.

Yeah, the time part is interesting. There was a study, as you were saying that, I can't remember where I saw it now, I'm totally blanking on the source, but it was showing how people are using AI or where the expectations are from executives, I think more specifically. And so their expectations were that it would help improve efficiency. The options were improve efficiency, drive growth, or a combination of both. Both was the most, but between those 2 other options, improve efficiency was the expectation for most.

Yeah.

Had a bigger share of expectations than the driving growth part. And when Fiona was talking and thinking about the time part, I'm like, yeah, you know, like we have this tool that is relatively new. It can do so much AI. Like, how are we? And she was really excited about AI as a part of an innovation process and partner, which I think is great. Like, we can do so much more, so much faster, but we're like, often driven to just doing the same things quicker.

I love that you brought this up. Yeah.

Right. Like, where's the time to explore not just incremental innovation, but like blockbuster? Where's the time to explore the disruptive stuff, the stuff that could be a game changer? As opposed to just like, do what you're doing, but more of it and faster.

Yeah, and she also framed that AI is a great input, but it's not the ultimate output.

Yeah.

And while AI dramatically reduces that friction between something in someone's head, being able to show it to somebody, et cetera, think about websites, apps, services, anything like that, but generating more possibilities increases the importance of discernment, knowing which possibilities are commercially viable. And that's the thing where the intuition comes in. So AI can serve as that accelerator, but you have to be careful on and really apply that critical lens or that intuition lens against it because it could convince you to go in a direction that maybe doesn't make sense.

Totally. Yeah, great call. Fiona, thank you so much for joining us. This was a Great conversation. We, yeah, both of us really appreciate how much thought you put into this and the book is awesome. It's really great.

Yeah, really well written. And to all our listeners, thanks for keeping us in your ears.

Stay sharp, everyone.