E4: Expertise is the Enemy of Innovation

What if expertise is the enemy of innovation? Welcome to Invisible Solutions. I'm your host, Steven Shapiro. Each week we tackle your most complex problems using the lenses from my book, Invisible Solutions. If you need the lenses, go to get the lenses.com with that. Let's get started with today's episode. On today's episode, we're going to explore why expertise is the enemy of innovation. And then we're going to solve a problem that was submitted to me and it's actually of quite relevance to me personally at the moment. So let's first talk about expertise. Expertise is, of course, important for innovation. We need to have you years of experience in order to develop some really great innovations. But unfortunately, our past experiences often limit our ability to see new, different, and potentially better futures. The reason for that is because we build up a series of assumptions. We build up assumptions about our customers, we build up assumptions about our market, we build up assumptions about our competitors, we build up assumptions about our industry. Just because you knew your customers doesn't mean you know them. So we need to be able to challenge these assumptions and to look at the world with a fresh set of eyes. The other thing that we know, and there's scientific evidence to back this up, is that when people are cut from the same cloth, that is, they have the same background, the same experience, it limits their ability to develop breakthroughs. If you're working on a marketing problem and you have 100 marketing experts trying to solve that problem, adding the hundred and first marketing expert probably won't make that much of a difference. But if you add somebody from sales, if you add somebody from manufacturing, if you add somebody from even legal, you might find some new solutions. So we need to embrace different points of view. And sometimes the fastest way to embrace that different point of view is one of the lenses from the book, which is lens number six, the analogy lens. Now, the analogy lens is a really powerful lens. I love this one. Because the analogy lens basically says that we want to look elsewhere. We want to ask ourselves, who else? Who else has solved a similar problem? Not the same problem, but a similar problem in a different industry, in a different area of expertise. And when we do that, we unleash some really great solutions that might have been hidden from view. And we'll explore that later. In fact, in this episode, I think we're going to probably use the analogy lens. So with that, let's get to today's challenge. And this is, like I said, one that is personally relevant to me. The question is, how can I increase podcast downloads So I was talking with a friend of mine who has a podcast, and he was interested in increasing the number of people who are actually listening to his show. Now, of course, that's going to be of interest to me, so I thought this would be a great one to tackle. And I want to apply the lenses so that I can be better at my podcast. And you'll notice I'm doing something slightly different with this podcast based on the results of the lenses. So let's dive right in. The first lens I would want to use is lens number seven. This is the result lens. This is the result lens. Now, the result lens says, what does this make possible? Why are we even investing our time in developing a podcast? Is it really to get downloads? Is it really to get listeners, or is it something else? I can't speak for anyone else, but for me, I'm very interested in a number of different things. One, I'm interested in increasing the number of people who are aware of the work that I do. But equally important, maybe even more important in some respects, is deepening the relationship with the people who already know my work or at least have a sense of my work, so they get a deeper appreciation for what I do, because what I want to do is make a bigger impact on them. And my belief is that the podcast will help people understand the process of reframing problems so that they are able to get even more and greater value. And, of course, when I look at it from that lens, I'm then also looking for people to bring me in to apply this process. So my goal is to give as many people the tools to be able to do this. But at some point, of course, I make a living helping people solve their problems and helping them figure out how to solve their own problems. So maybe in that case, it's not the number of downloads. It might be something completely different. Which then leads us to lens number three, which I really believe is probably going to be the most interesting lens for this particular challenge. Lens number three is the reduced lens. What if instead of increasing the number of downloads, I actually looked to decrease the number of downloads? Now, that might sound a little crazy, but it might be the solution to really getting the most value from the podcast. Instead of 10,000 people downloading and passively listening to the podcast, what If I had 50 people who had changed their life, change their business, 50 people who might want to bring me in to do business with them, to help their business? That's much more valuable than 10,000 people who are going to be listening passively and really not apply the concepts. So I think that if we look at it from that lens, it's going to give us some very interesting perspectives. And this might lead us to lens number one, which is the leverage lens. I use this one a lot because I think it's really powerful for us to start off understanding what's the leverage point with any problem we're trying to solve, especially when they're broader problems like increasing downloads, which is a pretty broad problem. So we might want to look at who do I want to target, who would get the most value, who would be most impacted by this work, and from a sales perspective, obviously, who might be in the best position to hire me, so I could be looking at it. And again, it comes back to the result. If the result lens says we are focused on being able to make sales, for example. So if the point of a podcast is to increase the number of buyers, well, then we need to make sure that the people who are listening are in a position to buy. So these are two great lenses, the reduced lens and the leverage lens being worked together. That'll give us some very interesting insights. And this might lead us to lens number 15, which is the substitute lens. The substitute lens. What if instead of downloads, this substitute lens, by the way, just means changing a word, One word, two words, doesn't matter. But how do we change one or two words in a problem statement in order to drive different solutions? So in this case, maybe instead of saying, how can I increase the number of downloads? Maybe I change the word downloads to engagement. Well, now that's a very interesting perspective. Instead of trying to just get people to passively download, now I want to be able to get people involved. And if I want to get people involved, well, maybe there is a different mindset. So maybe my measure isn't just the passive download. Maybe the measure is how many people email me after they listen to the podcast. So that's what I'm encouraging you to do right now is email me. Email me, tell me what you thought. You like it, you don't like it. What would you like to see? Tell me a problem you want me to solve. So I'm looking for engagement. I want people who listen to this to actually take action. Now, engagement might be engagement with me, or it might be engagement with my content. So you'll notice that in the beginning of the show, I talk about getthelenses.com well, I can measure after a podcast goes out, how many people are actually downloading the lenses. That, to me, is important because that's a different form of engagement. Maybe the engagement I can't measure that might be the most valuable is how many people are actually using the lenses after they download it. But maybe that's a different challenge for me to try to figure out. My point is that if I'm focused on downloads, it might not be the right measure. Engagement could give me something much more interesting to look at. And this gets me now to lens number 11. Lens number 11 is the resequence lens. The resequence lens. Now this is one which I love because I use it so much because it gives us so many different opportunities. And in this situation, it's about timing. It's about timing. What we tend to do is when we release a podcast, it gets announced the day that it's released, and then we sort of move on to the next podcast. But what are the things we could do prior to the podcast coming out? You think about a movie, the James Bond movies coming out next month. Very excited. Well, they've been doing a lot of advertising online and other places to build up anticipation. So how can we build up anticipation for our podcast? Maybe I could start publishing the types of problems we're solving in advance so that people who have that problem would be interested. Maybe we create a really cool trailer about the podcast like they do for movies. So that's one option. The next option might be what happens during the podcast. Now, right now, the timing of my podcast is you submit your problem prior to the episode and then I solve it during the show. What if instead it happened during the show? What if I had a call in show instead of recording this? What if it were a live show where people called in and said, hey, Steven, I got a problem. How would you solve it? Well, that's a different level of engagement. That's real time engagement. I would love to see that. Maybe we'll get to that sometime in the future. But the other thing to consider is what happens after the podcast? Instead of moving on to the next one, maybe there's something we can start thinking about that will keep people engaged afterwards. And I'm going to give you a little challenge at the end of this podcast to hopefully keep you engaged after we're done. The last lens we're going to talk about today is the analogy lens. And I talked about this at the very beginning of this episode when I talked about expertise being the enemy of innovation. One of the lenses to use to get past that is the analogy lens is to ask who else has solved a similar problem. So if I'm looking at this from the perspective of who else has solved the problem of getting people engaged, getting people involved. Well, maybe it's a multi level marketing organization, a direct marketing organization. Instead of trying to target 100 individuals to sell, they might target five people. Now, those five people would tell five people, and those five people might tell five people. And if you start doing the math, it's like that old Faberge commercial. If you remember that, you know, it's like you'll tell two friends and so on and so on, and then you get this exponential growth. And what if instead of just blasting out your podcast to people on social media, which is just casting a really wide net, what if you targeted the people who you think would be most impacted, the people who would be your biggest advocates, and you had those Advocates talk to five people to create five new advocates. The first five people now create 25 advocates. The next level, they created 125 advocates. And you go through this process and now after just a couple of levels, you have a pretty good group of passionate people about your podcast. Now, whether this would work in practice, I'm not 100% sure, but it's actually something I'm going to think about is who would be the five, 10 people that I think would be most passionate about what I'm doing so I could get them involved. So there you go. We talked a lot about how can I increase my podcast downloads. We put them through the lenses of the result lens, which is, why am I doing this? What I want to achieve with a podcast, the reduced lens, which says instead of increasing, what if we reduced the number of downloads that would require us to focus, which then leads us to the leverage lens, which is about, okay, if we're going to focus, where will we get the greatest impact? The substitute lens then went away from downloads to engagement. How do we keep people engaged? How do we get them involved in the process? Which then led us to the resequence lens, which is about timing before, during, and after the podcast, and then finally the analogy lens. Here's what I'd like you to do after listening to this. Write me, send me an email, tell me, what did you think about this podcast? I'd love to hear from you. What did you learn? What did you like? What did you disagree with? Now, if you want to be even more active, download the 25 lenses and apply them to a problem and then write me to tell me, hey, by the way, I was struggling with this problem and I actually solved it, or send me a challenge you're struggling with. I would love to hear from you and solve that problem real time on the show. That would mean the world to me. So those are some things I'd like you to do after the show to keep you engaged and to be able to measure the amount of engagement that's actually taking place here. So with that, I just want to thank you for being here today, and I look forward to the next episode where we will work on a different problem and we'll have a tip of the week. This is Steven Shapiro. This is Invisible Solutions. Happy Problem Solving.