Stephen Shapiro explains innovation as staying ahead of competition through adaptive thinking, not rigid process. He uses a grizzly-bear running-shoes story to define it, contrasts classical music with jazz to show why flexibility matters, and teaches a framework called MOTIV for building innovation as a repeatable capability.
Chapters
It's an absolute pleasure to be here in Singapore today. I have some footballs here with some questions that I'm going to ask you. And there's a few rules to this game here. Okay? Rule number one, if the ball is thrown to you, you catch it. Number one. More importantly, rule number two is you do not throw it back at me. Get ready to wake up. All right, so what's the question and what is your answer? And say who you are. It looks like I've caught this. What is your number one barrier to innovation? That's a good question. The application of creativity. That one is just a little too profound for even me. Now, I think it would be useful to talk about what do I mean by innovation. We've heard a number of people talking about innovation. I think it's useful just to set the stage before I get started what my definition is. And to do that, I'm going to tell you a story about a time back in 1998 when I was hiking with a friend of mine through the mountains of Canada. And we're walking through the mountains and everything is great and all of a sudden we stumble across a 600 pound hungry grizzly bear. We look at each other, we're trying to figure out what to do. So my buddy, he sits down on the rocks, he takes off his backpack, takes off his hiking boots and proceeds to put on his running shoes. And I look at him and I'm like, what are you doing? You can't outrun a bear. He looks back at me and says, I know I only need to outrun you. And that is what innovation is about. It's about staying one step ahead of your competition. Because if you don't, you will be eaten. If you look at the approaches that we use, process flows, flow diagrams, swim lane diagrams, even simulation, all, all are born out of computer management sciences, which are designed for repeatability, designed for predictability, designed for being able to execute the same process the same way each and every time. Very valuable for an organization. And I sort of equate this, since we have a musical theme going here, I sort of equate this to classical music. When classical music is composed by the composer, the objective is for it to be played the same way each and every time, regardless of which orchestra plays it. The business world is changing pretty fast. So I want to suggest a new metaphor for process. I want to suggest jazz. Anybody who knows jazz, typically, what there is, there are some simple structures, sort of like a 12 bar, B flat, blues, some common structures, maybe some common Riffs that allow innovation to emerge in the moment when it's most important to the customer solving their problem. From my point of view, creativity is about collecting and connecting dots. Different perspectives, different ways of looking at the world. If you think about a child, a child views the world with a fresh set of eyes. They're not encumbered by facts and knowledge and all the other things which we gain as we grow older. As you get older and you learn more, the brain stops to work. As soon as it knows the answer, it stops thinking and you start to filter more and more. Instead of expanding dots, you actually start to eliminate thoughts. You become an expert in a particular area within your organization. You start focusing on specific things that you think are going to add value to the exclusion of almost everything else. And you end up seeing the world through a filter. We also start to look at all the reasons why things won't work. I have a number of clients who I like to say that they put the no in innovation. Most of you, I assume, are probably doing this the way the first diagram is, that is trying to figure out a use for a brick. It's a logical thing because that's what I asked you to do. A more powerful way to do this and a way which you'll get some extremely unique answers very quickly is instead of trying to think of uses of a brick, try to find absolutely random unrelated things and figure out how you can use a brick for that. So I was actually talking to a group yesterday and the guy happens to be from the. It was Dennis, the guy who works for the water company down in Australia. He says you put a brick in your toilet because it reduces the amount of water. Or you could throw it at your TV as a way of shutting it off. If you think of not a cost effective way. If you think of different ways of looking at it, rather than starting in the middle, you could come up with an infinite number of answers quite quickly. My point is we're all walking around like we have sunglasses on. We have a filter. We don't know the filter's there. Everything we see and observe is through that filter. It's like a polarized lens. And so only you can change your filter. But it's difficult for you to even know what your filter is. So one of the things I have people do is apply a new filter. I want you to wake up each morning over the next two weeks and I want you to make believe you are someone else. Make believe you're a detective, make believe you're a carpenter, make Believe you're a mechanic, make believe you're an artist, make believe you're a magician. What you will see are things that you have never seen before, because when you have a filter on it is to the exclusion of everything else. You never know when collecting dots, which dots are going to be valuable. So what we're going to do is a yes and activity. Now you all get the concept of yes. And basically one person says something and then the next person has to say yes, and they build on it. Okay, so dentist on the moon. What a lovely day, being on the moon. You know what's great about being a dentist out here is it's so much easier to extract things because there's no weight. Yes. And it's so hard, though, to hold onto the tools that I don't exactly know how to be very good at. Being a dentist. Yes. And that's why I have rubber walls around everything. So they just keep on bouncing back at me. Yes. And I'm getting bruises on my head because they keep whacking me in the head. Did you hear what she was doing? Yes, but. Yes, but it was. Yes. I was saying yes and then doing it. Yes. But if you think about value that innovation can add to an organization, and you think about a curve, what you have right here is idea generation, basically coming up with ideas. The problem is if you don't have a process to see those ideas through to fruition, you don't get a lot of value out of it. So the next level is a process within the organization where you have the ability to take ideas, sort out which ones are of value and deliver them. And it may be through pilots and prototyping and testing and scaling. Where I like to focus my energies is actually up here, which is building innovation as a core capability of the organization. What I want to do is give you a way of trying to remember the principles a little more easily. So we have a word here, motive, and you just sort of forget the E for a moment. The M is for measures. You get what you measure. The O is for owners. Excellent processes need excellent owners. The T is for targeting target high value processes. I is innovation. Innovate, don't duplicate. And the V is for value. Process outcomes creates value. Now, I'm going to do something a little unusual here because everything we do, we're always adding E's. Well, I just want to sort of drop the E from this thing, if you don't mind. And if we reconfigure the letters, we end up with a slightly less professional. So just in case you don't feel motivated after a long night of drinking, you might just actually remember the principles quite quickly. Okay, let's get this off of here before George shows up.
