WTW 072 - Stephen Shapiro - FAST Innovation

I've been looking forward to this one. Not only is he one of the top speakers in the world, he's written an incredible series of books including Invisible Solutions, one of my favorite titles. Best practices are stupid. I want to hear more about that. And, uh, his name is Stephen Shapiro, and it's so nice to meet you, Stephen. I hope we have, uh, I hope this is the first time of many. In fact, we're presenting together at EBC for the Woodworking Network in Colorado in the fall. That's a great event.

Well, I'm looking forward to that.

Oh, they're going to love you. It's a really, really great group. Listen, I wanted to come out of the box. I was going to challenge you on this one until, uh, and I'm going to point people to your website, uh, stephenshapiro.com. And, you know, usually I anticipate having to spend some time getting to know my guests. Well, your demo video was a tremendously powerful condensed version, I think, of what you're talking about. And one thing that jumped out at me right away was asking for ideas is a bad idea. And I thought, geez, I don't like that idea until I heard your explanation, right? Why don't you tell us a little bit more about that? Because that's a fascinating perspective. I think I'm going to adopt that myself.

Well, look, you know, I mean, let's face it, in today's world of social media, we ask everybody for their opinions. We post something, we say, what do you think? And the reality is, first of all, are we asking the right people to get their ideas? But more importantly, if I ask— let's say you're a CEO of a company or running a department and you ask your people, hey, what are your ideas for improving the business? What you're going to get is a very limited set of what really is valuable. In fact, what you'll probably get are 1,000 ideas, of which 1 or 2 of them actually produce any real value. Life of the organization. Because everybody looks at a problem through their own lens of what, what's important to me, what's important to the people that I deal with, rather than what's important to the bigger picture. So when I say asking for ideas is a bad idea, a lot of it has to do with the fact that suggestion boxes, the way we've done them over the years— look, do they produce value?

They do. But you have to say, how much, right?

Yeah, thousands. I mean, on average, basically, we've seen on average between 2% and 10% of ideas that are submitted in the early stages of a suggestion box have value. And that diminishes over time because once you've got sort of the great ideas that were bubbling under the surface, that there was no place for them to be shared.

Right.

Well, once that happens, now it's just like, okay, well, I'm going to throw anything out there. And it's, it's not a very efficient way to run a business.

No. And, you know, when I heard you talking about it on your video, it was fascinating because First thing that came to mind is that's an obstacle that I think as leaders we have to fight all the time. That our ideas might not be the best ideas, right? Like you said, we each come at it from our own perspective. And so, and that was the pushback I had on it until I heard your explanation was that it is important, right, to solicit ideas from all levels. And that some of your best input, particularly in a large organization, comes from the front lines. They're in position to understand what's going on there, right? Where some folks that run big organizations also these days, some folks that run big organizations don't know anything about what front lines doing. They didn't have that experience.

Absolutely. And one of the things which I do believe is instead of looking for ideas, which are basically answers, I want people to start focusing on better questions. So in business, we've always said, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. And I'm like, no, no, that's bad advice. I want better, bigger, meatier, juicier problems. Because if you can do that, now at least we can put people on it to tackle it and solve it the right way. Rather than whatever you think the solution might be.

No, we're singing in harmony there too because I always hated that expression for a number of reasons. But not the least of which is if you tell people, look, don't bring me any problems. Bring me the answers. Bring me the solutions. It scares people from pointing out the problems that, like, if I'm hearing you right, those problems, those challenges, those are fertile ground for progress, for innovation.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that to me is— so, we work with a lot of different frameworks to, first of all, identify problems, but then also to prioritize problems. And if we can get everybody inside the organization understanding what's important, how to identify and prioritize problems, then once they bring those in and whether they're problems or they're opportunities, we bring those to the surface. Now we can use a number of different techniques to solve them. And sometimes the people who are good at seeing opportunities aren't necessarily the best people at solving opportunities. And so if we can even separate the problem definition from the problem solution finding, well, now we get a more greater opportunity because we get greater collaboration and more people involved.

Isn't that part of the challenge, though, too, for leaders? Because a lot of times, you know, you're going to get a lot of suggestions, like you said, and even if you refine that search, you're still going to get a myriad of suggestions, some of which will work, some of which might work now, some of which might not work now but might work later. And how important is it that leaders develop a discipline of recognizing and appreciating everyone's input, whether or not it's going to fall in that priority hierarchy you just talked about right now, right here and right now?

I think one of the challenges as leaders is, you know, it gets very easy to think, as you said before, we have the answers. But the leaders don't have the answers. In fact, the leaders shouldn't have the answers. The leaders should have questions that others to get others to ask better questions.

You know, I want to go into that in a second. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so one of the things which I think is really important is the power of experimentation. So instead of having people bring, OK, I've got a problem, I've got an idea, and bring it to leadership, why not just give— what would you do? And this is, this is always a question I have my clients consider is what would it be like if you gave every single employee in the company $100 to run some experiments to find a powerful solution that's going to create tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in value. Small scalable experiments. And if you can get everybody inside the organization thinking that way, now they're not just reacting, okay, I got a problem, here's a solution, but I'm going to test it out. I'm going to spend my time working on it. And it's a really powerful model.

Yeah. And I don't want to— I want to come back to that too. I don't want to lose sight because isn't that in itself, you know, your specialty being at that world of innovation, you know, the idea of self-directed groups and stuff that's come under the Agile banner and people having— giving people more autonomy. To me, it seems like such a natural progression. And it seems that every time I work with an organization that adopts those principles, at least in part, really produces more than they ever expected. So is that where we're going? Are you talking about this more? Self-directed groups, more autonomy on the floor?

Absolutely. There should be more autonomy and collaboration. So these aren't individual efforts. These are—

sure, yeah, efforts.

But also, it's the challenge at times is when individuals or teams don't see the bigger picture and they're running off doing autonomous things that don't produce value. And so it's really just getting that alignment of making sure that everybody understands what's important What is it we need to focus on? One of my big beliefs is that you want to innovate where you differentiate. And the problem is differentiation is something which is sort of understood maybe by a few people at the top, but it's not disseminated down to everybody in the organization. And that's really important.

That's very often the problem. Isn't that the— I think that's one of the primary responsibilities of leadership is you're the stewards of that vision. You know, this isn't to denigrate anyone at any level. But people are going to come and go. The folks at the top are generally, well, hopefully a little more stable. They're the ones that started the organization or the ones that are carrying it on. And it's that vision that unites people, right? Gets everybody— transforms me into we, so to speak.

Yeah, and I do distinguish mission, vision, and values from differentiation. They're related. They're cousins, but they're not the same. And to me, differentiation is how do we create value for our customers in a way that creates the greatest impact for them? And it also, as in, in return, will create great value for us. So it's, to me, it's a combination of those two things. And differentiation is actually very actionable. And so if everybody inside the organization understands how we differentiate and equally important is how does each and every individual contribute to that differentiator. That's a game changer. We've seen just a massive change in the impact of each individual when they understand how they contribute to the success of the organization rather than I have a job or a task to do.

No, and again, it feels very nice that I think again, we're singing in harmony where I've been preaching for a long time that people are going to perform at their best when and only when first of all, they know their leaders care. When their work has meaning and when they have the chance to learn and grow and develop in their position, right? And you just hit that very nicely. You sounded that note very, very nicely. Our contribution to the group, our contribution to that effort is really a large part of what gives our individual efforts meaning, no?

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

I don't want to lose sight of that idea about, you said, if I'm hearing you right, leaders are not people with all the answers. And that's another thing that That's another song I've been singing. The best leaders, you know, people have all the answers. We have another name for them, don't we? You should call them a-holes or something like that. Nobody likes the guy with all the answers all the time or who thinks. And I've never met somebody who has all the answers that actually did. The best, the most effective leaders that I've met and that I admire are the people who discipline themselves to know how to ask those right questions continually. Right. And that's an ongoing process if I'm hearing you right.

Yeah, as a leader, you even mentioned this earlier, is that a leader can't see everything. They— and there's sort of this arrogance in believing that as a C-level executive or even a leader of a department, that we're going to have the answers. No, we're actually too far away from things at that point. So the real opportunity here is to get people inside the organization to know how can they do what they do best and contribute the most that they can contribute. And the way you do that is not by directing people, but rather asking people, you know, the questions that are going to get them to ask better questions. And that to me is this, this system of asking better questions, more important questions, more powerful questions is really the key to unlocking and unleashing a lot of power inside of organizations.

No, I'm glad you brought up the word power too, because, you know, really that's part of the process of empowering others, isn't it? To ask the right questions, make sure people get the resources they need. And I might not understand that. And That's, I think that's a slip that we're all susceptible to. I know I've done it many times, even in a small organization where, and I think, and please, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I think sometimes we get blinded by the fact that we care so much, right? Especially if we're the, if I'm the person who started the organization, if I'm the person who had the idea, if I'm the person who brought this product out, it's hard for me to divorce myself right from that level, that intimate level of caring in that. And I think it's fair to say it'd be hard to find anyone else who is going to care as much as I do about it. Right. And I think that can be a— it can be a good thing. And if it's managed properly, but it can also be really detrimental to us now.

Well, caring is great, but confirmation bias is bad. And we as human beings all have it. So basically what ends up happening is if I believe based on the history of the company that if you're a founder of a company. I founded this company, and it influences our beliefs. And therefore, what ends up happening is confirmation bias just basically means no matter what evidence you get to the contrary of what your beliefs are, you will only see what supports your beliefs.

Yeah. That's where it becomes dangerous. Or as dangerous as you seek out that confirmation, right? Surround yourself with the husband, the classic, right? The classic.

Absolutely.

Yeah, no, that can get really hairy. What do you see right now as the biggest barriers to innovation as you're working with company? Obviously, you know, Tell me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me from learning a little bit about your work that both of us have, at least at this point in our careers, we have the blessing of preaching to the choir a lot, right? If someone invites us in, they're usually very receptive to the ideas we're sharing. But still, there's always, you know, there's always some barriers, obstacles. Like you said, there's biases that we carry with us. There's prejudices that we all take into it. What do you see as barriers to innovation? And particularly, I think the lens in good companies that really want to make these changes, but they're still finding that there's some resistance?

Well, I think there's a few different things. One of them we just talked about, which is confirmation bias. I believe that is— there's a great quote from Scott Cook, who the founder of Intuit, and he said, right, for every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome. And that just goes to prove that as human beings, we believe what we believe based on our past experiences. So that is that institutional knowledge is a dangerous thing, which then leads me to say that expertise is often the enemy of certain types of innovation because our past experiences put our blinders on. And there's just so many examples of companies that were successful for many years and they couldn't get out of their own way. And it wasn't because they didn't have the ability, but they just thought what they did in the past was going to make them successful in the future. And actually, past success is a pretty good predictor of future failure. If you aren't able to do some kind of interrupt.

Right, right. That's one of the biases. You know, it's interesting, there's, um, I can't remember who did this experiment some years ago. It had, it had to do, um, sports is a great metaphor for some of these things to investigate these phenomena. And this, uh, psychologist was, was demonstrating how, uh, basketball players on the free throw, free throw line, or field goal kickers in a football game if they're very successful, the expectation is the next shot's going in or the next ball is going through the pipes, right? And quite the opposite is true usually. The more success you have, that failure is looming there somewhere. It's just a statistical inevitability, right? And isn't that something we have to manage when we're talking about, you know, what you're operating with here?

Absolutely, which is why the power of experimentation becomes really important and also good experimentation. One of the issues that we run into is sort of a cousin to confirmation bias is something called positive test strategy, which means that if I'm running an experiment, the odds are I'm going to be designing experiments that are there to prove that this is a good idea.

Yeah, that's interesting.

But what about running experiments specifically designed to prove it's a bad idea? And what about involving people who their role is to be the devil's advocate, to be the people who are looking at this problem and saying, I need to break it. I need to find reasons why it's not going to work. Because if everybody thinks this is a great idea, this is a great idea. Well, that's all you can ever see. It's a great idea. And that's— and I want to say this is really important is in innovation right now, we've been overglorifying failure. And what I mean by that is we've been saying we need to fail. If we're not breaking eggs, we're not innovative. Fail, fail, fail, fail fast, but fail. That's the wrong message. It's the wrong message. You don't want to fail. What you want to do is you want to excel.

It's a struggle, isn't it? Yeah, I hear what you're saying because that's something we fall into, you know, with my past life, you know, the— it's not so much that we're looking for failure, is that as martial artists we recognize that failure is inevitable. It's inevitable part of the process. So it gets a little different semantic connotation, right? But boy, did you open up a can of worms there. I mean, you're talking about people wanting to experiment, to set up experiments where they're going to expose themselves to some different options, if I'm hearing right. If we're going to couch it in a more positive way, right? But that, boy, that rubs against what we're seeing culturally right now, isn't it? I mean, the dominant structure in our culture right now is find confirmation, find other people that are going to support your point of view. And I think that's extremely dangerous, not just in organizations, but I think culturally in our society as a whole. I don't know, maybe I'm an idiot, but I tend to like to seek out people who are going to argue with me.

If you're going to spend a lot of time, money, and energy on something, you want to make sure it makes sense. So the concept of small scalable experiments basically means that we're going to test something with the least amount of time, money, and energy with the right people to make sure that it actually is truly validated. And an important point is when you run an experiment, If you disprove a hypothesis, if you prove that your idea was bad, that is not failure.

No, that is actually a favor. It's a resource saver. Yeah, that's— well, that's Edison's philosophy, as much as it's co-opted in a nutshell, isn't it? I think people misinterpret that, don't they? And like I said, using that word failure, I don't want to run away from that word, but it's not that that's the end game. That's what you're looking for. So I like what you're talking about. It seems to me there's a— there's an economy to what you're proposing here. And maybe that's the best way to overcome our resistance to it, right? Because what's the biggest resistance to experimentation is the fact that there's risk there, right? You're always introducing an element of risk. It sounds like you're managing that pretty well. Can you put a cross and T's and dot some I's on that for people who still might be, you know, wondering how do you bring that economy to it? I like what you just said about that efficiency, the experiment, something that's going to be efficient if I'm hearing you right and use resources economically?

Absolutely. First of all, I want to say I'm an engineer. So even though I'm in the innovation space, I'm an engineer. And so I'm always looking at efficiencies. It's what I trained to do, and it's what I've done my entire career. So what I've basically done is I've taken the innovation process, which has been wildly inefficient in my opinion, and I've re-engineered it to become something that is more efficient. Now, there's obviously going to be unpredictabilities and inefficiencies in it. But one of the keys that I'm— I always encourage people to say, and I said this before, is like, how could you— if you, if you have an idea, instead of saying this is an idea, let's go do something with it, let's go implement it. I would say, how do you know it's a good idea? If I gave you $100 and you were to spend a few hours or even a week if you needed to, to test it out, what would it look like? Because most people jump from idea to implementation. I've got this idea. Let's go do it. There's a lot of steps in between.

I'm guilty of that. Yeah.

Test it out. Make sure it works. I mean, one of my products is a game that I developed that uses poker cards, specially designed.

I saw that. Yeah. Tell us more about that because it looks like people are having a lot of fun with that, for one thing. So that's, that's a, that's a nice way to teach.

Yeah. So, so it's called Personality Poker and basically it's built around my belief that there are different ways we contribute to innovation. Not everybody is the same. And so we need to understand how do people contribute. Some people are very analytical and are going to be great at the data necessary for innovation. Some people will be great at connecting the dots and developing crazy solutions. Others will be great at the implementation. Others will be great at the people. And so this started off as a spreadsheet about 20 years ago. And it was just boring for people to fill it out. And I'm in Las Vegas playing blackjack at the Venetian. And I got this like, wait, there's 4 steps to the innovation process. There's 4 different types of people who contribute to innovation. There's 4 suits in a deck of cards. What would that look like? So instead of just saying, okay, I'm going to go off and take my spreadsheet and produce tens of thousands of dollars worth of cards, I went home, grabbed a Sharpie, grabbed a deck of poker cards, and I took all the words from my spreadsheet, put them on poker cards, and I started playing around with it, experimenting. Okay, this doesn't work. Test this out. Change this. Oh, hey, by the way, what can we do with the colors? What can we do with the numbers? And we kept on changing it and experimenting with a deck of cards. So I probably spent like $20 on 10 different decks of cards goofing around with this until we got something that worked. And then I developed— sorry— developed another experiment where we printed off very inexpensive, terrible-looking cards. But now I can start doing it at scale. We started doing it at events using these terrible cards, but people were loving being part of the process. Then eventually printed 100 decks and then 1,000 decks and then 10,000 and 50,000 decks. But I wouldn't have gone from this idea in Las Vegas to 50,000 decks without those experiments.

You must be the only guy that took something useful away from a blackjack table in Vegas. I got to tell you.

Well, certainly didn't have the money. So that's why I had to experiment. I lost all my money at the table.

Yeah, there it is. But isn't that— and you know, that's an interesting thing too. One of the big barriers I hear to innovation is, you know, the lack of resources. And to me, that's kind of a cop-out. So either straighten me out or, you know, take me in the right direction with this. And this is a lesson that's interesting because sometimes I even question myself, like, why I share, you know, my past life. In fact, when I tell people, I usually open a program with my resume, I say, "Well, I'm a former drug addict and a 2-time college dropout. Aren't you glad you paid all this money to listen to me talk?" Right? And I used to think that was a really poor resume for somebody, especially in the leadership space. But I realized it was a very good one. And here's why. If I'm hearing you right, we're talking about transformation. That, you know, that's one of the root words behind everything we're talking about. And I finally accepted it. Who better to talk about transformation than somebody that had to learn it in order to survive? And that's what leaders do. I mean, leaders transform themselves. Most successful ones—transform others, adapt to the times, deal with the uncertainty that's out there. And I think the best leaders, the greatest leaders, are the ones that really make transformation happen, right? They see a need there. They bring their company in alignment. They bring their organization in alignment to face that need in this ever-changing world. Are we—how much in harmony are we there on that topic, on that aspect?

Well, if expertise is the enemy of innovation, we need to bring in people with different perspectives. One of the speeches I gave, I actually presented the very first large TEDx event back in 2009 for NASA. And the title of my speech was Rocket Science Isn't Always Rocket Science. And the point was that if you have rocket scientists trying to solve problems, if you have a rocket science and aerospace engineering problem, you have 100 aerospace engineers working on the problem, adding the 101st aerospace engineer is not going to make much of a difference.

But if we bring together— I just heard a rocket scientist say the same thing. He said, don't— I'm not the right guy for everything.

Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the point is we need people who bring different perspectives, different attributes, different personalities. And what ends up happening, though, is in innovation is— and this, look, it's natural. We tend to surround ourselves with people who think like we do, who are similar to us. But we actually need to be able to find people who make us uncomfortable, people who don't— we don't even necessarily resonate with them. And if we can figure out why we don't resonate with them, what makes us uncomfortable, maybe they think differently than we do. They see the world differently. They have something to contribute. And that's really the power of good, powerful collaboration.

That— yeah, I agree with you 100%. That in itself, you know, I was talking about leaders looking in the mirror and that reflection, best reflection for a leader are the people that you serve, right? And so, to notice those differences, notice that. But let's, I want to drill down. I think maybe I didn't phrase that properly. How do you overcome that resistance to somebody who doesn't, you know, and I get, and I'm not, you know, again, I'm not crapping on anybody. I understand there's a lot of rational, rationality gets in the way too, right, as well as expertise. We can ration ourselves We can rationalize ourselves out of some really cool opportunities, sometimes out of fear. And I'm not saying that it isn't legitimate at times. But how do we overcome that? How do you help people overcome that resistance to say, you know, I don't know, I don't want to change, or I don't want to change that much right now?

We are wired. There's so many interesting studies that have been done that show that even when we say we want change, at a subconscious level, we fight it. Yeah. I mean, there's one study done, which I thought was so fascinating, where they looked at people's external response to change. Yes, we want it. We need it. We have to have it. We want creativity. Right. We know it here. But when they tested them— yeah, we know it here. But when they tested them using something called the Implicit Association Test, which tests unconscious biases, when they looked at the relationship between change and creativity, the strongest words were vomit, and distress. It's like they don't want it. And so what we need to do— and this is why experimentation is also really important, though, is because, of course, change is difficult, because if we're going from point A to point B and it is a huge leap, that's going to be very difficult. But if we can conduct experiments and course correct and learn— I call it meandering with purpose— well, now we can grow and expand as we get new information. And then the risk doesn't seem quite as large as it shouldn't be quite as large. And it also helps us through the process because it doesn't feel like we're taking on something that's astronomical. We're just taking another step at a time. I'll give you a— Right.

No, I love that what you say without giving away the store. What are a couple of, let's say, immediately applicable tips you can give people to start that process of winnowing? Because I like what you're saying. And again, it's the same thing with You know, I can't help but going back to the context of martial arts. You know, people look at a martial artist do a complicated set of movements, a kata or a dance, you know, and a lot of people, even people that are involved in it, don't realize the way to that is to break it down to its smallest component parts, right, and perfect each piece as you go along. It's that process of experimentation you're talking about, right? I have to do this, I have to fail small here, and then put the pieces together as I grow. So What do you think? What are the top things that you advise people to do to get comfortable with that process?

I think the first thing that's really important, and we alluded to it before, but I'll get a little deeper into it right now, is the concept of reframing. Okay. What ends up happening is when we look at a problem, it looks a particular way. Now, maybe it's a really big problem. Okay. If it's a big problem, what are the ways that we can reframe it? And I have 25 different lenses that I use. It's from my latest book, 25 different ways of reframing problems. So if a problem is really big, for example, we were doing some work in the UK on the education system. That's a big problem. What we did was we went through this process of reframing. So, OK, well, is it really about the education system? What's the outcome? Why do we have an education system? Well, it's not because we want teachers in classrooms, but it's because we want children to be able to learn and be productive members of society. Great. How do we reframe that? Well, then we asked, what's the most impactful part of a child's learning process? And one of the things is positive parental involvement. So as you start peeling the onion, now you go from education system, which is teachers, teachers' pay, classroom size, infrastructure, technology— it's just like overwhelming— to how do we get parents involved with the child's learning as they go through the process? A totally different question that could have a profound impact on the solution.

You're one of the most philosophical engineers I've ever met, I think. That's kind of interesting, right? And the reason I'm pointing that out is because I see this all the time in human-centric leadership. There's sometimes— there's an acceptance of it. People want to embrace it. But then there's this idea that, well, this is philosophy. This is a lofty position. How do I reduce it? And what I found is, well, a couple of things. First of all, I do believe that somehow our society is kind of addicted to complexity, right? And you just said it so nicely, so beautifully. You take this huge problem, this lofty problem, when you frame it in those terms, what you really did was reduce it, didn't you? You made it simpler to understand. Now you still have to take it apart, and now you're going to start seeing the complexity, but then each component piece is easier to manage.

Is that where you're going? That's partly the case. The challenge at times is if you just deconstruct a problem into smaller pieces without the overall guide, right?

Yeah.

Then reconstructing it actually causes more problems in the long run. So it's not as simple as just breaking it down into parts, which is why I always use these different lenses to look at it. So we didn't just say, okay, education system, well, you've got teachers, teachers' pay, classroom size, technology, nutrition, da da da da. We didn't do that. We said we use what we call the result lens.

Result lens is, yeah, yeah, yeah, here's where we're going, right? This is what we ultimately want.

Yeah, that's the reframe. Because it's a different lens, different perspective on the problem. And then we use the leverage lens, which says, what's the one factor that has the greatest impact or what's the greatest barrier? And now we haven't really deconstructed it, but we've actually with laser precision, we got down to something that if we solve this, it will have a big, profound impact. And at the same time, it's not going to cause problems anywhere else in the process. Yes, yes. You get this ballooning of solve this problem, but now causes a problem over here.

If I'm hearing you right, you're finding that connecting tissue, right, that different departments, different areas, different people might see as separate. But you're finding that connecting tissue, if I'm hearing you right. And that's hugely important, right? Because if it's taken to an extreme, if you deconstruct things too much, if you separate too much, you know, that causes another great problem, right? This idea— and I still see it all the time— siloing. Departments. I remember one— geez, one workshop, this was terrible— that two people, department heads, and they got along terrifically. They were cordial to each other. They were friends, right? And they had this problem that was relatively simple to solve. They had been dealing with this problem for 5 years, and we solved it literally in about 30 seconds just by getting them to look at what the commonality was, right? Here's from my perspective. Here's something— oh great, can't you just have a meeting? With your folks and explain these two things. And they said, oh yeah, that's great. Why didn't we do it 5 years ago? But they hadn't seen the connecting tissue. They were operating, like you said, from their own perspectives, from their own frames, and unintentionally had separated themselves. Like I said, there was no— we always talk about it in terms of adversarial or conflict, and it wasn't that way in this situation.

Yeah, I mean, what you just described is an organizational construct of where separation or deconstruction deconstructing a business into departments or functions causes issues. And we see the same thing with problems. And so what we need to do, I always say, I call it line thinking, and it's not necessarily the best word, but we get so focused on the dots inside of organizations, the people, the departments, but we don't think about the lines. And the lines are the connective tissue, as you were saying, between them, what connects them. And if we focus on those interconnections, that's where some of the real power lies.

Yeah. No, I agree with you 100%, and that's why it's so important, you know, from in my world to make sure people understand that one of the most important things you can do is to constantly work on those human connections, to make sure that you're approaching each other as human beings. Because if you, you know, if you allow those barriers to get in the way, well, the most obvious thing that happens initially is communication breaks down. But then, you know, you take that simple problem and it compounds and becomes interdepartmental conflict, interdepartmental competition, right? Competition between people. And that competition between people can be really destructive, I think, particularly on the leadership levels in the executive suite. Yeah. Absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, there's— I'll give you just a very quick example here. There's a client I was working with. They were developing products only 15% on time. And so what we do is we went in and we said, okay, well, maybe we need to redefine what, what it means to be product development because they used to think about it as the R&D department, the people actually designing. And when product development, development was redefined as 6 months after successful product launch and any involved in that is now going to be part and measured in that process, whether it's marketing, manufacturing, legal, sales. Boom! Basically, just by redefining what product development meant, they were able to go from 15% to 75% on-time product launch in just a matter of months. So it's amazing when you start focusing on those connections, the power that you can have.

No, that makes perfect sense. In fact, it just brought to mind another great organization I was working with, and I think you'd be a good contributor to them, where there was a huge breakdown between sales and product management. And again, on a human level, the people were fairly well connected, but they had no understanding of what the other department's roles were whatsoever. And that was causing a lot of friction, which was starting to affect their personal relationships. It's going to inevitably.

Yeah, I mean, I always like to use music as an analogy because I'm a sax player. And when I think about businesses, we I'm not laughing at you.

I'm looking at my wall of guitars as you said that.

Oh, nice. Yeah, I need to put my sax up on the wall. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But, you know, if you think about the way we typically designed organizations, it's sort of like classical music, a lot of processes, procedures, structures. Right. But I'm a jazz player. What I love about jazz, and I actually demonstrated this once during a speech, is we hired a jazz band, had the event organizers hire a jazz band. I never talked to them. They had no idea why they were there. They were just backstage. Their instruments were on stage. And about halfway through the presentation, I came out, had the— I was out there, had the band come out, and I said, okay guys, we're going to do a 12-bar B-flat blues. I'll count it off. And I basically just count off, and for 10 minutes we just jammed. Yeah. And the point was we didn't need to have sheet music. We didn't need to have processes, procedures, and policies. All we needed was that simple structure that allowed all those interconnections to happen. And then we were able to create this great music. And that's what we need more of in organizations is that flexibility and spontaneity, that improvisation and innovation that happens in the moment through structure because we need structure. It's got to be the right structure.

No, I love that analogy for a number of reasons and not the least of it, too. You know, I'm glad you brought up an old-time rock and roll ballhead blues guy, you know. So when you brought that up, it's this, right? What— that works because people in a jazz context, in a jamming context, you're listening to one another. Yeah, yeah. Not just doing your own thing, right? Not just showing off. That's— yeah, perfect metaphor. Well, listen, I'd love to— first of all, I'd love to have you back again on the program if that would be cool with you. And absolutely. And anytime you think you see something out there that's trending that you think our, our listeners would benefit from, uh, please give me a shout and you'll have a discussion about it. Again, Stephen and I will be together out in Colorado, Colorado Springs in the fall with EBC. So the folks from EBC, I know you like to listen to the program. I'm really impressed with what Stephen has to offer. I think you guys are going to really enjoy him. Stephen, you're going to enjoy this group. This is a fabulous group of people. We'll have a good time. Do you play golf?

I'm excited. I'm more of a hacker than a golfer, but I do enjoy it from time to time.

That's cool. We can get out there on the, on the golf course at the Broadmoor if you want that. And believe me, folks, I had the opportunity to do that last year. There's no ego there. Don't worry about it.

As long as I'm not playing against, you know, a good golfer, I might be okay.

No, we weren't against anybody. In fact, it was funny because I didn't even keep score. The other guys are keeping score. I said, "Are you kidding me? I'm just enjoying the view. This is amazing." So there you go. Yeah, that'll be cool. Stephen, why don't you talk, you know, tell us how to get in touch with you. And if you want to mention, like I said, which books did I mention? Invisible Solutions. I love that title. Best Practices Are Stupid. That's one that I'm gonna buy I'd buy that right away and get that on my shelf. That's a cool one.

Yeah, those are my two latest. I'm actually working on number 7 right now. I'm hoping to have that out later this year. But, you know, the best way to find me is steveshapiro.com. And the reason why I use Steve as opposed to Stephen is there's two ways to spell Stephen. So I'd go— so steveshapiro.com is the easiest way to find me. And there you can learn about Personality Poker, which is a book and a deck of cards and a whole system for being able to create high Forming Innovation Teams. And yeah, you can learn about stuff there. That's probably the best place.

Yeah, I'm going to, I'm going to pick up a deck of those cards too. I'm going to try to, try to push those out for you.

That sounds like a lot of fun. It is a blast. It is.

Hey, thanks so much for being here today. And let's give you the last word.

Well, let's see. I think that the key thing with innovation is to make sure that you put your ego aside, that you allow your team to be able to thrive the best that they can and make sure you've given them enough direction so that each and every person knows how they're contributing to the success of your organization.

You, sir, are a sensei. Thank you. Thank you.