Mindsets, Not Maps: Rethinking Corporate Innovation | Richard Braden | 683

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Rich Brayden. Amongst other things, besides being at Stanford and doing all that sort of cool stuff, he is the co-author of Innovation-ish. With Tessa Forshaw, and the subtitle I love is How Anyone Can Create Breakthrough Solutions to Real Problems in the Real World. So, uh, let's just dive in. What's going on today, Rich?

Uh, just excited to be here and, and talk with you and get the word out to people because it really is about how anyone can create breakthrough solutions. And the re— uh, a lot of why we wanted to write this book is In our work teaching in universities, as well as going out and working with a number of clients, we kept hearing the same messages over and over. We were trying to introduce people to creative problem solving and innovation, and there was this huge resistance. Who am I to be an innovator? This, I'm not a creative person, or it's for other people.

And we, we'll stay there a minute.

Yeah.

So I, I think that one of the, every subset of thought leadership has its own quirks, right? So I've done a bunch in the innovation space as I have in, in other spaces. And what's weird about innovation, there's not this big anti-innovation movement, you know, ex, ex, exaladites, right? Yeah.

Right, right, right, right.

Which is literally what they do, right? But then kind of what you were saying. The who owns it piece and, and who am I to sort of take that on is a little vague and fuzzy. So some companies might have a chief innovation officer, or they say, well, that's product development, whatever. But I love the way you are sort of reframing it to say it, it's sort of this democratization of an innovation mindset is what I'm hearing.

Absolutely. Absolutely. And there's sort of two pieces of that. One is we're kind of fed a constant diet of who an inno— innovator is. And we did a general population survey and and asked a very open question of who are innovators? And resounding answers came back with about 5 names.

Huh.

They were Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. Right, right. Uh, Thomas Edison. So it's all these iconic people. They were, and they all happened to be men. So it's kind of ridiculous on its face, but that's what we think of because we're fed this constant diet. And so there are a lot of people that are like, but I'm not Mark Zuckerberg, I can't innovate. And that's just not true. And the other thing is what you alluded to. They think of innovation as the big idea that starts a company that creates a unicorn. It's this giant thing.

Right.

And the reality is once you have that big idea and you start that company, The majority of the people in the company are in the sort of enterprise enablement or operations space supporting that main big idea. So, right, right. There's far more potential for innovation at every organization across all of the people that can do big and small innovations.

So stay there for a minute because if most of us were honest, we'd say, I'm not Musk, I'm not Zuckerberg, I'm not like, okay, nor about them. Right. Nor, right. But then the next part shouldn't be, so therefore I shouldn't even try. No. So I, I think there's a, a scale and scope to what you're talking about innovation. Right. So most of us won't invent the equivalent of the iPhone. Like, it's just not gonna happen. But you can be an innovative dentist, whatever that might be. You can be an innovative actuary. So tell me a little bit, 'cause I'm, I'm sort of a junkie on models and methods and frameworks. So if you, if you go from Jobs to Musk, to sort of the everyday dude and, and, and woman thinking about this, right?

Sure.

There's a model, there's a method, there's a framework here. So tell us about that.

Right. Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, let's dispel the fact that Musk and Jobs and all those people, they are impressive individuals, but they are not a lone genius that invented everything. They brought their teams. It is a collaborative idea. And the key to that in terms of models and frameworks is you've gotta get everybody moving on the same page and working in the same way collaboratively. And that's done right now. There are, we've looked at over 80 different creativity frameworks that are out there. There's a ton of them. And we did some analysis.

And by the way, the, the world probably doesn't need another one.

We don't need another one. No, but we don't need another one. But another one is fine. Fine because what all of those are trying to accomplish is they're trying to get people to look at problems in a different way, to take on a different mindset. Now they do it as a side effect predominantly, but what we are saying is the mindset approach, the how you look at your problem is the key to how they all work and how you should do it. Many of those, because it's easier or because you can, you know, wrap your proprietary framework around it, give you a series of steps, kind of like, I don't know, a recipe for cooking or a piece of classical music.

Okay.

Instead, we take the approach of you gotta look at the mindset that you need next. And an example, so first of all, a mindset is, it's a, a perspective, a way that It guides your behavior by how you look at a situation. Yeah. And that changes your behavior. So if you go out to a retail location, if you have a shopping mindset, you might be ready for, you know, a couple hours of browsing and looking and seeing what's there.

Sure.

If you have a buying mindset, it's about, I want to get in, get the thing, and get back out so I can move on with my day. And that guides your experience. The same is true with innovation. If you put on a mindset of, I want to go and learn from others, that changes how you approach it and what you do next, as opposed to a mindset of iterating and building and tearing down and getting feedback over and over. That would be more of an iterations mindset. So all of those processes and frameworks are all trying to get you to do those mindsets. But they present it in as like a map, like a, here you go from step 1 to step 2 to step 3. And while the analogy we use is if I have the world's best map of New York City and a great itinerary, and I give that to you, I'm like, you should use this on your vacation. That works really well if you happen to be in New York. But if you open that map up and you're in Bangkok, Thailand, That map does you no good. And so depending on the problem you're solving, the people you have, the resources available, the process map that you got from some creativity piece may not be helpful. It's better to be a navigator to decide what you wanna do next.

So that does a very good job of sort of at a, at a very basic level, sort of What is the it? What is the thought leadership that's underlying the book, that's underlying what you do, et cetera? I wanna shift to sort of the business side of this, right? 'Cause you were your, your co-author. There, there's an academic piece to this in terms of where, where you spend your time, uh, where she spends her time. But give me a sense of the underlying business model. And I always like to ask sort of, well, who's paying you to get what done?

Right. So traditionally with engaging innovation, there are a couple of routes people take. One, they spend a lot on development and send people out to programs, try to hire in and build their capability of innovation so that they can try to use it. Often that happens sort of in an innovation wing or center or position.

Yes. Mm-hmm.

The other is we need to innovate. Who can innovate? And they go hire a Defiant Design firm or consulting firm and they, they bring their army and they do it for a while and then they go away. The approach that we use is a hybrid of the two. We know from the academic side that the best learning happens when you're working on real work that is meaningful for you and it takes effort. And if you're going to outsource, you need to keep outsourcing. It builds a dependency.

So instead, well, so, so, so stay there for a minute because yeah, that, that framing is typical for lots of things that companies do.

Sure.

We, we need X, so if we outsource it, we're gonna pay a premium, we're gonna get X done, it's gonna get done on time at a high-level budget, but we're not interested or haven't, don't have the time or haven't framed it this way to say we want to learn how to do this organizationally. We might say, hey, listen, We're a company that does, you know, we're a manufacturing company. We're not good at building web websites. We need to do it every so often. Let's hire a great website firm. And that, there's logic to that, right? Totally.

There is a place for that. Absolutely. Yep.

But I like what you're saying to say at some point, many organizations should, should say, whether it's about the dependency or the economics, does this become a core competency or could it, should it become a core competency for some to many of our employees? And in the absence of that, are we a competitive disadvantage in the market for not understanding how to, how to look at the world in an innovative lens?

And I think there are places, and website's a good example, where outsourcing can be a reasonable option unless that is the core strategy for your business. But now in the pace of change that everything is moving and there's new technologies and there's AI and Everything is going so fast. Being agile and being able to adapt as an organization across the whole organization is a competitive advantage. So for innovation, infusing innovation into your day-to-day, your business as usual, allows the whole organization to adapt if you build that capability.

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So I wanna, I wanna, I wanna push on that because I, I love that thinking because I think if you, if you were to map out and you're, you're better qualified to do this than I sort of the history of innovation in corporate America, right?

Uh-huh.

So there's the Edisons of the world, right? These crazy innovators that do cool stuff, right?

Sure.

But then it matured and I would say, I don't know, IDEO and all that sort of maybe 30 years ago. People were like, okay, this is a thing. We need to figure this out. So they would create the chief innovation officer, whatever, but it would be such a small percentage of the total population. And it's also absurd to say, let's, you know, let's make that the responsibility of these 9 people, you know, in Silicon Valley or something like that.

Right. Well, I mean, even if you're generous, so it's the small strategy team, it's the product development team and research and development, like that whole group, maybe that's several hundred people, it's still 700 people in what could be a 10,000 to 50,000 person organization. There's so much extra potential we're, we're missing. And so many of those people are closer to the problem than those people in the innovation unit.

Yes.

So we worked with, uh, one of the largest quick service restaurants in, in the world, but in North America to help them redesign their supply chain.

Okay.

We worked with people from the restaurant, like owners and crew in the restaurant, to people who were pulling cases sometimes out of the freezer in a distribution center, to executives and executive boards at owners. We had a huge team and we led them through, we split them into sub-teams and we led them through a process to help look at their supply chain. So we had all these different perspectives. And we had people from all walks of life and background and experience. They were all able to do innovation.

Okay.

And what, what's more, by the time we got through the first piece of work we did with them, took about 9 months, they had changed how they talked about problem solving. They had adapted this because they'd used it in real life on problems that were meaningful to them. And they go something we couldn't do if they tried to outsource to us. We are never gonna have 30 to 40 years of experience in a supply chain like that. So the hybrid worked incredibly well.

So when you, when you talk about your hybrid approach, because I'm, I'm trying to understand the business model here. There's the outsource piece, which you can do kind of some of that, right?

We could do.

Yeah. But, but structurally your answer is we're not outsourcing our capabilities development. It's both. We're gonna get, get the thing done. We'll help, we'll support it, but your people are gonna do some of the stuff too.

Absolutely. Let me make it really concrete. We took a core team of about 45 people from across the supply chain and we broke them up into small teams.

Mm-hmm.

We met with them 2 to 3 days at a time, every couple months, every about 6 weeks across 9 months. Every time we got together, we heard what they had done, we introduced some new concepts, we helped them make the decisions on how to move forward, we released them back into the wild, and then we'd have coaching calls along the way to just keep them on track. So we guided how they move forward because we had the experience to help them make the judgment decisions that they weren't quite ready for, but they had the depth of knowledge and experience in supply chain that we didn't to be able to pull out the insights. So that's the hype.

So, and it's an applied model, right? We're not just—

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So I, I love that. This was not education. This was not an exec ed program. This was, they had real within the business unit problems they were trying to solve, and we helped guide the work that they did and help keep them on track. So we owned a portion of the outcome because we were rolling up our sleeves with them to get them where they needed to go.

But what I, what I love about that is, is when you're doing education, what I would call education in isolation. The issue is really engagement. People are good, people work hard, but sure, if I'm doing this Exec Ed thing and my company paid all this money, blah, blah, blah, I'm gonna do my best 'cause I'm a smart person and I want to do my best.

Yeah.

But if I have to, you know, sort of balance out the demands of, okay, we just had a lunch break during this Exec Ed and I got 9 emails and my team's on fire, I kind of have to deal with that. But if, if there's no sort of, uh, artificial boundary between the educational component and the applied component, it's just kind of what we're doing over the next couple of months.

Yeah. Exec ed has its place and I teach at Stanford in the exec ed program and it's great for awareness and background and being able to understand what's going on. But what we were doing was something that was different. It was capability building along with driving a business outcome. So they got to do both, and along the way they built their capacity. And we kind of build in our own obsolescence because after a while they don't need us anymore, but that's fine. What we want is to help people come up to speed, and this is why we wrote the book, is so that they can take control. They can be agentic and control their own destiny and drive it for themselves because Anyone can do this. They just need to get their practice going and we can help accelerate that.

Got it. So on the business side, so I, I love the model. What are the things that you're doing to increase awareness of there's a different way to look at this, right? You know, what, how are you putting thought leadership out there deliberately, strategically, et cetera? So the people that are sitting with these problems, they're probably not Googling this way of being cuz they probably don't know it exists. So how do you push that out there? So somebody goes, huh, interesting. I should give Rich a call and have that conversation. Yeah.

I think what we're doing is giving a different approach to what they're already looking for, which is how do we incorporate innovation, creatively solve problems? How do we keep up with the pace of change and not let somebody disrupt us? By staying ahead. And I think the tests that they are not, they maybe are less aware of, are a different set of problems where innovation is hot, innovation, the, the executives are saying do innovation, but I'm sitting in a function that isn't traditional innovation. How do I even start or do that? And I think that's where you talked earlier about scale, where where we see innovation as a spectrum. There are moonshot ideas, the iPhone.

Yeah. The big, yeah, yeah.

Company-making ideas. But underneath that, if you're gonna deliver on that, there are a whole bunch of orbit shot ideas. And below that are cloud shots and roof shots and jump shots. And so depending on where you are, you need more or less capability in doing innovation. If you get everybody a little bit of innovation, You can solve a bunch of thorny problems. The, the example I always use is if the finance team could get a little innovation and solve the expense report workflow so it was easy and accurate for everyone, they would be heroes. It's not gonna change the company. They aren't gonna be an expense report company, but in every company, if they could solve that and, and the dozens of little things like that that cause so much friction in an organization.

But I, you know, that's great innovation, but I would argue that that could, I mean, not that one example, but if you had that mindset and said, let's set, you know, like Peter's got a bunch of things he can do today, you know, spending 27 minutes getting reimbursed $300 for the Ruth Christener he took somebody to is not going to drive the business, but it needs to get done, right? We have to brush our teeth. We have to take out the trash. So if you can free up that gunk. To let me do the things I want to do, you know, or I'm the best at doing.

Yeah, it's the aggregation of that portfolio of innovation that I think is the real value, and that can transform a company. It can transform how you interoperate, how you work together. It also can change the bottom line. You can save a lot of cost in making those small corrections and doing them in a way— I mean, how many, how many initiatives have we seen where They come up with a new expense report thing, it's no better, and they never talk to anybody about what it should be. That's just wasting money implementing programs. There is a better way by adopting this approach of the innovation creative problem solving toolkit to make all your problem solving better. So whatever it is, wherever it is in the organization, it just works.

Well, now wasting money is the big piece of it, but it's also another ding to to engagement and creativity and blah, blah, blah. So, you know, there's more tools to it. Well, this has, this has been great, Richard. I appreciate the, the, the conversation and I love the way you're, you're A, not to get meta, but, but it's an innovative approach to getting the idea and the work out there because I think it, and oftentimes there's an either or mentality. I'm either in a capabilities development business or I'm the getting stuff done business.

And I love that.

Why does it need to be that way? Or, you know, there are times it might need to be one or the other, but from a client's perspective, they don't put that wall between the two. Why should we as service providers? So I love that.

That's right. Yeah. Both have value, but this hybrid approach gives something more.

Awesome. Well, it's been great. Appreciate your time and best of luck. Thank you. Continued success with the book. Thank you.

Thanks.

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