Shamira describes a common barrier in innovation coaching where legal and compliance teams often block experiments (the ‘‘legal says no’’ problem). Her approach is to involve legal/compliance early during program design and kickoff—so they understand experimentation and can give practical guidance—and to bring them into testing/coaching calls later, reframing interactions from ‘can we do this?’ to ‘how can we do this?’ to enlist them in problem-solving. The example context is pharma, where legal clarified that patient-contact restrictions apply mainly to clinical trials.
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What I'd like to share with you is one of the biggest challenges that I face and how I've overcome that with my teams. Friends in the UK might be familiar with this. It's a comedy sketch that's in the uk, Little Britain. If you haven't seen it, check it out on YouTube. But it basically is about people in the service business not being that helpful and using computer says no as the excuse for not providing the service. I have experienced something similar in my coaching where instead of computer, it is more legal and compliance says no. And so this is where my teams are energized, are eager to work, everything's going really, really well, and then they come to legal and compliance, and the response that they get is no. So there's two ways that I address this. The first is really at the very beginning, and that's at the program design level, where Alex said, we have program managers, program directors, and this is where I like to involve legal and compliance to secure their support already then so that they understand what exploration is about. And then I incorporate the guidance into the program because they play a very, very important role for the organization. So each corporate has a different culture and there are certain ways that they operate with this, and it's important to incorporate their guidance into your program. And then lastly, I also try and involve them in the kickoff. So maybe I don't get all of them, but one or two of them to come and attend the kickoff. So maybe I'll share with you a story where I did this and we had the person come and spend time at the kickoff. That was about two days where the team spent a lot of time on ideating on the different value propositions and the business models. And then they actually create various conceptual prototypes and plan going out into the market to test. And so by the end of the two days, the team members, they understand that they actually now have to go and talk to customers. And the first objection they have is, wait a second, we are not allowed to talk to patients. So this is in the pharma industry. And this is where I get then the legal and compliance person to come up and address that in front of them. And this is where he explained that that restriction is only around clinical trials. But there are other things that they can do to talk to customers directly. There's certain processes they need to go through. And so what that did for the team was it took away the myths they had in their head in terms of, oh, we cannot talk to customers. The other thing it did also was that Going forward, they had somebody to go to. If they had anybody say differently to them, they could always refer to this person in legal and compliance. Now, sometimes in spite of having this set up up front, sometimes when you're working with the market, they might have some different setups and legal compliance requirements are different in certain countries. Or it could also be that you've come in only as a coach and you weren't involved in the program design and this was not part of it for whatever reason. So this is where then I actually involve legal and compliance during the testing phase. So once again, recognizing that they're serving a very important purpose for the organization and. And inviting them to the coaching call. And this is where then I do take the time to explain to them, explore versus exploit. And what we are looking to do is about experimentation, helping them see that the risk is really limited to that experiment, and then getting them to work with me to solve the problem. So instead of asking them the question that they normally get, can we do this? I actually get the team to ask them, how can we do this? Now the legal and compliance is involved in problem solving.
Absolutely. Thank you, Shamira. That's really wonderful. And what it does is it speaks to the point that the job of the coach is not simply a cheerleader to help people put sticky notes on canvases. The job of the coach is to help teams navigate from idea to a business model that works. So whatever context you can help and facilitate for teams to make progress, you can actually do that by legal and compliance. So legal is not your friend, not your enemy. Exactly what Alex is saying online here. Wonderful.
