Strategyzer Webinar: How To Design An Innovation Culture

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Hi everybody. Welcome to another Strat Chat Strategizer webinar session. It's the first one of 2018. We're going to get started right away. We're at the top of the hour. At any point throughout the session, if you want to make a comment, share a question, or simply give us feedback, just type it into the questions or the chat box for GoToWebinar. You can also reach us on Twitter at the handle RateGizer and use the hashtag Stratchat. Our topic today is how to build an innovation culture, and as always, I'm your moderator, Kavi Gupta. I manage content and community at Strategizer. Our host, who's back in the host chair, he was away for a little while last month, is Alex Osterwalder, co founder of Strategizer. And our guest is a good friend and collaborator with Strategizer X Plane founder Dave Gray. Again, once more, just a quick reminder, if you ever want to make a comment, you want to make a question or give us feedback about this session or any other thoughts you might have, reach us on Twitter rategizer. Use the hashtag Strachat. You can also visit blog.stragizer.com to check out some of the materials and content that we have about the topic today, as well as other webinar topics that we've discussed before. Lastly, I'm going to mention this a couple of times throughout the session, but we are currently in the steps of designing a course around the Culture Map around building great innovation cultures inside companies. Using the Culture Map, we're hoping to obviously help you better discuss, capture and design your company culture. If you visit that short URL right there, the Google link that's on that slide, I will pass it around throughout the session. You can sign up with your email and your name and we'll notify you when that course is ready to go. So Dave, I'm going to hand the reins over to you. In the meantime, Alex, why don't you just talk quickly about why this session was so important and why we decided to do it.

Thank you, Kevin, very much. So first, welcome to everybody and welcome to Dave. Also, the reason why we thought this is an important topic is you might have all the tools and all the processes to do innovation, but the biggest obstacle is actually a mindset shift that we want people to work in a different way, at least for the innovation part. So we've talked a couple of times about the Ambidextrous organization having this dual culture where an execution culture and an innovation culture can live side by side. But what's important to recognize is that innovation culture is different from the execution culture. It's not that one is right and one is wrong. We need both of them. And the best way to kind of discuss this and cultural change and in particular innovation culture is with Dave Gray. Because Dave Gray approached us quite a while ago, you know, talking about culture and said, hey Yves Alex, I'm really interested in working on culture. I think it's a big topic and I have these concepts. Can we work on the tool that I have here? So together with Eve, we worked with Dave to kind of iterate the heavy lifting that he's already done. And the result was a pretty exciting new tool which is the culture map. So let's dive right into this and I'm going to hand it over to Dave, maybe Dave, for those who don't know you very well yet, I know we have a couple of your fans online as well. In addition to myself, I've been a long time groupie of Dave, long time follower. Dave has written a lot of books, entrepreneur precursor in the visual thinking space. What have I forgot to mention about you?

Well, I think the thing that's relevant to what we want to talk about today is the fact that I've been. Can you see my screen okay?

Yep, we can see your screen.

Perfect. Yeah. I've been doing really one thing since I was probably about 10 years old and I've found that it's tremendously valuable in a lot of different contexts and that is working with visual thinking and visual language to talk about my ideas. And I started this, doing this when I was in grade school and I draw, try and draw what the teacher was saying to me and go to the teacher and see how I if I was learning. And lo and behold, I was found that the teacher, even though they weren't drawing the lessons for me when I presented them with the sketch, they would be able to fix it for me because my drawings were always wrong. But one of the things that I learned in that is that drawing is a really powerful way to put your knowledge or your lack of knowledge on paper. And once you can make your ideas explicit, you can start having conversations with them with other people and you can start to improve your understanding. And this is something that I've, you know, I was so fascinated by this visual language in when I was in grade school I went to just study design. I got, had a whole career in the newspaper business for about 10 years doing exactly this, going out to experts, asking them to help me draw the knowledge that they had in their heads and making infographics for newspapers. And in the early 90s, about 25 years ago, I started a company, my company called Explain, which is focused on exactly this. And I think it's very relevant to today's discussion because language and culture are really deeply interconnected and most, most businesses we have this. You know, Alex, you've described it, and I think Dan Rome even wrote a book about this as blah blah, blah, right? And one of the things that has become very common in these, in the execution culture in most organizations, it's blah, blah, blah. We talk in order to make decisions and maybe people present PowerPoints to us. And another way of thinking about an execution culture is it's maybe a decision culture. It's focused on, primarily about generating, making decisions. And decisions, of course, are only going to be as good as the options know that come to the decision maker and they'll use PowerPoint for that in a lot of cases. But at the end of the day, you know, when, if you're, if the people who are coming to you with options are coming to you with, you know, very conservative, low risk options, then your decisions are going to, you know, you're not going to be able to make very good decisions in a design culture. An innovation culture might be, you might say, is more design oriented. There's a lot more focus on generating more options. It doesn't mean you don't make decisions in innovation culture, but it means there's a lot more focus on generating a large pool of options. So you can actually, when you make decisions, you're deciding from a larger set. Does that sound.

So maybe you can dive a little bit into why the visual thinking part and you kind of started addressing it. But why is the visual thinking part so important for an innovation culture? Because sometimes, you know, we hear people saying, well, this is just about drawing and I can't draw, I can't do this. But you know, you and I and many of the people in the innovation space have a deep conviction that you need to use visual tools in this innovation culture, design culture. Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that.

Yeah, well, one of the problems in the blah, blah, blah land is that, you know, working memory, which has been studied by behavioral scientists for a long time is basically very limited. The amount of ideas or objects that you can hold in your head at one time is, you know, literally around three, three to five, depending on who you Talk to maybe, maybe seven at the most. And when you're, when you're working with such a limited set of thoughts of what you can hold in your head, then you're limited in what you can, in the complexity of what you can think. Whereas if you put something out on a sheet of paper, you can actually deal with a lot of complexity. So any kind of. You know, there's two things that happen when you put something on paper. One is you increase the amount of complexity that you can show, so you have more. You can actually see more stuff. And the second thing that happens is that now, if it's visual, it becomes shareable. So now you can have multiple people talking and looking at the same thing, which is what I discovered in grade school that was so powerful, is that when you make that knowledge explicit in some way, making it visual. And I know you know this very well because this is what the business model canvas and the culture map and other tools are all about. Putting this stuff out and making it visual. You are, number one, you're sharing these ideas and number two, you're creating a very different kind of environment. Whereas if, if someone is presenting, you know, a PowerPoint to you, here's a little guy presenting a PowerPoint to another person, you know, then, then they're, they're showing you ideas. So they are using visual thinking in some ways. Maybe there's bullet points, but you're now in a. This is a. This is a very decision culture dynamic because you're now being asked someone, someone is the presenter and they are putting you in the mode of decision maker. Whereas what you do, what happens when you draw ideas is now suddenly you are creating a creative or design, you're putting everyone in the role of designer or creative thinker. When you're presenting ideas, that is a sketch, it's a creative mode that you put people in, which is very different. If you can think about, imagine yourself in a coffee shop, sitting across from someone, and scenario one, they pull out a laptop and they open it up and they say, oh, let me just show you some things. It's going to just take a few minutes. Where does your mind go? Where does your heart go? What are you feeling in your gut in that moment? I know a lot of people are starting to feel dread because what you're hearing, what you're thinking is, okay, this is time. What you're saying really is, you want me to stop talking and this is no longer a conversation and you're going to present, you're going to try and sell Me something, basically. Whereas if someone pulls out a napkin or a sheet of paper and they have a sketch or they start drawing a sketch and invite you to participate, you know, just think about how that would feel. Scenario 2. It feels very different, doesn't it? So, you know, you're. If someone starts sketching and you start drawing together, you're now in a very different mode. You're in a creative mode, as opposed to a judge mode. So I think a PowerPoint is very conducive to making judgments, and there's no reason that there's nothing that says judgment isn't important. But the visual thinking mode and the culture that surrounds that is around thinking and creating, which is what we really want to see more of in innovation culture. So I've. I've. In the last few years, I've gotten really interested in teaching people this visual language to open the door to more creative thinking, more options, more building, more alignment with their teams, and so forth.

Okay, so let's stop here for a second. Dave. Kavi wants to quickly make a poll to see what kind of people are in the audience. So maybe we can switch back before we continue the conversation. And I'll let Kavi take over and invite everybody to express who they are in terms of what type of company or participant so we can maybe adapt the presentation a little bit.

Sure thing.

Great.

To everybody in the audience. I put the poll up now. You should be able to see it on your screen. Which of these best describes you, your organization, and you can select one or more of the following. So I'll give you about 30 seconds to go ahead to Dave and Alex. What of the 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 options there, what you think will be the largest?

I'm not actually seeing the poll. My own screen here still.

We've got consultant, startup, SME, large enterprise, or academia.

Where would I put myself? Is that what you're asking now?

Which do you think is the most in our audience today?

I would guess startup. Just because there's probably more startups out there than anything, I think we'll have.

A lot of consultants.

That would be my second guess.

Okay, I'm going to close the poll. And now you can obviously see the results there. Consultant came in first, 41%, startup, 20%, SME, 14%, large enterprise, 32%, and academia, 11%. Oh, wow. All right, I take it back to you guys. Go ahead.

Great.

So maybe after we can adapt a little bit to, you know, give some tips to consultants, how to help companies with innovation culture, and then really take it also a little bit from the large enterprise perspective. So, Dave, maybe you have this one saying that you like to say that to manage a culture or understand a culture, you need to visualize it. So maybe before we dive into the innovation culture, tell me how you visualize the culture. That seems like a very difficult thing to do.

Yeah, we can talk about that. I mean, before we go there, I want to just give people a little exercise. If you have a sheet of paper, grab a sheet of paper. You know, we talk about drawing, and a lot of people say, well, I'm not a visual person. I have a friend who is a cognitive science researcher who says that, you know, that actually the optic nerve is by far the greatest amount of bandwidth coming into your brain is visual. He says if you can walk into a room without falling down, you're doing visual thinking. Visual thinking is something that we do so ubiquitously that we don't even recognize it. But when people tell me that I can't draw, I'm a little worried about that. I tell them not to worry. And that's one of the reasons I teach this stuff. And one of the ways that I get people started is just doing this little exercise called squiggle birds. So do you want to. Can we take a little minute and do that one?

Love it. Let's get started.

All right, so just grab a piece of paper and a pen, everybody, and just make some squiggles like I'm doing on my screen here. Just regular old scribbles. They don't have to be any particular type. And what I'm going to show you is just very simply an exercise that's designed and I. And you can use this to get people warmed up and so forth. But it's really simple to show people. Okay, we're gonna make all these squiggles into birds. So I'm gonna put a beak on there and a dot for an eye and a couple of feet and a tail. See that? And the reason that we're. That I'm showing you this beak, eye, feet, tail, beak, tail. I don't know where his feet will go over here. And the reason I think this is important is because the secret of visual thinking is not that you can make a squiggle and make it look like a bird. The secret of visual thinking is that the mind will fill in almost anything. The mind is very, very powerful. And you don't really have to be able to draw very well to give people the illusion that stuff is going on there. And there's always the fact that you can always just label things too. So this is just a way that I show people the how simple it is to learn visual thinking. It's not hard, it's not difficult, it's just a matter of. But it is like learning a language. You know, you're not going to expect that you're going to learn French in a one hour webinar and you're not going to learn visual language in a one hour webinar either. But. But just like any language, it takes some effort to learn it, but it is learnable and it's not really a hard one to learn. In fact, if you're reading and writing and doing math, it's no different than any of those, no more easier or harder than any of those. So now, Alex, you said you wanted to get into the culture thing. I think it's fascinating and you alluded to this earlier, but that you and I go way Back to what, 2006, 2007, something like that. And you had done this tremendously cool thing that called the Business Model Canvas, which was very exciting. And I'm sure everyone on this webinar is familiar with it. Groundbreaking. And we got together, I asked you if you'd help me do something like the Business Model Canvas for Culture. And you and Eve and Alan were extremely helpful to me in getting this stuff figured out and thinking it through. And I'm super excited to be able to share it with people today. And this is the, basically this is the tool. We went through a lot of a ton of different iterations to get here. As I'm sure you remember, it was a lot more complex when we started. But basically what it comes down to is you have the behaviors which are really literally the things you do every day. Let me make sure I've got all this webinar stuff on my screen. I want to make sure I'm on the right layer. There we go. So you have the behaviors, which are the things that you do every day. And we talk about behaviors in terms of things like what happens during a great day, what's a great day here, what's a terrible day. And I think, I do want to point out that I think one of the big innovations of the Business Model Canvas which we're doing here is and since we have a lot of consultants on the line, these are intended to be very self explanatory. So you'll see there are questions here which we ask and they're really the facilitator questions. And this is one of the things that Alex, you did with the business model canvas that I think was truly groundbreaking is to take these. There are a lot of tools like this, but to take these tools and make them extremely simple, extremely easy to use, very self explanatory, is a really powerful thing. And so the purpose of this tool is to say, okay, culture at the end of the day is behavior. It's what we do every day. It's all the stuff that we do and how we behave, but what we don't usually talk about or why people are behaving in a certain way. You know, I've been, you know, I've seen companies where, you know, there's a sales problem and they've identified it as a sales problem and they put more pressure on sales and they fire the head of sales and they continue to put pressure on sales thinking it's a sales problem, when maybe it's not. It might be a pricing problem, might be that the product's too expensive, or it might be that customers are no longer buying for other reasons than the activities of the sales force. So we look for behaviors. Then we look for what are the things that are enabling and blocking the behavior. They may be incentives, they may be other things. And then what outcomes do we get from those behaviors? And by connecting these things, and Alex calls it working in slices, by connecting these things with each other, we actually come up with a lot of insights. And most of the insights are down here. They're the things that are not usually discussed, but they are either rules, incentives, procedures, sometimes unwritten rules, habits, things. We just, we've. Why did we do this? We've just because we've always done it, we do it because we're rewarded for it, etc. And so I actually think of this like a garden and use the metaphor sometimes of a garden where you have, you know, down here you have the things that are the roots. These are the, actually the things that are, are driving or causing the behavior. But they're hard to see because they're underground. They may be hard to see because we don't think about them. We don't talk about them that much. A lot of times we don't think that they're changeable. Then we have the behaviors which are kind of like the plant growing, the growth. And then we have out of those behaviors we get outcomes which are like the fruits of the garden. And so I think of these things as all very connected and we can, we can actually talk about it. And Alex, we were talking about maybe doing this with, you know, separating Out. You know, what's blah blah? If one culture is blah, blah, blah culture. And another culture is visual thinking? What, what, what kind of, what, what happens in these. Actually, I'm going to put blah, blah, blah down here because it's kind of an enabler as well as a behavior. What kind of thinking, what kind of behavior comes out of blah, blah, blah? Alex, you've been in enough of these meetings.

I would say misalignment that people do things that are not aligned, they contradict each other, they lack understanding, they do things without understanding.

So they think, they think they're aligned, but they're not.

Exactly.

Right.

So we use the same words. So we think we're aligned, but we're actually not aligned and we end up working at cross purposes. Misalignment.

I'd add another one, maybe death by bullet points.

Right.

So we have these presentations with hundreds of bullet points and complexity and then people don't dare to ask because they don't want to look stupid.

There you go. And the PowerPoint is an enabler of that, isn't it? If we're using PowerPoint.

Actually interesting, because the way PowerPoint is designed with a header and bullet points is indeed an enabler. There's some reason research on that because that's the de facto format. People don't do visual thinking because the bullet points are de facto, you know, in the, in the template.

Yeah. Okay. So it's power, not just PowerPoint, but the templates, the way the templates are designed. Okay. And I think I would say also because we're, if we're working in a verbal world, it forces maybe sometimes oversimplification. So you may have, you may end up simplifying things to the point that they're actually meaningless because you're, you're working in blah, blah, blah. So you have to. In other words, you have to. You have to. Yeah. You know, we've seen companies where they have to get everything down to three. You know, we are, you know, fast, whatever the three, you know, you know, these corporate descriptions that are like fast, designed, you know, beautiful or whatever. And it's like they, they could almost describe any company, but we have these three words and we block into these three words and we're going to use these three words everywhere we go. Every time we talk about the company, we're going to use these three words and it becomes a mindless exercise that people are just using the three words but they're not actually getting stuff done that needs to get done because they've, because Words are limited. Words are limited in what they can tell or what we can achieve with them.

Dave, let me ask you quickly. What would you see as one of the main blockers, you know, to getting people to use visual, you know, visual thinking a little bit more, sketching out, using whiteboards. What are the main blockers?

I think that blockers for that are mostly status quo. Fear of standing out. You know, people are, you know, you know, it's like imagine you. You go into your Monday morning meeting and you start. Everyone's used to, you know, having. Taking turns and showing PowerPoint. And suddenly, you know, one of the people, instead of showing their PowerPoint slide, they. They start to draw in the whiteboard or they start to show a picture. It's going to be. It's going to be different. It's going to be unique. It's going to be different. And if you are. If you are someone who's. If you're in a culture where being different is dangerous, and I'll put that down here, that can be a blocker. There are also some technical things. We've all seen these, where I present a lot. I do a lot of keynote talks, and in my keynote talks, I tend to draw them well. A lot of the conference organizers have this rule, well, get your slides in. You have to get your slides in. Well, I don't have any slides, so how do I answer that question? If they have a deadline when the slides need to be in by. What do I do if I don't have slides? It hasn't usually been a problem, but I think there's just a default expectation in a lot of organizations. What the tools are going to be used to communicate with or another one.

Is that slides are sent around before. Right. More as a document rather than a presentation. So basically a slide document.

Yeah, pre sliding, whatever you want to call that.

So what's the outcome there? What's the negative outcome of that kind of blah, blah culture? We did a lot of talking a lot of bullet points with, you know, in our presentation over simplification.

I think you see people making mistakes because they're not aligned. You see people bumping into each other. You know, ultimately you. You see missed targets, missed goals, You see finger pointing, you know, blame game. Sometimes we call it. All those. Might. Some of these might be better down below here. Mistakes are an outcome, but blame game is more like a behavior.

Whoops.

So maybe Dave.

So Right.

This is a conversation tool also.

Right.

Let's maybe take a quick break here and let Kavi do another poll, and then we can maybe drive the enablers and blockers and behaviors and outcomes of an innovation culture on the right hand side. So let's quickly see. Kavi, what's our next poll? What are we interested in?

Cool. I'm going to launch the poll now. And to the audience, the question is, how often does your organization talk about its innovation culture? You can select one or more of the following. Is it weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, or never? I'll leave the poll going.

What would your guess be? What do you think is going to come out of this one? My guess would be never or maybe annually.

Rarely. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think depending on the organization and the level of perceived threat, it might be that it comes up pretty often, but.

All right, I'm going to close the poll. If it'll let me Just a bit of a lag there.

I think you're doing this on purpose to create a little bit of a suspense.

Right, Kevin, now the. Come on, Gotowebinars just being a little bit. Oh, there we go. I'm going to share the results. So weekly, 18% monthly, 17%. Quarterly, 19% annually, 22%. Never, 28%.

You're right.

Pretty evenly distributed.

Right.

Pretty interesting.

So, Dave, maybe as opposed to we took a little bit of a negative view here, why don't we do a little bit of an outlook on, okay, innovation culture? So how can we use this culture map to talk about innovation culture? And then maybe after that, we can go into some of the things that you've seen in the real world working with this tool, with organizations.

Yeah, one of the things I've seen a lot of is maybe just draw a picture here. Another head here is people have a lot of stuff in their heads, and if they express it in words, they have to really simplify it down really simply. But if they can draw the idea in their head, they can get a lot more of the nuance and complexity of what's going on in a drawing or a map. What I have found is that when you ask people to draw, you are accessing a very different part of their brain. One of the first exercises we do with teams is to say, let's draw the problem. Just draw the problem. And I take people through maybe 10 or 15 minutes of exercises just like that squiggle bird, get them comfortable with drawing, and then free them up to, say, draw the problem. And what I have found is that when you ask people to describe a problem verbally versus asking them to draw a problem, you get radically different stuff when they're describing a problem verbally, you get a lot of abstraction. So I think that's probably over here. You get a lot of abstraction. You get a lot of vague terms. You don't get as many specifics when you ask them to draw a problem. You get a lot more of the emotional, emotional content. You know, someone's drawing, especially if they're drawing themselves in the picture, they might draw it in a more, sometimes more metaphorical way that has more meaning to people. And you see people compare their drawings. When they compare them, if you have two different descriptions in language and they're written, you really end up highlighting the things that are different. Whereas if you have two drawings, they could be very different. But let's say one person is drawing, you know, the problem as a boat and, you know, the water's too deep or something, and another person's drawing the problem as we're trying to climb a mountain. You know, these differences actually help to create a richer, deeper understanding and more nuanced understanding. Whereas over here, you just end up in a lot of argument and debate. And so, like one of the companies that I've worked with said that you took us from argument and contention to discovery and invention by shifting the language, by shifting the way of thinking, from debate, argument. And you see a lot of that over here. You see a lot of argument over here. You see a lot of creativity, discovery.

I'd actually add something to that. So you see, in addition to discovery and creativity, you see more collaboration.

Right.

So to build on what you just said is that once you have an artifact, like a drawing or business model canvas, or a value proposition canvas, in this case a culture map, you're actually working together on this artifact. You're going to say, no, no, no, I don't think it's like this. You're going to change it, but you don't attack the person. You kind of work on the artifact. So I've seen that be very, very beneficial to collaboration, actually, because an idea will become a little bit more tangible by drawing it, but then it also becomes like something tangible that we can change. Right. That we can shape together. Confrontational discussion.

Right? Yeah. And even, even in terms of physicality, you have two people sitting across a table. That is a, you know, that's, that's just an argument waiting to happen. Whereas if you have, you know, if you have people standing around a large whiteboard that are working together, that's a totally different dynamic. And as you pointed out, it's a, it's partly a question of where people direct their focus. If the focus is on the artifact that you're creating together, you have a greater degree of collaboration. If the focus is on the other person, you're creating more of a debate kind of stance. I have one of our customers favorite things to say, which I love to hear is walking around the organization. He says post its mean progress. And so what he's talking about is, you know, as he walks around his organization we, when he sees people using post it notes and sticky notes and things putting their, making their knowledge visible and explicit, they're, they're creating, he sees that as a, creating the culture of innovation. And I think when you know you can, if you can. One of the things that's happened in the last, you know, 50 years or so, as we've moved from a lot of manufacturing type environments where you can walk around a factory and you can see what everybody's doing, right, you can see who's pulling the levers and picking, you know, moving the widgets around and who's on a forklift, et cetera. But if you walk into the software company or a digital company, you're going to see something. All you're going to see is a bunch of people on computers. You can't actually see the work being done unless you find a way to make it visual and explicit. And that's what visual thinking is very good at, is taking that stuff that people are doing that you know, to the outside observer just like looks like a person looking at a computer. Whether they're, whether they're writing comments on Facebook article or writing code, you can't tell from looking at them. Whereas if you, if you start to see there's like a thing called a Kanban board, very basic, ready, doing and done. And it's a way for teams to make very explicit what are the tasks that they're working on. So they have something called backlog that has things that they haven't started on yet, but they prioritize them. And then they have a panel that shows these are the things that are actually being worked on right now and who's working on them. And then here are the things that we got accomplished, here are things that we got finished. So this is just one example of by turning things from blah, blah, blah and we just kind of walking around to we're making things visual, we're making things explicit, we're putting the knowledge on the, on the whiteboard where now we have ways to share and collaborate and share information that we didn't have before in real Time.

So, Dave, I remember working with one Fortune 50 company and I used the culture map to talk about what's blocking an innovation culture in their organization. This was the office of the Chief Technology officer. So we kind of mapped out all of the blockers that is preventing them from testing ideas, iterating quickly, etc. Have you ever applied the culture map in a context around innovation where you're trying to foster a little bit of an innovation culture? Have you any experience with applying this particular tool in that space?

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Yes, I have.

Share that a little bit.

Sure, sure. Let me, let me hide this layer and start a new map here. I won't be saying the name of this company, but I can, I can talk through some ideas. So, so on the, on the blocker side, so we have things like low trust, we have power struggles, We have too many priorities. So lots of competing priorities. And so what does this cause people to do? What happens? What are the behaviors? Well, we see people, we see people with too many. Bringing too many stakeholders into meetings. So too many chefs, we got to get everybody. Nobody trusts each other. So we have to get everybody in the meeting. We see no clear way to resolve conflicts. Nobody wants to step up. And this is actually very consensus driven culture, right? No clear way to resolve conflicts. We see this driving this culture of consensus.

Right? Something that might look very positive, a culture of consensus can kind of lead to not putting the things out there, right? And then it's going to be very hard to innovate because nobody's going to say, hey, well there's a problem here, this is not going to work. And you can't show evidence that contradicts somebody, right? So what might look good on the surface if you look at the outcomes at the end of the day, on the innovation side can be tricky.

And so the culture of consensus and the unclear way of resolving conflicts drive some of these power struggles. People trying to make things happen, wanting to make things happen. So then we have, this company happens to be wanting to move toward the cloud. So who owns the cloud? We don't know who owns cloud. It's all over the place. There are lots of people owning the move to cloud. Very open question we have. It's unclear. You know, like let's say in the old days when we were shipping. This is a software company. In the old days we were shipping software on CDs, right? So the, it was very clear where marketing was focused on getting people to buy stuff. So marketing owned the website and product, you know, was the. They Shipped the cd. Right. Well, now everything's on the web. So who owns the website? Everything's on the website. And where, where is the website end and the product begin. It's. It's a little bit of a question mark now that everything's on the website. So we have more power, which leads to more power struggle. So these things are cyclical too, Right? You could see that one of the big outcomes is unclear accountability. We don't know who's accountable. And actually there's some of the sort of innovative. You think that the culture of consensus could be a good thing. We want to get more consensus. But what happens in this, in this culture of consensus and low. When you. It's combined with low trust is you get people just saying, okay, screw it. And you get them saying, okay, I'm. They're just going to assume responsibility and just say, okay, just do it. Which leads to. Just do it. Which leads to all kinds of crossed wires and difficulty there too. You just do it and just move ahead. So it's either. So you have either. You have your, your choice feels like either go achingly slow and get everybody on board or go very fast, piss everybody off. Angry people. And so what you see is, you see these things feeding each other. So the low trust angry people creates, you know, you went off and did this without asking me. And that goes back to the low trust. Now we bring everybody in again. We have the culture of consensus and everybody's agreeing. But now things are so slow and now we want to go. Just do it. I'm okay, I'm just going to do it. You see how these things end up being sort of feeding each other. Right.

So. Yeah, no, finish the circle. Sorry, I didn't want to cut you off.

Yeah, no. Well, what you end up getting is you get some of these vicious cycles and you start. This is where we start looking. Okay. We have people who want to assume responsibility. That's good. We have low trust. That's something that we can work on. Right? How do we increase trust? Now, when people trust each other, they don't need to have be in every meeting, right? Nobody wants to be in meetings all day long. Nobody wants to be there. They're going to these meetings to make sure that nobody's going to do anything that's going to screw them over. Right? So there are things you can do. We can try and create a podular, more podular structure. We've talked about this in other contexts, Alex, but a more popular structure that gives. Lets people operate freely to separate to separate. What this is a balancing act that every company has to deal with is how do you balance the things that are important for individual freedom? Which are, There are a lot of these things in the innovation world. We need to have the freedom to try things. And then there's the stuff that, you know is important, that it's common for the common good. We shouldn't, we shouldn't all be allowed to decide which side of the road we want to drive on. That would be a invitation to chaos. We should. All we, you know, in England, everyone agrees to drive on the left. In the US everyone agrees to drive on the right. I can't remember. I think it's Europe is more like the U.S. am I right? Like people driving on the right side. Okay. So you have, these are important distinctions to make in order to get people, you know, you want people assuming responsibility and you have to find ways to increase that freedom. So these are some of the things that we work with down at the enabler and blocker level.

So, Dave, I'm going to ask a follow up question. So how do you kind of use this in a workshop setting? But first I want to just quickly, quickly hand over to Kavi to get our participants to answer another quick question and then we'll get back to this drawing because I think it's an interesting starting point for another conversation of how to use this in the real world. Kavi, what's our next poll?

So the poll is up now. It's what investment has your organization made in creating an innovation culture? $0, $10,000 or more, $500,000 or more, or $1 million plus. And I want to be clear. Innovation. Sorry, Alex, go ahead.

Yeah, I'll be more specific. Not innovation projects.

Right.

Not like I'm going to come up with a new business model, but in the culture specifically.

Right, yeah, yeah.

While we're waiting, I can, you know, a lot of my clients are talking to me about, they'll do things like they'll have a design thinking workshop they, sometimes they might send executives to. In the US it's the Stanford D School. In Europe, it's, there's the Hasso Platner Institute that can send people into that curriculum. And I think all that stuff, or all those things are, are good investments. But at the same time, I think there is a challenge when you're doing, when you have the training and workshops, you know, especially when they're expensive. You're, you're sending your executives out. You can't always afford to send everyone in your company through these things. And unless those people come back and start introducing some of that stuff into the culture, you may have enlightened those executives, but you haven't really started to shift the culture until they can start to bring that stuff in. And I think that's where, again, where the status quo stuff gets really difficult. I'll go back to this other image that we had here.

You know, you have, Dave, we have the poll on the screen before you get back to your image, and then we can get back to your image. So Kavi's switching around.

Looks like zero is the winner.

Yeah, we had 49% for zero, 36% for $10,000 or more, 5% for $500,000 or more, and 11% for $1 million or more.

Okay, good for you.

Interesting.

Dave, one of the things that I was wondering is. So you drew out pretty nicely that the kind of dynamics, cultural dynamics, that you've seen at that company without mentioning a name. So how concretely did you actually use the culture map? So was it that you used this as an analytical tool and you kind of put it up there, or did you conduct workshops where people were filling out the culture map, or how did you use that with this organization to kind of get to this understanding and result?

Maybe I actually prepared something to show you that gets into the process here. If maybe this answer your question, how do we actually do this when we are engaged by an organization to help them with culture? So, you know, this is a drawing I pre made. But basically we start with some kind of discovery. We have to actually figure out what are they trying to achieve with the culture map. We conduct these sessions which are, you know, sometimes they go under different names depending on the organization. You know, not everyone wants to talk about, call them culture mapping sessions. Sometimes we'll call them employee engagement focus groups. But what we do is we basically get small groups, usually groups that work together. So we might start with centralized groups like IT or finance to get a sense of what is going on in the organization. And we just do. We get food, we get cookies or pizza or coffee, depending on the time of day. We make it fun. We get a small representative group, five to seven people, and. And we just do a culture map. And we just say, okay, we're here to visualize your culture. The executive team has recognized that there are some needs that really need to. Some things that need to shift around here. And we're here to ask you, what do we need to do? What does the company management need to do in order for you to be jazzed to come into work and exhibit these kind of behaviors that we want to see more collaboration, more creativity, more innovation. We what are we doing that's blocking that? What can we do to enable more creativity and collaboration? And we get a lot of really valuable information. Sometimes I call it island hopping. We start with finance, and maybe finance points a little finger at something that maybe on their map they talk about sales, they might talk about operations, and we basically hop from group to group, and usually they're pointing us to these areas until we get to a point where we're hearing a lot of the same stuff. And at that point, we know we've got kind of a picture of the organizational culture. Always finance is going to be have a subculture. And I think there are, you know, the reason that we have to hop around is that there are different groups within the company will have different subcultures and different points of view on things. And you find that a lot of the problematic stuff is not in a particular group, but sort of between groups. And so we find, like, this is one of the reasons I think this is an interesting process, is we find that, well, there's stuff that these people do that is dependent on stuff that these people do. And somehow in that handoff, the numbers coming up end up being a little bit distorted, or there are things that are happening in between here that technically are nobody's responsibility, but they're really problematic. We bring that stuff back to the executive team, we go through the findings, we work with the executive team to synthesize those and prioritize a set of behaviors, usually five or or so specific behaviors that we want to enable and reward in the organizational culture. And we take those, we do a visualization session. We literally create a visual map of what those behaviors look like, and we design a survey or a way to measure that perception of how we're doing along these behaviors. And one of the things that we make it that we make very clear even before we take on any of these projects, is to say we want the measurement. You know, if you're not going to make culture just a priority in your executive meetings, that you're going to look at it weekly or monthly in the same way that you look at your other numbers, then maybe you don't actually want to undertake culture change because it's a pretty serious. Maybe you don't really want to do it. It's actually something that people should take on with. Mapping sessions already by when we start gathering the information already, we are starting to create hope among the rank and file that things could change. And even though we don't make any promises, we say, and even in these sessions, we say we can't guarantee that the management team is going to take our recommendations, but our job is to create those recommendations. So the more you can tell us, including all of your dirty laundry and the things that are problematic for you, the better chance that these things will change. And so as soon as those five people walk out of that meeting, they start talking to their co workers and peers and colleagues about this interesting session that they just went through. And it creates a lot of hope. So when we come back and we talk to the executive team, often we're holding up a mirror to them in these, in these sessions where we're synthesizing the findings. And often because the enablers and blockers are the things that people are pointing to, those are things that have been designed by management. They may be incentives that have unintended consequences, they may actually be intended consequences. But a lot of times that this moment here, where we bring these findings back to the executive team is a bit of a moment of truth because we're holding up a mirror and we're showing people things that they are probably, often they're aware of at some level, but they have not been aware of the impact of these things. Things. For example, the fact that we're paying salespeople commissions might cause salespeople to hoard accounts and not share when they should be sharing. And it might be better for the organization for them to share.

So you're bringing up an interesting point. And maybe just before I hand over to Kavi for the last poll, maybe very quick story in one minute. When you get people to map out behaviors in a group discussion on the culture map and you ask for typical patterns of behavior, I'm sure you've seen some crazy, awkward situations where people actually really kind of come out with the big things. Maybe you can tell a story, of course, without mentioning names or companies. What's the kind of craziest situation that you've seen talking about company culture? Maybe just a one minute story before we hand over to Kavi.

Okay, I'll tell you a crazy situation. This is a failure. This is a learning from failure story. We had a company, we did this whole process with them. We came back, we were in the executive team session. It was a very consensus oriented culture, very collaborative, but also very prone to inaction. Okay. And they had, they were, they had, they're basically under a tremendous amount of pressure from Amazon and others. In their company. They're, they're feeling a tremendous amount of, amount of pressure. Sales were falling pretty deeply. There was definitely some shifts going on and we had all these, we had these behaviors and initiatives up on the board and it was basically sticky notes on a whiteboard. And I was looking around at this team. It was a very large team, executive team, probably that part of the problem. 25 people, maybe this team. And they were just looking at each other and it was time for them to make commitments. And they were just sitting, looking around each other at the table. And I had to say, look, this is the time, you know people, this is the time when you need to stand up and each take one of those sticky notes and take one that you're going to own and make a commitment to your peers about what you're going to do about it. Because culture is not something you can delegate to a committee. And so one of the guys got up kind of really slowly and one by one they took these initiatives. But lo and behold, and they said, they even said things they're going to do. I'm CEO said I'm going to come to you for my one on one meetings. I don't want you coming to me anymore. I'm going to come to your office and we're going to have those meetings right with your team. And someone else said something along the lines, so I'm going to, I'm actually going to go to the, to the cafeteria for my lunch more and just be seen there more, just, and hang out with people so they, I can be more visible so they can see more into the decision makings. And these were all things that were related to stuff we had encountered. But then I, you know, then they, they really didn't follow through on it. And the CEO was, who had engaged us, was so pissed off that he resigned and that initiative ended up going nowhere. We, we ended up, you know, it's, it's a, kind of a sad story because they spent a lot of money. They, we brought the mirror up to them. They, they looked, they took a glance in the mirror and then they, they ended up, you know what, what. I think the thing that finally put the CEO over the line was when they delegated the culture changed to a committee, his executive team, after specifically we had this conversation that there was no way they could delegate it. They created a committee and delegated it, which ended up really being a way to kill it. And unfortunately the story ends with that company still in a downward spiral. A new CEO now they're undergoing cost cutting instead of culture change, which I think is a mistake. But unfortunately that's kind of a sad story of one that failed. And I think one of the lessons that I take away from it is before we undertake any kind of culture initiative, I want to sit down with the person who's in charge of the group or the team and make sure that they really want to do this, because it is. Undertaking culture change is not something to do lightly. Just basically you're messing with the entire operating system of the company and the way that the company does things. And if you're not willing to follow through and make those major changes, it's almost better not to undertake it at all.

That's a great lesson learned. And you need these kind of failures, I guess, in a company and us as new to using these culture map tools or tools to understand what it takes to really get companies to transform. This is a big thing, right? Once you open up the box, it's very hard to kind of close it again. So we unfortunately we ran out of time. Like this was just flying. And I'm going to hand back over to Kavi, but I do want to tell our listeners that if you're interested, Dave is looking at creating a culture map course, Innovation Culture course course with us. If you show enough interest, we're actually going to get this started. So later on, shout out if you're interested in this and why. And Kavi will definitely remind you of the link to kind of vote on this. Kavi, what's our last poll to wrap up?

So it's in progress. People are voting. It's what solutions or services has your organization used to create an innovation culture mindset? None. Training and education, an innovation incubator or a competition or consulting and outside agencies. I'm also going to take this moment to thank Dave for joining us today and Alex for hosting the session. It's great to be back in the swing of first strap chat in 2018. Dave, thank you so much. We unfortunately did not have time to take audience questions, but Alex and I have been talking. We're definitely going to address a lot of these questions and more in follow up blog posts and maybe even going back to our Scratch at podcast. I'm going to close the poll now and I'm going to share the results. So 30% of you said none, 38% said training and education, 20% said innovation incubator or a competition, and 12% said consulting or outside agencies. So again I want to thank everyone for being on the call today. We are going to wind down now. That's the top of the hour. And just a quick reminder, you will get a recording of the session within 24 to 48 hours in your inbox. Dave, Alex, thank you so much for your time. We're going to sign off now.

Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me. And if there are questions on Twitter, I'll try and address them there.

Awesome.

Thanks a lot, Dave. Thanks, Kevin.

Good morning, good afternoon. Good evening, everybody. See ya.

Thanks.