What makes a good Innovation Coach?

Hello. Welcome, everybody. My name is Nick Kimovic and it's an absolute pleasure to be welcoming you to this month's Strat Chat, all about what makes a good innovation coach. I'm going to share my slides with you. You're going to be able to see them in just a second. Let's see. Here we go. Hello, hello, hello. So there you go. What makes a good innovation coach? It's very exciting because on this month's show we've got familiar Tendai Vicky with us. So, Tendai, say hello to everybody.

Hello.

Hey, everyone.

And do you want to just. You got a fantastic shirt on today. What's that one you've got there? All right.

This is a Tristan Kroma special. It says an idea. Sounds stupid, but it's actually awesome. That's how you get disruptive ideas.

Fantastic. And thank you very much. And we've got 10. We've got Alex Osteoart as well joining us. Alex, how's it going?

Pretty good. I live in the yellow part of Tendai's T shirt there.

Like on a permanent basis.

On a permanent basis. That's why I figure out something every now and then because I look stupid.

About it sometimes per day.

And I'm very pleased as well to say that we've got Shamira Miller joining us as well. Shamira, thank you so much for joining us. Shamira is a strategizer coach and, like, going to be giving a fantastic little presentation, sharing some insights from her perspective. So, Shamira, hello, how are you?

Good, good. Good to be here.

Fantastic. And we've also got Aya Caldwell. Ayah Caldwell is from Novartis. And Aya, thank you so much for taking the time to be on the show this month.

Thank you. And I would be outside of the circles on Tendai shirts.

Fantastic. We might have to show some real corporate response.

Gotta represent.

Tendo. You might have to show your shirt again in a few minutes. For those that are just joining us. So if you are just joining us, please let us know where you are in the world. In the chat box, I can see that we've already got someone. Ricardo's from Quito, Ecuador. So bienvenidos. Welcome to Larry from Atlanta as well. Munich, Northern ca, London, all over. It's exciting. Great to see. Colombia, South Africa, Birmingham, everywhere, all over. This is good stuff.

Japan. Anyone from Japan?

Not seeing anyone from Japan. We've got almost everybody else covered apart from Japan.

It is a bit late, you know.

Oh, that's true, that's true. Actually.

In Thailand, I saw Thailand, in Australia. Oh, Australia. Wow. Thank you.

And I'll just give a quick mention to the, to the series, the Strategizer series. We've got our series of books, all five of them there. So let us know which one's your favorite as well, in the chat box, because that's always fun to know, too. Okay. And also a mention as well. To tend to. Got a fantastic book, Pirates in the Navy. If you haven't checked it out, I recommend that one. The audiobook is particularly good. I like that one as well. Like you're not reading that one, Tendai yourself, but it's still really, really, really good, right?

Yeah. That was the weirdest thing, listening to somebody read my words and pretend to be. It was Brad Pitt, though, by the way.

BRAD pitt, voiceover thank you, everyone, for if you just joined, just a quick summary as well. We're very thankful to have Tendai Vicky, author of Pirates in the Navy, Alex Osterweilder, author of the Invincible Company, Shmira Miller, Strategizer coach, and Aya Caldwell from Novartis joining us on this month's show. In terms. Oh, before we get into it, please make sure that you get your phones out and you can scan the QR code or you can go to menti.com on your phones or on a browser and type in 441-524-91 because we're going to be using that for a quiz in just a minute. So we'll come back to that. But if you can get that ready, that's great. If you can't, we'll come back to it in a second. So what are we planning for the session? First of all, we're going to be looking at what makes a good innovation coach and be doing a quiz around that. Alex is going to be leading that part. Then what we're going to be doing is going into the Invincible Coaches of the month, and that's where we've got Shamira and Aya so very excited about that. Then we'll go through like one of like, you know, really fun part of the session that we always get a lot of good feedback from, which is about hot or not and creating a little bit of controversy there. And then lastly, we're going to be going through a little mini assessment to reflect on some of the things that we've covered in the session and see how we can kind of apply it to ourselves a little bit. Okay, so that's the agenda. Before we get into it, just a couple of things. We've got a Virtual Masterclass Boot Camp for like really understanding this stuff and really going into more detail. And if you go to strategizer.com notifyme virtualbootcamps with the dashes in between, you can find out when we open that up and you can be the first to sign up for that if you'd like to. Alex, is there anything you want to add on that point as well?

Now we get questions quite a lot after a masterclass, how do I go deeper and understand how this stuff works? So we designed a boot camp which used to be physical a week immersion, 60 hours in a row with Tenday, myself, Eve, others to go really deep on testing business ideas, business model patterns, etc. How to do this. And we designed one now for the virtual world which is six sessions over 12 weeks, which is going to be really fun.

Cool. Brilliant. Thank you. And we've also got the testing Business Ideas Virtual Masterclass happening on the 21st, 23rd September. So if you'd like to join that sign up and if you use the code joinustbibmc10, you can get 10% off as well. So there you go. But let's go into what makes a good innovation coach. Alex, I'm going to hand over to you.

Okay. And I think we had a couple of questions of Menti. You should post that one maybe in the chat window. So I am just first, before we go into what makes a good innovation coach, I'm just going to tell you what an innovation coach does. And we're talking about here coaching innovation and startup teams, not coaching the leaders to create the environment to succeed. Right. Those are two very different things. We actually make a distinction between an innovation coach and a program director, which would be more about working with the leadership to create the environment to succeed. So just to put it into context, if we're talking corporations, we have two worlds. I like starting with this just to kind of set things straight. In the exploit world, it's about managing the existing and there's efficiency, innovation that can be done there. The methodologies apply as well, but it's easier because we're closer to the core. Where it starts to get a little bit more challenging is coaching teams to come up with new value propositions that customers care about and new business models that can scale and sometimes maybe even cannibalize existing business. So we're going to go into the left hand side and understand how that journey kind of looks like and just going to quickly map that out before we do a mentee quiz to figure out if we have any great coaches participating today, because you can win Swiss chocolate. Amazing. Swiss chocolate. Like a passport to heaven. And an E book of your choice from the Strategizer Library. So what is innovation and startup coaching about? It's going from idea to a real business, right? And traditionally we used to write business plans, but we know that it's a very messy, chaotic process. This is the search for value propositions that customers care about and business models that can scale profitably. Now, the process itself, from a more kind of conceptual point of view, has these six steps. First, say, two big bubbles. We need to figure out the business design, meaning what value proposition or value propositions are we going to create for customers? And in which business model are we going to embed them? Those are important strategic choices that you'll figure out over time by adapting your idea constantly. And then I think what's really important, and this is the hardest part, is actually not just to design a business model and value proposition, but constantly test and adapt it. So you go through this double loop again and again and again. As an entrepreneur, as an innovator and as a coach, you help the teams go through this double loop. So one of the steps, ideating, figuring out what the value propositions and business models could be, mapping them out with the business model canvas and value proposition canvas, and then assessing if these make any sense, which is more like a design assessment, and then decide, is this good enough? And that should be maybe after an hour, maximum half a day. If it's good enough, you accept that probably it's wrong, but it's a great point to start. And you go and test. But before you test, you need to ask, what are the key assumptions, the key hypothesis underpinning my idea? You figure out the most important ones. Those are the ones you're going to test. So you're going to run experiments, and you need to run many experiments. Big part of coaching to whip the teams in shape and get them to go through 10, 20 experiments, an experiment per week. At the beginning, you learn from that and from the insights you get. You either adapt the idea so you go back to this loop here on this side, or you continue with experimentation to get more evidence and stronger evidence. So we like to say design as if you were right, but test as if you were wrong. So does the process look like? We do this with what we call strategizer innovation sprints. The first sprint is a discovery sprint, where we do a kickoff workshop. We introduce people to the methods, and then they in a workshop today, this is done remotely. The teams shape their ideas. The coaches need to help them understand business models and value propositions and then immediately get out of the building and go test. And they do this over 8 to 10 weeks or 8 to 12 weeks. Constantly adapting the idea. Because ideas don't matter. What's hard is adapting the ideas until you figure out what customers really care about, what value you gonna create for them. And a business model that can scale. Once you have that, you synthesize the findings as a team or as a coach, you help the team synthesize the findings and into an evidence based presentation and that's what's presented to leadership. And then you decide, does this team get follow up investments or should we kill the idea? And the coach, the innovation coach, helps the team go through this process again and again and again. So shaping ideas, testing and adapting ideas and then creating evidence based presentations. So as an organization we can make evidence based investments or as a startup we can raise money from a venture capitalist. So that's the process. We didn't talk about the skills yet. Just a very, very quick crash course in five minutes. How this actually looks like in terms of the steps and in terms of the process.

So just a quick plug as well. Just a quick plug. You should definitely watch our not your typical startup pitch event YouTube video to go into this in more detail as well.

Excellent. Yeah. We did this with 10 startups and coaches that we assessed and those presentations are online. So you can see what an evidence based presentation looks like. Completely different than the typical kind of product pitch. You present evidence, you put the spotlight on the evidence you collected, not the idea per se. So that's kind of how the process looks like. So what do we have next, Nick?

Up next. We are moved? No, we're going to go into the quiz now. That's the next part.

Okay. So we will assess if we have any good coaches in the room in addition to our invincible coaches of the month. Right. With Shamira, anything you would want to add to the process? Where I'm going to while I'm throwing up the mentee.

I think it's really important that you shared the process. You showed everybody at the beginning. Because sometimes when people think about innovation coaches, they think about it in a very sort of flowery, sort of non concrete way. And what we don't really want is for people to just think innovation coaching is hanging out or ideation and helping people come up with ideas and all that stuff.

Right.

It's really about that navigation from idea to finding something that Works and the shaping and the testing and the iterating and the repeat that you need to do around that and the methodologies and the techniques you use for that.

So yeah, putting up the sticky notes is the easy part. Right. It's good that you point that out. I talked to CEO of a big Swiss insurance company just last Friday and he was saying that's attention they need to manage is that the innovation teams and the innovation coaches are seen suspiciously right. By the core business. He says the core business, you know, they're not really happy sometimes to hand over the money to the innovation teams. So you really have to show that this is actually serious business with processes and very hard. It's very different from managing. It's very different hard, but there are processes to do this. Okay, so anybody who wants to win a passport to chocolate heaven and a e book strategizer ebook of your choice, please participate. Now. You can see we already have 200. There are eight questions and they're all related to coaching. And most of them have one answer, some have two, but you can only answer with one answer. And we'll see who has the best knowledge, coaching knowledge, before we actually talk to two world class coaches with Aya and Shamira. Okay, everybody ready? Zitenna, you should participate.

Just to see how good I am.

Okay.

This is the worst. It's like failing a driving test when you've been driving forever.

Okay, speed map.

You can get Pirates of the Navy.

Copy says strategizer published. That's a warm up question. 1, 3, 5 or 6, that's a warm up question. Then we'll get serious. Okay. In the mentee. Okay, Nick said that up front, so that was pretty easy. Shamira, you wanted to add something?

Sorry, I was just saying that if Tenday wins, he can get a copy of Pirates of the Navy.

Exactly.

I'll finally read what my ghostwriter wrote.

Okay, next question. Now we're getting serious here. Question two of eight, Speed matters. What do you need to do first before testing a business idea? Define your minimum viable product, conduct a market analysis, define the hypothesis your idea builds on, or prioritize the cheapest experiments to run. What do you need to do first before testing a business idea? Okay, most of you got it right. 200 correct answers. Excellent. You paid attention to what I said before. So Tenday, do you see this actually happening with innovation teams, that they make their hypothesis explicit first?

No, they don't actually. You have to make them do that. Like make them extract from their design what needs to be true. For their idea to work. Sometimes you face resistance and sometimes they'll say what these 15 people said on this, which is, we've already done a market analysis and I as nodded because we've seen that quite a bit as we've worked together as well.

Completely underused. Completely underused. So that's why coaches need to push teams actually to do this. Okay, three, third question out of eight, speed matters. Which evidence should you have before testing a product or a solution? Evidence for your channels through which you want to sell key resources to build your product, Customer jobs to be done, or the competitor landscape? What do you think? Okay, so the beginning is easy, right? So we got good people here paying attention. So whoever said competitor landscape, think of Je Bezos. He always likes to say that, look, as long as competitors are looking at us while we're looking at customers, we'll be completely fine. So don't worry about competitors. Learn about your competitors through teams. Okay, let's go quickly. Next one. So we'll go to the more sophisticated questions. Question four, Which risk do we reduce when testing business ideas? The risk of missing project deadlines, not being able to make money, overspending on planned budgets, building something nobody wants. Okay, we're still more in the easy ones. Tendai, which one is it? Which one is it?

You don't want to miss the project deadline.

Excellent. Okay, so the first two were jokes there, right? But how do you see this, Tendai, when you're looking at the metrics of companies, do they actually measure the last one, building something that nobody wants, or are we still measuring project deadlines?

Well, I mean, a lot of the time, right, people present their ideas, leaders decide if they believe their ideas, and if they do, they put them on the roadmap, and then they just manage them on whether or not they're on track with the roadmap. And one of the most interesting pressures that we face and Irish Amira can relate to this, is when they're on the roadmap to get them to stop and map their hypotheses. They start, they're like, no, we said we would deliver this by the end of this period, so we're not going to. They don't care that much that they're going to build something nobody wants. They want to finish, and that's what they get rewarded for.

And what's really interesting is I ask this question very often when I speak at a conference. Who's working on something nobody wants? You always have hands going up, and that's not because the people are not smart. So why the heck are they still working on something nobody wants? Because the processes are not designed to kill ideas that should be killed. Because we try to stay on track. Right. It's crazy. It's crazy.

And you can always blame fails. You can launch the product and go see fails. Don't know how to sell the things we make so you can get away with it.

Right, Excellent. Okay, so we have four questions. So let's look at the leaderboard. Who's winning at the moment? It's only in the middle. So close. Tight race here.

Wherever Rebecca is.

Killing it. Killing it. Okay, so we have four more questions. Question five.

Yeah.

Answer fast, gives you more points. The most important metric to track testing progress is number of experiments conducted, number of hypothesis tested, strength of evidence supporting the different hypothesis, time spent on testing ideas. You can see after the break we switched a gear. It's getting hard here.

I love this. I really love this question. Oh, wow. The majority got it right. That's awesome.

Very good. We have a really, really informed. So Tenday, why are you surprised actually that so many got it right?

Because actually what happened is this is one of those lean startup byproducts where people sort of focusing so much on the experiments and the hypotheses and not focus on the point of running experiments and having making progress towards finding a business model that works. And so the strength of evidence supporting that you're on track is the measure of progress. The number of experiments or hypotheses you've tested could actually be showing you that you're not on track. And so that's not such a good metric to actually track. It's an activity metric, not a progress metric.

Excellent. And what we see a lot is that teams do a lot of interviews and surveys, which is evidence, but it's very light and weak evidence. Right. And we need stronger evidence like pre purchases or letters of intent. So really good, informed audience. So now let's see for the next one. We've got three remaining. What statement is wrong? This is hard. Which one is wrong? Concentrate. Good and bad ideas look similar during the ideation phase. A landing page produces stronger evidence than interview. Even the best leaders cannot pick the winning ideas. A lot of experiments equals team progress. This one's hard.

Yep.

I wouldn't look at that.

That's amazing.

Still, the majority got it right. So this surprises me because often people say, well, you know, a lot of experiments means progress, which is wrong. Right.

But I like the one that, you know, why do. Well, why does a landing page produce Strong evidence than interviews because somebody else was asking on the chat, how do you measure strength? It's the distinction between what people do versus what they say. If you're measuring behavior, you've got stronger evidence than hearing what people say.

Another aspect there about strength is how big is the investment. If we're testing with customers from the customer, signing up with an email on the landing page is light evidence, but it's already more than what people say. But if you make a down payment or you write sign a letter of intent, that's stronger because the investment reputation and so is bigger. Right. So it's the action and the investment that determines the strength of evidence. That's why we say interviews and surveys are relatively light. But super happy to see such an informed audience. Great. Following all our webinars, I guess. Two more questions. Two more questions. The key ingredient before scaling a successful venture is a great idea, a value proposition. Customers care about a profitable business model, flawless execution skills. So you can only pick one answer, but there are two correct ones. And a lot of people focus just on the value proposition. If you get the product right, you're going to have a business. But that's not true. You actually need both. It was a bit of a trick question because some companies, they create great products and still go bankrupt. So in their coaching tendai, do you see this awareness in teams that they actually understand that from the start they need to figure out the business models and that that's an opportunity.

So that's a really interesting one because one of the things that has also happened with the lean startup movement has been this focus on figuring out what customers want. Focus on figuring out what customers want. And they left up the business model lens, which is how do you deliver that value in a sustainable way? Which is something Steve Blank actually talks about. I think I have heard me say this several times, which is it's actually possible to make stuff people want and lose money doing it. And so you have to figure out the other steps along the way.

So yeah, it's actually easy, right, to make something everybody wants. You could just sell Swiss chocolate for 20 cents, everybody would be happy in the world.

But maybe you can sell $10 for $8 and everybody will be happy. Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. That was we work. Right, so two more left. Oh, sorry, that's the last one. Last one. What is indispensable to build a lasting innovation culture? So an Easy Last Leadership 1. Innovation Labs Hackathons ability to build a minimum viable product or leadership involvement. A small, relatively easy one to round it off.

There we go.

Of course, of course nobody chose hackathons.

Hackathons are now cursed.

The hackathons are current. The hackathons are not bad, but they don't create a lasting innovation culture. So leadership involvement is something that's really hard to achieve. And it'll be interesting to also hear from Shamira and Aya on that. Tenday, do you really see senior leaders now embracing innovation beyond the words, really giving their time?

So that's a hard one. Right? Because one of the conversations that's easier these days is this embracing of. To grow your company, you need to innovate and scale. And they'll put it in their strategies and make that explicit and then say, okay, will you now invest the time to remove the blockers then? That's harder for them to do. Right. So that's. Yeah, that's still very difficult. We see and experience that all the time.

Excellent. I'm already seeing in the chat window, people are complaining that they weren't being able to answer fast enough and they're regretting that because they're not winning. Swiss chocolate. Right, so let's see who is the winner. Oh, no.

What happened to Rebecca?

We lost Rebecca. Rebecca disappeared. And we have Frank. Frank is the winner. So please reach out to Nick and you get the Swiss chocolate and an ebook of your choice from the Strategizer Library, which includes Pirates in the Navy. So thanks for participating.

Alex, what kind of chocolate is it? Swiss chocolate is a very broad category.

Exquisite Springli chocolate.

Wow, that's high end. That is very high end.

We should send Rebecca chocolate. Anyway, in the chat, Rebecca was like, I panicked and lost my head.

Excellent. Over to you, Nick.

Thank you very much. That was fantastic. I can't believe we're actually on time as well. So congratulations, Frank. I've just sent you a message in the chat. If you could share with me some of your details, we can make sure that we can get. I love it when Alex says that. Swiss chocolates, it's like. It's like. What do you say? What's your expression again?

It's your passport to chocolate heaven.

Yeah, I love that. I remember that from the. From the. From the live masterclasses as well. Okay, great. So we're going to be moving on to the Invincible Coaches of the Month. This section is normally the Invincible Company of the month, but of course, because the topic is coaches, we thought, let's call it the Invincible Coaches of the Month. So it's amazing that we've got Shamira Miller here as our first Invincible coach of the month. So thank you, Shamira. We'd love it if you could go ahead. Do you want to share your screen now? And then I'll let you go to it.

Cool. Hey, Shamira, can you see my screen?

Yeah, we can see your screen. So, conversation that Alex and I were having, could you tell us a little bit about, like, you know, some of your biggest insights of, like, how to, you know, do, like, really great innovation coaching? You've got a really extensive experience working in large companies, large pharmaceutical companies as well. So, yeah, just tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, so I thought 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. And so I want to start with this thing here that says computer says no. Now, my 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. And 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. 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 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 it's. 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, you know, one or two of them to come and attend the kickoff. So maybe I 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 spend 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. By the end of the two days, the team members, they understand that they actually now have to go and talk to customers. The first objection they have is, wait a second, we are not allowed to talk to patients. So this is in the pharma industry. This is where I get then the legal and compliance person to come up and address that in front of them. 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 are 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 poach 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 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? And so now the legal and compliance is involved in problem solving. So here's yet another example. There I've been coaching a team in Israel, again in the pharma industry, and they were looking to. They were looking at a really, really interesting idea. I'm sorry, I cannot share the details of the idea, but just generically speaking about it, they were looking to explore an idea that involved two other partners, external partners. And in the first instance, they went to legal and compliance and they got the typical answer, no, you can't do that. This partner, we worked with them in the past and the negotiations with them will take one whole year. That's how it was in the past. So we invited them to the coaching session and I then explained all of this to them and now posed the question, how can we do this. And this is where now the legal and compliance person was able to understand the context, understand what risk was involved. And then she came up with a creative way which was actually quite simple, and said, you know, okay, when it's just one day experiment that you're looking to do, we can just have a service contract with them for that one day, and we don't need to have any kind of partnership deal with them. What I encourage all of you coaches out there to do is involve legal and compliance really, really early on in the process whenever you can, and if need be, bring them in and explain the specific situation of experimentation.

Yeah.

Back to you, Nick.

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. Right. 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. It's your friend, not your enemy. Exactly what Alex is saying online here. Wonderful. Okay, Nick, are we moving over to Aya now?

Yeah, let's do it. So I'm going to present Aya as the second invincible Coach of the Month. Aya comes from Novartis. Thank you so much for being here. Aya, do you want to take it away? Tendaya, do you want to take it away as well?

Yeah. Aya, so I've enjoyed working with you. You're like, one of the most.

I've really not enjoyed working with Tenday.

It's like public rejection. We're supposed to make jokes about Alex, not me.

Nick is like, guys, the time is ticking.

It's been really great. I really enjoyed working with you from the Novartis perspective, large corporate, and you're like, part of the corporate setup, but we're trying to drive innovation. So what are some of your experiences that you've had in terms of how to really drive great coaching in that context?

Yeah.

And just wanted to say thanks again to the Strategizer team for bringing me on. And all jokes aside, Tenday is one of the most fabulous people I've ever worked with. So my chapeau is always off to him. I call him the philosopher. I think, just really briefly, I think one of the things that we haven't touched upon is actually how do you create a team that's really focused on innovation? Because I think Alex and Tenday even Shamira talked a lot about some of the technical pieces around the evidence, business model, canvas, the legal compliance. But the three things that I think are really important that often we don't discuss is the first is really how do you create that psychological safety in a team so that you're actually able to innovate, not in a vacuum where people are able to challenge each other. Right? Because if you're just thinking, oh, I have a fantastic idea and everyone's just saying, yes, yes, yes, you're not going to be really thinking about is this really the best idea? So I think that's just something from a coaching perspective. How do you make sure you're looking at the team? Do they have the psychological safety to have the ability to challenge, to question, to make sure you're pushing each other for the right solution? And tied to that, I think is the second thing is like, how do you really have that common vision and customer obsession? Right. I think Alex mentioned the Amazon example, the empathy piece of the customer. One of the things that I love to do when I'm sort of coaching teams is everyone thinks they have the same idea of who the customer is, but then you ask them and you get about 30 different post it notes of who the customer is. And there's very oftentimes, especially in corporations, a confusion between what is a customer versus a stakeholder. Right. Because I think oftentimes, as Tendaya was mentioning, you know, leadership may have a certain idea and that's what teams end up focusing on. But is that the customer or is that really the leadership as a stakeholder? So I think having that crystal clear understanding of who your customer is, who you're trying to serve, what's the evidence that you need from them? If you don't have that as a team again, you're going to be going on six different directions. And the last thing that I want to just say is like you have to be razor focus on what you're trying to achieve and you're constantly ruthlessly prioritizing for it. And I think part of that is that, you know, idea generation, I think Alex said this too, is like, that's the fun part, right? Like we all love thinking of ideas and hackathons, funds and like, let's get these teams together and rah, rah, rah. But then when it actually comes to like doing the work, it is hard. And so make sure you're prioritizing the right ones and that you're focusing on, is that actually going to get the evidence and the outcome that I'M going to want to see because it's really easy to do activity metrics, right? To say, oh, I did this many experiments, I did this many trainings, I did xyz, but so what? What does that actually achieve? So I think those are just the three things that are at least really important for me to drive when I'm thinking about coaching. So I'll turn it back to you, Tenday.

Thank you. I just want to focus on one of the things that you spoke about, which is the psychological safety piece.

Right.

And Alex and I have had long conversations about this, which is a lot of people think coaching is about being obsequious and being nice to the people that you're coaching and agreeing with everything they say and encouraging them. There's no such thing as a bad idea and, you know, those kinds of things. To what extent do you think that it's important to drop what Alex calls diplomatic hand grenades to make sure that people really get better and improve the ideas they're working on?

I think they're really important. But my whole thing is that if you don't have psychological safety, you could drop a hand grenade and no one's going to notice or they're not going to take you seriously. Right. I completely agree with you. A coach isn't there to do niceties. They're there to make sure you're getting challenged. You're really prioritizing, you're focusing, you're asking the hard questions. But the reason why I say the psychological safety needs to be there is that you're going to have no impact as a coach if the team itself doesn't have that psychological safety. To be able to trust each other, to say, hey, I'm going to go run off and do this experiment. Right? And everybody in the team says, okay, I trust that this person is going to do it. Whereas, like, you could then have infighting and then you're just wasting time on, like, internal team dynamics rather than actually getting the work done.

Absolutely. Really, really great responses. Alex, anything to add? Any extra questions you want to ask? Any observations? I think Shamira and I are both shared really great ideas.

I think it's really interesting, you know, the perspective. Two things that were highlighted. Number one, I think legal is often seen as the enemy, but those are the early stages of innovation. We now are getting a lot more professional. And I'd say any company above thousand people that doesn't have a legal person hundred percent dedicated to innovation is not taking innovation seriously because you need to have legal in the design Process of experiments and what Aya said about psychological safety, that relates to metrics. Any company that does not create the cultural space for teams to actually explore, experiment and fail does not take innovation seriously. So those are two big things, right, that we don't hear enough. And it's actually two things that if you look at that and a company has it, you know, they're actually good at innovation. So you can start to observe. Is that company innovating?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think Shamira was awesome. I mean, she showed like the coach is not just for coaching the strategizer tools, it's also for really helping the team navigate complexity, which is really, really important. So it's awesome. Thank you so much, Ayer and Shamira. Back to you, Nick. What are we doing next?

Oh, wow, this is running so smoothly. Like, this is fantastic. Thank you so much, Aya. Thank you so much, Shamira. And thank you, Tenday as well for that section. I think that was really, really great getting all of your insights. So we're going to be moving on now to Hot or Not. This is quite an interesting section because I'll just move on this bit. By the way, if you click on the view in the top right hand corner and you click Presenter View, you'll be able to see me with my slides better for this part for a moment, but I'll switch to present slide in a second as well. Hot or not is one of the fun parts of this session where we kind of create a little bit of controversy, create a little bit of division, a little bit of argument, but then we make up at the end afterwards.

To say that I always win.

Tendai has been winning a lot. This is, I think the fifth time that we're doing it. So I think the audience has agreed with Tendai quite a lot on this, in fairness, to be fair. Okay, so if you haven't already, please can you go to mentee.com same as before, same number, 441-524-91 and then what I'm going to do is I'll come out of this and I'll present my screen now, see if it's going to work. I'm going to go full screen. I can see you're already voting. So for this first one, wow, people are getting in there already. So for this first one, agile, the concept of Agile Agile methodology, what are we saying? Is it hot or is it not? Alex, you're already getting into it. I can see it. Go on.

So just to be provocative, I'm going.

To say not.

The reason, I'll tell you why, because people use the word agile as a catch all. We do agile, we're innovating. Well, come on. I mean there's agile in your execution projects and there's agile in innovation. It's not because you work in an agile way that you're actually doing innovation. So people mix it up. So that's why I would say not. Not because I don't think we shouldn't work in an agile way. But agile doesn't per se mean innovation.

Yeah, you like made a noise there when you heard that. Gone.

Yeah, because is it, I guess the dilemma I have in my head is is it the fault of the concept that it's misunderstood? That's the real like. Because a lot of people that do agile, it's absolutely right, they just go with the rituals but they, whatever they're working on is not what the goal was. And so they'll do the stand ups and the retros or whatever but they're not really working on anything innovative. And so that connection. I don't know Aya, you, I mean.

So, so I would, I would say it is like a super hot topic right now, right. From a company perspective, especially with COVID I think everybody's realizing that you need to pivot really quickly and that's, you know, a lot of agility is focused on that. I totally agree with Tenday though. There's, there's doing agile and being agile, right. And like I think that's where is it? Are people actually thinking about the mindset like the transparency, the trust, the rapid iteration based on customer or are they just like saying they're being agile or you know, being agile because I have my standups, my retros and planning. So I mean I love it but I think that it's a, it's a really, if you don't really get it then I totally agree with Alex. It's like the next digital.

Hot or not.

I think you're going to be in the minority here Alex. I also think it's hard. From my perspective it's because I see two different kinds of customers that I work with. Those that don't have any agile in the organization and execution and those that do and those that do come with a more flexible mindset to my coaching. And so even if they're doing agile in the wrong way, they're still introduced to the concepts of agile and they understand what agile actually means is meant for. And so with my coaching now I am able to better build on that rather than you know, completely new people stuck in that old way of thinking. So. Yes.

Thank you, Shamira. Thank you. And so on that note with coaching, this is interesting because the coach approach is something that I think is getting a lot more popular, particularly like in large corporations. And we're talking more about innovation coaches. So is it like, you know, because often we get external coaches. What about internal coaches and having your manager being the coach? What about that? Tendai, what do you think about this one?

Oh, this one is not hard for me. Like, your manager being your innovation coach, like, that's just, I can just imagine how awful those conversations are. Like, you're standing in the business model campus, you're just doing everything your manager is telling you to do. Like, it's just, I've been in those situations and it just doesn't work. It's a. I also.

Sorry to jump in, Nick, but I think, I also think, like, one of the things that this question doesn't allude to is that innovation coaching is a really deep practice. Right, right. And so when you. So, which is also where I go to the not piece is that, like, if you're, if you think that just because you're a manager, you can be an innovation coach, like, I think we're missing the piece.

Thank you. Thank you. Aya and Shamira.

Shamira, what would you do with Tendaya? I'm going to throw back to you this thing that you said earlier about agile. You know, coaching per se is not a bad thing if managers are performing it badly.

Right. Okay.

You know, coaching in general is like, every person should be doing that. Even we as parents should be doing that. And so I think managers as coaches in general is a good concept. But sadly today they don't understand what coaching really is and they end up having this very dictatorial, kind of authoritarian way of managing. And so the minute they end up having coaching as the way of managing, then you can also start having that psychological safety that Aya spoke of. So, yeah, I still say hot because it's again, a transition that slowly and steadily people will get there.

Thank you, Shamira. Tenday's feeling the burn. I can see it because his own argument was used.

I'm just wondering whether Shamira is going to say a few times, I got a way to go.

Alex, just quickly, which one are you going with?

So 100% agree with Aya in the sense that, yes, it's a profession. Innovation coaching. Innovation is profession. But I'll go with Shamira on hot, because you can take a subset of it you can ask questions like, well, what about this evidence? I haven't seen evidence here. Or what if we shifted or pivoted to a recurring revenue? Have you done that? So I'd still say there's a niche where you're not telling the team how to do the process, you're not making the decisions for them, but you're asking really good questions. So I'll go for not and hot.

Interesting. Interesting.

You can gang up on me if you want, but the crowd agrees with me. You saw that.

That was quite even. I thought the crowd was in the middle there. So outsourcing, testing. So getting, you know, external agencies to work on the testing.

Not, not, not, not.

Okay. I think Alex is going with not Tendai. What are you going with?

Shamira is going to say hot. No way. Go ahead, Shamir. I want to hear what you have to say.

So, again, I am also practical about coaching teams and what I see with corporate teams that, one, they have the financial resources to some degree to outsource it, unlike startups. Two, they do not have the time to allocate to it, like startups. And so where's the middle ground? And the way I find the middle ground with them is getting them to do the hard work of analyzing the data, looking at it, determining the hypotheses, determine, you know, determining the experiment, coming up with a brief for it. But then when the actual execution of it, creating the landing page, creating the surveys that they need to do, or, you know, setting up all the experiment. Fine, outsource that part. No problem.

Right? Yeah, I guess you're right in that I'm more of Steve Blank. Right. Steve Blank has got the thing that he always say that even the engineers writing the code should be out talking to customers. And he says that because engineers are introverted. He says the difference between an engineer he's coached and an engineer he hasn't coached is that the engineer he's coached is looking at the customer's shoes versus his own shoes when he's interviewing the customer. And so this is. I really believe that you need to see, see and feel the customer rather than get information passed down to you so you can make better decision.

And Aya, do you want to jump in? What's your $0.02 on this one?

I agree in terms of, like, needing to know your customer, have the customer obsession and empathy, but you could do testing as a service. Right? Like, and I think that's where you. I think, as Shamira was saying, in big corporations, sometimes, like, that's what ends up Happening. I don't agree with it but I just know with the teams that I've worked with there's a lot that they're managing outside of just the experiments and the innovation that they're working on. From a time perspective, it could definitely be as a testing, as a service model.

Interesting because I think overall the audience has gone with not on this one. So there we go. Interesting perspective as always. Super fun. If you liked that hot or not, let us know. I think we seem to get some good feedback on that. So let us know in the chat if you've enjoyed that one. We've got the next section which is this mini assessment. Alex, I'm going to hand the hot potato back over to you.

Okay, so right back to the mentee actually just to self assess. And we do this, we do this in our boot camp also where every participant needs to self assess their coaching skills and we look at three domains. Business model coaching or business coaching, but value propositions and business models testing, coaching and facilitation. So I'd like you to score yourself on this one left hand side. You're new to this novice. I don't know what the value proposition canvas is. Right. Or I've worked with over 20 teams that have really substantial experience. That would be more on the right hand side. Strategizer business small patterns. Have you even bought the invincible company? Do you know what those patterns are, are about? Not just oh, I'm going to fill out these boxes and then the next two really just the experience that you have. So it's interesting because you know, I like to call this, you know, like medical education. You have a technical part and not anatomy and physiology. You need to know those tools, you need to know what a business is from business model perspective. But you also need to do right. So, so same thing. You don't want a surgeon to show up. Never read an anatomy or physiology book, but you don't want a surgeon to show up who's just read books. So we should have the experience of the theory and the practice in the field. So this is for the business part is what I was alluding to. Around leaders as coaches ask if there could be a better business model, could you pivot the idea? Because again, you can actually go bankrupt with a great product. Kodak did that. They actually committed innovation suicide. They came up with a digital camera that killed their revenues. Right. So great. Because they didn't think business models enough. That's the first one in terms of self assessment. Let's go to the second One, this is really about testing because it's not just about designing business models and value propositions, it's about finding that evidence. So I'd like you to score yourself on these four types of experiments that you need to run as a team or when you coach a team. Desirability is about customer understanding and value propositions. Viability is about can I make more money than I spend. You also need to test your cost structure. Feasibility is about access to patents, to technology, scaling the activities and adaptability is about the context around your business model, regulatory timing, technology trends, et cetera. It's interesting to see quite a lot have experience, but not yet on the very right hand side. I do think you only really get to know how to do this well when you've done this with more than 20 teams, when you've run 20, 40 experiments or you help teams do that. This is something you can't just read the books. You don't need to do it yourself as an innovators entrepreneur, but you need to have that experience with testing anything. Aya Tenday Shamir would like to add on the testing part because I think this is harder than the business part is a little bit more accessible also to corporate innovators. But the testing part is completely new. Anything you'd like to add?

Testing is really interesting because some of the challenges people start and what's interesting as well, you can even see with the pattern of layouts here. It's like as we evolve our practice, people got really great at design, designing value propositions and business models. And then we got really great at the early stages of testing, customer interviews, desirability, et cetera. And then the later stages get more difficult because we need to start thinking, okay, how do I test pricing and get reliable evidence? How do I test visibility to make sure that I'm making stuff or I know, figure out how to actually make and how do I test adaptability? So as we get more and more deeper into our practice, I think you'll find that people will get better and better at some of these things.

Okay, last one and here I'd love to hear, you know, Aya's and Shamir's experience. We're going to talk about facilitation skills. You know, have you, I firmly believed in the first one. If you haven't looked stupid 20 times in facilitating, you haven't tried hard enough and you haven't learned enough, right. You need to, you need to have that experience.

Experience.

I think, oh man, I screwed that one up. Not going to do it again, I believe in that first one. I think a lot of you are putting giving higher scores good news. Second one is what Tenday said, throwing that diplomatic hand grenade. So, yes, you need a great rapport with the teams, but you should also have brutal, honestly kindly delivered. If a team after six weeks has done one experiment, you need to throw that diplomatic hand grenade. They should be running six experiments after six, six weeks.

Right.

And the third one pushed teams to conduct more testing. They were way too nice. The standard is, you know, over, you know, maybe half a year. You should probably have 15 experiments, not three. Right. So that's just the standard now. And then the last one, successful pivot. Aya Shamira, you're invincible. Coaches of the month, how do you see yourselves and your facilitation insights?

Aya, you want to go first?

No, go ahead, Shamira.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, all of these are definitely up there. And I've made a fool of myself way too often, especially when I'm on the same stage with Alex. I'm like totally nervous and I make a total fool of myself. But no, and it's also about, you know, experimenting yourself with different kinds of way of facilitating. Now, one of the things that I'm not seeing here, and I think it's important to mention, and that's around understanding corporate teams, especially corporate teams, and pushing them. Yes. But then also understanding the environment that they're operating in and how difficult that really is for them. So it's a really fine balance between pushing those teams and then still having empathy for what they are going through and helping them. Like the example I gave with legal and compliance, finding a way to help them get out of what they're stuck in. And that's really important.

Excellent point, Shamira. Ayaan, what do you want to add?

I can't emphasize, like, I know Tendaya said it in the chat of like, silliness and fun. I think there's been a lot of studies and research saying the more laughter you have as you're facilitating, the actual. That's actually what creates trust and psychological safety. And I think that's just something. At least when we're facilitating sessions. It's actually one of our key principles is to have fun. Right. Because if you're not, you spend a lot of time at work, you spend a lot of time with each other, have those tough conversations. But at the end of the day, like, if you're not sort of then laughing about it, then it's not as enjoyable. That's the only thing that I would add.

I'm just gonna jump in and say definitely let us know if you've had fun on this webinar because we want to get your feedback. So I just dropping, I'm dropping in a poll just like just now before people shoot off because we're starting to round. So if you hadn't participated in this month's RAT Chat webinar, you'd be very disappointed. Somewhat disappointed. Not disappointed. I wouldn't have wasted my time. So if you could let us know, this is like the Sean Ellis test. If you could let us know that, that'd be really, really great.

I would have been very disappointed not to participate in this one.

Me too. Me too. Brilliant. Alex, is there anything else that you want that you were going to add on there as well?

Great time.

Cool. Perfect. So we're going for Swiss time then going to present. You can see the feedback now. We're doing that now. So thank you very much. I'll give people a few more seconds to complete that. And while you're waiting, just to mention again the bootcamp and I will put a link in the chat as well again in a second to it so that you can register to get notified about that when that's happening. And then also if you haven't already, check out the Testing Business Ideas virtual masterclass that's happening on the 21st to the 23rd of September. And if you use the code join USTBIVMC10 you can get a 10% off as well. And we'll send you a follow up afterwards so you can use those codes as well. So it makes it even easier. The next webinar get notified@stragizer.com webinars the next one is happening on the 8th of September, so that's going to be a good one. Alex will be here, Tenday will be here. And we're going to be talking around the topic of what's the topic on this one again. But it's going to be very, very special.

How Alex beat Tendai at Hotter Knob.

Indeed.

How Alex beat 10 day at hot or Not. That's the topic.

The topic that's fake news. The topic will actually be does everyone need to be an innovator in the organization? Is that right or wrong? That's the topic for the next one. So we'll let you know if you sign up@stragizer.com webinars and we'll let you know when that next one's happening so you can sign up for it. That is pretty much it. I'm going to end the poll there as well. Oh, no, if you haven't, I'll give you a few more seconds to vote. Do you want to just give us what's like a kind of a thought for the day or a signing off thought? It was. I always enjoy doing this. Uwe had a really good one on the last webinar. Tendai, your one was a bit disappointing last time. Have you got a thought to end the webinar?

The way you asked the question made me go blank.

So much to psychological, psychological safety.

Nick. But I just want to say thank you. Aya and Shamira. We really learned a lot from everything that you said. You know, Shamira illustrating that coaches need to do more. Aya would make sure that we create psychological safety and teams feel safe to push each other. So I think those are really, really great takeaways from the session.

Should we go with Shamira next? Have you got something to sign off?

Yeah, I just say, you know, get started. Even if you're not really good at it, even as a coach, if you're looking to start coaching, get started and eventually you'll get there.

Yeah, that's really great.

I think that's really good advice. That's how I started, just by getting going, even offering the services for free, what I did in the beginning, I think that's a great way to get into it. What was that, Tendai?

And you're still not good now? I'm just saying.

Okay, let's hear from an invincible coach. Aya. Aya, go on.

I just wanted to say, like, if it's not hard, it would have already been done, right? So a lot of this is like, it's going to be hard, you're going to have to push it. But that's like part of what being an innovator is. It's like you're trying to push the boundaries, you're pushing the ecosystem. You're an antibody oftentimes, especially in these big companies. And so if it's not hard, then you're probably doing something wrong. So keep challenging yourself.

I love that. Mine will just be adding on top of that. Aya, if you're not looking silly all the time, you're not trying hard enough to do the really hard stuff. Right? We just grow by getting out of our comfort zone and innovation. We know a lot by now, but we don't know everything. So let's just push boundaries until we get all of these established companies to innovate.

Did you see that one? A ship is safe in harbor, but that is not what it was built for.

That's a really good question.

That's the type of thing I was looking for on that one. I'd like to thank all of you participating for joining this webinar. It's been an absolute pleasure hosting everybody. Thank you again to Shamira and Aya, and of course, to Alex and Tenday. We hope to see you in the next one in September. In the meantime, have a wonderful rest of July and August, summer, summertime, and see you next time. Take care, everyone. Thank you.

Thank you, Nick. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Aya. Thank you very much.

Bye. Bye.