E013: Innovation – An Introduction

This is the world of work podcast with James and James, hi. This is

James. Just before we start, I wanted to remind you that you can read our articles, explore more podcasts, and learn about our online personal and management development programs and workshops by visiting our website, www dot, World of work.io. All right, onto the podcast.

Hi everyone. This is James. I'm James, and welcome back to another episode of The World of Work Podcast. Today, we're going to be talking about innovation and doing a bit of an introduction, looking a little bit at some different types of information and reflecting on reflecting a little bit on culture and leadership for innovation as ever. You can get in touch with us on our website. You can check us out at www dot the WoW podcast.org, or you can, you can tweet us on Tweet us at the WoW podcast. Yeah, lovely. Cool. So yeah, as I said, innovation is going to be the focus for today. We're going to talk about definitions, as we usually do. We'll do a bit of a research round up. We've got a list of the week for you, which is traits of highly innovative people. We'll be sharing a few personal stories from our working lives in stories from a keyboard, and a couple of final thoughts, and then we'll check out. But before we get into that, let's just check in how you've been doing, what you've been up to. I am all right. Thank you. I am

having a week of self reflection, of realizing that sometimes I need to listen to my advice. Yeah, I've tried to cram a bit too much in next week, and I can already see it coming around the corner. But aside from that, I'm really, really good. Good saying no is a hard one, isn't it, right? Sometimes it's hard to say no to stuff. I'm so beyond bad at saying no to stuff because it's shiny. I know shiny new stuff, isn't it, right? You just bounce over. And the frustration is that normally,

before I before, I sort of went on this journey of transitioning a little bit into different work. My work was pretty straightforward. I was kind of knew where I was with it. Yeah. So whereas now all the things I'm doing are nice, new, shiny, interesting things, so I need to just say no, because I don't have to do them all at the same time, it's hard to say no, isn't it? It's really hard. I'm just not very good at it, but it means you got lots of fun stuff to do. So it's great that we've very true. What about you? What have you been up to? So I came back from the states earlier this week. Yeah.

So I came back, and I've just been kind of settling back in. I've only been back for two days, so seeing people and settling back into what I've been doing. So it's not getting body clock back, getting the body clock back, so I feel pretty much back on Scottish time getting used to the darkness. Are we gonna do a podcast on transatlantic relationships at some point? We probably should, but we kind of find okay. So shall I get started there on definitions? That'd be great. We've got a few in here, and some of them might not, at first glance, be that familiar to you, but I'll try and talk them through as easy as easy as possible. So we'll start with the basics. And what is innovation? Well, is, according to Oxford dictionary, it is the introduction of new things, ideas or ways of doing something. So pretty straightforward. The Cambridge

dictionary talks about disruption, which we're going to talk about a little bit more later as an interruption in the usual way that a system, process or event, works, which I think is quite interesting, because actually, it's not that different to innovation. It's not as a definition, and it doesn't imply that that interruption is in any way

violent or particularly mag height of a large magnitude. Yeah, it's not really scalar. Is it in the way that we think about it? No, not at all. So then we're going to get some slightly more complicated ones, disruptive or primary innovation. And this is from Wikipedia, an innovation that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network displacing established market leading firms, products and alliances. And many of you listening will be really familiar with that concept in the world, if not with the phrase or the word, because we're seeing it around us constantly at the moment, with new products and services coming onto the market and completely changing the way we interact with that market. Yeah. So whether it's about

financial models of subscriptions, whether it's about the technology we're using to access them, or whether it's about completely different products because they the technology didn't exist to give us those products before, we are consistently seeing companies that did not exist in any way before being the market leaders. Yeah, really quickly. And maybe they're not quickly from coming from startup point of view. But certainly they're moving within the public consciousness, and they're grabbing that, that monopoly, or virtual monopoly, of a market sector, very quickly. Yeah. And the scale of them is phenomenal at the age that they are. So Google's like, what, 20 years old now, and the scale of growth there, and the scale of disruption and impact on the world is phenomenal. It is. And I think.

Probably very short lived. I cannot believe that, as a society, the western world is going to or the the industrial or the technological world is going to sit there and allow this state of affairs. I just can't imagine that someone will be allowed to sit there with that level of dominance. It just sooner or someone's going to change the rules so they can't be dominant. So incremental or secondary innovation, I need to ask a question about this in a minute. Incremental and secondary innovation, a series of small improvements to an existing product or product learn that usually helps maintain or improve its competitive position over time.

So in complete contrast to disruptive or primary innovation. This is about small things, lots of them, and over a long period of time, constantly iteratively, moving through a process of change and improvement.

And very similar to that is continuous improvement, which is a phrase I think quite a lot of us here, yeah, a lot lots of people's jobs got shifted over to continuous improvement, I think a few years ago, when they were thinking about research and development. And actually quite a lot of that split into and you saw quite a lot of people moving into continuous improvement. And it's on every job application. It really is. Every job description must have that must have a approach to continuous improvement. Through continuous improvement. Which is, which is, it's the new norm, right? It's the implication that no one's always changed. Yeah, everyone should always be looking for ways to improve themselves. Which is, you know, good, but exhausting as a world. So that definition is from competitive solutions. Inc, they're getting a shout out, yeah, an ongoing effort to make incremental improvements products, services or processes over time. Processes are constantly audited and modified based on their efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability. The one thing I would say to competitive Solutions, Inc, is good. People are constantly auditing and modifying based on their efficiency. I see a huge amount of continuous improvement that has not been audited, and therefore they end up

doing things again and again. Yeah, go back. Why don't we? Why don't we do this before? Oh, you did Yes, yes, yes, yes, someone's left. And then finally,

it's kind of been implied, but marginal gains philosophy. So the most common place people will have heard this recently is around the success of British sport, which was trailblazed by sort of del Brailsford, bringing it to popular awareness, certainly not from him, yeah, but Team Sky originally, and then he moved into British Cycling as well. And hold held, actually both posts, and it's been hotly, hotly debated recently, because there's been this huge contextual stuff around the way that cycling has been successful, namely that they they operate in a very uncompetitive market of sport. So they operate in a sport that's got high costs to gain. Yeah, big barriers. Yeah, there's very few. There were very few countries competing in it at that point.

And it requires you can make improvements, because it's technological, so it's got bikes in it, right? It's just about improving the athlete. So it's quite contentious, but his principle is that there is a 1% gain that can be made, yeah? And that ultimately, is what the philosophy is. It's about finding those tiny margins. And when you're operating at the top level, his argument is that, effectively, that's where you will find the difference. The irony being, of course, that

actually British cycling's previous success had been on Chris Boardman, who'd been a disruptive innovator. So he creates a brand new bike and style, yeah, never done before, and he completely ripped apart the content of how cycling worked, yeah. So partly, I'm really interested in that, because I think there's a juxtaposition around which one comes first and which ones come in and out of fashion in a sector depending on what's happened recently. Yeah. So I think there's an element of looking around and saying, Well, okay, if it's been disrupted so much actually, right now, what everyone's looking for is, let's, let's finesse that. Let's fine tune that disruption to get better and better and better until the point where there's it's really difficult to find a competitive advantage, and then you start the whole cycle again. Yeah.

So anyway, James has created, I feel like I should let you read this one out. Oh, it's rare. Okay, you can go ahead. I want to be really clear. This is James marginal gains philosophy, my own personal belief. Go and read some stuff about how Dave brails approached it, because they often define it. But I quite like this, the objective of generating very small improvements across many metrics, leading to a significant overall improvement in performance. So that's James's The only thing I would contest around that is it's not always

the probably the key word for me, and that is significant. So it doesn't have to be big, so it's not significant in terms of what you it doesn't need to be absolutely but it needs to have all it has to be as significant as in it is a shift in where you were to where you are, and that could be naught point, naught one in your sector. Yeah. So this concept of you are.

Only looking for the foot that helps you get over the next. Yeah, yeah, you can win by nose, as they say in horse racing, yeah, and, and, although, no, not recycling, because your nose isn't it. No, no, you can. You can win by a few other things, like

when you see plastic. When you were just chatting there, I was thinking back to do you remember the Olympics in I think it was Sydney, when they brought in the new swimming,

swimming, they got thrown out. So that was a big sort of technological disruption to a sport, but changed it, and then they had to pull it. And for me, that's where that is the best possible example you could have put picked of where my fascination with innovation comes, yeah, which is at what point, particularly technological innovation, because at what point does the technology disrupt the existing, in this case, sport, to a point where it is no longer holding to the premise of what it is enough that people feel subscribed to it? Yeah, and so, you know, in some senses that the fight, the fight against drugs in sport, is the same, yeah, because it's about as it's as much about saying, Well, this is what we want it to look like. And I think sports, you need to place that, because it's entirely based on people having faith in it. Yeah, right. It's very there's very few politics maybe the other thing, yeah, so one of the things I think that's really interesting around innovation and politics is around electronic voting, yeah.

How do we believe? And how can we believe, and will it damage what we do such that voting will actually drop because no one believes it, or will it improve it? So yeah, and part of that is, you know, back to leading change and innovation as a change process, or adopting to new innovation is a change process in itself. So the people that need to use whatever the innovative technology is, in a technological example, need to go along the journey of getting used to it and exploring it and being comfortable with it for it to be effective. Yeah. And I think, I think it's, well, we'll get onto, let's go on to the research. Yeah, actually, I think we get, we could get, yeah, we could actually want to stick to the research first and get everyone to same place as us before we carry Yeah. So, so let's do a little bit of research. So what, what we're going to talk about in the research round up today is we're going to speak a little bit about the distinction between, you know, what Jane described as primary or disruptive innovation, and then secondary or continuous innovation. We're going to tell you a little bit of some of the differences between them. We'll talk a little bit about the types of things that you might have seen or heard of in most different areas. We'll run through a few examples of the impacts or

ways that disruption and action presents itself, and we'll speak a little bit about the role of leadership and the role of culture in these different areas of innovation.

So if we start out and we think about the difference between incremental and disruptive innovation, they occupy sort of different spaces within the competitive landscape that organizations and individuals exist within if we start with the incremental innovation, what's really happening with this is, is you're trying to make an existing way of doing things a little bit better.

It tends to have very little impact on your overall market. It's a it's a slight change, and it tends to have very limited technological progress. So you're refining the things that you have. Maybe you change a little bit of your architecture, you change some processes, you do teeny bits of automation, things like that. But it's not a fundamental change to your technology. So it's got limited market impact, and it's got limited technological drivers behind it normally. Now coming with that means that it's actually fairly low risk, because you're not really changing things. And associated with that low risk is the fact that it's generally fairly low return. So you'll make some changes, but it's fairly low return. So that's your incremental innovation. If we then speak about your primary innovation, your disruptive innovation, and it's called primary because it's it's the first of bringing something new to your market. What we find is that primary innovation tends to have associations with fairly large technological changes, and it tends to have really large impacts on markets. So this is disrupting markets. This is the type of change that sometimes forces obsolescence or restructures hierarchies within market organizations and again, you know, conversely to the incremental innovation, disruptive innovation tend to be fairly high risk. You'll probably come up with loads of ideas before you find one that really succeeds, but the return for that risk is huge. Increasingly, we're almost in a winner takes all environment. So if you think about some of the new organizations that are out there that have in implemented new and disruptive technologies successfully, they've really taken huge amounts of market share and are really market leaders. So we're almost in that winner takes, all takes all,

sort of paradigm, I guess, if you will. One other thing I wanted to say is that when we spoke.

About the definitions earlier we talked about, you know, incremental innovation taking place up to a point, and then maybe an organization or industry being disrupted. I actually think that this all happens at the same time. So people are always trying to increase incrementally innovate. It just gets harder to do so, but more but you refined the process. But I think throughout the life cycle of any technology or product, people are always trying to disruptively innovate, and I think that's the case because quite often people don't really know what they're trying to disruptively innovate. So technology and pure science is progressing, and then at later stages, it gets absorbed into industries and organizations and ends up being disruptive. But it's not always disrupted in a specific area for which it was intended, in its production and design. So for me, that's kind of a distinction between incremental and disruptive innovation. Have you got any thoughts on that? Any reflections

on that? Oh, you always ask that question, yeah, should I say anything? So I'm, I really struggle with this. Yeah, as a as a dividing line, and so,

so, for example, on the slide that you've done, and guys, as always, with topics like this, where we're talking about some, quite some, we're going to move on to some sort of relatively detailed stuff. The slides are really helpful. But so where there is a where we're drawing a very clear group of innovative

behaviors, concepts, whatever they are, better disruption versus disruption incremental, I really struggle, because I don't think it's as straightforward as that. And I think you've alluded to it in what you were saying around you know, the idea that you can be incremental, quite often, disruption comes from something that might be incremental. It's not, I think, I honestly think that aside from this very recent labeling of disruptive technology, of firms that are going out to seek disrupt the market, I don't think it's as clear cut. I think there's a lot of people, a lot of

developments that are happening where people are just trying to run great businesses and do better, and they're not saying they're not going out thinking, I want to be disruptive, or I want to be incrementally great, although they are at the moment, because that's a new thing. Yeah, I think for a lot of the time, they were just looking for opportunities, and they were looking at what they do. And I think, I also think that it's not to get to

what's the word I'm looking for? Come on, big idea II. Yeah, that's not the word by the esoteric

No, quite, but I'll come to it. But not to get to too big idea. But ultimately, what we think is disruptive Now we may view 100 years later as being only very much sure a period. So, for example, this idea that

Airbnb have completely disrupted the hotel industry, we may have such a different concept of travel or of enjoying locations that we may look back 100 years time and go disruptive. That's not disruptive. That's just changing the way you book it. Yeah, this is disruptive. And actually, you know, we're all hanging in the air, in our own bubble that we do, just living in our little VR world and

so and so, there is a little bit of me that I always and I know, I know you hate this, but I always wonder about how much this is about marketing. I always wonder about this is how much is someone trying to sell me an idea that they are new and shiny and clever and different, are they really don't know. So I think disruption as a sort of zeitgeisty Word is right. I think you're right about that, and I think I'd agree that the aspiration to disrupt is fairly new, and it's kind of market buzzy. So do you know what generally since when this disruptive become positive? Yeah, so

all of the truly great change processes I've been involved with, whether they've been big or small, they've never felt disruptive, they've never felt shouty, they've never felt they felt exciting and energized, and the big one, whether they're big or small, they felt like they're bringing people alongside them. And I just, I, you know, I just, it smacks to me of someone sitting in a marketing room going so disruptive, because changing everything, yeah, yeah. And, you know, historically, I think disruption occurs when people are just trying to make a really good product, and if it happens to be a disruptive great but it's about product first. I think, yeah. And, you know what? I we're gonna get onto something a little bit later, and when we were discussing it. So those of you don't know James and I talk about stuff in advance. So just to make sure that we I understand some of the ideas, because sometimes I don't, and likewise, one of the things that is really interesting that is that I now have you, having said that, understand completely what you mean about the role of science. Oh, yeah, okay, which we'll get on to later. But this idea that actually people are doing this is what I guess this is what I mean about the differentiation. I don't believe the really good innovators in this world sit in a room thinking, Am I looking for a marginal gain, or am I looking for a big disruptive they're not. They're focusing on what is the problem they're trying to solve in the world with their political service and.

Therefore, how can we make it better? Yeah, and sometimes they'll be looking big, and sometimes we look sometimes, sometimes we reactive, and sometimes it'll be proactive. We can divide them like that. It's arbitrary, right? Anyway, sorry, ran over. Cool. So, so that is, that's a lesson to me and asking what you think about stuff, right? It's always interesting. It's always interesting. So, so that is a bit of a reflection on incremental and disruptive innovation. What we're going to speak about now is a little bit more detail about these two different areas, and then we'll talk about a couple of examples of this happening over the history of, I guess, modern life. So let's look a little bit at incremental innovation. What you know, what we're saying with this is that we're trying to work to make the things that we have a little bit better. So let's make stuff a little bit better. And all I want to do is, with this is to call out that you might have heard of other phrases that basically linked to incremental innovation. So we've got, you know, all kinds of things like continuous improvement. Sit within here, Kaizen, you know, sort of Japanese, Japanese philosophy of always improving sits in there. Lean does things like problem solving contribute to this? Things like reviewing end to end processes and trying to improve them, sitting there. Product Development can sit in here. Marginal gains, black box thinking,

things like AB testing, they all sit within this sort of incremental innovation. You're just testing different things, trying different things, measuring your effectiveness, and you try and make it a little bit better. So that's, that's really incremental innovation. When we speak about disruptive innovation, it tends to be kind of research based, right? So where you're incremental, you can really achieve with hard work and focus. And, you know, let's, let's analyze a process and make it a little bit better, your disruptive tends to really be kind of research led, and it's fairly creative, and it's kind of broad, and it's trying to bring ideas from different places into into your market, so you can, you can come up with something that's fairly radical and different, and often there's a lot of luck involved. You know, a lot of ideas that are developed in one area, in one arena, transfer into another market or arena and become disruptive for something that they were never invented for, and we'll share some examples of those in a bit. So disruptive innovation is really about creating something that's totally new. And as we said, it tends to disrupt markets, disrupt your sort of competitive hierarchy within the organizations working in there. It tends to disrupt value networks within marketplaces, and it tends to force observation obsolescence. And we've got a list of a couple of things, you know, a couple of, I guess, inventions or innovations that have been disruptive. So for telegraph, I think that's a fun one. And I like it because, you you know, people talk about, like, the Pony Express, you know, riding their ponies across America, and, like, whatever, three days to get across America, or something. So something stupid. But the Pony Express only really existed for 10 or 15 years, right? It was just a little blip. And then along comes the telegraph, and that's gone things like production lines for automated for automobile production. So, you know, Model T Ford, that was a massive technological disruption, computers, combustion engines, catalog sales. So things like Sears, Sears Roebuck starting to do catalog sales. Huge disruption. The next catalog for those bricks, you don't know, oh yeah, the next one, yeah. Or, you know, similar to that is department stores, right? Department stores were a huge innovation, and a lot of them came out of Paris. And one of the or several great things about department source was fixed price, so you didn't have to haggle, and an ability to return stuff. And those are massive innovations in terms of retail models. Ai, everyone will talk about it. So we just say it. We don't have really much to say on it. The Internet still the printing press, right? Talk about disrupting innovation, massive social disruption as a result of a printing press. My personal favorite is always self build furniture, yeah? So, yeah, no. But even before the MFI days, okay, where you'd get your bit to your desk, and they'd all and, you know, self build for me is a fascinating thing, because it it completely disrupted logistics. Yeah, transportation suddenly gets so much more in, yeah, and it became really efficient. I love, yeah, fuel efficiency, environmental I'm big in anything that's logistics based, anything that sounds like, wow, you can get so much more. Yeah. It's like filling a space, right? It's efficiency. It is. You just look at people and go, Why can we do that? Yeah, yeah. Why are we shipping around all this air? Yeah? Okay, so, so that was just a few things to think about in terms of disruptive innovation. We're going to share three examples of disruption in action,

just so you can kind of conceptualize some of the impacts that have ever first one is really quite old, and it's from, I guess, Middle Ages when in London they for a while they really didn't have bridges over central river Thames in central London. So what happened was a bunch of engineers and architects got permission to build bridges and started to build bridges. Now people don't really think of bridges as a technology, but I guess really they are, when you're looking at large spanning tidal rivers like that.

Yeah, and what happened when they started to build these was they had huge protests from the weary men. And for those that don't know, weary men were the individuals who ran small boats up and down the river and, more importantly, across the river. So there's a whole industry of people moving other people from one side of the river to the other, and they are saying, well, we don't want this new bridge technology. Get that bridge away. What about our jobs? What about the impact on us? And despite the fact that, you know, we think of bridges as, you know, bog standard now and and so on, they were thinking, Oh, look at this new technology coming along, taking all of our jobs. Before you know it, we'll have no jobs left, because the bridges will do everything, or whatever. It happens to fall off the side, and then where will they be? Yeah. So about the fear of technologies. Next

one, jumping forward a little bit sort of towards the Industrial Revolution, is the introduction of, like spinning Jenny's and and cotton cotton industry equipment that led to a sort of lot of uprising. So people come in and suddenly they're introducing new technologies that takes away job from individuals. It massively increases productivity, but it's really disruptive, and people don't like it, and they start to smash it up. And again, the same conversations that we're having now about AI happened back then, about how am I going to have a job? What about my means of production? What about my living and so on? And then a more contemporary example of this is Uber in the taxis, right? So all around the world, you see, or have seen taxi strike action or go slows or protesting, because Uber is taking their jobs, right? So Uber's disrupted that market, brought in something new, and it's affecting their jobs. Although I do think there's an interesting concept, because Uber, particularly, I'm not sure how new the technology was. I was using an app called COVID, certainly. And I know Uber was in American companies in America a long time before that, but there were apps where I could call a taxi from a number of firms, and they I could choose which price, and it was telling me how far it was and how reliable they were, way before I'd heard the word Uber, yeah. And what I think is really interesting is when, because my bet is, like, a lot of science, there's loads of people working on things at the same time. It's not one structure company. It's just that one gets itself to a place where it can snap up the front. And I think you get that, like, with loads of scientists, where they, you know, when you like, someone says, oh, this is the person that founds it, yeah, and then someone goes, there was another guy. His name got knocked off, yeah, money, or wasn't didn't have a patron, or they didn't buy it, or he was too early. And I just love that idea that we have very short memories, and ideas have a moment in time, right ideas of the product. We'll speak later in another episode about the fact that ideas are all built on other ideas. So, you know, they tend to pop up independently across the world at similar times. I think the one of the things with Uber is, you know, the innovation is not just the ability to call taxis remotely. It's about elimination of a taxi company and sort of changing it all into your mobile phone, and being able to have independent drivers, and then having the algorithm so that you track and allocate those jobs and do the pricing. What's interesting is whether, at what point, so we talk about progress, but we never talk about what didn't get forward. Yeah, and so for me, what's really interesting is that I would argue that certainly the removal of organizations

is actually dismantling of labor constructs. Then the way organizations work, and I would see that as a backwards move, yeah? So if you think about society evolving and the way that labor bands itself together to protect itself against capitalists, yeah, capital owners, capital holders. That's that's been written, and I think it's really, really interesting to see flash forward, because what the other two we know where we are with it, right? We know what happened. We know that, interestingly, the River Thames is still a hotbed of challenge around the people who own the rights to play on it. But this is about public transport, so they still have ridiculous prices because they are able to control the water despite the bridges. So it'll be really interesting to flash forward and see how that innovation sits within a context, and whether it is indeed that or whether it's about something. Then, yeah, the social construct this is interesting, yeah, ultimately will it be viewed as disruption 100 years from now? Yeah, never gonna. I'm not gonna find out, unless they disrupt medicine. No, I think, no, I think, I think, okay, so. But 50 years, right? Yeah, 50 years, all right, last week, deciding, you know what, where I'm gonna be, yeah, check in for a check in for Uber.

Exactly where are you now? So there's a little bit of reflection on disruption in progress. What I wanted to just touch on now was a little bit of

thought around the role of leadership and the role of culture in relation to incremental innovation and disruptive innovation. And.

And as you know, as Jane said earlier, these are slightly arbitrary categorizations, but they are ones that are used. So we're just going to reflect on them a little bit. So I guess first, if we think of things that leaders can do, of a role of leaders in supporting incremental innovation. So again, this is the continuous improvement, the marginal gains, making things slightly better, but not fundamentally changing what you're doing. If we think about the role of leadership, some of the things that you can do as a leader are to agree a vision and a mission that captures continuous improvement, right? So by working with your teams to agree and construct your vision and mission statements so that they embed that ethos, that's a powerful thing to do. Embedding incremental innovation into your objectives is another really powerful thing. With that comes the ability to measure and measure again and measure again, so understanding your efficiency and processes now and then testing different ways to see if it improves it and then re baselining your performance and measuring it again, and then starting that process over again. So that data driven measurement of performance is really important. As a leader, publicly committing to incremental innovation is important. So say you're going to do it, set some goals, stick by them

as ever. Once you've committed a goal publicly, you need to constantly communicate it, right? So you need to keep letting people know that this is the direction you're heading. Direction you're heading as a leader. You need to also role model continuous improvement. So with that, it's challenging your own ways of doing things, but it's also celebrating what other people doing, do continuous improvement, and calling out good behaviors, all that kind of stuff. Another really important thing is to make sure that you move towards standardization. So document your processes have clear standards of performance in relation to the processes that your teams follow, and then challenge them and say, What can we do to improve them? And you need to pay attention for to details, for incremental innovation, because it's about these marginal gains. A lot of the marginal gains come from details. So you need to be close to your details and have a really good handle on the minutia of what's done. And you might not need that as a leader, but within your organization, you need to have that attention to detail. If you're going to improve things, you need to create, often, routines. It's you know, one way to drive incremental innovation is about the efficient use of time, so routinization of process is a helpful way to do that. Another thing I call out for leaders is, if you're going to look for incremental innovation, you really should hire for incremental innovation. So some people get motivated by finding, you know, a point, oh, 6% savings in time or whatever. And some people look at that and think, really, I couldn't care less about that, right? So, so some of it's about mindset and ability and interest, but, but do think about hiring people that will fit for what you're trying to do make sure that you reinforce good and bad behaviors within your team.

And you know, a biggie for me is, if you're going to work on an incremental innovation model and you want to drive it, you need to give your teams the time to work on this stuff. So incremental innovation can be achieved with time and effort, but you need to give teams time and effort if they're connected. So for me, that's some of the leadership things around incremental innovation. I think, yeah, and I think there's some really, really helpful tips in there, because and observations, because, I think absolutely without question, the concept of documenting and the concepts of creating routine behaviors that are about so really simple stuff,

like building into a weekly routine an opportunity to look back and, okay, here's all our processes, what went well, what went badly, and what, where should we be looking for the improvements? Because, you know, it's like looking for needle and haystack, this stuff sometimes. And I think if you know where you should be looking, you know where you you're where you still believe you have margin, yeah, then you've got a much better chance of finding those small, incremental things. Yeah, but you're right, high detectives, yeah, totally Yeah.

They are. They want to demonstrate the sort of people, and I love that. It's the person who comes up to you with a spreadsheet goes. So I ran this three times because it just, there's something about this number that I feel like it could be different, and I'm not sure what it is, but there's something about the reason that it's always dropping. So I've just, you know, off my own back, spent 20 minutes looking at something. Yes, is what I found. Yeah, that's the person it is. Helps you find those. And what you don't want is the big picture thinker who's trying to say, well, strategically, we need to be somewhere else, because they might get bored with some of the minutiae. And it's about balancing it.

So let's talk a little bit about the type of sort of cultural traits you might want or look for or try and create to support incremental innovation. And we've just called out a few things here. So we've said, you know, high attention to detail, that sort of focus on detail is important. You're kind of less 8020 in this space when you are kind of 100 zero, right? I mean, you really want to focus on the detail, because it's the marginal areas that you want your gains in. You want a sort of culture of excellence. You really want to focus on making things as good as they can be. So there's not really space for sloppiness. And with that, you need to.

Be consistent, right? So you need your teams to focus on quality, which really is a priority for you. And your teams need to be focused on maintaining those standards throughout delivery. So it's really a sort of production type environment where quality and consistency and excellence is what you're after.

Then another important thing is, you know, you're when you were just saying there about the person coming up to you and spending 20 minutes improving something, right? Well, you want to have a culture where that's okay, so individuals at all levels, you know, everyone who's involved in doing stuff should be able to challenge it. And there's some great examples of that from, you know, sort of Toyota where, where individuals on production lines are all allowed to propose changes and improvements. So everyone at every level should be able to challenge. You also want to celebrate trying new things. So if somebody has an idea, if somebody comes to you with that spreadsheet and says, Hmm, I think this is better, you should say, Well, let's try it. That's great. It's fantastic that you've done that, and you welcome the ideas from everyone that's there. It's important to in this type of space where you're looking at small, incremental changes to make sure that you understand if your changes help. So you need to focus on your metrics and measurements, as we spoke about earlier. And you really do need to be data driven in your decision making, because at this stage, you know half a percent here or there makes a difference. So you need to understand if you're getting that

you should be valuing routine as well. So that kind of routine type focused environment is what you're looking to create. It's more likely that this type of culture would support a bit of directiveness, because it's a little bit more procedural than some others. And with that, it can also be slightly hierarchical as well, though. You know, I don't really stick up for directive or hierarchical in most walks of life. I think if it's anywhere this sort of procedural, process type area is a reasonable place for it. Here, you also tend to find value in fairly deep knowledge. So people become process experts, and they become really deep in their knowledge, and that's sometimes more important than breadth of knowledge, because they're trying to, you know, really drill down and understand specific processes and products and things like that, so that they can make those marginal increases, so that value, valuing of depth of knowledge is important. And the last point for me, is kind of a call out of some things earlier, which is about really creating a culture of pride and quality and consistency and improvement. So there are just some sort of reflections on culture. I think, I think they're really good. I think two things I would just say

about that is, one is, I think you make a really interesting point about the attention to detail and the process driven people. And one thing I would challenge to those of you working with bigger teams is the detective doesn't have to be the problem solver. And quite often, one of the things you might find if you've got a team of really process driven, brilliant people and someone's struggling, just have a look at that person and see if, actually, that person isn't great at doing the process, but is great at finding solutions or spotting the problems. Yeah, because quite often, so I've had, I've had a number of team for that can do the same role, like customer service or something like that. And if you pull one person out because they're not very good, turns out what they are brilliant at is figuring out what's wrong. They just can't do it themselves because they've got no consistency ability. And so interestingly, it can be a real problem in process driven teams, where they're also good at being consistent, they really struggle with some of the problems. Yeah, you're right, absolutely right. Great. Call out that mix of skills and working styles is really useful. So

let's talk a little bit about the sort of primary or disruptive innovation. And if we talk about roles of leadership here, some things you can do as a leader, you know, to work in this environment. Well, then to create environments that support disruptive innovation, it's often important to remove sort of fear. So it needs to be a quite fear free and open type of working environment. So trying to take out that fear is helpful.

Building diversity in so different mindsets, different experiences, different knowledge, and creating an inclusive environment where those diverse individuals can be be their best is really important. So building diversity and inclusion willingness to be really radical is important in leadership. So is fostering a psychologically safe environment, which links into the inclusion something that's really important in this type of space is just getting out of your team's way. So often, if you're trying to do this stuff, you've got smart people who are trying to do really good things. You should just get out of their way. It's hard to do, but it's important. You should provide stimulation for your team. So help them maintain, you know, creativity and get new ideas. A big role of leadership here is removing barriers. So getting rid of bits of bureaucracy, getting rid of things that slow people down and that distract from from the core things that they're trying to do. Leadership role model.

And curiosity and role models should also help join the dots between their teams. You'll have different people looking at different things, and part of your role in leadership is pulling people together and connecting the ideas and the individuals

I touched on incremental innovation. In incremental innovation hiring for that type of mindset, well, the same goes here, right? So if you're looking for disruptive innovation, you should hire the type of people who enjoy working in this type of environment. So try and hire for it. You need to listen to everyone as a leader. You absolutely need to support your teams with side projects, and try and build that in so that everyone in your team gets, I don't know, 2010, 30% of our time to work on their own side projects. You should support an experimentation based approach to working as well. You should test new things and trial them. Get a hypothesis in there, you know, change your ways of working, test it. You should celebrate failure, provided you learn from it. So failing fast, seeing that as a positive thing, learning lessons and moving on is important.

And as I said earlier, connecting people is really important. And then there are two other things I'm going to call out here, but I think are important if you're looking for disruptive innovation as a leader, one is you've got to keep a show on the road, right? So you're doing all this great stuff, you're thinking about stuff, but there's always routine stuff that needs to happen, and in a really innovative team. A lot of people aren't going to be doing a lot of that, or aren't going to instinctively want to do that. So you need to make sure that you focus on get keeping the show on road, and making sure that it's, it's all progressing. And then there's also a need for somebody to turn all these ideas into products. You come up with really good things, and people say, Oh, that's great, and you've got a good thing, but it still needs to translate into something that's actually useful. So that process of turning it into products is important. So those were just a few bits there. I know that you had some thoughts about knowing when to let go of something a bit around risk as well, to just two things that I think really can be valuable to leaders in a situation where they're trying to create disruptive innovation, one is about

developing a appetite for risk, so making sure, and to some extent, hiring for it as well. You're looking for the people who are happy with investing a lot of time and effort and potentially money into things, and recognizing that, yeah, rewards could be great, but they could be zero. And I think you see that in startup all the time, with people who are prepared to take jobs in organizations that have no security. And I think the other thing for me, and this is a really big one, is letting go of stuff when you know, if everyone's is a leader, if everyone's invested an idea, and it's not working,

and you know it's not working, it's up to you to get them to not just fail fast, but accept it really quick. Yeah? Because, actually, I think quite a lot of the time in startup world, and actually, generally with disruptive innovation, you know, you my favorite example would be the NHS in Britain trying to digitize all of their records. Yeah, and just throwing money after a decade, I would say,

not accepting that whether the idea was brilliant or not, it was not feasible in the context of where we were as an industry and as a sector and as an organization and as a country, etc. So for me, that's about as a leader. You've got to be the one that doesn't get carried away, and you've got to step back and say, Hang on. Doesn't matter how brilliant this idea is. There isn't a market for it. Yeah,

cool. So that's a little bit of thinking around, you know, leadership for disruptive innovation. We're just going to blast quickly through culture for disruptive innovation and come onto our list of a week. So some sort of cultural things to think about, fearlessness, experimental, often slightly alternative. There's a piece that you touched on earlier that I think is important, which is about Valuing ideas for the sake of ideas. So that sort of purity of concept, I think, is important in this space, inclusive, flexible and risk tolerance. In there, often you want sort of empowered and autonomous cultures, fairly non hierarchical, agile in terms of their ability to deliver and to shift focus to new things, psychologically safe, supportive. It's helpful to try and get sort of cross disciplinary cultures,

high levels of curiosity, fairly sort of liberal and unconstrained in terms of thought and structure. Quality of voice is important. Tolerance is important. We talked about celebrating failure and learning, and again, just to close off, about sort of almost valuing the purity of science and technological progression for itself, almost irrespective of application. And so one of the roles of leaders is to turn those ideas into products. But a lot of the innovative people are just doing the ideas because they've got a really great problem to solve, and that's what they want to do. So you want to sort of promote and encourage them,

and that's, I guess it, for me, in terms of reflections on culture for disruptive innovation. Well, thank you, James. I think that's probably the most of all of our podcasts so far. And this is contentious. I feel like that's the most well rounded. I.

Research round up in the sense of, I feel like I've got a really rounded picture of where this stuff sits. So thank you good. Hope it's helpful. Yeah. And also, you know what I think I might might have, annoyingly, as you always do, challenged a couple of ideas I've got, maybe, maybe things differently about something. So for those of you who didn't pick up earlier, the last piece that James was talking about, about the purity of science, and that tending to be something that you see within leaders of highly disruptive, successfully disruptive organization. I wasn't sure about that. I was like, but actually, I think that's very true. And I think I think when you tie it with that concept of curious, curiosity for curiosity sake, yeah, then I it becomes very clear to me what you mean by that. Cool. So, yeah, cool. Okay, it's the week. Yeah, do you want to Okay, so I'm gonna call out this the week, because it's called four traits of highly emitted people. But I think there are eight traits here, oh, because

they're in pairs, but I understand why, and I hope you will too. So the first is, uh, around,

being curious and challenging so innovative. People are always asking why and how they challenge assumptions the status quo, if there are better ways to do things, if they need things to be done at all, and they're willing, willing to be really radical with their questioning,

and I would add, and sometimes make people uncomfortable in that, yeah, there is, without question, a beautiful thing. When you watch someone who is very innovative start questioning someone who's really good at process, and it's very slightly defensive of their presence, you can see, and because they're both skilled people, they pretty soon they get past it. But it is a joyful moment. Yeah, number two is learning and connecting. So innovative people are always looking to learn. They build diverse networks to learn from. They gather a wide range of sources, pursue a wide range of interests about deep and relevant knowledge, and bring divergent ideas together. And for me, that's crucial. It's it's the bringing together of ideas, where the magic happens. They're connecting what they're hearing and the problems they're noticing. The ideas of how they can bring them together. So third, dedicated and passionate,

innovative people are always passionate about what they're doing. They might not show it, and I think it's really important. So I was reason, when I was looking through this, I was like, they are passionate. They just, it doesn't mean that they're big and effusive about it, it. Just know that it matters. Yeah, they follow their genuine interest in what they do. They persist in the face of setbacks, and constantly strive to create. And I think what's really interesting about that is where you see a highly innovative person in the wrong job or in your organization, that's when it becomes really toxic, yeah? Because actually, they're desperately trying to create, and people don't want to hear that. Yeah. And finally, experimenting and testing. So industry, people are always trying new things. They hypothesize, they test new ideas, they experiment and measure their results. They follow the data and change and iterate until they find success. And oh, I could go on and on about following the data. So having a nose for something, I think is, is just so critical, yeah, people having a nose for when something looks out join Yeah, it's just not quite right, isn't it? Or it is right and nothing else is Yeah, or it's just thrown off a pattern. So the bit that always drives me crazy is i, we used to, I used to have a relationship with some, someone in work sense that was brilliant and but she wasn't curious when things went wrong. And it drove me. It just drove me absolutely mad. I would be, like, going around in circles, going, but this went wrong three times. Did you not want to fix it? Yeah, it takes me 10 minutes to redo it. And I'm like, No, but the principle, yeah, the principle is, don't you want to know why it's not working, and whether anything else is going on, just do it just like just get on, let's and you need people just change. You need that mix. So just a reminder, curious and challenging, learning, connecting, dedicated and passionate, experimenting and testing. Cool,

all right, so that gets us through our list of the week. So that's four traits of innovative people. Do you want to jump in? Have you got any stories from a keyboard around quite a few and actually, sadly, what I'm going to tell is

about resistance to it okay, and about a leader who got it wrong the first time actually got it right second time? So I'm allowed to tell the story. Effectively misunderstood

the control of who needed to be on board, yeah, with the disruptive innovation, because it was quite disruptive to a sector, and it was about bringing the use of bringing software into into

sports sector. And at the time there was, there was a misunderstanding about who actually ran support sector, and people sitting in jobs that they did, but actually the volunteers on the ground, yeah, were the ones who actually ran it. They were the ones day in, day out, churning, entering data, managing the situation, doing customer service, etc. And.

You know, there was just a complete resistance to it, because it wasn't well described, well explained, the benefits weren't introduced, and it was uncomfortable. And this is a new system, so it's a new digital system using technology to manage sport, manage the competitions and the events, and it was just really uncomfortable. So they just said, no, no, right, yeah, okay, okay. They just said, No, we're not doing it. And they got together and went, nah. And, you know, you could just see, and I guess my point and my call out on this is to leaders. You could see a group of people with a leader at the front of them who could not understand because they did not recognize that a these people were not particularly of a disruptive approach. They were much more about finding small

but also generally, they were very unconfident about the ability of the disruption to improve them in any way. And they haven't sold it. Yeah, and the idea that you think you can bring something to market

in any set, in any, any kind of market, and just confidently put it in front of people, you know. And I would argue that, what was the, what were the laser discs? Oh, yeah, this would be a great example, right, without question, acknowledged to be the best quality that at the time, yeah, you could get right? Did anyone buy them? No, because everyone just, they got launched, going, Look, it's brilliant, yeah. And we all went, No, it's too quick. After the last one, I'm all right with my quality. My TV is not that good anyway, so the difference, and also, they look really unwieldy records, and didn't we just,

and I just, I think they're good. That's a great sort of thing of just not understanding, you still have to tell people why it's good. Yeah? Well, everyone understands goes back to our sort of leading change. Yeah, it's really similar. It's a really similar place for it to be. But,

but what's I think one of the things is that I've seen is quite a lot of innovation coming from what would be traditionally research and development teams or insight teams or technology teams or IT teams these days because of the nature of the world, yeah. And the problem with that is that quite often the marketing, the comms and the commercial don't understand what it means to the sector, and the practitioners don't know how to make the two listen to each other and understand and therefore it goes out and then it just gets done, yeah, straight away, because everyone's like, Ah, I don't want to do that. That looks awful. I hate that. Yeah. And so for interested, for what's interesting about the philosophy around innovation, which is, I think, like, minimum viable product, yeah, that does not work when you are dealing with highly skilled,

small populations of people who have a really clear understanding of what they're expecting in the next iteration. And it's not that that is, you know, that works for the the masses, where you can afford to annoy half the population, still got half market. And I'm also not sure

it sounds kind of heretical. I'm not sure how much of a long term strategy that really is. I think, I think it completely depends what market is. Yeah, you're competing, okay? If you're not competing against anyone, there's no rush, absolutely right? If you're competing everyone, and you want to show people, give people a taste of what could be achieved, yeah, then I get it, because actually, all you're doing is getting someone to put your marker in the sand and say, We're involved. Yeah, I think the problem comes when there's no competition and the bunch of it's a very well developed market, and you're sitting there going and going, Ah, no, no. It just goes, well,

you're incompetent, is basically how. So that's that's my it's not so much as a lesson from the keyboard, as a lecture to leaders of just don't forget to bring people with you. Yeah, it all comes back to people, doesn't it? Um, so I've got a little story, and it's not actually from work, but I think it's really relevant to this. And I went on holiday a little while ago, and I went to Petra

in Jordan, amongst some other places. And what, what's happened in Jordan, in Petra, is that, for those of it you, those of you that don't know, it's a large site, it's, you know, maybe three miles from one end to another. It's an archeological site. It's got a main gate at the front, and you travel through it, and you kind of start at the main gate, go down through lots of different walkways, and end up at an end of it, and then you make your way back up. And currently, the rights to transport people throughout the site are allocated out to a tribe called the betool, which are kind of like Bedouin people, and they've kind of divided up a right. So for the first bit, it's you're only allowed on, I think horses. For the first bit, for the second bit, you're only allowed on horse drawn carriages, and for the third bit you're only allowed on camels, right? So they've kind of divided that up, and that's the way the process works at the minute. Now, a couple years ago, the site, the sort of oversight body for the site, set up a built a new road that would run from the end of a site up to the beginning again. And the purpose for this was that as tourists, you could walk down to the site, you could get your different lifts down, and then you could get a bus back to the beginning, and you've got a better experience. You've got more time. They get more throughput, and things are just.

Generally better. But what actually happened was that the Badu, the ones who run the transport or protested against it, because they were losing out on their their income from taking people back up to the introduction site, to the, you know, the main side entrance. So they protested. They threw rocks and bricks at the minivans that were used when they were first put in place, and they burnt some of them, and they kicked up such a fuss. But that new, I guess, sort of innovation in the small context of the road and the new route was actually closed, and they're not going ahead with it. So for me, that's just a great example that links back to things like the wary men of old, or smashing up the

smashing up the spinning Jennys and things like that. So this stuff is just, it's a motive, and it's disruptive, and it's hard, and, as in your example, it's a real people thing. And I think, I think there's a really interesting question about, if you're going to go and disrupt something, right be understand that you are physically disrupting people's lives, and therefore, at least have an ethical conversation with yourself about, do you really believe this is fundamentally going to be better for everyone and also for those people? And if it's not going to be better for those people, you better figure out really quickly how you can offset something, yeah, yeah, because there was a huge amount of innovation that goes on with no consideration of how. So I'm thinking about, you know, Energy policy in Britain and things sure that we've lost coal mines. And actually, you know, most of the world,

have a think, right? Have a think about your innovation. And yes, it may be that it's going to be the best thing in the world long term for the next generation. But one of the interesting things about climate change and the lack of action, yeah, in the general population, is there's a there's an inability for it, for you to understand, and people aren't prepared to live with the disruption that it would take for us, you know, flights and all of the stuff that we would have to do. And deep down, that's what it is. It's a resistance to disruption. Yeah, resistance change. Yeah. So interesting, definitely an interesting story, although i Isn't it awful. I'm on the side of them, and I shouldn't be.

Oh, dear. It's also complicated. It's very complicated. Any last tips or thoughts from you?

I'll let you go first, because I'm going to reiterate what you're going to say. Okay, so I guess for me, my tip kind of similar to something that we said earlier, and it's about, you know, setting the right tone and really finding the right people. So when we talked about, you know, incremental improvement or disruption or that kind of stuff, you can fit square pegs to round holes, but it's just better if you put fit square pegs to square holes. So trying to hire for for the types of work that you're trying to do, trying to get people who are interested in the types of thing that you're trying to do, and get the right sort of mindsets and skills and experience for the roles that you have is helpful. And like you said earlier, you need a blend and diversity in your teams, but just be conscious of who's in there and try and make sure you get the right people. That'd be my team, yeah. And so following on from that, my tip would be the all the best on both sides of that innovation scale that I've seen have had at least one person who's different, yeah, because that's what creates it. And my, my plea, actually, to leaders is just keep an eye on them. Keep an eye on them that they're not disrupting things so much that they're upsetting people, yeah. And also keep an eye on them that they're not isolated because they're different, yeah. So quite often that that absolutely brilliant thing is a leader that you can have someone who's a little bit different, it's great, yeah, but then you need to just give them a little bit of extra care, because quite often,

the person that's fine calling out on the problems or the challenges, either big or small, is the person that's also probably not the most popular person. Sometimes it can be the case. So, so that's almost back to that diversity and inclusion type of it's about, it's about, you know, you talked about role modeling behaviors. That's that's where you can absolutely nail it as a team manager or leader, you can be really clear about someone being valued for being different. Yeah,

cool. Well, there are some final thoughts. I think that's us getting to the end of what we do on this podcast. So that's been an overview of innovation, a sort of introduction to innovation, looking at primary or disruptive innovation, and looking at secondary or incremental innovation, exploring a little bit what those two different types of innovation are, thinking about some of the impacts of particularly disruptive innovation on the world, and looking at things that leaders can Do, both in direct leadership of teams looking to continually or disruptively innovate, and looking a little bit at some of the cultures, cultural traits that support that. Then list of a week, we had a little look at some of the four or eight, depending on how you look at it, traits of innovative people, and then shared a few thoughts. So I guess that's us as ever. It's great to hear from you, send us questions, notes, thoughts, anything like that, and then until next time, we're going to be checking out of here. So it's goodbye from me, and it's goodbye from me. See you guys.