Innovator's DNA

by Jeff Dyer

  Now, back to the challenge you or your company is facing. Try one of these forced-association exercises, identify an unrelated random item or idea, and take the time to reflect on what it has to do with your problem. The point is to randomly find things to associate with your problem and work your best to freely (even wildly) make associations, lots of them (remember, lots of associations can lead to great ideas). As you do so, table 2-1 might help organize your insights.

  TABLE 2-1

  Forcing new associations

  Tip #2: Take on the persona of a different company

  Follow the lead of TBWA, which often holds a designated “disruption day” to get new ideas.11 After defining a key strategic question or challenge, TBWA people haul out large boxes full of hats, shirts, and other things from some of the most innovative companies in the world, like Apple and Virgin. They put on the clothing and assume the persona of someone from that company to look at their challenge from an entirely different perspective.

  Alternatively, write down a list of companies (in related and unrelated industries) on a stack of index cards (or randomly go down the list of the Fortune 500 or Inc. 100 companies). Use the card stacks to create random pairings of your company with another. Then creatively brainstorm ideas on how the two could create new value through partnership or merger. By combining the strengths of both companies, you may surprise yourself with new products, services, or process ideas.

  Tip #3: Generate metaphors and analogies

  Engage in activities that provoke an analogy or metaphor for your company’s products or services (hopefully escaping from idea ruts), because each analogy holds the potential for seeing things from an uncommon perspective. To illustrate, what if watching TV were more like reading a magazine? (This is how TiVo changed TV watching. You can start and stop when you want, skip over advertisements, and so on.) Or, what if your product or service could incorporate the benefits of some of today’s hottest products, like Amazon’s Alexa or virtual reality headsets? What might those new features or benefits be? (See table 2-2.)

  TABLE 2-2

  Generating metaphors

  List of products (“what if” metaphor) Possible new features/benefits

  Alternatively, apply an analogy from a situation you know well to a new context. For example, the business model used by Uber and Airbnb involves connecting those who have valuable, underutilized assets (e.g., cars or apartments and homes) with those who want access to those assets (e.g., rides and lodging). Think about other contexts where that peer-to-peer business model might work. Where could you be the “Uber of X”? This type of analogic reasoning is what triggered the ideas for RVshare (connecting recreational-vehicle owners with renters), Neighbor (connecting storage owners with those who need storage), GreenPal (connecting lawn mowers with lawn owners), and BloomThat (connecting those with fresh flowers with those who want them).

  Tip #4: Build your own curiosity box

  Start a collection of odd, interesting things (e.g., a slinky, model airplane, robot, and so on) and put them in a curiosity box or bag (as people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did when they used curiosity cabinets to store interesting objects from around the world). Then, you can pull out unique items randomly when confronted with a problem or opportunity (and if you’re really daring, display them on your office shelves). When traveling (or even at home), visit local secondhand shops and flea markets in a new city to pick up surprising treasures (ranging from a Kuwaiti camel bell to an Australian didgeridoo) that might provoke a new angle on an old problem.

  Interestingly, the global innovation design firm IDEO devotes full-time employee effort to finding new things for its “Tech Box.” IDEO designers rely on Tech Box items (each box has hundreds of high-tech gadgets, clever toys, and a wide variety of items) when brainstorming for new ideas, because odd, unusual things often trigger new associations. It may sound silly, but seemingly silly things can provoke the most random associations, literally forcing us out of our habitual thinking patterns.

  Tip #5: SCAMPER!

  Try Alex Osborn and Bob Eberle’s acronym for insight, SCAMPER: substitute; combine; adapt; magnify, minimize, modify; put to other uses; eliminate; reverse, rearrange. Use any or all of the concepts to rethink the problem or opportunity you are addressing. This is particularly useful when thinking of redesigning a product, service, or process. Michael Michalko’s Thinkertoys is a useful resource for more details about the SCAMPER method. (See table 2-3.)

  TABLE 2-3

  The SCAMPER method

  SCAMPER challenge Invent a new type of wristwatch

  Substitute Use natural wood or rocks instead of steel material.

  Combine Create a space for easy, instant access to medications when the alarm goes off.

  Adapt Use the wristwatch as a reflective mirror when lost.

  Magnify, minimize, modify Make the wristwatch face large enough to be a cupholder.

  Put to other uses Frame the watch as a work of art.

  Eliminate Remove the internal workings of the watch and replace them with a sundial.

  Reverse, rearrange Change the watch hands to go counterclockwise.

  Put the watch face on the inside of the wristband to make the back of the watch the focal point in terms of design and fashion.

  3

  Discovery Skill #2

  Questioning

  “Question the unquestionable.”

  —Ratan Tata, former chairman, Tata Group

  “ANY QUESTIONS?” MOST OF us have heard that phrase hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Sometimes it comes at the end of a presentation or meeting, and most of us shuffle away because we don’t really think it is an open invitation to question. But other times, you may have real questions—about why things are the way they are and how they might be different—but you don’t ask them. You need to. If disruptive innovators occupied the same room, they would fill the empty space with thought-provoking questions. Why? Because questioning is how they do their work. It is the creative catalyst for the other discovery behaviors: observing, networking, and experimenting. Innovators ask lots of questions to better understand what is and what might be. They ignore safe questions and opt for crazy ones, challenging the status quo and often threatening the powers that be with uncommon intensity and frequency.

  Take Orit Gadiesh, the famously inquisitive and inventive chairman of Bain & Company. As a child growing up in Israel, she was fascinated by many things and “always asking a hundred questions.” Her parents also encouraged her to ask questions when called on in class, and she did. So much so that her eighth-grade teacher wrote in her yearbook: “Orit, always ask those two questions, and even a third and a fourth question. Don’t ever stop being curious.” When reading this teacher’s comment, Gadiesh realized for the first time that “asking questions was the true way to go.” Later in life, she relied on the same approach to cocreate client insights at Bain, knowing that “asking clients lots of questions is key to generating powerful solutions to problems.”

  For example, in the early 1980s, Gadiesh was fresh out of graduate school and new at consulting. She was assigned to help a steel-manufacturing client cut its costs to stay competitive. During her first visit to the plant, she was warned by the over-sixty-year-old CEO that women were “bad luck in the industry.” Undaunted, she pressed forward with the client, asking question after question about why it was doing what it was doing. At the time, there were two ways to make steel, the standard process of pouring it into ingots or, alternatively, continuous casting (then a new technology), where you literally cast the steel continuously and cut it into slabs.

  After reading about the continuous-casting process and sensing its potential, Gadiesh visited Japan to observe continuous casting firsthand. She left the country convinced that the new process could create significant value for her client. But the client’s executives and salespeople kept telling her that they couldn’t do it because they had three hundred fifty different products for custom
ers and it was impossible to continuous cast that many products when you have to add other materials to the steel simultaneously. “The client was stubborn, completely convinced that they couldn’t make the change,” she told us.

  Here’s where Gadiesh’s questioning skills best tackled the client’s problem. She went to visit the steel maker’s customers and started asking questions, “Do you really need three hundred fifty products?” “Why do you need all three hundred fifty products?” Their initial autopilot answer was yes, but as she probed further with additional questions, it became clear that customers didn’t fully grasp the cost advantages that continuous casting offered due to its unique capacity to add other (lower-cost) materials during the steel-casting process. Working with the client and its customers, Gadiesh literally went through each of the three hundred fifty products asking, “Why do you have this? What is its core importance?” to fully grasp why they made each thing they made.

  Based on the rich information gleaned from asking a series of simple questions about why each product existed, Gadiesh naturally moved from understanding what was to exploring in depth what might be. She moved deeper into disruptive territory by asking fundamental questions, such as: “What if we shrink the existing product line by 90 percent?” “What if we cast steel continuously with that sharply reduced product line?” “How might we maximize the addition of cost-saving materials when casting the steel?” Before long, the steel company executives realized that reducing the number of products from three hundred fifty to thirty not only was possible but was the most profitable course of action because it would give them a competitive advantage in the product segments in which they did compete. This allowed the company to add other materials, such as aluminum (thus reducing costs), through a new continuous-casting process, while still meeting most of its key customers’ needs. The client (then a little over a billion-dollar enterprise) built a new production facility and quickly raced ahead of US competitors.

  Gadiesh’s ability to generate new insights is largely based on her ability to ask her way into what’s really going on and then push the edge with constant, provocative questions about what might be. At the core, she believes that “when you persist in asking questions throughout life—particularly challenging ones—it’s central to who you are and how you lead.” In fact, she shared with us that in a recent meeting with several heads of state and CEOs, she was curious as to why they weren’t asking more fundamental questions about key policy issues. One CEO confided to her: “When you’re in the room, I don’t have to ask the fundamental questions because I know they’re going to be asked.” Her deeply rooted instinct to ask has helped her successfully guide Bain & Company since about 2000. It’s no wonder then that one of Gadiesh’s key steel-industry clients once gave her a hard hat engraved with the phrase “A little light will lead us,” referring not only to her first name, Orit, which means “light,” but also to her light-generating questions that helped transform the company’s business.

  What Is “Questioning”?

  Questions hold the potential to cultivate creative insights. Einstein knew this long ago, as he often repeated the phrase, “If I only had the right question . . . If I only had the right question . . .” No wonder he finally concluded that “the formulation of a problem is often more important than its solution” and that raising new questions to solve a problem “requires creative imagination.”1 In The Practice of Management, Peter Drucker grasped the same power of provocative questions, observing that “the important and difficult job is never to find the right answers, it is to find the right question. For there are few things as useless—if not dangerous—as the right answer to the wrong question.”2 Recent research by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi confirmed these personal convictions by finding that Nobel laureates were far better at achieving breakthroughs once they found the right question to reframe their problem.3 Our research also found that disruptors rely on crafting the right questions to accomplish their work. (For a more in-depth exploration of what causes disruptive leaders to ask catalytic, even transformational, questions, see Questions Are the Answer: A Breakthrough Approach to Your Most Vexing Problems at Work and in Life, by Hal Gregersen.)

  Questioning is a way of life for innovators, not a trendy intellectual exercise. Our research found that not only do innovators ask more questions than noninnovators, they also ask more-provocative ones. (Innovators who “strongly agreed” with survey statements such as “I often ask questions that challenge the status quo” produced twice as many new businesses than innovators who simply “agreed.”) Among the different types of innovators we studied, product innovators showed the highest reliance on questioning to deliver results, followed by startup and corporate entrepreneurs and, finally, process innovators. (See figure 3-1.)

  FIGURE 3-1

  Comparison of questioning skills for different types of innovators and noninnovators

  Sample items:

  Asks insightful “what if” questions that provoke exploration of new possibilities and frontiers.

  Often asks questions that challenge the status quo.

  By asking lots of questions, A. G. Lafley, for example, helped change the game at Procter & Gamble (P&G). Lafley often began conversations or meetings with: “Who is your target consumer here? What does she want? What do you know about her? What kind of an experience does she really want? What does she think is missing today?” Or when working within categories, Lafley often asked, “How well do you understand the different segments of consumers—not so much what we know about them demographically, but psychographically? What do we know about their biggest desires that aren’t met today? What are they most unhappy about today?”

  After searching for a deep understanding of what is, Lafley shifted lines of inquiry to powerful what-if questions to help deliver customer-centric innovations. For example, if talking to someone about science and technology or a product need, he asked: “What else is available in the world? Where else might we access what we need? Who across P&G—thinking across our business units or outside of P&G—could help us get what we need in the time frame and cost structure that we want?” Most of all, Lafley was constantly hunting for counterintuitive questions. Instead of asking, “How can we help consumers get floors and toilets clean?” he would query, “How can we give consumers their Saturday mornings back?” He found the latter question far more fruitful for surfacing rich insights about what might be in order to develop new products and services that consumers would want to “hire” to get their jobs done at home. No wonder Lafley’s weekly question to himself was, “What will I decide to be curious about Monday morning?”4

  How to Ask Disruptive Questions

  Innovators constantly question common wisdom. Aaron Garrity, founder of XanGo (an innovative health and nutrition company that was acquired by Zija International in 2017), put it simply, “I am questioning, always questioning, with a revolutionary mindset.” Innovators’ provocative questions push boundaries, assumptions, and borders. They leave few rocks unturned when they cultivate the garden. During interviews with disruptive innovators, we noticed not only a high frequency of questions but a pattern as well. They started with a deep-sea-like exploration of what currently is and then rocketed to the skies for an equally compelling search for what might be. Focusing on what is, they asked lots of who, what, when, where, and how questions (as world-class journalists or investigators do) to dig beneath the surface and truly “know the place for the first time” (as poet T. S. Eliot observed). They also invoked a series of what-caused questions to grasp the drivers behind why things are the way they are. Collectively, these questions help describe the territory (physically, intellectually, and emotionally) and provide a launching pad for the next line of inquiry. To disrupt the territory, innovators puncture the status quo with why, why-not, and what-if questions that uncover counterintuitive, surprising solutions. Whether descriptive or disruptive, the questions innovators perpetually invoke help get beneath the surface of everyday ac
tion to discover what’s never been.

  Describe the Territory

  Innovators treat the world as a question mark, rarely working on autopilot and constantly challenging the accuracy of their mental maps about the territory (whether products, services, processes, geographies, or business models). Suspended comfortably between a faith in and doubt of their maps, the best innovators remember that their views of the world are never the actual territory. Intuitively, they rely on a rich assortment of questions to develop a deep understanding of how things really are, before probing intensely into what they might be.

  Tactic #1: Ask “what is” questions

  Disruptive innovators leverage a variety of what-is questions to surface unexpected subtleties. For example, Pierre Omidyar’s work as a software architect (before he founded eBay) sharpened his what-is questioning skills by focusing on user interfaces and trying to make software less complicated. (His first startup was a pen-based computing application that attempted to make technology easier to use.) Using a blank-slate approach, Omidyar habitually watches others (for example, clients, customers, or suppliers) and wonders, “What are they really trying to do here?” He then follows up with all kinds of who, what, when, where, and how questions to dig beneath the surface.