(interview blurb)
Leo: To innovate is exciting, but, on the flip side, it’s scary and it’s vulnerable and it’s fearful because what you’re doing is disrupting status quo and no one that calls themselves an innovator can guarantee success whenever you start something, even if you’re midway through. We have no idea if it’s going to work or not and we have to try it and test it and there’s going to be failure along the way and there’s going to be learnings and there’s going to be wins, and so I think what I bring to the conversation is this is a really human thing.
(intro)
Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is the founder of Abound Innovation Inc. He’s a people and heart first entrepreneur who believes everyone can be an innovator. As an innovator himself, he has 55 US patents and over 20 years of experience, including working at State Farm and Chick-fil-A. Please welcome Leo Chan.
(Interview)
Alex: Hi, Leo.
Leo: Hey, Alex, how you doing?
Alex: Great. Thank you for joining me today. It’s great to have you.
Leo: I’m happy to be here.
Alex: Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?
Leo: I am drinking Zevia Ginger Ale. It’s a soda with no sugar in it so if you are a soda drinker or pop drinker, this is your brand if you don’t want sugar in it.
Alex: You know what, Leo, I completely forgot to look at the script yesterday and that’s where our guests indicate what they want to drink and I always match them. I matched like Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, I went and got the beans and I always try to do that.
Leo: That’s impressive.
Alex: Yeah, I know, and this was easy. I just had to go to like Whole Foods or something. And I did not realize we were drinking that until about 30 minutes ago so I’m just drinking coffee, so I am so sorry about this. We’ll do another episode some other time and I’ll match you with whatever you want.
Leo: There we go. I like that. That means we’ll get another time to talk.
Alex: Yes. And I could have just said I’m matching you because no one knows what’s inside of this cup but, you know what —
Leo: That’s true.
Alex: — transparency is one of those values we ascribe to at Coaching.com so I don’t want to start deviating from that for a drink. Well, I’m looking forward to our conversation today. Let’s start at the beginning. You do so many really cool things, a lot of innovation within large organizations, helping. I like this idea that anyone can be an innovator. Some people think they’re innovators, some people don’t, a lot of people are in the middle. So, what you do is super interesting to me and I know to other coaches as well. So take us back to that journey. How did you end up becoming an innovation expert? Where did all start?
Leo: Yeah, I actually like to say that my innovation journey started with Star Trek. I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation as a kid and I actually always loved the beginning which talks about like we’re boldly going into this unknown, into uncharted territory, where no one’s gone before, we’re just going to explore and I think that, to me, has always been within me and so, honestly, I feel like it started from that inspiration point. I didn’t actually know what I wanted to do when I was growing up and, at the time, the Internet was becoming something so I was very fascinated with technology but what I realized I was really interested on the visual side so I ended up liking graphic design and I got into graphic design school and, actually, that’s where I feel like I met innovation, even though I did not know that it was innovation. And so it was only until I was in corporate when I — so I moved, I was at State Farm Insurance in Illinois and the year that I moved to the States from Canada, they launched their innovation department and I just felt like everything that they were sharing sounded like me so, interestingly enough, my background in design actually was what got me started in innovation because when I applied to the position, they actually had a book that all the State Farm innovation people read called The Innovator’s DNA, which actually one of the authors was one of the presenters at WBECS recently, and so that book actually talked about what innovators were like and I actually felt like I was reading a book about myself.
Alex: Was that Hal’s book?
Leo: Yes.
Alex: Yeah. Hal Gregersen.
Leo: Yeah. It was so incredible for me when the top list of speakers came out and my name was there with Hal, I was like, “What, that’s — this is crazy to me,” but, honestly, it started I feel like watching Star Trek but actually my background in design is actually how my innovation journey all began.
Alex: That’s amazing. Innovation is one of those things that fuels the world. I mean, it fuels everything. I mean, when you look at the way we live today, it’s all like innovation after innovation after innovation. One of our differentiators from an evolutionary perspective is our ability to innovate and you see innovation in nature tremendously. I mean — but our ability to choose, even be conscious of our ability to innovate is something that I find very interesting. And I do think that, given my experience working with a lot of executives over a long period of time, I do think that there are some people that cast themselves as innovators and some people that cast themselves as they like the tried and true and they’re really good at, let’s say, implementing. Is that accurate? Is that how humans work? Are there some people that are innovators? Is there a degree of innovation that we all have? Do we all have it in us? Tell me more about that. I’m super interested.
Leo: A couple of thoughts. I think we all have the propensity to innovate because we are all creative and I feel like we’re always imagining new things. If we go back to our childhood as kids, I’m sure all of us would agree that we had imaginations, we would play, we would create things, we would make forts and come up with these wild stories and then as we went into adulthood, somehow, we may have lost that, maybe some of us kept closer to that than others, and I feel like we all have the innate ability to innovate but we don’t all do it. And it might not be because we don’t want to but maybe we don’t believe it’s possible for us. Maybe because the way our organizations are, even our educational backgrounds, when you go through school, you’re told there’s a answer as opposed to many answers. Like math, for example, one plus one equals two. I mean, there’s different ways to get to two but we’re taught that there’s specific ways to answer things and I feel very blessed to have gone through graphic design because there was never a right answer to solve a visual communication challenge. There was multiple ways to do that. And so I think that exploration, I was trained in seeing possibility and knowing that there’s not just one way to do it, there’s multitudes of ways, but I need to take the diligence and the time to explore and so I felt like my design degree really trained me to be an innovator, which was thinking differently about things and bringing those visions or dreams into reality. So I think it’s really more of a training issue versus is one person innovative and one person not, I don’t think that, and then Innovator’s DNA book says the same thing, it’s that we all have the innate ability to do it, it’s just that maybe we haven’t spent the time training, but just like anybody can read a book because we were taught how to read a book, it’s the same thing. In innovation, if you’re taught how to innovate, you can innovate. And so I think some of us maybe intuitively stumble across it, we just kind of start doing things and maybe we have a propensity to gravitate towards that, but I do believe that anybody can learn this if they want to.
Alex: Yeah, I agree with you. When I encounter the people that are, they see themselves as innovators, sometimes, they’re actually not as innovative, they just kind of like to cast themselves as innovators. And sometimes the people that don’t think they’re as innovative, they’re actually more innovative than they think. So, it probably comes down more to a personality trait or something like that, in terms of how you relate to your ability to innovate. You were talking about multiple ways of doing things. And to me one interesting fact about adult development is at certain stages of development, you’re more comfortable with the fact that a lot of truths are paradoxical. One thing can be true and, at the same time, not true in different contexts. To be able to grasp that, I think it’s something that I see a lot of people struggle with, like how can something be true and at the same time maybe not be true. How does that come into kind of like the way we think about innovation? How do multiple pathways that both can be right, how does that come into the fold?
Leo: Yeah, it’s interesting and it makes me think about there’s — so when I’ve facilitated innovation workshops and I’ve interacted with people, there are some people that like, hey, we’re here together today, it’s wide open net, go for it, dream about whatever you want, create anything that comes into your mind, and some people love that type of session, like myself. If you’re like, “Leo, we’re just gonna let things be and just dream whatever you want,” I’ll be like, “Yeah, that’s so exciting.” But for others, that terrifies them. They’re like, “I have no idea what to do with that.” And for others, they actually need, I wouldn’t say they’re guardrails but they need sort of direction and more specificity in able to unlock more creativity for them. And so they need like, “Okay, hey, here’s the box, we’re gonna be focused in on this, I want you to think about that,” that’s actually when they have constraints, it actually unleashes creativity but for others like me, it can stifle it. And so it’s really interesting to see that, actually, innovation can look different for all of us, creativity can look different for all of us, it’s just based on our personality types and our preferences and things like that so I think innovation can be typecast at a certain way and so, because of that, then we’re like, “Oh, well, because I’m not like so and so, then that means I’m not innovative,” and really it’s just a matter of, hey, we just need different things to help us. So I know innovators that are like me that a wide open net when we’re talking about just dreaming, but others are like, “No, give me some constraints and actually that gives me freedom.” So it’s just really interesting the dichotomy between the different personality types and the styles and all how we think and work but all of it’s still innovation. I want to be clear about that, yeah.
Alex: The typecasting is interesting because some people dress the part. If they want to be seen as innovators, they don’t want to even dress using conventional clothes. And then you also have like the Steve Jobs look. I’m going to confess this to you. Sometimes, when I see someone that is in a role that is in kind of like innovation leadership role within tech and they’re wearing consistently like a black turtleneck, I’m just like it’s interesting that you are trying to be an innovator but you’re mimicking the way an innovator completely was wearing, what, like New Balances, jeans, and a black turtleneck. That’s not what you would necessarily associate with an innovator but now we associate it because one of the greatest innovators ever, that was his uniform. But what does that say about you if you are an innovator and you’re dressing the part of someone else that was an innovator. So I always find that interesting in tack, it’s like, how innovative are you if you’re copying the innovator? And the other thing too sometimes, I do like when I’m seeing someone present on innovation and they’re wearing something funky, that always kind of reminds me of like, wow, there’s a conventional way to dress and then there’s an unconventional way of doing it and I do find it consistently that a lot of innovators kind of have in their clothing, like a message that says, “Look, I’m nonconventional.” Do you see that as well? Because you look very conventional. You’re like a master innovator but you’re dressed up like a normal person.
Leo: This is a very interesting conversation to me for many reasons.
Alex: I like to make it interesting, Leo. Our listeners have many options so we want to keep them plugged in.
Leo: I actually think clothing has a lot more to do with can we show up with our personality? Can we show up with who we are to the work that we’re doing? So, sometimes, it requires, if I need to wear kind of a dress shirt, a golf shirt, then I wear that because if the audience needs me to be like that for them in order to serve them well or teach them or train them, then I can dress the part. If we’re talking about clothing, I actually always have something fun on me. I always wear a fun pair of socks. If I’m going to like a corporate engagement, I’m doing like the suit and all that stuff, when you talk about innovation, but I always have something fun with me. And you can look at my background, there’s like the Lego series play box, there’s a cloud, so I always try to infuse my personality because I think what innovators do is that we show up the way we are. We’re not trying to be someone else. We bring our perspective —
Alex: You’re not trying to be Steve Jobs.
Leo: I mean, I love Steve Jobs, would love to be like him, but I’m not Steve Jobs and so what can I bring to the conversation or to the project that will help move the needle forward? And so when we talked about clothing when I was at State Farm Innovation, we actually were allowed to be casual. We wore hoodies and t-shirts and jeans and flip flops, shorts, whatever, it was fine.
Alex: That’s the way to do it.
Leo: Yeah, I mean, it was comfortable and I think there’s something to being comfortable when we’re trying to disrupt and think differently. And when I worked at Chick-fil-A corporate, it was a different dress code, it was business casual. But it didn’t mean that I changed, I was still an innovator, but regardless of what I’m wearing outside or inside, I think it’s just like can I still be myself, bringing the gifts and the ideas that I have to the table, so it can manifest me wearing a golf shirt, it can manifest me wearing a fun t-shirt. I always prefer to wear a fun t-shirt, of course, but depending on what the audience needs, if that becomes a distraction or in the way, I change because that’s not helpful to the mission.
Alex: Adapting to the audience is so important and I always appreciate when a speaker on innovation is wearing — the socks is actually something I’ve noticed, because there’s so many cool ways with innovating with a look with socks so socks have been all the rage lately. The last couple years. I feel like people are getting really cool socks.
Leo: Socks are like my favorite thing. This morning, I was at a business event. I was dressed similar to what I’m wearing right now but I had these fun heart socks because when I see hearts, I think of my wife so I’m bringing my person — they don’t know it’s there but I do and that’s enough for me.
Alex: That’s awesome. I’m sure your wife’s going to love that when she listens to this episode. So, for coaches that are working with clients, let’s talk about innovation within the scope of a coaching relationship. I know you’ve done a lot of coaching at State Farm and other places so let’s walk through kind of like the innovation guide for a coach in terms of like relationship with a client. How do you think a coach can bring up innovation? Is it something that is specific to maybe like something they’re coaching a client on? Should there always be an underpinning of addressing innovation within a coaching engagement? What are some of your thoughts around the focus of attention on innovation in coaching engagements?
Leo: Yeah, that’s a great question. I led a program at Chick-fil-A called Innovation Coaching and I was the head coach and so I had people, quote-unquote, “under me” that would learn innovation from me. And I think what is unique about me is that I think that innovation is very human. We always want the output of innovation so we want the widget or the ROI, the billion-dollar or billion-dollar disruption, but we forget that the person that creates that innovation is human, and to innovate is exciting but, on the flip side, it’s scary and it’s vulnerable and it’s fearful because what you’re doing is disrupting status quo and no one that calls themselves an innovator can guarantee success whenever you start something, even if you’re midway through. We have no idea if it’s going to work or not, we have to try it and test it and there’s going to be failure along the way and there’s going to be learnings and there’s going to be wins, and so I think what I bring to the conversation is this is a really human thing. And so what I’ve done when I’ve coached people is to address the human side of it. It’s like, hey, if you want to learn this thing, you’re not going to get it out of the gate. It’s just like anything else, you’re going to build over time. It’s like muscle training. Sometimes, we tear our muscles when we’re working out, sometimes we get fatigued and we’re tired, I’m like let’s have a real and honest conversation about those things. And be in those moments where we can express vulnerability, we can share with one another how truly we’re feeling about. But because that’s my background, I can coach you on, okay, here’s what I would do in that situation. I try to do it in a way that’s safe and encouraging and caring because that’s how I would want to be treated if someone was teaching me something so that’s how I’ve taught coaches at Chick-fil-A how to be innovative is by being human with them and just exploring the feelings. And also knowing that it’s scary to do something new and walking beside them, like a coach would, through that experience so that they know I got your back. It’s actually my responsibility to make sure you’re good or okay and to give you the opportunity to try, and if you fail, that’s okay because I got your back. And so the way I did this practically is one of the things that I do is innovation facilitation so I lead teams through workshops and I would tell my coaches that, hey, you’ve never done this before, let’s plan this together and I want you to practice or do one of these activities, and if you only just want to welcome people to the meeting, then I’ll do everything else. Or if you want to welcome them and you’re starting to feel uncomfortable and you want to try something else and do that, but I always got your back so even if the welcome and you kind of flub it, I got you, I will jump right in, I got you. So I wanted to make them look like a rock star and I’m just there to support and help and so I did whatever, as much as I needed to do to help them or as little as I needed to do to help them so that they felt confident and have that, hey, I got this, I can do this, Leo’s got my back. So that’s how I always wanted to mentor people in innovation because it’s inherently human and it comes with a lot of human emotion that nobody really talks about and we need to. We need to.
Alex: Definitely. Change steers emotion, and, as we know, change is the only constant. And there’s something very interesting about innovation that, in many cases, it feels like a luxury but the reality is that without innovation, let’s say a company won’t be able to be successful over a prolonged period of time. That’s something I’ve always found very interesting about innovation, sitting where I’m sitting, being the CEO of a technology and education company, sometimes, investing in education is you want to get really good at something and then you want to scale it and then when you’re scaling something, you found something that works, and innovation seems like either sometimes a distraction or a luxury but the reality is that if you are not constantly innovating, you’re not going to be able to sustain that scale. So, theoretically, it sounds like it makes a lot of sense but when you’re sitting there and executing, innovation sometimes becomes an afterthought because you were innovating, you cracked something in a good way and you start scaling and then you focus on optimizing, creating efficiencies, but, sometimes, creating too much efficiency is actually the enemy and there’s one presentation that the late David Peterson made, I believe this was at the coaching conference a couple years ago, and his whole topic was sub-optimization. It’s like you need to sub-optimize because if you’re too optimized, it’s not really a good thing. And that’s super counterintuitive, right? Because we want to optimize, optimize, optimize. Well, if you optimize too much, you’re actually doing yourself a disservice. So, I see that completely connected with the right philosophy that one should have about innovation. I’m curious to hear some of your thoughts.
Leo: Yeah, it’s a paradox and I’ve seen this too. It’s — even actually now, we’re going through a recession, I think, in North America and —
Alex: You think? We’re not sure.
Leo: We’re going through a recession and so I have friends out in the big corporates and things like that and I’ve seen their budgets are being held back and training and development in their people and innovation is being held back and this is constant through all the people that I’ve talked to on either the corporate side, the vendor side, people in between, and I was sad to hear that and I’m like didn’t the pandemic teach us that disruption can come at any time and if we’re not prepared, then we will be disrupted and we might shut down or other competitors will step in. Did not the pandemic show us how important innovation is? And so I don’t see it as a luxury personally, it’s actually what we need to get through the hard times, the difficulties, the challenges, because how else do we think differently about our work? So, as humans, we have a tendency, myself included, when we go through difficulty, we want to insulate the core, we’re going to protect. We don’t want to make investments anymore because we don’t know what’s going to happen. But if we do that, then how do we think differently about the work? And that’s actually what is needed to propel us forward, because doing the things exactly the same way is not going to result in new results. If we’re doing exactly the things the same way, that means we’ll get the same results we used to get and that’s not what’s needed when things get hard or difficult. We actually need new ways of thinking, new ways to think differently about the work that we’re doing. And so that is what innovation is and so I thought the pandemic actually showed how important innovation is, how much all organizations and businesses need it, regardless of what industry you’re in because we just don’t know what’s going to happen. So I totally agree, I think it’s paradoxical but we actually need to lean into the opposite of what we tend to want to do, is to lean more into innovation, I think, hey, let’s think differently about our work, our product, our customers and serve them in new ways.
Alex: Absolutely. And this came up with another episode recently where we’re talking about black swans, and black swans are not what they used to be so, for those listening, a black swan is an event that has a very low probability of happening but in this complex, fast-paced world, what we’re seeing is that there is a very high probability of low probability events happening so you have to be prepared for the unexpected.
Leo: And that’s innovation.
Alex: Well, how are you going to do that when things happen and then this is the first thing you’re cutting? It used to be coaching used to be super sensitive to recession so if you’re doing layoffs, maybe you would do some kind of career transition, coaching for the people you’re letting go, but coaching for development, coaching for performance used to be on the chopping block. I’m talking 15, 20 years ago. Now, I think there is a focus on people development that even when budgets are getting cut and there’s layoffs, you want to support the people that remain in the company, you want to keep them engaged. So coaching has made I think that jump from being in the chopping block immediately when budgets get shrunk a little bit or significantly. Do you think that innovation still hasn’t made that leap? It sounds like from what I hear that it hasn’t, that is one of those first things that gets cut in a difficult time.
Leo: I think it’s in transition. I think the conversation is happening and people are seeing the value. It makes me think about, back in the day when school budgets were to cut something, traditionally, it was always the arts, right? We kept like the maths and all the other things but the arts, the music programs, the drama, all those things started to get cut first. So, innovation, to me, kind of sometimes gets in that bucket of it’s like in the arts so just give it the cut but I think what the world is seeing is innovation and creativity skills, these are needed for the future of work. There’s more conversation these days around it. The World Economic Forum, if you look at the top 10 skills for the future of work, eight of those truly actually are innovation- and creativity-related skill sets. So I think there’s a shift happening in our culture and I think the more forward-thinking organizations and companies are onboard with that but there’s still some traditional thinking that I think needs to be addressed. And what I’m seeing on my side of the world is that innovation actually keeps people at their jobs. When people are empowered to think differently, to bring their new ideas forward to work, they actually are happier and they want to stay, and if they don’t have those opportunities, they leave and they look for the organizations that are part of kind of this new culture that believe in the skills that are needed and they’ll join those. I was at a conference in April in California and I was talking to someone, she was like a VP and pretty high up in her organization and she was telling me, “My boss didn’t get the things that I was doing and it was really frustrating to me and I was about to leave,” and she’s like, “But, at some point, we had a conversation,” she’s like, “What’s going on? Why aren’t you supporting these ideas?” and so they had a really healthy conversation around that, she got on board with why and he’s like, “I really need you to stay and keep pushing all these things,” so she kind of got some context but she was literally on the verge of going and I think this conversation is happening more. The companies that are not valuing innovation in their organizations, then people will just go to, especially with the remote era, you can just work for any company now in the globe that supports the values that you’re seeking so I think a shift is happening.
Alex: That’s good to hear. What are some of those skill sets? You mentioned eight, what are a few of those? And I want to break those down into skills because, for coaches, oftentimes, you’re helping people navigate the landscape of work and personal life and how they both come together and thinking around skill sets is very helpful because you can say, “Maybe this is a skill that this client needs to work on than this other skill.” So, can you provide a few examples of the skill sets that are directly related to innovation?
Leo: Yeah. Problem solving is one, which sometimes we don’t need even see problem solving as innovation, I’m like it is innovation because we’re solving existing challenges that either face us or our teams or we’re solving new challenges that need new answers. And problem solving actually entails a lot. It sounds simple but —
Alex: It doesn’t sound simple. Maybe it sounds simple to you.
Leo: It involves a lot of work because you’re identifying what the problem is and how do you know what problem is truly a problem?
Alex: Well, you can solve a problem from an innovative perspective or you can actually not use any innovation to solve a problem, right? And maybe sometimes that works.
Leo: Yeah, and so if you want to solve problems, then you have to generate ideas. And how do you generate ideas? That’s a skill set to learn. So, even within problem solving, there’s a lot to break down in what that is. That’s the quality of the future of work. If you’re a good problem — people want good problem solvers. They want people that are resilient and resourceful, that will figure it out and does your boss want to hire you if he has to tell you exactly what you need to do? Or would they rather hire someone that’s like, “You know what, Alex got this, this is super vague, I’m just gonna throw something really vague at him, he’ll figure it out,” right? Those are the types of workers that we want in our organizations. To figure it out.
Alex: We must, because in the age of knowledge work, I think, by definition, many managers don’t have the skill set to be able to do the jobs that the people that they report to do. So that’s a very interesting characteristic of knowledge work. It used to be that a manager would just be someone that was doing a really good job at doing the work and then you have people that are doing that work under you, but in the age of knowledge work, there’s so many more layers of complexity at work that we can’t assume that the manager really understands the intricacies of the work that the people around them are doing so you really are dependent on having that trust that people underneath you will find creative ways of solving the problems they’re solving because you may not necessarily be able to influence them. And I think that is a particularly challenging aspect of management in the 21st century, don’t you think?
Leo: Yeah. And it’s also interesting going back to like an earlier conversation we had today was some people prefer to be told what to do and some people prefer not to be told what to do. And so how are we equipping the people with the right skill set? If people don’t want to be told what to do, do they have the skill set then to go and figure it out? Or if people like being told what to do and then you tell them to do something that they don’t know what to do, do they have the skill set to figure that out? My wife likes a very defined job role. She does not like very ambiguous roles where I like to be a complete opposite. I like it undefined.
Alex: I’m not surprised. If you like innovation, you like to just — yeah.
Leo: Right, figure things out. But, again, we can teach all of these skills and mindsets to people, it’s just that there’s a lack of focus and intentionality on what these are and how to actually do it because within the innovation world, there’s so many, I say buzzwords, innovation is a buzzword itself but a word like creativity, we tell people, “Oh, why don’t — Alex, hey, just go be more creative. Just go do more creative stuff,” and you’re like, “I don’t know what that means. What does that mean exactly? Does that mean I’m gonna read a magazine or like how am I tactically doing this?” And so we need the ability to learn these skills. I always like to also quote curiosity. We tell people, “Oh, just be more curious.” If I’m not innately curious, that does not help me. If I don’t ask lots of questions in my day, just telling me to do it is not going to help me and so how do we break down these big buzzwordy things and make it tangible and accessible for more people? So it’s really important that we do that type of work.
Alex: How does coaching for innovation, what does that look like?
Leo: So I think it goes back to that earlier conversation, I think. Well, first of all, you need an expertise in what are needed to innovate. So if I want to teach you how to be an innovator, one of the things I will tell you is, hey, psychological safety is really important. I might have spoken about this before but psychological safety is really important when it comes to innovation because, first of all, I need to make sure as an individual, I have a healthy inside, which means that if I have thoughts that surface, let’s say, we’re brainstorming a topic, I’m not shooting them down even before it ever leaves my mouth. So what happens internally is coming up with ideas, I might be in my head being, “Stupid, Leo, nope, not good enough. Oh, I’m not gonna say that one out loud. Oh, that’s really bad.” I can have all this stuff going on internally and if I don’t address that as an individual, I can never establish that with my team that I work with. And so, as a coach, I talk about this. Psychological safety is really important on the inside. We need to address this first and then we can start working with our teams. And so I know that dialogue happens because I have it happen all the time in me but I know how to move on from it. It doesn’t limit me as it used to when I was younger. And so I’ve learned to address the voices and things like that too. So, when we think about coaching, these are the types of conversations we want to be having with our people is if they’re doing a creative project, like let’s unpack that, debrief it, how did it go for you, like let me understand how do you feel about it. Those soft things that we’re thinking about. You might be like, “Oh, that was a terrible — I hated that. That was awful.” I’m like why is that coming up for you? We need to be able to understand where they’re coming from and address those things. There was a time when I was at Chick-fil-A, I led this — it was like an experiential event so I was really excited about it, I thought like the entire company would come out ahead. It was like this jazz event in our innovation space. And I was like, “This is so cool.” We have like jazz musicians playing, we’ll have really cool doughnuts and coffee. So in my mind, there’s supposed to be like 300, 400, I was like it’s going to be sold out, like standing room only, it’s going to be super, and it was a lot more intimate than what I envisioned so I think maybe 25, 30 people ended up coming to this event. And I was so dejected after it ended. I was like, “Oh, man, what a failure. I don’t know, this is just so bad. I’m not gonna do this again.” And my boss had come out to the event and he was standing there with me so I asked him, “How do you think it went?” and I was like feeling really bad about it. He was like, “Oh, this was incredible.” He’s like, “Twenty-five, thirty people came,” whereas I was like, “Twenty-five, thirty people came.” The perspective there, he was like, “Hey, man, glad you try this. Let’s do this again,” he’s like, “This is the first one. They’ll build momentum,” blah, blah, blah, whereas I was like basically defeating myself and he didn’t know at the time but he was coaching me and what he said really encouraged me to keep trying, because I was so defeated but if he didn’t address that with me, if we didn’t have that conversation, I would have been like not doing this again. That was terrible, what a rotten turnout, all that conversation is going in my mind, that would have stayed with me without him coaching me to talk about it, encourage me. So, that’s an example. So many practical things that we can help with people and, again, a lot of it has to do with we’re just human. We want things to succeed but they’re not always going to, so how do we help people navigate those feelings and those emotions and be like, you know what, it’s part of the process and it’s okay, let’s just be human and real about it and talk about it.
Alex: I think that takes me back to that whole problem solving part of our conversation today.
Leo: Yeah.
Alex: I mean, you were almost problem solving, how are you going to fit all these people, and then, suddenly, the situation was very different. You were trying to problem solve for something that was not really a problem. So, sometimes, even identifying the problem, you need to get it right.
Leo: Yeah, it’s as simple as that too. Sometimes, we actually a problem is a problem and it’s not a problem. It sounds kind of funny but I’ve coached teams through — there’s a problem statement tool that I use and so I’d be like, “How do you know what the problem is? Tell me about it,” and they’re like, “Oh, it’s this,” and I would pick it apart, not trying to be mean but just trying to help the work move forward, I’ll be like, “Well, how do you know that’s true?” and then they’re like, “I don’t.” Sometimes, yeah, that’s coaching, right? Yeah.
Alex: That happens all the time in coaching. You ask someone what you want coaching on, very often, if you just follow that path, you’d be coaching someone on something that perhaps they don’t need to be coached on. Part of the whole coaching process is the discovery of the real elements that you really need to be focused on and I think that happens in therapy too, so part of the therapist’s role is to have in-depth conversations that really start to surface what the real issues are and, oftentimes, the real issues are not the issues that people bring up and I think, in coaching, I think it happens most of the time. Coaches are very aware of this. You have to be very patient to really diagnose and I don’t know that I want to use the word “diagnose,” it certainly sounds too much like therapy, but you do have to make a good assessment as to are we working on the right thing, and that’s I think where the partnership between coach and coachee comes alive when you’re trying to really get to the core of what you need to be working on and I think at the core of coaching, there is this very innovative, creative dynamic conversation that creates. So, for me, coaching is peppered with innovation throughout. I think the emergent nature of conversations that people have and the dynamism that you need to have successful coaching, to me, I think innovation is really at the core of successful coaching.
Leo: Yeah. As you were describing that, I was thinking, yeah, that’s innovation process, we’re doing discovery, we’re identifying what the true problem is, and in the case of coaches, it’s on an individual level but sometimes it’s teams, it’s different stakeholders and things, but the tools to get there are similar and when I think about solutions, when I did creativity coaching, I never proposed to my coachee what they should do. I would just point them or steer them and they would have the ahas and the epiphanies that come from their experience themselves and it wasn’t me. I could drop things here and there that would be helpful but the true power is when they came to the realization on their own, that, “Oh, yeah,” and so I’m just there as the guide, I’m not telling you what to do or any of those things but just guiding you to the right place and letting you make those discoveries. I learned that term was called scaffolding, you kind of get them right to the point where they need to be and they make that transition over to where they need to go, not you, because that actually is more sticky when they do that themselves versus you just telling them the answer or whatever it is. When they make that discovery, they’ll remember it versus you just, “I don’t wanna do what Leo told me, I want to find it for myself and then have that joy of knowing what it is and then doing it.”
Alex: Are there any daily practices that you would recommend for people that want to be more innovative?
Leo: Yes. Literally wrote an article about this recently on LinkedIn and it was really about — the topic was on disrupting status quo and I was actually inspired when I reconfigured my laundry room, believe it or not, and —
Alex: I believe it.
Leo: We actually have a preference for status quo. There’s something called the status quo bias and when humans are faced with decision making, we will often choose the familiar, the easy, the status quo over something disruptive and it’s just because that’s how we’re wired as humans. So, I think something that’s really intentional that we can all do, especially if we’re mostly working remote, is to intentionally do something different every day. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing. It could be sitting somewhere different, in a home office, move your seat to the kitchen or the backyard, just something to signal to you, to your brain, that nothing has to always be the same. I have colored lights all over my house and in my office specifically, and just the nature of colored lights changing signals to me that there’s always something — there’s more possibilities out there. You can see, I have a cloud in a lightbulb and I have a colored pencil behind me and just the fact of seeing colors change is a reminder to me that nothing has to be the same. Or if you’re a Zoom user, change your background every day. I do that too. Or your computer desktop wallpaper. I’m sure most of us have the same one through the years. So constantly creating change reminds us that there’s more possibilities out there. It’s really simple but very powerful.
Alex: Sometimes, I think when I find myself resistant to change, consistently, when change happens, you kind of go through this process of kind of getting reacquainted with some aspect of your life and it’s so powerful to see how that becomes your new normal too. So, being afraid of change is something that I see a lot in people but I also see that when change happens, we’re very quick to adapt and to make that our new reality. So, I think breaking down the reason why we’re afraid of certain changes, and, again, in my experience, it’s a very predominant aspect of coaching relationship. A lot of coaching is really about an upcoming change or whether it’s desired or systemic, so change, innovation, these are topics that are incredibly powerful within the scope of coaching so really love the work that you’re doing, Leo, and I love just the focus on innovation in large scale systems, at the end of the day, I think the 21st century will be either amazing or not so amazing depending on our ability to have large corporations be adaptive and understanding of our needs and our world so the work that you’re doing and injecting that innovator’s DNA into these large scale systems, I think it’s incredibly valuable. So, thank you for the work that you do, thank you for being a part of the Coaching.com community and you have one of the highest rated sessions in our summit, in the pre-summit this June, so thank you for that. That was awesome. I heard so many great things about your session.
Leo: Yeah, you’re very welcome. One thing that you just made me think about is, and this is what I said in the talk, that the future is happening whether we like it or not and we have the agency to craft that future and make it whatever it is that we want it to become and it’s through innovation that that can happen. So, any of us can do that. If you don’t like tomorrow, make it different, change it. You can change it. There’s different tools. This is what I teach but you can literally craft the future that you want and I think when we take the agency over what that looks like, it’s really exciting. That’s why I think innovation is the best thing ever because you can make this something you want to see happen and you can literally see it come to life. It’s just learning the tools and the techniques and the procedures and all the things, but you can do that. Any one of us can. It’s not just for Steve Jobs and the Elon Musks, it’s for everybody. So, we all have the ability to do that and I’m thankful that I do this work, I’m passionate about it. I’m grateful for the work that I do.
Alex: I can tell. It comes through. So, thank you so much for joining me for this conversation today.
Leo: Yeah, thanks for having me, Alex.