Kristin von Donop - Corporate Innovation Support

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com We're coming to the end of the book i'm afraid to say but i love this chapter and i'm so grateful to have the author of this chapter with us i'll introduce her in a second gonna tea this Chapter on this episode of as follows corporate explorers often start as long advocates of change inside an organization Building the capabilities to pursue it, they cannot do this alone implementing innovation and change on a scale relies on others adopting new ways of working

to succeed in the future the corporate explorers task then becomes to generate excitement and galvanize action. About new opportunities i guess refers to this as a leadership movement. This chapter is a guide to building a leadership movement that cultivates a shared commitment to success welcome to enrolling others in the work of transformation and the co author of that chapter, Kristin Von Donop, welcome Welcome to the the show Thank you, Aiden. It's a pleasure to be here. sure.

But you had a different role in corporate explorer you were a corporate Sherpa. Corporate explorers within IBM and i'd love to share a little bit about this to give context to where we're gonna go with this chapter.

I was there from 2000 to 2007, and it was an exciting time because These emerging business units were launched by Bruce Harreld supported by corporate strategy and I have the utmost respect for IBM executives because the organization of that size and scale has so much internal complexity and they were really out at the forefront creating something new.

What I really wanted to emphasize was the resistance. that is so natural because when people hear about the resistance to change they maybe take offense to it but it's perfectly human to become complacent when things are successful. Perfectly human. And also, there, I think there's a fallacy out there that people don't like change. It's not true. We love change when it's us. What we don't like is when we Have to give something up in order for that change to happen.

And to me, that just, if we can accept that assumption, you can then begin to understand why don't people get excited about your brilliant idea? Why is it so hard? Why do they see me as a competitor? And it's like, well, because you are you're competing for resources, you're competing for customers potentially. So first you have to get over this fallacy that people don't like change. So first accept that.

And then secondly, Have some compassion for why, I think it's compassion and curiosity for why people aren't excited about your breakthrough.

There was so many parts of this chapter that just opened up all wounds including this, little excerpt that i'm gonna read here and i love you to riff on this and explain it so you said " the toughest task for the corporate explorer.

Is to get others to help align the organization around the new venture or like you just said the new idea as a new unit or venture starts to scale corporate explorers move from a side show, to real competition for resources and attention inside organizations because they demand people to work on and think differently they encounter resistance to change. Making it harder to win support.

The demands of day to day work exert far too strong a force to overcome with persuasion alone people and we've all experienced this one may listen to a powerpoint pitch probably check in their phones these days does not lead to real change." the. Image that came to mind was, , moment when I was doing a strategic planning session, and we were.

Purposefully inviting members of the core to that strategic planning session because we knew , that we needed access to customers and the sales leader in the core business. She was polite and, attended the session and was present, it was a face to face working session. , But it wasn't until when we got to the action planning towards the end of the strategic planning that you could see she was not going to allocate time or people to help get it done.

That to me was the clue that you don't really know if people are with you until something is at stake. And that just then opened up a can of worms, but we had to really understand why not. Why did she participate in the discussion and how great this was going to be to expand the market and, to create new sources of revenue. Not by taking her sales team, right? It's, and let's think about it. Her career , was dependent on meeting her quarterly targets. Not chasing a dream.

So I think that's where at ChangeLogic, we talk about scaling begins at ideation. We really encourage corporate explorers to bring people in early and begin those conversations early so that you can understand what's at stake for others. What's the potential loss? Which is hard for any leader, but a corporate explorer, who's trying to lead change, asking yourself, what's, what might they have to give up in order for us to be successful?

Yeah As you say, it gets, when things get serious, they disappear. And we use the term can of worms as well, but my, my case, it was a bag of snakes and snakes in the grass, which we'll talk about in a little while, because we need to actually map out that territory to understand where those snakes will come from. But there's a, there's a line that I loved here. Where you said movements take organizations on a change journey. It is not an event.

There is a beginning, a middle, and an end in every journey. There, these are not staged one off leadership conferences. That's where the innovation theater comes in. The sheep diff. innovation movements should not be over designed or over produced but instead emphasize discovery and learning the secret to building momentum is to allow space for people to self organize, so that they take ownership of creating the future i thought that was.

Something that somebody might miss reading that chapter but something that was incredibly important this idea of not over designing the momentum. Because most times when an organization embarks on this journey they'll be watching themselves trying to actually over design and of risk or any kind of straying off the track but as you say you need to allow that to happen that emergence.

Yeah, it brings to mind the case we, we use in that chapter in Corporate Explorer with , the, the team at , Wireless Connectivity in Intel, and there were a couple of things that had happened. There was one team in particular , We ran through a 90 day sprint and they didn't make any progress. I mean, And they, they came to that 90 day review a bit beleaguered and heads, you know, just really bummed out. And even some of the other executives who were at the sprint review uh, were.

little dismayed, like, Oh, you know, why not? And you could have said, Oh, well, you know, they didn't make any progress. We must not have the right people on the team, or maybe this, we should just shut this down and let another team come in. And it was like, no, let's give them some more time. Let's give them some more time. And in the second 90 day sprint, they actually, um, They started to enjoy the fact that they were stuck. I shouldn't say they enjoyed it. They made comedy out of it.

They made, they made light of it because they were just like, wow, we are in the cloud, not, not the cloud of the internet, but just the cloud of discovery, not seeing a path forward, not really being able to find a place to grab a hold, you know, the scaffolding, like to move forward. And they struggled again in their second 90 day sprint, but in the third 90 day sprint, they made a breakthrough and they just accelerated. So I think that's part of the serendipity. None of us knew.

Did we have the right people? I don't know. Did we have the right idea? Were they ready to go forward? I don't know. Let's see. And, and then once they made their breakthrough, their, their pace was hugely rapid. And if you think about In corporate America or corp, just corporations writ large, the, to be in that state of ambiguity for 180 days in a high stakes, all these eyes were looking at them about, you know, are you making progress? Are you making progress?

That's a long time to sit in the fog for a group of people. And I think that's something that it's important for the corporate explorer to recognize is that you may be clear. Okay. But if the team around you is not clear, you have to stay with them. You have to, you know, you can't tell them the answer, but you have to stay with people during that process of discovery, just like you're doing with product market fit, right? You don't know. Same thing with the human system inside a corporation.

Uh, You have to, I like this term, hold steady, you know, hold steady through that, that ambiguity to see what emerges. And, , Yeah, so that that's one story that comes up is a reminder. , Another one is is the importance of not treating your assumptions as truth. Now we know this in the disciplines of IDA Incubate Scale, you name those assumptions, you create hypotheses about them, and then you test them.

The same thing is true as you think about the people who you will need to rely on in the future for your success. And The example that comes to mind is uh, working with a biopharma.

Uh, They've since been acquired by a large pharmaceutical company, but when they were young and scrappy , they, all their expertise was around the research around , the molecule at the same time, though, digital technologies and the idea of being more intimate with the patients that are actually taking your medicines and working with the providers, you know, the health care provider, and sometimes even the patient's family and that digital technologies would

allow so much more intimacy with the people who are taking your medicines. And so there was a lot of innovation happening around. Software as a medical device this, at the time, it's still a frontier in terms of the regulatory landscape. Go back 4 years ago, pre COVID. This was a new terrain and the, the typical response inside this company was, That's noise. That's, that's window dressing.

We're a hardcore research organization, but the people who were passionate about using the new digital technologies wanted to move fast and be on that frontier. They could see the opportunity. They could see the future. And I remember asking them, well, I noticed on your team, you don't have anybody from regulatory or legal. And they're like, Oh, are you kidding? We're going to involve them at the last minute. We don't want to involve them now. They're just going to slow us down.

They're going to. Throw the monkey wrench in the works. And so I was like, well, just let's explore it. Let's see. So sure enough we were able to get a woman from Regulatory involved. And what we learned by doing that was that in her office, they didn't even have the staff. to spend the time exploring how the new regular regulations were being developed around software as a medical device.

But by being involved with this innovation team, she was learning, she was learning and able to go and then explore specific aspects of the regulation that was related specifically to what they were trying to do. And, you know, They, So somebody who they thought was going to be a blocker ended up being a tremendous ally.

And I think that's, that's an important lesson to learn is, is that if you, if you at least just ask and explore and test your assumptions, we learned so much about her and we learned so much about the pressure she was under and what was making her job difficult, that it actually paved the way for being able to do some tests in the market.

. It's such an important piece that i've made the mistake myself where you kick the can down the road you don't deal with you don't tackle the monkey as astro teller would say you deal with the bottleneck first and that can be these people and understanding them unlocking early also that whole idea where you involve them and then they have a piece of co ownership is really important.

But let's share the three steps that you talk about in this chapter to build a community, enroll the membership, engage the community and embrace the resistance. I'm going to share on the screen, a diagram that you have, you mentioned there, for example, an ally. So in marketing, we talk about finding early adopters that you mentioned, but here we can actually map them. So map allies, advocates, ambassadors, and angels. I'd love you to take us through

. So allies are people who are, , they have, as, as it says here, they have influence and authority in the organization. So the sales leader that I mentioned earlier, , she had enormous influence in the organization because she was responsible for the, sales team in the core. And by involving her early , she was able to help us identify where those future bottlenecks were going to occur.

And so you allies, and I think we intuitively know that, Oh, we need allies, but I just would encourage us to look for allies in the, , not the usual suspects, but the, the people that, you know, I don't know if I want to call them unusual suspects, but don't just, don't just rely on people who are with you on the journey. The next are advocates. Now advocates are, they could be peers or they could be managers, but what they do is they're, they'll speak positively about the venture to others.

So they may not have , formal authority in the organization, but What they will do is that , if somebody mentions your your work and you're not present and somebody mentions it and they maybe snicker or , make a derogatory comment about, never come to fruition. Your advocates are people that will say, hang on a second.

I think I think they're actually on to something, and so what they do is they just, they will be there for those , moments to talk positively about what you're doing and be able to explain the rationale. , you may remember in, , In our, in the earlier chapters in our book, we advocate strongly that you create a strategic manifesto. Your advocates are people who understand that manifesto. will , be able to explain the strategic rationale to others in the organization. Ambassadors.

Ambassadors are really important , because what they do is they'll, they'll get into the thick of it. Ambassadors are people who will actually go and engage with people who , are actively blocking your progress. So let's say it's uh, whether it's access to customers, or , access to capacity in manufacturing, or um, routes to market.

I mean, You can think about it very broadly, but your ambassadors are people who actually go and sit down with those other leaders in the organization and help work through those challenges. And I think that what's really important here is that as a corporate explorer, you can't be the only one running around the organization. And in involving people um, number one, as soon as they see you coming, they know, Oh, here comes, here comes Joe.

He's going to tell me about this great innovation he's working on. When you enlist ambassadors, they do that work on your behalf. And then angels, I think we intuitively get the role of the, the senior executive sponsor. , They are so critical because they have resources. , And if they don't have the resources themselves, they have enough authority in the organization that they can , help pave the way for you.

So I think we, we intuitively get the allies and the angels, and if we think more broadly about, well, who could be a potential advocate? Who could be a potential ambassador?

And you start involving them early on and getting their input and feedback right from the day one, when you're talking about, you know, And when you're trying to to come up with the rationale of how this innovation fits with within the existing business, or if it doesn't fit within the existing business, why is it so important for us to pursue? So it may not be going after current customers. or using current capabilities, which would mean it's a really disruptive play.

Uh, But you want to, you want to start figuring out who are your allies, advocates, and ambassadors, and angels early on. And make sure you're nurturing those relationships. We create this us versus them. In our heads as well. And a lot of it's in our heads where it's like, I can't tell them. They're only going to resist. I I'll make as much ground as I can. That whole idea asked for forgiveness, not permission. It only gets you so far.

And that, that that's probably, that was the biggest things. If I look back, I would have involved people earlier. I would have given over more credit and it's a really hard thing to give away credit. I'm sure you didn't get it.

All the credit for all the hard work you did all the time and giving away that credit can be so hard, particularly to somebody who was a big blocker and they're there spouting on a stage somewhere about this great innovation, you're going, you were the worst, you actually, you were, I want to strangle you, you were a snake, It's so So true. You really do have to manage your ego. And it's, and then that's why you also need allies to let you know when maybe your ego is, is getting in the way.

But I would say that from my experience, the the people we've worked with at ChangeLogic, they, have I would say an emotional maturity and enough humility to recognize that if it, if they make it all about them, it's not going to happen. you know, One of the things I realized was it depends on the culture of the organization as well. If the culture is divide and conquer.

Then you have divide and conquer and people are all battling for their bit of tap on the back, you know, I did well, well done from the boss or whatever. And that, that is a huge part of that, that I realized that if that's missing and the leader doesn't know who's doing the work and is not secretly giving credit behind the scenes, as well as front of camera to, to everybody in the town hall meetings, et cetera, that's when things start to go right. So anyway, Old wounds. Old wounds,

. Yeah. But we'll keep moving to engage the community. And this is something where I'd just love you to share some of the ideas that you mentioned in the book because when people think about this, they often think about, oh, where do I get started? And so once you've enrolled a membership, what do you do? So over to you to explain what's Sure.

So this is where you involve your , your sponsors because they have convening power and you let them know that you see, , when the time is right, you see value in involving more people. So you need somebody with convening power and it. It's something that is so tried and true. It's something we did at IBM 20 something years ago , and even we did it two weeks ago with a client where the chairman of the organization brought together.

60 executives from various parts of the business, corporate functions, , core business units, geographies, , just a real nice mix of people. And we, we got them involved in just talking about the opportunities that were in front of the company and in the rat and the strategic rationale and allowing people to push back and ask questions. , We didn't have the chairman there the whole time. He came to launch it and he came at the end.

And so I think we know this formula, get people in a room for three days and really analyze the situation. But that's just the starting part , because workshops have a half life. Then you use the discipline of sprints. And so I think all of anybody in innovation knows today that sprints help us make progress in short periods of time.

But if you do those sprints with an eye towards the social system and how the social system is occurring in the room real time during the sprint, You can bring that up and work with it at the same time you're working on the innovation. And , this was true of the example that , we use in the book , in chapter 18. It's, there was in that organization, they had technical expertise.

As pillars, so all these different , communicate, which we all take for granted now, but these different technologies about, , GPS, GNSS, , , near field communication, Bluetooth, they're all operating on these chips. And when we got to the organization, you had these very strong, literally pillars, like they were. Each business was organ. Each , technology was organized according to those, but to meet the future, they had to figure out how to work horizontally.

And through the sprint process, we were able to pay attention and shine the light on how that. Competitiveness or legacy technology thinking was getting in the way, not to be critical of people, but to go, Huh, so I just heard you say X. Can you explain what that means? Why you think this idea we're proposing is ludicrous and give people a chance to work through that together.

That's where the engagement of the social movement using sprints, but you really have to be paying attention to not only what is being said, but , the music beneath the words, like, is this a narrative? So we had our assumptions about where the resistance was going to come from, but sometimes we didn't even anticipate it. but you have to really be paying attention and slow down and give people a chance to describe. And I think this is hard.

I think this is really, I've fallen into the trap myself when I'm super clear about, Oh gosh, these are the pieces of the puzzle that need to come together for us to scale. And you get, start to hear the resistance. And that's usually a clue to slow down, check in, find out what's really going on for that person. That's the, probably the most enjoyable part. I think , that enrolling and engaging the community, the difficult part is mapping where the resistance is going to come from.

And like any good strategist, this is a key role. And again, there's a brilliant matrix that you share in the book, and I'm going to share it on the screen and I'd love you to take us sure, I love the simplicity of this grid. Because it shows that, , yes, the angels in the upright are essential, you know, they, they, they help us make progress, but don't forget about your allies, because while they are, you know, they're supportive of you. But the thing is,, is that they have.

They serve a very important role because they have the opportunity to have impact in the organization with telling your story. And so what I like about this grid is,, is usually that the angels were super clear about, but then I asked people, well,, who are our allies or potential allies and how are we going to involve them and the blockers? Those tend to be the people we,, we avoid, but this is where that role of ambassador is really essential.

The ambassador, you can engage the ambassador to work with those blockers. Maybe that you get them to come to an event. Maybe you get them to commit some time during, to attend a sprint review. Um, And even better, The ambassador can get a blocker to help you in making progress. So this, this gets us out of the, I've been a consultant for so long.

I remember back in the day when stakeholder analysis was, you would do this very involved spreadsheet and do all this analysis, but it What do you do after the spreadsheet? I like this visual just to say, do we have enough people in each of these categories? What are their names and what are we going to do to keep them involved and engaged? So let's say they're not in the sprint, but are you following up with them? Are you letting them know what you're learning?

Are you letting them know about your pitfalls? You know, Just, you want to keep all of these people warm in your work. i don't know if this is ever happened to you where it's like a wolf in sheep's clothing so you assume the persons an angel an ally or an ambassador and or an advocate and then comes the meeting that meeting we've all had one of them. And outcomes the snake and you're like, I did not see that coming. It's like a movie.

It's like that person I thought they were on and they actually come in with a killer blow from nowhere and scooper the idea. Has that ever happened to you? Oh, yeah, yeah, it's best when it does happen in the room because we can deal with it. If it happens outside the context of the meeting, it's, it's harder to get your hands around it. And so we often ask, I would encourage people to do this. Does anybody see it differently? So often we want to.

Affirm who's with us, who's supportive of us, and, and we have our little tribe around us. But if you ask who sees it different, who sees this differently, then you can begin. That's your pathway to get really curious. Then you can begin to understand, what am I missing? So yeah, it's, it's happened. And when it doesn't happen, I often scratch my head and say, wow. Are we, we, are we in the zone of productive tension or not?

Because when you're in that zone of productive tension, as you covered in your interview with Alex Pett, if you're not in that zone, then learning isn't happening. we often have to, just, Do a temperature check to see, Hey, does anybody see it differently? Or If you do a vote this is a tool I love and I encourage corporate explorers to use.

Have people vote on their degree of support on a continuum, one to 10, one to seven, and then, so if seven is high, focus on the ones, twos, threes, and fours. So all the people who are clustered on the high end with you at, , five, six, seven, don't just have a conversation with them. Turn your attention to the people who voted lower and ask them, what would it take to just move up one notch? I'm not expecting you to be a seven, but what would you need to see?

What would need to be true to move up just one notch? Slow down, have those conversations. And then that's where you're beginning to weave the fabric of a leadership movement because you're showing that you want to learn from everyone.,

I just want to tie it to an episode we did recently with Annie Duke and we're talking about her book, thinking in Bets and she. Run a similar exercise, but they actually had a hidden voting system. So you didn't have that group think where it's like, what did they say? What did they say? It's done digitally and they capture, they only will release the votes when they're all done.

And I think that's added to what you're saying would be absolute gold because you know, the way you see, Oh, well, let's see. What Kristen says, she's always right. Or let's see what my boss says or whatever it might be to avoid that as well, there's a key piece and I'll, I'll finish with this. Cause I know you have to run onto a client. I loved what you said here. And it was such an unimportant little sentence in the whole chapter. You said, unless there is evidence of support.

It is better to assume that stakeholders are neutral or even opposing it is not smart to assume support from someone with the ability to derail the work of the corporate explorer and the leadership movement oftentimes we think that quiet person is supportive or maybe doesn't care and we're so keen to finish the presentation to get through and go few everybody support that we open this as you said, the dog that doesn't bark is often a signal in the That's right. That's right.

Yeah, it's so seductive to want to only hear people who are in favor of what you're doing. I mean, Let's be clear when you're a corporate explorer, you're up against a lot. So it is important. to get that support. But just remember, you don't need these people to love you. You just need them to love the idea. And so , again, , take the ego out of it. and really get curious about why this might fail, why this could be a rotten idea, why they, they don't think it's worth allocating resource to.

brilliant brilliant absolutely i love that chapter it's such a great chapter of the corporate explorer field book Kristin for people who want to find you where's the best place to reach out. ChangeLogic ChangeLogic. com. I'm a member of the team and uh, you can find me there and , I'd be happy to follow up with any of the ideas that we've discussed today. Absolutely brilliant.

And I just want to thank, before I thank Kristen, our sponsor, Wazoku, who helps large organizations create effective, sustainable innovation ecosystems that accelerate efficiency gains and new value growth. It does this through intelligent enterprise software that connects and harnesses the power of employees, suppliers, startups, universities, and a unique Wazoku crowd of over 700, 000 plus global problem solvers. Wazoku calls that.

Connected collective intelligence and you can find wazoku at www. wazoku. com author of the corporate explorer field book, Kristin von Donop thank you for joining us Aiden, I appreciate it.