How managers turn innovation ideas into real business wins

Where you actually put something out there and you get slapped in the face by your customer, that's quite a sobering thought and it focuses many as like nothing else. And failures being for last though, you know, I struggle with, I've done so many things, but the faster you feel, the more you can go to the next thing and I kept saying the best way to be successful. It is a bit of a numbers game. You have to kiss a lot of frogs.
Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. The podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
Hello, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Ways of Working podcast. I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome a fascinating guest today, Colin Duff, the CEO of Mosaic Innovation. Colin is an innovation and cultural transformation consultant with over 20 years of experience helping leading global brands such as Hewlett-Packard, Marriott, PepsiCo, Barclays, and the list goes on to crack the toughest innovation challenges. He's going to be sharing today some war stories, actionable insights, and some not-so-obvious solutions which are going to help you to innovate and change your culture to be higher performance. Colin, welcome to the show.
Colin: Yeah, I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me, Jimmy.
Jimmy: Colin, it's you know, when we had our initial conversation, I was struck by the alignment and overlaps that we had when it comes to thinking about innovation of culture and innovation in general. But I I wanted to pick your brains initially on how you ended up in this world of innovation and working with these incredible brands.
Colin: Well, it's um, I began my career in an energy company which certainly wasn't the most innovative in the marketing team, and I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. I was always the one trying to do all these crazy things, and they were like just go on with your job. And then I stumbled across, I've never heard there was such a thing, some innovation consultants that came in, and I had an absolute ball working with them. And when they were leaving, I said, "Please, take me with you. I really want to join you." And after much coercion, they did, and I got to join this really funky agency working on what does the future of vodka look like? How do you sell more Viagra to guys over in Russia as well as some mundane things like insurance, and pensions? And I just found it as a, one of these social scientists, I guess, absolutely fascinated to go out, research these subjects, and then again as at the time, I want to be entrepreneur to actually go and build stuff and make stuff, and just really have a lot of fun. And that was really only what I'd call invention side of innovation, the consulting, and I kind of fell into what I categorise as the cultural transformation, when people started asking me, "How do we do what you do?" And that manifested in some training. And then actually, more recently, about half of our business is in upskilling, and it's mainly learned by doing, and I'd say what distinguishes us is if you're teaching people well, the training will take you a very small part of the way. Really, it should be indistinguishable, a real project from an a a cultural development project, and that's the thing I see in the market. When many people are hiring others, it's very happy, clappy, and it's these people coming in with endless templates and canvases which I have some suspicions about, because I think sometimes it stymies thinking, instead of actually showing people what greatness looks like. Not saying we always attain greatness, but that's always the aspiration is to achieve an an end product that's an innovation, rather than just to take people through a kind of fun few days at the office.
Jimmy: That's so interesting, and I'm very aligned on the idea of a pre-ordained solution or a pre-ordained template. Because as you say, it's it stymies the conversation, and then that's all organic nature of innovation and cultural shift. When it comes to the companies that you've worked with and what you're seeing in the marketplace right now, how innovative do you think most companies are?
Colin: So, we work almost exclusively with very large enterprises and probably I'd say, uncharitably, I'd characterise as legacy, meaning they weren't born digital, um, and many of them have been around for decades as well. So, it's a mixed picture to be honest. In parts of the organisation, there is some real magic out there, but I guess as an overall, they're not very innovative. I keep reading stats like I think 90% of execs are saying innovation is a top priority, and almost the same number are really disappointed with their performance. And it's all the stuff you would imagine, the kind of bureaucratic blockers, the slowness, the risk aversion, the myopia, and those are the kind of things that we try to tackle. These big organisations are built very well for efficiency to execute at scale and do very incremental things. As soon as you want to do something where it's harder to quantify the impact or there's a bit of risk or you can't quantify the market size. I mean, imagine for Marriott, which is one of our clients, when Airbnb was emerging and saying, "Well, what's the size of the couch the sofa share market?" I mean, practically zero. But if you'd spoke to the people involved at the time, the buzz was incredible. It was palpable. So, it's trying to bring in non-traditional forms and particularly qualitative data in early stages. Andy Grove, the former CEO of Intel, he says snow always melts at the edges, and it's trying to get them excited and help them distinguish between the noise, there's so many facts and some of the the systemic changes that are happening, which is quite hard to do.
Jimmy: Let's I want to go back. You said something fascinating. "Snow always melts at the edges." What What does that mean, and how does that apply to what we're talking about here?
Colin: Well, I guess it's it's the point, I mean, if the stuff is shown up in the numbers, you've typically missed the boat, certainly on any major innovation. And that's what most large organisations do, is they look at the market reports, and they scan them, and they say, "Well, there's this emerging sector." Now, yeah, you can belatedly get in there through some M&A, but by the time you start building for it, someone else has typically eaten your lunch. So, you need to be more switched on to these early stage smoke signals. So, great innovation insights are much more like stories than statistics, and I think there's a lot of people in innovation, particularly at large organisations at the top, who have came through a quantitative financial background, they've got their MBA, so they're absolute masters of quantitative data assessment, but they've got zero skill in looking at some of these more qualitative, non-traditional forms. And there was a a great strategist, Roger Martin, and he said his best piece of advice for these guys was to do a sommelier course, to learn about wine. And they said, "Why the hell would we do that?" And he said, "It's because you need to value more that what you can't understand, because wine is quite, you know, esoteric and subjective, and that's often what we have to do on innovation and culture." We're actually doing a project just now. Part of it they've asked us as culture to look at is this large, traditional organisation's office, and we interviewed a few colleagues, done some focus groups, and everyone says it's uninspiring, it's stale, it's corporate, it's traditional, but then try to go to a finance director and saying quantify the impact of us doing that. And you say, "Well, we can't, obviously, you know, give you you will have 30% more productivity and 20% more ideas. You have to actually make a value judgment to say if you want to be a winning tech company," which is what is their aspiration, "and you're innovating in a surely sterile environment, well, what do you expect in terms of talent? In terms of output, you know, no wonder no one's staying past 5:00 when you need them all to be conquered."
Jimmy: It's so interesting, you know, thinking about And I completely agree with you. Many of the CEOs and the CFOs have come up through either an operations where it's managing the numbers very carefully, or a finance where it's managing the numbers extremely carefully background. And so, this can create a real resistance to, as you say, the smoke signals. So, there is that quantitative resistance to innovation. What What are some of the other barriers that we see that stops organisations innovating?
Colin: My pet peeve, actually, is there's this culture of idearaholics, as I would call it, and people are confusing the very front end early stages of innovation and brainstorming with substantive innovation. So, I see these people in endless loops of, and they've actually in many instances got great at brainstorming and really interesting ideas, but they just don't really know how to make them happen, and it's such a waste of potential. So, it's things like the ability to prototype, and they may only have a very small group of people if it's whether it's digital or physical, who can build things, or it's the ability to run lean experiments. So, to have what are our big uncertainties, and how do we trial them quickly and doubly accurately. And that still is interesting. Design thinking, which is a human-centred approach to design, I'd say most large organisations have got at least some competence on that, maybe a seven out of 10. Lean Startup, which is for your more cutting-edge, breakthrough innovation with high uncertainty, I'd say most of the large organisations I've dealt with, I'd put at about a four. Um, it's just not in their DNA to be entrepreneurial. They'll often say, "Well, we do the We do what you're talking about. I mean, it only took us six months to test this thing and 100k." And I'm thinking, "Oh, I was thinking we could've did this in like six days for 600." It's that kind of 10x magnitude where being entrepreneurial is still very difficult. I remember working with one client, I'll not name them, and we were doing a retail project and we were testing this new in-store concept, and they said, "Oh, we can't do it." I said, "Why?" It was like, "Oh, well, the polo shirts haven't showed up, so we won't We can't be branded." I'm like, "Well, we've got the T-shirt factory down the road, right?" "And also the packaging hasn't arrived." "Well, we can go to a printer and print it." And I think when you've got a lot of people who've grown up, as I say, who are very book-smart and maybe they've got their MBA, and they're can be almost a snobbishness to innovation of certain executional elements, because often it's not glamorous. The kind of challenges I have, you know, are things like, again in-store, the Wi-Fi doesn't work, or, um, you know, we've built this new prototype and didn't know that the browser that this company uses, because it's financial services isn't compatible. We need messy workarounds, right? We're having to bring in, go onto these like open platforms and get somebody to work on it overnight. And it's a very different mindset and skillset from someone who sits in an office and does lots of PowerPoint, does lots of Excel. It's kind of real-world problem solving, um, as it also meeting customers, and I'm amazed, as another, you talk about barriers, the amount of times I talk to large organisations and I'll say to them, "When was the last time you met a customer?" And they'll say, "What do you mean? Like why would I meet a customer?" And I'm like, "You're leading this innovation effort." "Oh, well, that's for the market research team." And I said, "Well, that's for you. You should probably be doing it like weekly or or monthly." And they just don't even know how to access these people. Like what How How would I recruit them? I mean, they might be doing some user testing. So, I think that's another big barrier, and if you want to be innovative, you have to be customer-centric, and you want to be customer-centric, you have to meet customers regularly, and having the mechanisms to do that still doesn't exist. Particularly in B2B, there's a real fear that if people interact with these people, that they might start pulling accounts or being embarrassed, and it's the opposite. Whenever I've met a B2B customer and taken an early stage idea, they're delighted to be engaged. They say, "We don't usually see this until you've launched it, and it's half the time not what we wanted."
Jimmy: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so what I'm hearing here is there's a a tension between innovation and maybe risk perception or risk management, because we don't want to get it wrong. We don't want to start without the polo shirts. We don't want to go without the packaging. We don't want to do that messy, clunky work around, because it's not perfect. Because if I make a mistake, it could be terminal or career-limiting.
Hey there, Jimmy here. And I just wanted to drop in to this episode and let you know we're extremely grateful for all of the incredible reviews and feedback that we're getting about The Ways of Working podcast. We've managed to get ourselves amazingly into the top 10% globally of all management podcasts, which is an absolute dream for me to be able to share the ways of working message across a wider community. I wanted to share a quick review from one of our listeners, because it's absolutely incredible and inspiring to those people that we're trying to reach and communicate with. From Pinnacle Coach, "Jimmy is a great natural interviewer, and his background helps him to ask some really good questions. I've enjoyed a couple of the episodes from here and always come away feeling inspired for my own work." Pinnacle Coach, thank you so much for that incredible review. We really appreciate it. And if you haven't already, make sure you subscribe or follow on your favourite podcast platform of choice to The Ways of Working podcast. And we'll see you soon. Take care.
How do you work with if I'm the CEO listening to this podcast and I'm thinking, "Well, I really want to create a culture of innovation in my business, but my people, and maybe I, am too scared to get it wrong. How do I start that ball rolling with my teams, with my leadership team, and to encourage that appetite for innovation?"
Colin: Yeah, I mean, I think that the risk is an interesting one and it's it's usually overstated. Now, there are a few select industries, healthcare would spring to mind and others where health and safety is at the forefront. There're special situations. But I think the first thing we have to do is actually to quantify the risk. So, if we're going to be running a trial, localise it as much as possible, whether that be geographically or, um, in one city or town, by channel, you want to shrink it down to something that's manageable. And I'd always encourage people to think, what is the worst thing that can happen here? So, being prepared to compensate customers if the thing doesn't work out or to have someone kind of a manual workaround. And the other one as well, and I've seen lots of companies do this really successfully, so First Direct, the bank, as an example or Gillette has even got in the act, they'll create a labs brand or a sub-brand, and they'll actually tell people, "This is the innovation engine. We're experimenting with new tools." And they'll either get a population of their custom- customers to opt in and say, "Do you want to be part of trialling and an experiment with these new products?" Or even just having the brand, it's saying, "Okay, you are buying something that's a work- in-work in progress." So, you're going after that more early adopter, um, cohort who are a bit more forgiving when things don't work exactly as planned. The other way around it is there are times when the brand risk really will be quite great. So, I can think of a story of, um, Volkswagen, and they wanted, in the early days of, um, telematics, where they were, um, tracking vehicles and doing GPS and thing in the, lorry market. They didn't want to go public with this, in case failed and competitors stole it, so they actually used Gumtree at the time. This is over in the States. And they said, "We're a start up, we've got this really cool thing, do you want to try it? We'll give you a couple of hundred dollars for participating." So, they did it anonymously, and there are instances where you can do that kind of thing. Or whether it's like a pop-up store as well, there's a platform we've used called Appear Here in the UK. So, if you want to rent a prime retail store for as little as a week, you can actually get it, it's very quite simple to do signage. And even there's online clients testing new concepts, and I've said, "I recommend doing it in a physical format, because then you actually get to intercept people and you get the context of the how they interact with the brand or proposition, whereas online, you just get the data." It's, uh, not quite as rich when you just find out that the people buy it or not. So, they're just all kinds of tools and ways you can, um, limit things to to avoid risk.
Jimmy: And I I love that, the idea of actually just getting started with and finding a way to actually learn some practical lessons versus hypothesising or theorising, but actually let's just try some stuff in real life and work around it. But, as you say, mitigating the brand risk and the failure risk by doing it in a safe context or a safer context.
Colin: Yeah, absolutely, and there's there's nothing better than getting your hands dirty. So, I remember in the shipping industry, we were going to test a bunch of smart IoT products and we were very confident, we knew the technology, we were very smart, and then we got on board and discovered quite quickly that the Bluetooth Low Energy that was so good, doesn't work when there's a bunch of steel around it. The, um, sensor we were going to put into a rope, I'm really embarrassed to admit this, to measure the tension so that we could detect if it snapped, try putting that through a winch, and it cracked, right? And it went on, and on, and on. "Oh, explosives testing, you didn't think to conduct your gear." But, fortunately, we'd only spent a few weeks and got these really crude prototypes using off-the-shelf components, so it wasn't a great waste. But it's the kind of thing that a bunch of smart people, as we thought we were, you could have spent months until you realised, you know. Even some of the human behavioral elements as well that you wouldn't think. So, again, with the smart rope example, we were envisioning the crew would open up the rope, and put the sensor in, and wrap something around it. They're telling us, "Do you know how busy we are? Why would we do that?" Right. And like it was, you know, small stuff that you just I I I describe it as thought land, and you can have thought experiments as as much as you want and there's some value to that, but until you get in the real world, which is much more messy, you'll never know. And when teams tell me they're in discovery for 3 months, or they've been working on something for 6 months with no real-world data, it's clear they're lost, right? And that's still the way many teams are operating as as I say, theorists rather than practitioners.
Jimmy: I really like that. And it reminds me very much of the the world of the military where I came from, where you had to do rehearsals before you went out and did an operation, because there was a plan. We did would would do a no a great deal of planning, create a strategy, brief the plan, and then we'd go rehearse it, because as soon as you started rehearsing, you'd be like, "Oh, that person's not going to reach this point in this time," or something's going to go wrong, or there's a ditch we didn't anticipate, or whatever it might be. And the same thing applies when you try to innovate, right? There's things you don't even think of, because you haven't thought of them, unconsciously ignorant about them.
Colin: Yeah, massively so, and and you're talking about, you know, desirability, so there's do people want it and often they do, but viability, as well, like are they going to pay for it? I remember early in my career, innovated for assisted living, so elderly people in their home alone, if they fall over, those kind of solutions to track that. Everyone loved it, and then we spent months and months developing this thing, no one would pay for it. So, all these adult children in the UK, quite wealthy, we're targeting the middle class, but because there's a public healthcare system here, everyone said, "Oh, they should pay. Why would I pay?" And the public healthcare system, "Well, we are not paying for this innovation." And we spent, you know, I'm embarrassed to say, about 9 months, just because everyone told us they loved it, but with no real world, you know, until someone's putting their hand in their pocket for some money, you've you've proven nothing, so.
Jimmy: Yeah, that is fascinating, isn't it? There's almost solving a problem that isn't a solution for a problem that doesn't exist, and then a solution for a problem that nobody wants to buy. Uh, two different conversations to be having.
Colin: I'll I'll give you one of my favourite ever insights, was I worked on, um It was for a big drinks producer, and they invented this product called Liquid Tea. So, rather than a teabag, they'd squeeze the tea leaf, like you would with wine, and made this purified tea, and we took this concept, we developed it, and everyone loved it in this focus groups, we did focus groups, and then a big insight for me is no one wanted a second cup, right? This thing was just horrible, so it was really clever and it was fresh and it was health, it was that, but I think there's a lack of common sense in innovation as well. There's a lot of things, I'm seeing very elegant charts about, "Oh, there's a x opportunity space here," and it's all colour-coded and stuff, but you almost want like, you know, your mum or dad to come in and say like, "What are you talking about?" Right? So, someone had invented this amazing event management platform, bells and whistles, and it was this SaaS product that's going to change the world. They said, "There's nothing like it, no competitors like it." I was like, "Are you kidding? There's Wix, there's Squarespace, there's Eventbrite, there's Meetup." "Oh, but that doesn't do what we do." And I'm like, "That's a really naive assumption, right? It does do what you do. You Because you know it intimately, you're an engineer, you've fallen in love with it's really sophisticated product, but discovering events and buying tickets, the market's saturated." Like but it it's just an example of how easy it is to lose perspective. And that's something that I've done several times, as well. It's the being an innovator doesn't make you immune, you do fall in love with your own ideas.
Jimmy: So, there's some really good guardrail parameters that you've suggested there, around not falling in love with your own ideas, testing it for viability with other people who might not be experts in your field, might not even be your targeted user base, but could be just a a mum and pa user that you haven't even considered. But does it Is it self-explanatory enough? Is the innovation obvious enough, simple enough to understand? What are some of the other small wins or momentum builders that you could recommend for leadership teams who are trying to create that culture of innovation?
Colin: You know, the there's the kind of quick fix sugar rush stuff, and I know that sounds like a really cynical way to do it, but it does kind of a work, right? So, if you're looking to galvanise people and build momentum, there is nothing better for a large group of people than a hackathon. So, you give people one or two days, you give them a sexy innovation challenge. So, there was a company I worked with in the UK, a retailer called Argos, and we ran on, "How do we win in Christmas?" And we had this great idea for a kids' wishlist app, which at the time was the first of its kind, and that directly came out with it, and you supercharge We had about 10 teams of seven people, so there's 70 people who are all just new, we'd set up this digital function, and it just really signalled the attack. We got the executive in for a kind of, what we call Dragons' Den or Shark Tank if you're in the US, pitching. So, that kind of stuff, it's a momentary thing, but it really builds energy. On a smaller basis, team, if you want a more intense, a design sprint, which is that method whereby a team of about seven people get together for a week and they develop a solution to a a problem, usually it's a clickable prototype, or it could be a physical thing, and test it in front of customers. Again, the intensity and momentum that builds, I think momentum is the most important thing in innovation. In fact, I used to, when I was brought in to look at innovation culture, I used to use one of the very traditional, big style consultancy diagnostic tools, with loads of questions about leadership, capability, systems. I stopped doing that, and instead I say, "Give us five of your big innovation projects, and I want you to tell me how long they took. And I want you to tell me how long you think they should take ideally if you were doing them well." And that, for then unpacking the reasons why, there is no better way to understand the dysfunctions in an organisation. And it's actually a very objective way of doing it, because rather than, "Well, are our leaders good or not?" It's a good way of building coalescing people around, "That took a year. Why could we not do that in 3 months, right?" And then you say, "Well, why can't we?" And it's because of it's x, y, and z. "How do we solve those?" So, that's where I will always start is, you know, I think Eric Ries, I'm going to forget his quote now, but he says, "Oh, the fast win. If you're a startup, you've got your funding and you've got your, you know, your runway of x weeks, in a big, sleepy organisation, you know, you've got infinite time often." And that's not right, so it's how do you move faster? And the fastest will win. And also, it momentum is kind of self-fulfilling. The faster you go, the more opportunity you get to pivot, um, because you spend less money. And just one other related tip as well, is the innovation failure rate's typically round about 80%, depends on the type of innovation and the the industry, etcetera. There is no way to bring that down. Even the best innovators, the Googles, the Amazons, etcetera, will sit around that level. The only thing you can do is to fail faster, right? So, it's the only way you'll fail faster as well is, as I say, to get out of thought land. And that includes focus groups and interviews. They're fine in week one, two, maybe even up to week four, but beyond that, do not be cue- confusing an anecdote for data. And I think most people still do. "Oh, they love this, this person." Great. Bring me someone who's put skin in the game. What have you did? So, if it's B2B, have you got a letter of intent? If it's consumer, have you got a landed page and smoke-tested it with some, you know, pay-per-click advertising? Like, even if you've sold it to friends and family, if you tell me you've a few hundred people on it, that is at least a positive data point in the early stages, but I can't stress enough, it's the biggest, um, failure in innovation I see, is people continuing without any real evidence. A canvas, we talked about at the start, is in no way evidence. [laughter] It's It's just It's just wishful thinking.
Jimmy: Yeah, no, I'm so aligned on this idea of, and we see this in culture transformation quite frequently, when you're trying to innovate culture to become a more high-performance focus in an organisation, and everybody agrees in principle this is a good thing, and then you go roll out all these initiatives, and then people are, "I'm actually too busy to do that." There's no skin in the game, as you said. There's no no commitment to taking on high-performance behaviours or ways of working. Instead, they're just wanting something different, but there is no time really and no real desire to change. It's hard to change. Amazing. Colin, this has been such an interesting walk through the world of innovation and some some fascinating stories shared. If people want to get in touch with you and learn a little bit more about what you do, what is the best way for them to reach out?
Colin: Yes, so it's uh, mosaic-innovation.com, and we've got a bunch of toolkits and brochures, so you can see what we're all about, and feel free to contact us through the the website. We'd be welcome the conversation.
Jimmy: Amazing. And if you package up a key takeaway that you want the audience to come away with today, what would that be?
Colin: You know, I think probably the same thing I've said it before is, how do we get out of thought land? If you're sitting around strategising at workshops and writing PowerPoints, how do you get beyond that and do something a bit more entrepreneurial? And it's if you're not There's a saying, "If you're not embarrassed by your first minimum viable product or the first thing you put out, you've taken too long." So, I really always challenge clients when they say, "Do you know what? You're right, we can do it in 3 months." I say, "What can you do in 3 days?" And, "Oh, that's ridiculous." "Okay, well, 5 days, right?" And, you know, it might be something look really rudimentary, but it's always better to get something quick. There's a certain audacity of zero before you start. It's all this wishful thinking and, you know, grand plans. Where you actually put something out there and you get slapped in the face by your customer, that's quite a sobering thought and it focuses many as like nothing else. And failures being for last though, you know, I struggle with, I've done so many things, but the faster you feel, the more you can go to the next thing and I kept saying the best way to be successful. It is a bit of a numbers game. You have to kiss a lot of frogs. If you're doing one, two innovations a year, you you know, you're dreaming.
Jimmy: Excellent. Colin, thank you so much for your time. This has been absolutely fascinating, and really appreciate the wisdom you shared with The Ways of Working podcast. Speak to you soon.
Colin: Oh, pleasure. Thank you, Jimmy. All the best.
Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and it's packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.