Good morning, good afternoon, and welcome to today's Chief Learning Officer webinar, five Mindsets for Leading Innovation. My name is Steve, and as always, I'll be working in the back on here to help answer any general or technical questions you guys may have. Before we begin, though, I would like to thank Experience Point for sponsoring today's event. It's always a pleasure working with them, we appreciate their ongoing support. With that, let's jump right in. First, there is no dial in number for attendees. All audio will be streamed through your speakers or headphones, so please adjust your volume there accordingly. At the bottom of your screen, you will see a variety of icons. You will have access to all these tools throughout today's session, so feel free to customize your console however you would like. Among these tools, we have group chat, ask a question, resources, and certifications. Please send your questions and all technical issues via the ask a question box by clicking on the icon marked q and a, type in your question, and click Submit. If you have a technical question, the answer will appear here. Any content related questions for our speakers today will be read at the end if time allows. The certification code for this webinar will appear in the certification box located to the right of your slides you have met the required watch time. You can download today's webcast slides via the green icon labeled resource list. Don't forget you can chat with your fellow attendees by joining the live group chat. And finally, you will receive a link to the recording of this webinar and a follow-up email, so please allow at least twenty four hours after the conclusion of the event before the information is sent. And now without wasting any more time, I would like to introduce our first speaker for today's webcast. We have Keith Laplante, the master facilitator at Experience Point. Keith, why don't you go ahead and start us off? Keith, thanks so much, and greetings, everyone. We're delighted to be here with you today. I'd like to officially welcome you to Experience Point's latest webinar. Today, we'll be talking about the five mindsets for leading innovation. Before we kick things off, let me take a moment to introduce myself and my colleague, Greg Warman. As you heard, my name is Keith, and I'm a master facilitator here at Experience Point. I have the great good fortune of being on the leading edge of delivering our world class digitally enabled learning experiences around the globe. It's been my great pleasure to meet people around the world and introduce them to the principles of human centered design. And now let me turn things over to Greg. Hey, thanks, Keith. It is always great to be with you, or otherwise. As you can see on the screen, I'm the co founder of Experience Point, Greg Worman. And for the past couple of decades, I've had the privilege of working with people that are seeking to be more human centered in their pursuit of new solutions. So let's begin with a quick overview of what we do at Experience Point. This will help bring some context to what we're about to discuss. Experience Point is an innovation training company, and we believe that innovation is a skill that can be learned and mastered. It's our philosophy that anyone can learn how to innovate, no matter their job, function, industry, or organization. So that's really why we exist. We offer a suite of experiential, digitally driven workshops that train people and organizations in the problem solving methods of human centered design. Greg, I think today we're going to focus on discussing what Experience Point has learned about leading innovation. What are the mindsets that leadership hold as they interact with their people and as importantly, set the conditions within their organizations? Although we'll share all of the mindsets in today's session, we'll dive a little deeper into the one that's critical to get the innovation ball rolling, especially during these unprecedented times. We call it relentless optimism. And a quick note on format, we'll lead you through material for about forty minutes, and then we'll take questions at the end. Thanks so much, Keith. Sorry. My apologies, Keith. I just wanted to pick up on the fact that it's no secret that the events this year have leveled blows on our economy, daily lives, ones that are gonna reverberate for years, if not forever. But I'm compelled to remind everyone that nothing has ever come from Right? Exceptional outcomes throughout history have been the byproduct of exceptional circumstances, and those outcomes have been driven by exceptional leaders. Remember that some of the fastest growing private companies in the US have been the direct product of recessions, which have emboldened business leaders to embrace innovation and to inspire productive action in themselves and others throughout the times of uncertainty and ambiguity. So where would we be without complex crises? Those that have so often inspired strong leadership and brought about solutions that have changed the world for the better. So let's begin. I'm gonna ask folks that you indulge me, close your eyes. And we've got the the black screen there, just in case you didn't wanna close your eyes. We're we're making it happen for you. And our question is, please think of an iconic leader of innovation. Go ahead, and I'd like you to enter that person's name into the chat. And, of course, you may need to open your eyes to do that. But who do you think of when you think of an iconic innovation? So we're looking over to the chat to see what sort of names are coming in. Go ahead and enter them in. Right, that starts us off with David Kelly. We see Steve Jobs, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison. This is great. Walt Disney, another Steve Jobs, few more Steve Jobs. Alright. My next question for you is ask yourself, what is it about this individual that made them so successful? What is it that makes them a great leader of innovation? Go ahead and enter that into the chat. We've got quite a few names that have come in. Leah kicks us off here in terms of what makes someone successful as a leader of innovation. They're fearless. Great. They took risks. They were visionaries. They were curious. Risk taking. Fantastic. This is great. Hey. It's not gonna surprise you that when we ask this question about, who are iconic leaders of innovation, that the names that pop up are invariably ones like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. And as to the secret to their success, the popular narrative of innovation leaders invariably emerges. These folks apparently are brilliant. Right? They are driven. They're creative visionaries who have little patience for fools and no tolerance for failure. Now, this shouldn't be surprising to us. Given the significant challenges that are inherent in innovating, we should expect both genius and tenacity to be critical. But when we closely examine these individuals and others who have distinguished themselves as innovation leaders, it becomes clear there's far more at play. For example, I'm sure you've heard that Steve Jobs' former colleagues disagree with any unidimensional portrayal of him as a man that motivated through anger. Yeah. So, Greg, I'm curious, who do you think of when we talk about the most innovative leaders? Actually, was the first name that came into the chat, and that's David Kelly. He is arguably the most influential innovation leader of the modern era. David Kelly is the cofounder of the celebrated global innovation consultancy, IDEO, and he's also the founder of Stanford's famous design school. A great number of extraordinary innovators working in business and education today can trace a direct line back to either one or both of these institutions. And the whole discipline of design thinking was pioneered by David Kelley. It's now an integral part of the strategies of companies like IBM, Procter and Gamble, PepsiCo, Intuit, Ford, just to name a few. So he's an iconic leader of innovation, but few would describe him as anything approaching, you know, Steve Jobsian type terms. Right? Rather, his influence is by design born from the institutions he started and gently guided. And after a stint in corporate America as a young engineer, he famously wrote a letter to his university buddies urging them to start a company together. He basically said, I just wanna work with my friends. And it's with that spirit that Kelly founded IDEO. It's a company that trusts that people, when given engaging challenges, a few parameters, and some light touch management, that those people are gonna be able to do incredible creative work. So we term Kelly's approach empowerment, as a mindset, and it's one of the five we've identified for leading innovation. It occurs to me, Greg, there's an important side note to make here, I think. Innovation leaders don't have to be those iconic individuals who've risen to widespread popularity. In fact, they rarely are. Right? The vast majority of leaders who are helping others do their most creative work or be their most creative selves are people like you and me. Now, changing someone's mindset is not easy and typically requires some pretty solid rationale. With that in mind, let's explore the critical question of why. Why should you or your leaders even care about innovation? Yeah. Thanks, Keith. And I think in some ways, it can be summed up by this Teddy Roosevelt quote. Right? It comes from a speech he gave, which is commonly referred to as the man in the arena. And some of you may know it from Brene Brown's work. She's brought this quote back into the spotlight recently. In his address, Roosevelt claims that it's far better to be the person who attempts to do great things, even if those attempts end in humiliation. It's better to be that person than it is to be the one criticizing from the sidelines who neither knows success nor failure, because that person doesn't risk anything. And comfort, well, comes with a cost. So, great point, Craig. Like, let's talk about that cost and the overall case for, innovation. And there's no place where the cost of comfort is on display more than in corporate America. During our recent fifteen year stretch, fifty two percent of the firms on the S and P five hundred disappeared. Some were swallowed whole by competitors, some went bankrupt, others still exist today in a scaled down form that doesn't have a good sense to die regardless of how they went. The one thing they have in common is that these stalwarts stopped being relevant to their customers. And begs the question, Greg, it makes me wonder a little bit, how does this happen? Yeah. Well, I think, Keith, we've all heard that truism that the only constant is change. And, I believe it's the truest of truisms when it comes to customer preferences. We've all lived this. Right? New possibilities and technologies and services raise our expectations of all the products and services in our lives. If I can ask Amazon's Echo at home to turn up my thermostat, it seems reasonable to be able to ask Alexa to turn up the heat in my car while I'm driving. My expectations have been raised, and car companies need to pay attention. Right? It's remarkable. And that's only happening with greater speed and expediency now. It definitely is. And what typically happens is organizations account for shifting preferences with specialized structures and processes. But most of these structures and processes are very much focused on optimization, optimizing what already exists. So marketing research seeks customer feedback on existing offers and product development tweaks an organization's offer in response. And indeed, over time, investments in expanding these traditional structures can help grow a company's responsiveness to changing customer preferences, and that's what you see represented here by the dotted blue line. However, what you're seeing represented by that, orangey yellow line is the fact that today's unprecedented global interconnectedness influences our expectations, right, as customers. And it's coming in greater volumes and greater speeds, and our preferences are changing exponentially. And although it varies from industry to industry and from company to company, at some point, this rate of change outpaces a traditional organization's ability to track and respond. Now to be clear, it's not necessarily a death knell when this happens. Think of the various products and services in your life with which you feel stuck, public transit or real estate agents, for example. Your expectations aren't being met, but there's no viable alternative, at least not yet. Because the more time that passes and the greater the gap between your customers' preferences and your ability to keep pace, the greater the risk of you becoming irrelevant and potentially joining those organizations that have burned out or faded away. Now, look, that's kind of a gloomy rationale for innovation, right? A focus on survival. And in our current environment, perhaps more than ever, businesses are focused on survival and that's okay. But we can also make a case for innovation based on thriving. When you're relevant to your customers, more relevant than your competitors, you shine. And here are a few stats that back that up, right? Last year, McKinsey found that companies that practice human centered innovation outperformed the rest by two to one in terms of both revenues and returns to shareholders. Speaking of returns to shareholders, a study by the Design Management Institute found that human centered innovation companies outperformed the S and P five hundred Index by as much as two eleven percent. Finally, when IEO assessed over five hundred companies' approaches to launching new products, it found that companies that use human centered innovation and explored five or greater possibilities increased the odds of a successful product launch by more than half. And, Keith, just one more thing I would add here. When we talk about thriving, the environments that we create when innovation becomes part of our culture are more interesting ones in which to work. So not only do we see these great results from the business, these kinds of outcomes, but also employee engagement increases. One of our clients actually described the transformative experience this had on her people as working them from a slumber. Yeah. Indeed. Well, listen, folks. We'd love to get a sense from all of you. How many of us are confident that our organizations and offers are on top of changing customer preferences? You can see the options there in front of you now, we'll do a quick poll. Option one is most definitely we're ahead of the market. Option two is we're okay today, but we could and probably should be doing more. Option three is now we've fallen behind and are facing a relevancy risk. And option four is that we're not really relevant anymore. I wonder if you all could take a moment to respond. We'd be interested to see where you all stand and where your organization stands. Go ahead and select one of the four options for us. That would be fantastic. And in a moment, we're gonna do the reveal. There we go. There's the big reveal, Greg. I can see it. Interesting. So it looks like close to sixty percent think we're okay today, but we could and probably should be doing more. We've got a sizable percentage that feel they're ahead of the market and some that are lagging. Looks like there are a few there, twenty six percent or so that feel they're lagging a little bit. Interesting. Interesting. And we have, it looks like one percent that suggests, sorry, we're no longer relevant to our customers. So, we've got some, good news for you in this particular webinar. We'll be able to talk about, some mindsets that can help you get back on top of the curve here. So the question is, how do you close the gap, this relevancy risk? It's a classic make or buy decision. So let's start with buy. Okay? You could go ahead. You could hire an innovation consultancy to come in and pulse your customers. This consultancy, no doubt, will suggest game changing new solutions and recommend how you might proceed from here, and that's great. But when the consultants leave, they take that expertise with them. Now let's look at Make. You can try building the capability in house with an innovation center or a innovation hub, but that's not gonna fully leverage the sensing surface area of your organization. To awaken people from a slumber and awaken their problem solving energy, you can provide training, but if people return to an environment that isn't conducive to practicing the skills they've learned, frustration undoubtedly will result. So, Keith, let's talk about how we might be able to create a culture of innovation. Right. So to create a culture of innovation, an organization's leaders need to simultaneously pay attention to skilling up their people and creating an environment with opportunities to use those skills. An imbalance in one direction or the other can crush efforts to create an innovation culture before it even gets started. For example, an investment in employee training with scant attention to the organizational environment usually results in pretty frustrated people. They can't do the work the way they're excited to do it because of the org environment that makes it too difficult for them. Common challenge is, legal might have IP concerns, intellectual property concerns about testing nascent ideas and products with customers. And that's in the way of applying some of these innovation techniques. And on the environment side, you can create all of the right permissions, incentives, and process changes. But if you don't have a complementary people development plan, the organization can quickly be frustrated by how long it's taking people to adapt and adopt. So the path to a more purposefully innovative culture is to consider both and iterate over time. Underpinning a leader's innovation strategies, tactics, and interpersonal interactions is a collection of mindsets which inform their beliefs about how highly creative work can be realized. And in fact, Keith, as Margaret Thatcher famously said, mind your thoughts, because if you follow the chain, the thoughts determine who you become. We can think of successful innovation leaders as having a composite of mindsets, sort of one layered upon another. And that's the aggregate effect that results in leaders finding the the right direction both for creating the organizational conditions for innovation and for supportively interacting with those they are trying those that are actually trying to do innovation work. Although every innovation leader may have a different mindset, like a single one as their superpower, it's almost certain that if they're successful, their practices will all be informed by all of these mindsets. Now, without further ado, what are these mindsets? Let's enhance our intuitions on this topic based on your own experience with leaders. Think about a time when a leader helps you be at your most creative, some point in your career where you felt like you were just free to bring new ideas to fruition. Alright? So if you've got that time in mind, go ahead and enter into the chat what it was that that leader did to help you succeed. Claudia kicked us off here, but see yeah. Thanks. They empowered you. That's great. Yeah, Carol, that they can Keith, you and I are both seeing such great responses here. We're both trying to jump on top of them. Right? And so many. What an awesome group of participants. I love it. Valerie points out they gave her freedom. Maria talked about trust. Awesome, Maria. I love it. So critically important. Victor's also on the trust train. Yeah. I see it. Fabulous. Fantastic. A great collection of responses. And Greg, it leads me to think about the reciprocal question as well, right? So let's think a little bit about the other end of the spectrum, right? Now let's look at the opposite. So I'm gonna ask you to do the same thing. Keep your chat fingers warmed up and respond in chat. Consider a time when a leader you worked with stifled your creativity. What did they do to prevent you from being at your best? Love to hear your thoughts on that. Go ahead and throw them up, in chat. Consider a time when a leader stifled your creativity. What did they do to prevent you from being at your best? Julie, thanks for kicking us off. Micromanage, all in caps. She's yelling at us, Greg. Don't micromanage. Micromanage has come up a lot there. Holy cow. That's that's a lot. Involved in micromanaged. Yeah. It's pretty. Yeah. Wow. It would appear that we've had quite a few, bad experiences in addition to the good ones. Right. And a pretty consistent one. Micromanagement, dismissive, too clerical, I saw. Oh, giving me the solution, not allowing me to come up with my own. Awesome. No time for feedback. Yeah. Focused on trivial elements. There's another good one. Poured cold water on my ideas. Dwight, I'm sorry you had that experience, but I can relate. I hear you. Interesting. Thank you all. Great responses. I love it. Yeah. I saw the one in quotes that often happens when we ask this question, when a leader says, that will never work, unfortunately. Yeah. But here's the thing. Right? When we look at this subject from both sides, so we talked about the things leaders have done to encourage and discourage our creativity, it's easy for us to kind of triangulate in on the key leadership mindsets that support innovation. So our group here has shared that we liked being trusted. We liked it when people empowered us, That we felt that when a leader actually gave us a little bit of guidance and, believed that we could be successful, that in fact we would be able to do our most creative work. And so what's really cool about this is we can talk about, the fact that your experiences track to our view of the five critical mindsets that every leader of innovation must possess. These are the mindsets that help them find the right balance between optimization and innovation. Let's take a quick look at where these mindsets came from. The first source of these five mindsets, it's just that we've been so fortunate to work with hundreds of leaders at various levels in various industries, and we've witnessed them succeed with certain innovation mindsets or struggle to part with some of the optimization oriented ones. The second source is our synthesis of popular business research. So you could think of these five mindsets as coming, as a synthesis like a a blinkist of HBR articles, McKinsey Quarterly, and Forbes. Those are among many of the publications that have dedicated space over the last five to ten years at cracking the code of what it takes to lead innovation. Our synthesis of this work is here in these five mindsets. So I'm going to go to the first mindset, which we're actually going to talk about last, but I want to highlight it as first. The first mindset is the one necessary to get the innovation ball rolling. Relentless optimism is critical. We're going to focus on this today, so we're going to skip it for now. We'll come back to it a little bit later. We want to take a brief look at the other four. Like the David Kelley example we gave earlier, empowerment is all about setting the stage, checking in at key moments with your people, contributing as an equal, and the magic language here, trust, which you all highlighted in your responses in the chat moments ago, trusting your people to do incredible work. Each mindset has a counter orientation, of course, that's sort of optimization focused and can work against innovation. And in the case of empowerment, it's respect for hierarchy where leaders are generally considered the best source of new ideas. Thanks, Keith. And next up, we're gonna be talking about human centeredness, and this relates to insisting on and creating opportunities for connecting with your users to both surface opportunities to help those users and refine your solutions that are intended to help those users. Right? The counter orientation to human centeredness, the more optimization focused one, is usually the starting point for most leaders, and we would call it capability and profits. Right? So leaders who see the world through that lens tend to believe that innovation investments have to leverage existing capabilities and show a certain path to financial return. And therefore, they start with the quest for new solutions with, hey, gee, what can we do well and what can we do profitably? Rather than let's figure out what people truly need. The next mindset is absolutely my favorite, actually. It's all about having a learning focus. Leaders who practice this mindset minimize speculation based on the past or their whims, and encourage multiple prototypes and experiments that help reveal what a winning solution looks like. It also encourages the bringing in of multiple perspectives to develop a much more dimensioned solution. It of course runs counter to a pervasive mindset in modern business, which is a speed orientation, Determining the right solution, right solution in scare quotes, by the way, determining the right solution quickly so we can have a product in market post haste rather than purposely learning one's way into a solution. I love that language of learning one's way into a solution. And in fact, I I'm happy to talk about the final mindset here because it's the glue that enables the aforementioned ones to function effectively. And the good news, if you're looking for good news here, is that most leaders have grown up with and already excel at this mindset. We call it discipline and excellence, and it's about enforcing accountability for commitments and deadlines and demanding excellent work throughout. Now, the challenge that leaders struggle with here is that discipline and excellence feels a little bit off when you have some of the more playful techniques associated with innovation. A lot of leaders could believe that it's necessary to minimize management demands and expectations to create that psychological safety for people to participate in creative work. This is only partly true. As we've seen over and over, right, deadlines and the demand for excellent work is what really keeps innovation teams motivated and moving forward. Okay. So that brings us back to relentless optimism, the mindset that gets the ball rolling for innovation work. This mindset involves having the confidence that much better can exist and is worth pursuing, despite the challenges and uncertainty inherent in innovation work. Of course, there's also a counter orientation here. The counter orientation to relentless optimism is a deference to the challenges of attempting to change when facing forces beyond our control. For example, company traditions, organizational barriers, industry regulations, and so on, which may seem reasonable, but it won't help us develop new solutions. Greg, I wonder if we could talk about this mindset in a little bit more depth here. Yeah, thanks Keith. So someone who has a mindset of relentless optimism looks beyond tradition and beyond constraints in the organization, and they believe in pursuing a better way, and they believe it's possible. So, here's an example to provide a little more texture to this mindset. If there is any industry that could claim constraints to prevent them from innovating, it's the airline industry. It is, one of the most heavily regulated in the world. And with respect to the in cabin experience, safety rules demand that airlines remove a lot of personal freedoms and, in some ways, kind of treat their passengers like children, and this is even more true now in COVID times. But even prior to COVID, there were a number of regulations. So an airline got to tell you, hey, you have to wait for your turn to board. Right? And once you do board, you need to sit down. Now you need to put your seat belt on. You're not allowed to take it off. No. You can't go to the bathroom, and you don't get to eat a drink until we're ready to serve you. Right? Greg, you sound just you sound just like my parents. You sound just like my parents, Greg. Yeah. You know what? I I'm sounding like my own parents here too. But it's absolutely true. A lot of personal freedoms get removed in this type of situation. And, again, airlines have every excuse to be realistic here, and therefore, they can, potentially only make minor changes to differentiate the in cabin experience. But a little story, of course, comes from the leaders at Virgin America. Right? And starting with that one leader at the very top, sir Richard Jensen. They decided to take a more relentlessly optimistic view, look squarely at all of these regulations and ask the question, how might we make flying fun again? What they did is they found ways to give people little bits of their freedom back. They pioneered on demand drink service, on demand meal service. They did seat to seat messaging. They were the first to do that. And they even had more fun by creating this cheeky little version of the mandatory preflight safety video. And what was the result of all of this? Well, Virgin America was voted the top airline in America for twelve years in a row, and they saw their competitors really struggle to play catch up. So despite its eventual sale to Alaska Airlines, Virgin America's leadership's relentless optimism allowed it to carve out, emblaze a new trail in what is a highly competitive and crowded field? That relentless optimism is required to first, get us started and second, to keep us moving throughout the search for an innovative solution. Why do we needed it to start? Well, because we'd never attempt the journey otherwise. It isn't just about courage, it's about recognizing in the first place that there's an opportunity to go beyond what we accept as givens, just as the leaders at Virgin America did. And why is relentless optimism necessary throughout? Well, innovation, frankly, can be tough work. Relentless optimism keeps our doubts from slowing or shutting us down. Great leaders make their relentless optimism infectious to maximize shared momentum. And so now that you've heard, a little bit about relentless optimism, we wanna do a flash pulse of our audience here today. So take a look at these two statements. In which of the two do you think is a better description of your organization's leadership culture? So the first one is, we consistently seek to find new and better approaches and solutions rather than accepting tradition or constraints. And the second is we recognize stability makes us more efficient, and therefore, we approach change selectively and in incremental ways. So we're gonna give you a few seconds here to consider your leadership culture, your organization's leadership culture, and then we will show you the results. Remember, there's no wrong answers here. Yeah. Me too. And again, no wrong answers. As you probably surmise, the one on top, the first one is more reflective of relentless optimism in an organization that's prioritizing innovation efforts. The one below reflects an organization that is more focused on optimization. Every great company needs both. It's just a question of balance. Alright. So let's see the results of this poll. Interesting to see. So, I'm going to kind of, round down and round up on the the second one there. So round down on the first. We have basically about a third of our folks say, hey. They come from an organization where leaders are relentlessly optimistic, not just accepting the tradition of how things have always been done or the industry that we're in, but rather always looking to pursue better. And then two thirds of us are roughly thinking that stability is a good thing or at least the leadership within their organization focuses on stability and therefore does more incremental change. This is great. Also looks, Greg it also looks, Greg, like, there were a couple of thoughts offered up in chat here. Looks like there's a few folks who must work for a Canadian company sitting right on the fence in between the two there. So sort of somewhere right in the middle, I see. So good for you guys. I because, yeah, you may you may be. Keith, I know you're allowed to say that because you're Canadian. So, of course, you can you can make Canadians the fence sitters. Love it. Alright. Great. So here's the thing. If you're trying to cultivate more relentless optimism within your organization, there are a few questions that you could sit down with your leaders and try and answer. Right? So the first is, how might we encourage people to consistently search for better ways of doing things rather than just accepting things as they are? And then the second question here that leaders can answer is how might we instill confidence in our people when they're working through the uncertainty of innovation? So we have, actually some thoughts for you on these questions as well. The first one, again, is how might we encourage people to consistently search for better ways of doing things rather than just accepting them as they are. Greg, a powerful example of a leader who consistently challenged the status quo is, of course, Steve Jobs, who came up earlier in our conversation. In Walter Isaacson's biography, there are numerous examples of what colleagues came to call Steve's reality distortion field. Whenever his people ran up against a seemingly impossible challenge and said, I can't, his response was to say with utter conviction, you can, and then to expect no less of them. The tactic was based on a simple insight that people's perceived limits prevent them from even exploring how they might do something. Perhaps this is a tactic that could work for you or your leadership. Greg, it reminds me of an experience I had years ago when I worked in financial services here in Canada, and in particular, when I worked in the investment business. I had a colleague who used to meet with his prospects and customers to plan for their long term savings and investment needs, and often would talk to them about retirement. And he would regularly be sitting with folks who were in their 30s, with thirty working years in front of them, who hadn't even thought about retirement. And he'd ask them, what do you envision for your retirement? And they would say to him, well, that's a long way off, I don't really know. And he would pause for a moment and then he would say, well, yeah, I get it. But if you did know, what would it look like? And then they would proceed to lay out a clear plan for what they hope to do in retirement. It's remarkable what people will deliver on, if they have the expectation of themselves. Now, Greg, if you were to tell me, Jobs is a once in a generation leader, there's no way our leadership could be equally compelling, I'd first say, you can, and then I'd offer up this example, a client of ours who found a different path to the same relentlessly optimistic outcome. This is a leader at a different tech company in Silicon Valley, so not Apple. They realized that more had to be done to motivate her people to search for better solutions. So she started, get this, a monthly failure meeting where her direct reports are expected to show up and share the biggest failure they'd had recently and what they learned as a result and how they were using that learning to change what they do now. In time, it actually became unacceptable to show up to the meeting without a failure to share because that signaled to the group you weren't taking enough risk. The second question here that we're thinking about is, how might we instill confidence in our people when they're working through the uncertainty of innovation? Yeah. And I have an example for this one. So, full disclosure, I actually went to the design school at Stanford, and, I don't care to give the year on that. But at the time when I went, the mantra of the director, sorry, the mantra of our, director of the d school, George Kimball, was have faith in the process. Over and over again, he would say this, have faith in the process. It was a simple but important acknowledgment that the search for anything new, a new solution, that's gonna be a departure from how we traditionally solve problems. It made it okay to feel uncomfortable. But what else the B School did is it was really an incredible job and a lot of intentional effort about building up our confidence in the innovation process by taking us through really small projects. These projects all started in chaos, but then quickly resulted in some sort of new solution. And so as our confidence grew, so did the complexity of the projects. So if you're a leader or you're thinking about how you could get your leaders to build this sort of confidence, think about how you might chunk work so that people's faith in creative exploration can be built over time. And if that's not possible and remember, as Keith told us, Steve Jobs would tell us it absolutely is possible. But if you think it's not possible, look for stories. There are so many different examples out there that show how people were able to wade through vague or ambiguous information to arrive at new solutions. In fact, Experience Point has a story bank that can help you do just that. Email us, and we'd be happy to share. Hey, Greg, thanks so much. So that wraps up the formalities for today. Before we get to answering your questions, though, I'd like to invite you all to visit our blog, The Prototype, where you'll find a range of relevant and timely articles related to innovation and human centered design. We also invite you to connect with us on LinkedIn or get in touch with us personally. We're happy to answer any questions you may have. And for those of you interested in a firsthand experience, watch for a post webinar email from us to enter for one of ten complimentary seats for an upcoming lead by experience point workshop, where you'll have a chance to not only explore the five leadership mindsets necessary to support a culture of innovation, you'll also learn about the critical leadership skills to help bring innovation to life in your organization. Be sure to respond to the email to enter, and we'll look forward to seeing you there. Now let's get to some questions. So I'm gonna open the q and a, Greg, and let's have a look at, what's come in here. Yeah. I just saw one in the chat, which I'm happy to tackle. It says somewhat unrelated, but how does the d school compare to IDO U for learning about design thinking? And happy to address that. So, of course, I I have a bias towards both. We are good friends with the folks at IDOU, and they have put together an incredible collection of courses that can help you with not only the foundational components of design thinking, but also in other subjects where human centered thinking can actually help you do a better job of things like strategy or business models. The d school as well has its offering for executives. I'm not quite sure what the current status of it is with COVID as people are not gathering face to face on Stanford campus right now. But that being said, the d school always creates experiences that are top notch, and I couldn't recommend them more. I suppose the biggest distinction between these two is IDO U is one hundred percent online, and as far as I know, the Stanford d school is one hundred percent face to face offer currently. That may have changed in the last few months depending on the direction they're going. But hopefully that helps you out. Awesome, Greg. Thanks. I'm I'm looking through some of the questions that have come in here. I I hope I'm pronouncing this right. I see a question from, Anshal, who asked about consumer insights. Do consumer insights and groups really deliver innovation, or does it require radical thinking, sifting consumer layers? That's a great question. Thank you for asking, really a very insightful one. I'm sure Greg, you have some thoughts on this, I'll offer up sort of my initial reaction. What we know about focus groups and that kind of consumer study, Anshal, is we typically solicit a reaction from folks via a survey or some kind of an interview process. And what we know to be true in the world of human centered design is what people say they do and what they actually do don't usually line up. There's usually some discrepancy between those two things. And so we really focus heavily on leveraging some of the principles of ethnographic research and real in context user observation to better understand how people are actually behaving, and more importantly, what motivates that behavior so we can incorporate those motivations into the solutions we start to design for them to really meet their needs. So it's not that focus groups or that traditional kind of consumer research isn't helpful. It absolutely is helpful. It lets you know what people say they do, and then you can measure that against what you observe them actually doing and start to develop solutions that really meet them where they are. Greg, additional thoughts there? Well, maybe an additional story, and this one comes from Guy Kawasaki of Garage Ventures here in Silicon Valley. He tells a story about the folks at Sony. They had a huge success as maybe many of us are aware, back in the nineteen eighties with the Sony Walkman. And the thing that was rather distinctive about the Walkman was that it was this interesting bright yellow color. So Sony decided to extend this product into, the sort of a a portable stereo offer. And when they got a focus group together, they asked them a number of questions about what this portable stereo should look like, including what color should it be. And the response that they got overwhelmingly was, of course, yellow. So the folks who were running the focus group said this is great. As a thank you to all of the participants, they had some of these portable stereos that were outside the the focus room and told each participant, you can take one of these as a a thank you as a gift. And what was great is as everybody left and the focus group management team is sitting there sort of collecting their notes, somebody pops back in and says, hey, do you have any black portable stereos? And when they went out, they saw that of all the different colors they had produced, that there were a lot of yellow ones there, but actually a lot of the focus group participants had selected the black ones. So to your point, Keith, about people saying one thing and doing another, that's why ethnographic research works really well. And in this particular case, the focus group sort of lucked out into that insight about what color this particular product should be. I see another oh, sorry. Go ahead. I was just gonna agree with you, Greg. I'm just gonna agree with you. So insightful. Great story. Thanks for that. Well, thank you. Hey. I saw another question here that I thought was a quick one we could just cover off. And, Keith, I'd I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. It's human centered design versus design thinking. Is this the same thing? And my short answer to that is yes. Design thinking always starts with your user. Understanding them at a deep level, understanding their needs at a level that maybe even your user doesn't fully appreciate. And human centered design is essentially just calling out more explicitly that, in fact, you are starting with people. Any other thoughts there, Keith? Yeah. They they are are both predicated on on your your end user, however that's defined for the challenge that you're facing, Greg. And of course, they always start from a place of desirability. So we always start from a place of how can we best serve that user. And although things like feasibility and viability are critically important in the final design of of the solution, our starting place when we're talking about human centered design is always that desirability place, what would be really meaningful to our users. So, yeah, they they are used interchangeably, and I think of them as you do. I think of them in the same way. I see another one that strikes me here, Greg. Santiago asked, How can the five mindsets help creating an ecosystem where innovation and creativity happen in an organic way? I love the progressive thinking in that question, right? How do I turn this from a methodology into a mindset? And Santiago, I can tell you that that's actually how we teach it in our workshops. We encourage people to think of it not so much as a process or an approach, but rather a way of thinking about the challenges that you're facing. And it's when you embed that into your leadership, into their mindsets and into the mindsets of the folks that are executing on the project work in your organization. That's when it starts to become organic. So when we stop thinking about it as a methodology and we start thinking about it as simply a way of thinking, that's where that starts to happen. That's a critical component Santiago to creating the culture of innovation. It has to be more than just a checklist that you go through to design a solution. It has to be the way you see the problems that you're facing in your business and how you're tackling them. Thanks for the question. It's a great question. Greg, any any additional thoughts there? Yeah. Just one other suggestion, and it's a really simple one. If you're looking to create an ecosystem where people are feeling more creative and innovative, one of the things you can do is to start running brainstorms with a few sets of, rules. And so when you are finding yourself in a situation where you're with a group of people and they're trying to come up with some new solution or, an answer to a problem, you can run a brainstorm and follow some of the basic best practices there. One of the best practices is around deferring judgment. As ideas come out and they're put on the table, instead of sort of finding all of the flaws in the idea, think about how you might build upon it and make it even better. Now, I say brainstorming as a very specific thing that you can do. The really cool thing is, if you start doing these types of idea generation sessions with some regularity, what you'll find is that you develop more than brainstorming sessions, you'll develop a brainstorming culture. And that general rule about deferring judgment on new ideas and building on ideas just becomes the way that people interact with one another. Bob Sutton talks a lot about this in terms of creative cultures. He describes them not just as cultures that have certain practices isolated to certain steps within a process, but rather practices that transcend those steps and just become part of the way that people interact with one another. I see we have a few more questions here, Keith. I don't know. Have you spotted one? I'm trying to look through the various ones that are available. Yeah. I think we probably have time for one or two more here, Greg. I see one from Nadim. He asked if if we have any experience working with natural monopolies like, like government or utilities or things of that nature. How would you approach leadership there to introduce some of these principles to them? Yeah. I was thinking that oh, sorry. Yeah. Sorry. Please go ahead. I was throwing that over to you, Greg, so I'm glad you stepped in. Okay. And there I tried to throw it back, and here it is. You know, the thing that comes to mind for me is we have worked with a number of government organizations, places where there's not the usual sort of competitive force that is to incent innovation. And what I have discovered time and time again is that these same organizations are really still interested in being creative. One government organization that we worked with helped run trade shows. And in running these trade shows, their objective was to help introduce, companies from their country, develop partnerships with, potential vendors in other countries or resellers in other countries. Sorry. And what was great is they were thinking about the traditional trade show and how that normally functions. Right? You set up a marketplace, people walk around, it gives, reseller partners a chance to go to the booth of different, vendors. And then they decided that it would be good to try and practice something different. So where did they look for inspiration? They looked at the world of speed dating and how that's set up and what those who have worked in that world have found to make for the most successful speed dates and then subsequent relationships. And I thought that was a really interesting way to kind of get people thinking differently about the way they they traditionally approach things. Keith, what would you add to this one? Yeah. I think, Greg, I would just echo what you said. We are by our nature as humans. We are innately creative. Although as we age, we convince ourselves that we are not, we educate it out of ourselves, the truth is that it's still there. And when you create the conditions for people to tap into that creativity, it's remarkable how willing they are to play ball, regardless of the environment, how heavily regulated or how large a monopoly it may be. It's in our DNA to tackle problems and solve them creatively. We just need to create the conditions for them to do that. And of course, the critical mindsets we highlighted today are key to leadership setting those conditions in their organization. I think I'm glancing at the clock here, and I think we may have to put a bow on this, Greg. It's been such a pleasure to spend today with all of you and thank you all for your insightful questions. If you have others and wish to reach out to us directly, please do so. But Steve, I think I'm going to throw it back to you. Thanks so much. And we'll look forward to connecting with you all again sometime soon. There's just one last thing, Keith. I'm sorry, Keith. Okay. Go ahead. Go ahead, There was a question here that I would be remiss if I didn't answer, and our marketing team would be upset with me, and that is, how do people access our blog. I believe on one of the previous slides, there was information there on that. Let me see. Hey. I can get us back there. Great. So, you can subscribe to the prototype newsletter. If you just Google Experience Point prototype newsletter, it will take you to the right place in order to sign up for that blog. Fantastic. Sorry about that, Steve. No. No troubles at all. I just I wanna say thank you again, Keith and Greg, for taking the time to present this great information to myself and to this audience. I know we really loved it. I can see the chat room is still blowing up. It was awesome. Thank you again to the audience for taking the time to join us for this Chief Learning Officer webinar as we continue your guys' ongoing support. And finally, last but not least, a big shout out to our friends over at Experience Point again for sponsoring today's event. Always enjoy working with them, and I look, forward to doing so in the future. With that, I hope you guys can all join us for our next chief learning officer webinar, creating an inclusive company culture through your learning program, Tuesday, October twentieth, two PM eastern, eleven AM Pacific. With that, stay safe, everyone, and have a great day.