Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar, The Power in Your People, Transforming Your Workplace to Unlock a Culture of Innovation. My name is Ty, and I will be your moderator for today's sixty minute program. This event is being presented by HR Morning and sponsored by ExperiencePoint. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions during the presentation, please type them into the chat box in the control panel. If they're regarding the subject being presented, allow them to the queue for questions at the end. Now I'd like to introduce your master facilitator, Keith Laplante. Hey, Ty, thanks so much. We're really excited to be here with everyone today. I'd like to officially welcome you to ExperiencePoint's latest webinar. We'll be talking about how you can transform your workforce to unlock a culture of innovation. This topic is resonating with a lot of business leaders just now, and we hope that you walk away with new information and inspiration that you can bring back to your work. So by way of introductions, my name is Keith, and as you heard, I am a master facilitator here at ExperiencePoint, which in a nutshell means that I partner with our clients to deliver our class leading award winning learning experiences to their organizations, helping them build and foster a culture of innovation. And I'm delighted to be joined today by my friend and colleague Mihir. Hello folks, an absolute pleasure to be here and we're so happy that you could join. Before we kick off this webinar, please note that we will be hosting a Q and A at the end of this webinar to respond to any questions that you may have. But of course, as Ty mentioned, don't hesitate to engage with us in the chat throughout if there are questions that come up along the way and wherever possible, we'll stop and address them. Thanks Mihir. So let's begin with a quick overview of what we do at ExperiencePoint to help form the basis for our discussion here today. ExperiencePoint is a workforce transformation company, and we believe that innovation is a skill that can be learned and mastered, a concept that we'll talk about much more shortly. We offer a suite of experiential, digitally driven workshops that train people and organizations in the problem solving methods of human centered design. We're also gonna explore the principles of human centered design shortly as well. So let's get the proverbial show on the road here, Mihir. Of course, sounds good. All right folks, your screens are not malfunctioning, it is generally a blank slide. Indulge me if you will in this little exercise. I'd like you all to sort of close your eyes, think of an iconic leader of innovation. Could be an organization, could be a leader, could be someone you've worked with or someone you admire. Now, enter that name into the chat for everyone to see. Of course you may need to open your eyes for that. Who comes to mind? Chat function at the bottom of your screen folks, don't be shy. I see a few coming in. I see Steve Jobs, my father's. I'm glad that's exciting to hear somebody's dad, think of him as a new one. Steve Jobs, I see a bunch of Steve Jobs coming in here. Oh, I see an Elon Musk. Great. I see a few of them coming in, yeah. All right, It won't surprise you that when we ask this question, some of the names typically keep popping up like Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Indra Nooy, Indra Pichai, the list goes on. And the funny thing is, everybody has a personification of what innovation and innovative leaders look like. And the popular narrative that invariably emerges is they're brilliant, they're driven, they're creative visionaries, and they've taken their organizations to greatness. And this shouldn't be surprising. Just the sheer challenges inherent in innovating and rallying people around a cause, we should expect both genius and tenacity to be critical. But the question that arises is, does that always need to be the case, that only the best and the brightest can be an innovator? Mihir, that really is the question, right? Can anyone be an innovator? Does it take special talent or a special skillset? Or is it up to the organization to provide the right environment, the right culture and the tools for people to be innovative? We also see creativity and innovation going hand in hand. So the other question we wanna answer is, can anyone and everyone be creative or do they all have the potential to be creative? Well, before we move forward, I think what we need to sort of level set on, Keith, is sort of what innovation actually means. And I love to sort of take a step back and demystify what that means for all our listeners here today. I like the definition on the screen because it's simple and straightforward and it's something that I can relate to. Innovation in a nutshell here at EP for us is new ideas that work. Of course, these ideas must have a purpose and not just for ideas sake, and actually drive some sort of business outcome. But I'd love it at this moment, Keith, if you could share some examples of innovative efforts that you've seen in companies that obviously we've worked with at EP. Mihir, the range of innovation efforts is so broad and the complexity so varied, from a manufacturer we partnered with that used human centered design to completely rethink their supply chain system and processes, and that helped them to reduce their costs by over one hundred and twenty million dollars to the hospital that installed lights in their ceilings that look like the sky, reducing the stress and anxiety of patients lying on a gurney or an examination table, to the human resources department that used design to reimagine their employee engagement surveys, increasing survey participation while also dramatically improving overall employee engagement. The list of examples is long and considerable. One thing is for sure though, they all illustrate the powerful impact that human centered design can have in any circumstance. So what you're saying is you don't actually need to be a tech company in Silicon Valley working on VR to be considered innovative? No, absolutely not, Mihir. In fact, I often highlight for the organizations that we partner with, there's a few indications, critical indications that human centered design might work for you. You know, anytime you're facing a challenge that's complex, that is to say there's more than one path you could pursue to solve for it and it's not apparent which path to take, that's an indication that human centered design might work for you. Anytime you have a challenge where if you were to solve for it, the impact you'd have on the organization and for your users would be disproportionate. You would have a meaningful impact for all involved. That's an indication that human centered design might work for you. And of course, the clearest indication is anytime you have a challenge where humans are at the center of it, right? Human centered design obviously will work in those circumstances. So yeah, you don't need to be a tech company working on virtual reality to be considered innovative, not by any means whatsoever. Great. And I think when you think about it, all organizations have that one core competency that they've developed or that they need to develop, which is their own innovation. When I think back to the last fifteen years, over half of the S and P five hundred companies have disappeared, or at least the list looks very different today than it did fifteen years ago. And I'm sure we can all think of companies that haven't survived, Keith. Who comes on top of mind for you? Yeah, know, Mihir, when you ask that question, I think about standing in the video store on Friday night getting frustrated because all the new releases were rented already, right? Like Blockbuster comes to mind for me. I am not gating myself with that. Right, or the days when we used to take our film in to get it developed, before we had all of our images stored on our tablets or mobile devices. So companies like Kodak come to mind for me. Right, and that makes so much sense. Without innovation, we constantly see that you miss the next wave of customer preferences, they're changing demands and those kinds of things. And the risk of obsolescence becomes very, very real, because capabilities that you're building, product features that you're essentially imbibing into your product, are either irrelevant or that the train has passed, so to speak. When we look at some of the research here, Keith, McKinsey and Company for example, ninety four percent of executives are dissatisfied with their firm's innovation performance. And when you think about some of the barriers that they have to that, because on one hand you have executives that are saying, Well, we're dissatisfied with innovative performance. On the other side, you don't see a lot of people making big waves and changes on that. Some of the big barriers that we see are obviously around fear and risk. They don't know their customers as well as they think they do. Some organizations just are built so large that they have an inability to move quickly and agility is not in their DNA. And sometimes just have the wrong people in the wrong places. Yeah, also true Mihir. So with that context, we've unpacked what innovation really means a little bit and why it's important to continually innovate. How do we unlock a culture of innovation in an organization? Interesting question indeed. Before we get to that, Keith, and I sort of talk about that, I do wanna reiterate and reemphasize before moving forward, that you don't need to be a Steve Jobs or an Elon Musk to be an innovator. I mean, I'm sure that helps, but it's much more realistic construct than you might have initially thought. So at EP what we wanted to do was, we wanted to build almost like a simplistic way of explaining what we do and the concept of innovation. So if you think about it in the context of two axes, you have skills on one axis and you have conditions on one axis, typically we find organizations are investing in one area or the other. So for example, if an organization is impacting skills, and they invest a lot in leadership development and talent development, hypo programs, but the organization itself is not set up for managing those changing behaviors or excitement that people come back with when they do one of these sessions, then you find them sort of drowning in their own little world or their own little class and over a period of time that gets stamps out of it because the organizational inertia is just too hard. In other situations, we find that the conditions are created for innovation, but the skillset and the people portion is just not there. A story comes to mind, I was chatting with a colleague of mine who's a CIO of a major bank, and I don't wanna tell you that his name was John, so let's just call him Greg. So Greg calls me and Greg says, We've invested fifteen million dollars on this tech project and it's failing miserably because people are still doing work the same way, even though the new tech is supposed to give them efficiencies and drive better benefits for their business. And I said, Okay, so what have you done from a skills development perspective? And he said, Well, we've been trying to keep them in the loop all along. We've been sending them weekly emails, letting them know what we're doing, where the project's at and all those sorts of things. And so obviously we paused for a second and I laughed, and Greg realized sort of his mistake. Because you cannot be making all these big organisational changes and conditions for innovation, but leave your people behind. So what is harder in your opinion, for most organizations to achieve these? The balance is the challenges in it Mihir, right? So you're developing employees who have the right skills and mindsets without creating the right conditions that will often leave employees frustrated and unmotivated. And that's when you start to see organizations with high turnover, these folks you've invested in are now moving on or where the internal power struggles kind of start to emerge, right? Because there are people wanting to do good work, but they can't. On the other side of the coin, as you just described with former colleague in the bank, you know, you develop the systems to support, the implementation of a culture of innovation, but you don't teach people how to do it, that leaves the organization frustrated and then they start making rash decisions about their personnel and their people's capability and they become frustrated with the execution. So it really is critical to strike the balance. Right, and we've seen that with customers, haven't we Keith? The balance is essentially what takes you to that culture comment. And so if we were to move ahead on the slide where you'll see, when we have both, the employees with the right capabilities and organizations with the right structures in place, you can create what we call a culture of innovation. And again, level set and demystify it because that's one of the favorite things for me to do, is to level set on what we mean by culture. And put it very, very simply, it's the way we do things around here. So I think Mihir, it would be fun to take a minute now to do a quick poll before we move forward. So folks, we're gonna ask you to have a look at the poll question here and give us a quick answer. How ready, willing and able is your organization to take on a culture of innovation? Are you all systems go? The time is right, but there's still some reticence in the organization. Are you the we're hungry crowd, but we don't know how? We're distracted by too many other priorities are you in the most people don't care and don't know how to get started sort of category? Go ahead and take a moment to respond. We'd love to see where the crowd we're working with here today lands and think about that relative to some of what we've seen in the marketplace. So go ahead and respond to that poll if you would hit the submit button there. And in a moment we'll get to sort of an immediate reaction. We'll see where you all landed. I can't take the tension here. It's exciting. Yes, it is. Do you think we should tell them there isn't a right answer? I think you just did. Outstanding. Oh, here we are. The results are in, let's see where we stand. It looks like the bulk of us are in either we have too many other priorities or we're hungry, but we don't really know how. That looks where the biggest portion are. I'm delighted to see that nearly twenty percent though are all systems going here. That's fabulous. This is fantastic, this is fantastic. And honestly, we're not that surprised when we see a bulk of folks are, you don't know the how or that you have too many other priorities, because very often, design thinking is considered as that airy fairy, empathetic, post its on the wall kind of philosophy that may or may not drive business outcomes. And for the latter half of this presentation, obviously, we'll demystify that a little bit as well. The ExperiencePoint method of transformation essentially is very simple. We focus both on the people and the organization piece, as I've said before, and both are required essentially to create a culture of innovation. Mihir, I wonder if now might be a good time to address the innovation hub versus design team versus innovators in all areas of the business. What's kind of your take on that? Yeah, so a lot of times when we work with customers and we sort of talk about the challenges that they're having with scaling innovation, is that you have a design team and those are specialized folks, and then slowly what happens is, because they're only working on the coolest projects, or sort of the next generation of business, they start getting put on a pedestal and it's not imbued in the DNA or the processes of the organization, so whatever they create is this niche product that has to be commercialized or comes to market over a period of time. One of the areas where I think organizations, more often than not, trip up, is they only focus on these specialist teams and my question to them is, Why do you only want one area of your company to be innovative? We've got so many examples where good ideas can come from any part of the business, and limiting the impact an organization can have to one area of the business, is just leaving money on the table as far as I'm concerned. What do you think, Keith? Mihir, I have to agree. Again, what I highlighted earlier around the criteria you might think about where human centered design really can be a benefit. I'm not sure why you wouldn't want everybody in the organization to be immersed in and comfortable with the principles and sensibilities of human centered design and be able to apply it in their day to day work. In fact, it's often in their day to day work where the biggest impact can be realized. It's less about those sort of unique one off projects you were just describing. And it's much more about, how does legal leverage human centered design to be impactful? Or how do the folks in finance leverage it? It's really about taking advantage of this across the organization. So now that we've talked about what innovation is, how we demystify innovation and what we think about when we talk about culture, the question that comes up is how do we provide organizations and people with the right skills and conditions to create this culture of innovation we've been talking about? And this is essentially where human centered design, otherwise known as design thinking, comes in. Simplistically put, the whole difference between design thinking and human centered design is the focus on the stakeholder, in this case, humans. I'm sure some have seen the term before and are already using HCD or human centered design in your work. But it is through human centered design that we believe you can transform your workforce. And we're gonna tell you how and why. Yeah, so here other than what you see on the screen, I would say human centered design is as much a mindset as it is a problem solving methodology. It's grounded in a few core beliefs. The first is that anyone can be innovative. We are all innately creative and that creativity can be unlocked. The next is that wild ideas lead to great innovation. So we encourage wild ideas as we're thinking about solutions. It's much easier to dial a wild idea back into something that's more practical feasible than it is to come up with the idea in the first place. So we always focus on reaching for the stars. And finally, successful design relies on a thorough and empathy driven understanding of our users' wants and perhaps more importantly on our users' needs. You don't need to be a designer to utilize this process. In fact, as I highlighted in my earlier examples, we teach everyone from accountants to marketers to operations folks how to use human centered design in their everyday work. And yeah, comment that you made on wild ideas is so important, because a lot of people again think that you create these wild ideas in a design thinking environment, but then there's real work and real business that you have to get back to, so you park those designs or those ideas and you sort of go back to business as usual. But to your point, I think the key takeaway here for most of us listeners should be around that it's easy to dial back a wild idea to something that's desirable, feasible and viable, as opposed to starting from your proverbial box, because then it's just harder to go through some of the biases that have crept into that process. And so as we go forward with that thought process, human centered design essentially relies on empathy. And given the times of today, I think we can all agree the crucial importance of empathy in the world. So, Keith, could you tell us about how empathy entails as it relates to human centered design, why it's crucial to the problem solving process, maybe share an example with the group? Yeah, for sure, Mahir. Empathy in design really comes to truly understanding your user. As Gene Litka wrote in the Harvard Business Review, I have that quote from me here somewhere, let me pull this out. Traditionally customer research has been an impersonal exercise. Expert who may well have preexisting theories about customer preferences, reviews feedback from focus groups, surveys, and if available data on current behavior and draws inferences about needs. The better the data, the better the inferences. The trouble is this grounds people in the already articulated needs that the data reflects. They see the data through the lens of their own biases and they don't recognize the needs people haven't expressed. Design thinking processes, counteract human biases and that tend to thwart creativity. And so it's crucial that we learn to look beyond our own personal views to attempt to understand the experiences, reactions and realities of others. This takes empathy. Right, but Keith, help us understand what it looks like in practice. So, again, here there are so many examples, but the one that popped into my head as you were asking a question was developed by a clothing manufacturer. It stands out to me because I can so easily relate and my guess is a bunch of the folks online with us here will be able to relate as well. You see among the various bits of clothing that these folks made were several lines of shirts. While observing purchasers and owners of their shirts, these folks noticed that many of their users wore corrective lenses and almost all of them had the same habit of using the corner of their shirt to clean the dust and dirt off their glasses from time to time. So they thought, how may we make it easier for our customers with corrective lenses to clean them off? And bingo, they started sewing a small piece of proper lens cleaning cloth into the corner of their shirts. It was a small and a simple change, but one that was really meaningful to their users. And since more than seventy five percent of the earth's population needs corrective lenses of some sort, it helped them serve a pretty broad market. Now here, as you know, I wear corrective lenses, so go ahead and ask me whose shirts I almost exclusively buy. Well, would my friend, but you didn't tell us the name of the clothing manufacturer, so that's a catch twenty two. Going back to the poll results that we sort of talked about a little while earlier, and when people talk about competing priorities and too many things on the go, design led organizations realize ten percent more value than the ones that aren't. So, one of the ways to think about how we build that into a culture of innovation, or get an organization to start thinking about innovation as a strategic business outcome enabler, is to look at other projects and determine what is their impact to revenue, because as we all know, especially in this COVID stricken pandemic world, top line revenue is under stress for most organizations and most businesses, and so the ability to re architect that and to re imagine what that looks like to drive that kind of growth, should take precedence over most other activities. In fact, when you start thinking about an organization that has integrated design thinking habits and builds some of the design thinking muscle that we were talking about, customer centricity, focusing on unleashing your greatest asset, which is your people, increasing revenue, as we've talked about, and then eventually de risking innovation, because design thinking offers you an agile approach to experimentation. You will spend less resources, time and money on building new products, services and experiences that will actually resonate with your customers and drive that value for your business overall, across all kind of stakeholders, employees and customers alike. But to bring this to life even further, Keith, why don't you share a story with the group on the impact human centered design has had on an organization? And of course, some of the outcomes if you can on creating a culture of innovation. Sure thing to hear, I'm happy to do that. I'm reminded of the story of our friends at Pacific Power and Gas. Pacific Power and Gas is a utility that operates in the Northwestern US in Montana and Oregon and up in that part of the United States. As you know, they have some pretty tough winters up in that part of the world, some pretty cold, pretty demanding winters. And the folks at this utility have an ongoing challenge with managing the accumulation of snow and ice on their power lines, the electrical wires and on the poles that support those electrical wires all through some pretty deserted areas. There's few people in lots of space, so lots of blank country with these power lines running through them. And so it was an ongoing challenge for the organization to hear, and they had for years struggled with how to tackle this challenge, and they'd failed to come up with anything other than, of course, sending people out to manually take care of the lines. They had to do this proactively to avoid the more expensive and dangerous and involved repair work that came from lines snapping under the weight of the snow and ice. And so for years it was an expensive and a risky proposition for the organization and they struggled to resolve it. And it was only after they introduced, started to develop a culture of innovation, embraced human centered design as the way we do things around here that they actually got to a really innovative solution. And it was born of a round of brainstorming sessions. They were working with with some consultants to help them think through these challenges, and one of the human centered design principles that they brought to the organization was the idea that a diversified brainstorm can way to generate new and innovative ideas. Prior to this, they had run brainstorming sessions around how to tackle this problem, but they involve the folks you would normally think of involving. So the people who worked on the lines, the people who designed the grid, all of those folks were the folks that they involved. So in these design oriented brainstorms, the practice is to bring a diverse group of folks in. So they were holding one where they brought a range of folks in, folks from accounting and folks who worked in customer service and worked at the front desk and all parts of the organization into these brainstorms. And again, they were brainstorming this challenge around dealing with the snow and ice. While they were in discussion, somebody in the room sort of snidely pointed out that, we have a big bear problem in some of these same remote areas here. If we could just train the bears to climb up the pools and knock the snow and ice off the lines, then we'd have no issue. We wouldn't need to send any people out there anymore. Of course, everybody laughs, How are you gonna train bears to do that? Very clever, smart aleck, But it stimulated a line of thought, right? And remember, we encourage those wild ideas, right? So somebody else said, well, how would you ever train them to climb up the pool? And another person in the room said, well, wouldn't have to train them. You could just put, honey pots on top of the lines and then they would climb the pools to get at the honey. And I'm sure then just climbing up the pool would shake the lines enough that the snow and ice would fall off. Again, another round, Mihir, as you might imagine, another round of laughter, everybody chuckles, very clever. How are you ever gonna get the honey pots on the top of the poles becomes the next question. Somebody else in the room said, well, we have a fleet of helicopters. We could just fly a helicopter, over the poles and we could just place the honeypots on the poles using the helicopter. And there was a young lady in the room here who who was a relatively new employee. She worked in a she was an admin assistant. Knew nothing about working on the lines or working in the field, but she was ex US Army reserve. And she piped up and said, you know, those helicopter blades create an awful lot of downdraft. I wonder if the downdraft from those blades might help knock the snow and ice off the lines. Of course, the solution they landed on, as you might imagine, to this very day, they fly helicopters along the lines now and the downdraft from the chopper blades knocks the snow and ice off the lines and it saves people's lives, it saves people risking their lives, it saves a ton of money, all because they applied the principles of human centered design to tackling a challenge. That's fascinating. So, obviously we've talked about human centered design and how it can help organizations train their people, essentially in a proven process for innovation. But often we get asked, where does an organization start? Like if you think back to the poll of folks that are on this call today, about thirty percent of us were there in terms of how do we get started, and what is required to build an organization where we can start building this innovation capability. And so, we really like PwC's five pillars to successful innovation. If you just look at the bottom left, it has to sort of start from the top. Leadership needs to be closely involved, because now you're looking at building and changing a culture of innovation. And so, they need to be involved in this program from the get go. There also needs to be close alignment of the innovation strategy, with the business strategy, because we don't wanna just be innovating on ideas that work for ideas sake. It has to have and drive a business outcome, and eventually a culture wide, cultural support of innovation. Start by choosing one project in the organization as a proof of concept, right? So start small. One project in one area of the business, but use human centered design to solve a challenge. So you'll have a cross functional team of people working on one project that may be impacting one specific area, as I said. But then this project becomes your reference story, or your success story to sell into other areas of the business. And so, when you talk about competing priorities, nothing speaks louder than success. And this is the way we think you should think about that at least. And the last pillar is around base innovation on direct insights from end users. Going back to the empathy example that Keith shared with us, it is very important to remove biases from how we come up with our insights, and therefore, observing humans in their natural habitat, for lack of a better word, is probably the best way, as it ties in directly with human centered design, as you've seen now. Know Mihir, another company that I know you are familiar with and we always love to highlight as an example of building innovation into their culture is Disney. And what I love about this example is that they're what I'll call innovation initiatives are relatively simple to implement. And I think anybody, any organization given a handful of resources could implement these things. For starters, they have something they call an incubator program where they bring people together from all around the business from different levels, different skill sets, they bring them to tackle challenges in a specific area, a specific idea or challenge they're facing. The group is given time and resources to really dig into the issue over the course of several months, then they have the opportunity to present that back to the leadership team. Now I just shared the story about, you know, Pacific Power and Gas and we saw the impact of that, you know, having somebody in a brainstorm session we wouldn't normally have can have. This is a way to do that in your organization. So really simple concept and practice, but it's one that creates that diversity of thought and experience. It enables and empowers members in all area of the business to be contributors and to make a difference. They also have what they call intrapreneurs, Shark Tank style innovation program where employees get to move outside of their comfort zones and area of business and expand their skills by working across teams. Basically they're pitching for seed money to be able to bring a new idea to life, and Disney has some absolutely phenomenal ideas that have come out of it. So this is just one example of a company who's implemented ways to create and sustain a culture of innovation. I really think these are ideas that can be implemented anywhere. It doesn't take a whole lot. You don't necessarily need a vast amount of resources to act on some of these ideas. Yeah, and honestly, one of the things that I really like about this as well is that the organization has made it accessible to everybody. So with the entrepreneurs option or the good ideas option, anybody can participate in it, should they still be willing. And know Disney is one of the first companies, at least in my mind, that comes when you think about creativity and innovation. But we were recently working with a state fund insurance company, which is probably the most, and again, apologies for anyone who might be in that industry on the call, but one of the unsexiest industries compared to a Disney. And they're fighting for talent in Silicon Valley. One of the things that they wanted to do was just help improve employee engagement. And so over the last six or seven months that they've been working with us on, they have actually re imagined and instilled about fifteen new processes for day to day tasks. So nothing as groundbreaking as the next Disney movie or the next iPhone, but they've improved employee engagement significantly by just focusing on retaining talent and looking at processes with keeping their employees at the center of it. Awesome, hey, look, Mihir, it feels to me like now might be another good opportunity to do a quick poll before we move forward. So this time folks, we're gonna ask you to actually respond in the chat with A, B, C, D or E as you consider what you think the number one barrier to innovation is at your organization. So go ahead and throw your responses up in the chat there. What are the biggest barriers to innovation in your organization? Is it politics, turf wars, there's a lack of alignment? Is it perhaps cultural issues? Maybe there's an inability to act on signals, people just aren't picking up on them, or maybe you just don't have budget or resources to support you, or perhaps it's the absence of a strategy or vision around bringing innovation to life. Go ahead and let us know through those A, B, C, D or E responses up in the chat. I'll be interested to see where you land. We're gonna do the math in our heads here, Mihir, as we see the individual responses ending in here. Good luck with that, Keith. Yeah. It's a really diverse range of responses here. It looks like much like the last poll we did here with this group, it looks like it's fairly spread out. I'm seeing a mix of things. A fair number of a's, a fair number of politics turf wars. I'm gonna opt for no alignment as the as the language there that resonates most for this. I'm sure there aren't politics and turf wars in their organizations. I'm sure it's really about the absence of alignment. I see a few Bs and a couple of Cs and Ds. It's quite a mix, quite a mix. Well, me share with you what happens when you actually run this across the board. So KPMG ran this benchmarking innovation impact survey around the same questions that our esteemed group answered today. And honestly, most of them were AS2, right? Politics, turf wars, and no alignments, as sort of the number one reason as to why nothing was getting done, and why there were barriers to innovation. And again, it just goes back to culture, doesn't it? And cultural issues sort of came in at a close second, with forty five point three percent of responses. And then budget and strategy and vision were sort of lower down on the totem pole, but politics and cultural issues definitely speak to why focusing on the organization pillar is so important. So when we think about overcoming this culture issue as a barrier, here are some ideas that you might wanna think about. Based on what we've heard from you as well, it's very much in line with the KPMG polls, and when you think about companies that need to make everyone the innovators, creative thinkers and confident problem solvers, you essentially need to think about processes that can be put in place to help celebrate and give access to those kinds of things. If you create this one innovation hub or the innovation team, and romanticize it, and make it for the niche or the few, then you essentially preclude everyone else from participating in it, because then it becomes their problem to be innovative. And therefore, innovation as a skill has to be taught, just like anything else. So as you're thinking about your leadership development programs, as you're thinking about how might you approach a business problem, whether it be a revenue problem, a cost problem, a people problem, innovation is a skill that can be taught and applied to those kind of aspects. And then there's also, making people understand where and when innovation can happen. It is again the question of demystifying and deromanticizing what innovation stands for. And the fact that innovation can and should be measured. As I said, McKinsey is talking about revenue gains of ten percent, but that's one of many, many statistics that you can actually identify as part of what innovation can drive for your business. In fact, one of the key things that we love to do with our customers is agree upfront as to what those key performance indicators, or objectives and key results would be, for whatever project we are engaged on, so that we can help drive that business outcome for our clients as well. So, just to circle back to where we started from, how do you build a culture of innovation? It starts with empowering and training your workforce, so that your people have the right skills and mindset to innovate. And then essentially, it's about ensuring your organization has the right conditions in place to make innovation thrive. And the conditions, if we go back to the five pillars, leadership buy in, innovation strategy, aligning with overall strategy, company wide cultural support of innovation, focus on customer centricity, or the end user, And then starting with one project, sort of prove it and then do reference selling. Keith, do you have anything else to add before we wrap it up for today and get to Q and A? Yeah, for sure, Mihir. The last thing I'd add is, you can do this. Any one of you on the line here, you can do this. Anyone can do this. We are all by our nature creative and capable of tapping into that creativity. It's part of who we are as humans. By following what we've outlined here and with a little bit of practice, you can unlock the power of creativity and innovation in your organization. You can make a meaningful and lasting difference for you, your peers, and your colleagues, your employees, most importantly, for your users. Folks, we wanted to be sure to allow some time for a Q and A here at the back end, but before we do, as we wrap up here today, we would be remiss if we weren't to let you know about a few upcoming events we have planned, at ExperiencePoint. This coming Thursday, we're hosting a webinar that will provide an overview of two of our best selling programs, ExperienceInnovation Learn and Impact by ExperiencePoint. There's a link going up in the chat if you'd like to sign up and learn more about that one. And for those looking to perhaps bring one of our workshops into your organization, but would first like to experience one yourself, you can participate in our virtual public events. We have three of those coming up on February twelfth, February fifteenth and February eighteenth. If you'd like to take part in one of these virtual events, you can get in touch with our colleague Jamie, we'll put his name and his email up in the chat here as well. There are a limited number of seats to those though, so limited availability depending on interest, we may be doing a draw for those seats depending on demand, but please feel encouraged to join us for any of these, we'd love to have you come. So folks that wraps up the formalities for today. Before we get to answering your questions, I'd also 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. And also follow us on Medium, or even better, get in touch with us personally. I can see that Joe's been chatting about our email addresses, so don't hesitate to send either Keith or myself an email, connect with us on LinkedIn. Obviously we're happy to answer any questions you may have. So now, let's get on to some questions. Fabulous, I see a couple have landed in here. Mihir, maybe we'll get started with some of the early ones while others are typing their questions in to the chat. There are a couple that landed here. How can you measure innovation in an organization? Here you talked a little bit about innovation, can and should be measured. I wonder if you have any thoughts around that. Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about sort of a transformation journey, the first portion of that is just around making sure that people have a general understanding of what design thinking is and how it's gonna get applied. So to do that, what you should typically do is bring in a core team that's gonna be critical. It could be cross functional, could have your sponsors, could have budget holders, whoever it is, it doesn't really matter. But they need to have some level of decision making ability, as well as the ability to know what outcomes are expected. And then you bring them into a workshop style setting, and ask them as to what those KPIs are that are going to be important for them. Design thinking has a lot of different shapes and forms, as you know, Keith. We could be solving for a specific problem. We've been in cases where a customer brought us in and said, Listen, we need to reduce time to market for our products. You're looking at the product life cycle and then we're using design thinking to help fix those kinds of situations. But there are also situations where you have high potentials going through programs and workshops and it's just about sensitizing them to it, so that they go back to their workforces, they're more engaged. So depending on the type of project you're engaged on, there will be key performance indicators and metrics that you target. And then as you go about building those prototypes and doing sort of more agile type development, you'll be able to start looking at those metrics after you baseline them to see how you've moved the needle on those. Yeah, Mihir, and to build on, I echo everything that you just said and to build on that and actually to segue nicely into a question that Bob asked. So Bob asked a question about providing some practical examples of design thinking being used in day to day business. They've had some training in his organization over the last number of years and haven't seen a whole lot of application for it yet. And when we think about measuring innovation, we often think about it as you know, Mihir, we often think about it first in terms of watching for behavioral change, right? And Bob, to your point, that's some of the early indicators are not so much that they're big sweeping projects that are a result of the application of the principles of human centered design, but rather there are small changes in the things that people do. They brainstorm differently, they engage with users more proactively, they think less in the form of solutions and more in the form of questions. And those are some of the early behaviors that we watch for when we're measuring the impact that human centered design is having on the organization. That in the medium term results in perception change. It changes how people see themselves in the organization. It changes how the organization sees the challenges that they're facing and it changes how the world sees the organization. You start to be viewed externally as much more innovative, much more client oriented in a in a meaningful and an empathetic kind of a way. And ultimately, as you are highlighting here, it leads to those those project results. So I highlighted an example earlier of of, you know, a partner we worked with who who realized over one hundred and twenty million dollars in savings by applying the principles of human centered design to their procurement and supply chain operation. And the fact of the matter is there was no one big project that led to that one hundred and twenty million dollars savings. It was a string of small things, incremental things, but they were all happening sort of simultaneously with multiple parts of the business that led to this collective savings. The real impact from design is that below the surface stuff, it's those day to day behaviors rather than the big dramatic projects. Every now and again, you're gonna have one of those, you're have one, a big kind of a breakthrough, but it's the day to day stuff where you really feel the impact. Yep, and I think that goes into Vivek's question a little bit as well. How do you balance incremental projects essentially versus disruptive innovation in an organisation? And I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it, but from my perspective, I don't think you do. It's a question of where you're applying it into your business and what the outcome is. So I think the outcome that you're trying to get to, first of all, has to be identified and articulated. Because without that, it goes back to the point that Bob was trying to make, is you've been trained on design thinking and now you're looking for that big project to work on, but you don't really know what that is going to be. So, if you think about how process efficiencies have been driven, first of all it was around Lean Six Sigma, then it became agile, and you'll have the next best thing. But all those things are just about driving more and more efficiency. Very few of those capabilities are for redesigning the process itself. And that's where design comes in from my view. So yes, we can look at making incremental changes from day to day and that builds those small quick wins. Those are the ones that will help you drive employee engagement. Those are the ones that will help you build that culture of innovation in the organization. And then disruptive innovation, or new revenue streams, can honestly come from anywhere. It just depends on the type of project that you're picking up. So if you're looking at improving an existing product, then maybe one of those ideation sessions would lead to an idea that could potentially become a new product while you're making the existing process more efficient. So it's a question about how do you run a structured design sprint or a structured design thinking process, just so that you can look at both the short term and the medium and long term outcomes. Yeah, Mihir, I agree, and just to build on that as well, Vivek, great question. The distinction between the process improvement orientation and the Greenfield breakthrough innovation orientation, that's a challenge for all of us. It's part of why I stressed earlier that human centered design is really more of a way of thinking than it is a methodology. When we teach it, I'll be candid with you here, Vivek, when we teach it, we teach it as a process because it's easier for people to learn when you teach it in a systematic way. So we teach it that way, but I always make a point of qualifying that this is really a way of seeing the world. It's really a way of seeing the challenges you're facing. It's really a way of shifting you away from your solutions orientation to one of asking lots of questions and seeking insight from your users. And so, when it becomes, as we've highlighted here, when it becomes the way you do things around you, when it becomes how you think about the challenges that you're facing, you know, the question about how you out what how much time and energy you allocate to, you know, process improvement versus versus greenfield innovation becomes moot because you're always thinking about greenfield innovation. You're always looking at every every challenge. You know, I'd illustrate it this way. My favorite design joke, it's also the only design joke I know, so by default, it's my favorite design joke, but my favorite design joke is, you know, how many designers does it take to change a light bulb? And the answer is, does it need to be a light bulb? And bam bam. Right? Once you embrace that way of thinking, then everything you encounter every day in your business, in your operation, that question is being asked, does it need to be as it is now? And that's really the magic of human centered design as a mindset. I hope that's helpful. Let me have a look through here and see if there are any other questions coming in. Hey, I'm not sure I'm pronouncing this right, forgive me if I got it wrong, the hell I think that's how it's pronounced. You asked about innovation in small business being different from large ones. I love this question, right? How can we convince small businesses and startups of the importance of innovation for them? The irony here is it's almost more important in small businesses and startups because they have nothing to lean on. They have no history or track record, or they don't have the scale to not be innovating and lean on their past successes. So it's almost more important for them to operate in this headspace. But I would say to you, there is no difference other than you may have access to more resources if you're in a larger organization, although you also have all the challenges that others have highlighted about, leaders being reluctant to invest in all of the risks they fear and all of those things. So maybe some of that is mitigated or mitigates the lower access to resources, but the mechanics are the same, right? We adopt a user orientation. We start by identifying our challenge and then investing time with our users to understand what are their motivators? What drives their behaviors? What would be really meaningful and impactful to them? And then we develop solutions that meet them where they are. Know, Nihal, I did some work with a large international manufacturing company not long ago. And they said two things to me that really struck me as the light bulb started going off for them around design as a way to tackle their challenges. And the first thing they said to me was, know, we're a lot better at MeSearch than we are researched, right? And the implication there of course is we tend to look internally and rely on our deep expertise as this source of inspiration rather than investing time our users and gaining our inspiration from them. Acknowledge that they were better at that internal orientation than that external orientation. But the other thing he said to me that really struck me was he talked about the solutions orientation in his organization. He said, you know, we always come to every challenge with a solution already in mind, rather than engaging in an exploration. We already have a solution preordained. And look, we work really hard to bring the best version of that solution to life in the world. You know, we massage it and we care for it and we nurture it and we polish it and we do everything we can to make the best version of that solution come to life in the world. And then we put it into the world. And when people don't react to our solution the way we think they should, we don't find fault with the solution, we find fault with their behavior. And then what we do is we develop a training program or a brochure to educate them around how they should behave properly with this brilliant solution that we've provided them with. And what he said to me is the human centered design solves that for me, right? Because we start by taking their concerns and considerations into account and then we design a solution that'll meet them where they are. There's never a need for a training program around something that makes perfect sense to everyone, they just embrace it. Did I hear anything to add? That was a long winded response, forgive me. No, I think you did it justice, my friend. I didn't wanna talk about Roman's question He says, Managers are sometimes reluctant to sponsor cost saving innovations since measuring them might result in budget cuts to their budgets. Any thoughts on how to overcome this fear of measurement issue? So I'm gonna give two responses to this. One wearing sort of my design hat and one as just sort of a business leader. Sometimes budget cuts are necessary to manage bottom line impacts, especially in a publicly traded company. So Roman, I don't know if you're a publicly traded company or not, but sometimes those are harsh realities that you have to live with. In other situations, people are looking for efficiencies because they wanna invest the money somewhere else. So I guess the conversation with your manager has to be, listen, if you stay as a bloated cost structure, because that's what you would be if there were efficient ways of doing it and you weren't, then the headcount reductions are gonna happen at some point in time whether people like it or not. Because that business unit is gonna be not performing as well as some of the other business units. So the question then becomes, well, if you can do something better or save costs doing it, then where can that money that is saved be reinvested into that business or that business unit? And so what's worked for me in the past before, and again, it's got nothing to do with design thinking necessarily, is if I'm saving twenty million dollars on a project, what more can I do for my business with that twenty million dollars Whether it's unlocking a new revenue stream or investing in something else for our business that grows, maybe it's international expansion, whatever that might be? So usually there's a give and take on it. But unfortunately if you're a business that is just focused on cost and saving cost implies that you will get less budget next year, then that again is a culture issue that needs to be addressed in terms of what is the end goal or purpose of reducing the cost. Because sometimes the answer is hidden in the so what. Keith, anything to add on that? Again, that was a pretty thorough response. Wonder what would come out of a human centered design orientation around managing costs. You can't shrink your way to success, right? So inevitably there's going to be growth opportunity emerge from your efforts around those those cost control opportunities opportunity will present itself in there. Yeah, I want I wonder how that could be turned on its head, how we might reframe that, still deliver on the cost savings, but with a view to how we leverage that to create opportunity. An interesting challenge to undertake to be sure, Roman, and I appreciate the question, great question. I think probably Mihir we have time for one more quick one and I'm gonna throw it at you because I know you have some insight on this and I have the mic right now so that puts me in control. Great, okay. But a question came in about, we made a reference earlier to transforming both people and organizations. So a question came in about, how do you transform the organization? Can you say a little bit more about that? Sure. So essentially, there's a So let me sort of give an EP response to this one. We think about it, or I'd like to think about it in sort of three different phases. The first phase we've already talked about when I was addressing sort of Bob's question in terms of getting the core team, figuring out the OKRs or the KPIs, whatever your acronym of choice is. But essentially the metrics that are gonna guide whether or not the project is gonna be a success. The other key element of that is to identify catalysts. Now some businesses call them as communities of practice. We like to call them catalysts at EP. But these are essentially people that do train the trainer type things. So when we are not there as a business, because again, our business model isn't that we wanna be there with organizations forever, We'll come in, we'll enable your people to scale up their capability sets into delivering and managing these processes themselves, and then we will sort of exit stage right, as it says. But in the communities of practice, or the transfer phase, what we wanna focus on is identifying those key individuals who are going to represent design thinking and innovation within that business. And again, it's not one team, it is individuals across a broad spectrum of teams that will be responsible for this. And their job essentially is gonna be facilitating or managing this within their own BUs. And then eventually, come to the scale aspect of it, which is that bare minimum level of understanding of design and how it is applied across a broad range of people. If I go back to the example that I gave around that state fund insurance company, over ninety percent of their workforce, regardless of role, is trained up on design thinking. So at least they have a basic understanding of what design thinking is, and how and where it might be applied. And so when you add that with the specialists or the catalysts or the communities of practice holders, that becomes a very potent combination and that's how we've typically seen organizations get on the road to transforming with innovation. Awesome, Mihir, thanks. Thanks for that. Folks, we're just about at time. So on behalf of Mihir and I both, we wanna thank you for joining us today and for your active participation. We are delighted to have you here. Again, feel encouraged and welcome to connect with us through all of the links that we provided. You can visit us at ExperiencePoint dot com and learn more about what we're up to and how we can help your organization. And without any further ado, I'm gonna turn it back over to Ty here. Thank you all again for attending, please until our paths cross again, stay well, stay safe, stay healthy, keep your distance, wear your mask, wash your hands, and we'll look forward to connecting with you again sometime soon. Thank you all so much. Thanks a lot, Keith and Mayor. You gave the same guidance I was about to give. On behalf of HR Morning, I would also like to thank everyone for attending the webinar. This concludes our program.