To innovate let’s hack some myths on innovation

The secret sauce to innovation doesn’t have a single recipe. Thousands of books out there share some interesting ingredients and it’s probably a mix of these that will help us shake our organisations and put them in a better place to act innovatively. Should it be the task of a specialized department or rather a lens that embeds all parts of the organization?

While I honestly believe the latter, it’s true that what comes as a general belief is that brand teams (call it marketing, creative departments, or experience designers) should definitely have innovation running through their veins.

But innovation is liquid by nature and can’t be easily chased, so embedding it in the team is not a simple task. If innovation starts by looking at things from a different angle, why not look at the drivers of innovation from a different angle as well?

More or less communication?

The benefits of open, transparent communication are clear for all of us and it’s typically an objective when designing an organisation and its procedures. It contributes to team engagement, helps spread knowledge and empowers more efficient processes. In a well-crafted team design, we should include communication workflows, easy to access information repositories and internal trainings to include everyone in.

However, when we aim at developing a new product or service, should we maximise communications? Damon Centola experienced with network & systems modelling and arrived at a different conclusion. Maximising communications and collaboration above a certain threshold can actually hamper collective intelligence. Too much communication can actually increase the status quo around certain ideas, leading the team to evaluate the same set of proposals and reducing the space for divergent solutions. Enabling smaller teams, with reduced access to overall information, is their solution to accelerate innovation. Limits are indeed a great enhancer of creativity.

Processes or persons?

There are multiple strategies, models, and roadmaps around innovation, according to the abundant business literature. While it will always be interesting to take key insights from many of them, in a recent article of HBR, the authors of “Leading transformation: how to take charge of your company’s future”, make a different bet and put the focus on persons. Ensuring certain profiles in the team is their key to driving an innovative organisation.

Three traits characterize these profiles: negative capability (the ability to accept the lack of an immediate answer), being chaos pilots (who can lead and execute in unfamiliar territories) and combining divergent thinking, convergent action and influential communication.

These are not easy to find profiles and often neither easy to deal with, but it’s their distance from status quo what makes them good conductors of innovation.

I will add to the equation one thought: are these profiles found or made? While recruiting is an art and identifying these persons on the outside will for sure bring added value, creating an organisation that empowers individuals to become chaos pilots will contribute for sure to a more endurable shape shifting organisation.

A goal or a means?

Finally, and coming back to the beginning, should innovation be a goal by itself or rather a lens through which the organisation looks and interacts with the environment? Some companies are famous for their innovative drive and have innovation departments or roles, radiating certain guru aura. Without going that far, innovation can happen in every single task of the day: in how we plan or execute a meeting, in how we approach the design of an emailing, or even on how we develop our consumer understanding (the concept of “Unfocus group” by Tom Kelly from IDEO is one of my favourite research tricks.)

Applying innovative techniques to our everyday responsibilities hacks its output and enable us to bring our brands further. But it’s not something that comes out of sheer inspiration -even if creativity is often seen as the gift of some lucky ones-: it comes by acknowledging the need to break the “we have always done it this way” mode, by taking the time to think what can be done differently, and by trying out new techniques. Setting the right framework for these behaviours to flourish is undoubtedly one of the key missions of the organisation.

When innovation becomes the means to challenge the way we operate in the day-to-day, it’s when we start nurturing a learning organisation, definitely one of the good recipes for the secret sauce of innovation.

How will AI change the way brand teams work?

Much is being written about Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. Even a letter by some of the top tech leaders stating that we should slow things down when it comes to developing technologies more powerful than Chat GPT4. (As usual, life happens faster than laws and it would make sense to put a halt for regulations to catch up.) But whether we slow it or not, it’s clear that AI is progressively getting embedded in our everyday and companies are not an exception.

Multiple tools are arising and they’re not only the offer of a new provider or a cool quote on a trends report: they are probably a resource some employees already use at the individual level. The question is not so much whether this is right or wrong, because when something it’s hard to stop, that’s not a very fertile question, but rather, how leverage it in the best way.

So how will AI affect the way brand teams work? And how can organizations get ready to face this outburst? Some hints ahead.

The productivity grail?

Productivity is indeed one of the key variables when defining a high performing team. It’s obviously critical for marketeers, who juggle between data-driven insights, socially triggered conversations, and last-minute optimizations. AI gives a helping hand, as it can liberate time for what’s really important and automatise the tasks that require a certain level of research, replicability and -yes, let’s face it- creativity.

To make it more tangible, a recent MIT study estimates the increase in speed completion of certain taks can be as high as 37% when using ChatGPT.

How can we start integrating it in brand teams’ ways of working? And how do we make sure it really delivers on the productivity promise?

Room for experimentation

In this episode of HBR Idecast about the future of work, Ethank Mollick, associate professor of Management at the Wharton School, insists on the benefits of using ChatGPT in daily work and invites teams to start experimenting with it right away to detect which areas of responsibility it can handle. Doing prework research on a topic, summarizing the content of a meeting, automatising the generation of certain emails, writing content pieces… These are all areas where AI can deliver reasonable outputs or at least a good basis to start with. This article shows quite a good array of AI tools to help on different areas. And indeed, teams should start experiencing with this asap.

Several tactics to kick it off:

- Empowering the early adopters to test AI tools and share the learnings and applications with the rest of the team.

- Create “lab sessions” where all the team members play with an AI tool and check how they can manage some of their individual tasks.

- Identify a project to be accelerated through AI and build collectively the change roadmap to achieve it.  

Back to basics: the core behaviours

But will AI rise the productivity no matter how? I wouldn’t be so sure, as there was one key point to be careful about earlier on: AI liberates time “for what’s really important”. Being able to identify what is important and how to acheive it is fondamental. In the end, it all comes down to behaviours and without some critical competences, the use of AI could remain just another shiny object that won’t bring added value.

To accelerate productivity through AI we actually need to reinforce some basics of a productive brand team:

- Make the right questions: It’s always more interesting to rise a good question, than to give a good answer, because questions open doors to new visions. To ensure AI delivers an effective output, it’s key to make sharp, thorough, clear questions when using it. An anecdote shows it: the fake images of Pope Francis generated by Midjourney, had actually quite a precise briefing. And on a more thourough note, this article on Forbes stresses the importance of questions and why AI needs definitely the HI (Human Intelligence) to give its best version.

- Connect the dots: I always remember one meeting with a top luxury brand when I was working on the agency side, when after a long strategic workshop focused on upcoming trends, the client asked: “but… how do we connect the dots?” The question remained lingering for a moment, and she hit right on the spot. Having the capacity to make a brand live through a rich storytelling and an engaging, consistent omnichannel experience is still something that ChatGPT will have a hard time doing.

- Write the algorithm: and I’m not talking about writing the hard code, even though it will always be something interesting to learn, I’m talking about setting the rules that make AI work. This is particularly important when it comes to personalization, one of the hard-core benefits of AI as Salesforce logically states in this article. Creating meaningful, right-on spot, journeys in the brand experience requires human understanding and a quite a bunch of testing.

It's no surprise when we realise that these are key competences in the brand job: it’s all about insights generation, powerful strategic vision and the capacity to build and quickly course correct actionable brand roadmaps. By the end of the day, as Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic puts it in this Fast Company podcast episode on how AI will shape the future of work: “[Our] differentiating angle will be to develop and cultivate our emotional intelligence, our social skills, and our ability to feel what others feel and connect with them.”

Definitely, the competences of a good marketeer.

The year of the rabbit and why it’s important in organisational design

The Chinese New Year has just started and as you may know, we’re entering a year dominated by the Rabbit, a gentle creature that is supposed to bring hope, peace, and prosperity. I’m not sure these astrological predictions can safely be applied to the business challenges that we face nowadays, but there’s definitely another rabbit hole worth digging into for that matter: the trends report that some very interesting media are sharing these days. Why is this interesting? While it won’t tell us how love or luck will favour us this year, it can shed some light on how management is evolving and what we should be focusing on in the months to come. No menial advice!

Since at DUCTIL we are fond of brands and of teams making brands happen, we’ll first look at the trends around the future of work for this 2023 and how this will impact management and leadership. This list is far from exhaustive and only aims at pointing out similarities across studies. Reports like those carried out by Forrester, Udemy, Gartner or McLean, among others, share some common points; let’s discover them.

McLean trends report states the Employee Value Proposition is one of the key aspects to consider in 2023. 55% of companies don’t have an EVP, despite its beneficial effects, proven when it comes to recruiting talent, and promising in many other areas. Indeed, this is an area where organisations need to transform themselves: acknowledging their strengths and areas of improvement, in order to build a proposition that goes beyond the pure listing of purpose and values.  Having a clear statement on the advantages offered by the company to the employees, both material and intangible, on what makes it different from its competitors will at least make the organisation reflect on itself and have a clear northern star. And most importantly: “…organizations must also reinforce the EVP through their everyday practices.” How to ensure mechanisms that enable this in the long run is critical and one of the key areas where organisational design becomes key. Setting the right framework, to nurture the right behaviours, in a sustained manner over time, will be the engine keeping alive a healthy EVP.

Gartner also makes an interesting point about what they call “quiet hiring”. Squeezed between the phenomena of “quiet quitting” and the difficulty to recruit new talent, managers will have to focus on developing their existing teams (shouldn’t it always been the goal, by the way?). To this point, Gartner mentions how new sources of talent will be leveraged (alumni networks, contract work…), but also the importance of talent mobility, of stretch assignment and upskill to provide growth opportunities for employees, while also responding to always evolving organizational needs. Again, never has it been more critical to look inside and acknowledge where the opportunities of growth of each of the employees are, individually but also as a team. This focus on development will require more time and focus in the months to come. And this can’t be attributed only to a single department or responsible. The organisation will have to enable frameworks and dynamics that channel this focus on internal development throughout the whole organisation.

Udemy’s trends report also stresses the need to develop employees. Not surprisingly, learning becomes critical in their views, with a caveat: “a company is not automatically a learning organization when it offers training programs”. How to create a learning culture is a key aspect of organisational design and a delicate, intangible, area, where stirring the right behaviours and habits makes all the difference. “When learning and culture are closely aligned, they mutually reinforce each other, creating a powerful flywheel for employee and company growth.” We couldn’t have said it better.

But let’s be prudent. While nobody would argue that employees’ development should be a priority, Forrester points out how some B2C CMOs will fall in the short-term revenue growth trap. The search for quick-hit sales might favour certain profiles and practices, that will overlook brand building and “strategic levers that fuel long-term growth”. While it doesn’t sound promising, brands can’t afford not to deliver on results. Setting wise objectives, being smart about expectations management and maintaining a balance between the long-term view and the yearly goals are part of a healthy equation, that again, can only be sustained by the commitment of a well-integrated team.

This is how far we’ll get today, in terms of management forecasts, more to come in the next post. We won’t close without confessing though that we also did read some of the astrological predictions out there. If we are to trust the Chinese zodiac, “2023 is a year to focus on building deeper connections with loved ones, being more open and honest in communication, and appreciating the little things in life”. Mmm… not completely disconnected from what we just wrote! Let’s indeed focus on reinforcing connections and communication. This is what empower teams and what makes brands actually thrive. So many similar prophecies can’t all be wrong!