Dear CEO, (a seven letter series)
About what follows:
I have been speaking around the world, from Singapore to Copenhagen and back, to audiences of all shapes and sizes, about the innovation imperative and how to create a culture of innovation in order to realize that imperative. The reception has been incredible, the feedback consistently positive and the questions from the audiences often the same: “How do I get my CEO to embrace the need for my company to change and how do we change?” Those questions are often followed by this question, “Would you be willing to meet with my CEO and try to convince him/her of all this?” Well, since I can’t likely meet with your CEO, I thought I’d write him or her a series of letters explaining why and how to change, and more specifically how to create a culture of innovation. The sub-title of the series is, appropriately, “letters to the reluctant.”
September 12th
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: here to help.
We are between a rock and a hard place you and me.
The fact is every leader today is being pressed on both sides, tasked to keep the current value proposition ticking while we decipher and invest in what the future business will look like. And that future view is muddied up by a massive and growing list of unknowns, charmingly presented as “disruption”.
The funny thing about disruption is that we humans tend not to acknowledge it until it’s too late. We do that in part because we’re necessarily focused on our current business but also because we are reluctant to embrace the truth of our vulnerability, the changes in the world, and the changes we might have to make as a consequence. And to admit that we are vulnerable is to admit either defeat or mismanagement, and neither of us is going to do that.
The other thing most of us are unwilling to admit is that the pace of change is now faster than our organization’s current natural capacity to change. And maybe even our own. And therein lies both the real problem and the source of the solution.
The only way to get out from between that rock and the hard place is to change our organization’s and our personal capacity to change. We can’t solve this problem by synthetic means, e.g. hiring a chief innovation officer or building an innovation lab. We can’t solve it through acquisitions or making massive investments in “digital transformation.” To prove that last point a recent study by CIO Magazine revealed that of the $1.3 trillion spent on digital transformation over the last ten years, $900 billion was determined to be a waste of money. The study also revealed that five out of the top six reasons for that failure rate weren’t technology related but rather human issues, behavioral issues to be exact. Which sets up my conclusion and fundamental advice.
We can only solve the innovation task organically, which means a top-down, bottom-up sustained effort to change our behaviors. Innovation is not a thing, getting better at change is not a thing, it’s a behavior. I know you don’t want to hear this. Nobody does. But it’s true.
So, the question then becomes how do we change the behavior of our organizations? How do we shift our culture from what it is to a culture that is more innovative, more capable of productive change? How do we motivate (and require) people at every level of the company, including the executive team, to think differently, act differently, collaborate differently to produce the insights, and the ideas that can result in a sustainable future? The bad news is that the answers are complicated. The good news is that I have spent the last ten years contemplating the question and have determined seven basic lessons that lead to the outcome that we are after. An organization that is aligned, driven, and pretty damn unique in its capacity to not just keep up with the pace of change but actually get ahead of it. I’ve got to run catch a plane now, but I’ll follow up with another letter soon that begins to share those lessons and the pathway. In the interim, hang in there. And know that you are not alone.
Chris
September 19th
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: the right measure
I hope you are well, and that the world swirling around you is swirling a little less and that you’re feeling less stressed about the path forward. Unlikely, but it’s okay to hope! As I shared in my first letter, the challenge for us all is that the pace of change is now faster than our organization’s current natural capacity to change. The disruptions we face, the torrent of new competitors, new technologies, and even new ways of connecting the basic dots of how to run a business are overwhelming, befuddling, and downright debilitating. Because rather than rise to the challenge of change, most organizations and most people either run the other way or simply stop dead in their mental tracks, ignoring the truth while longing for the good old days. Until it’s too late.
So in order to respond to change we must get better at it. We must increase our organization’s capacity not just to change but to change quickly, effectively, and in perpetuity. Because the other ugly truth is this dynamic is not going away. In fact, I think you’d agree that the pace of the change and the consequences it carries are only going to get bigger.
So what exactly do we do? Well, it turns out that the only way to substantively increase your organization’s capacity to change is to motivate it, teach it, exemplify it, require it, align around it, and measure it. And interestingly, measuring it is the essential starting point. For in order to make something better, we first have to agree on what better is. So, when you tell me you want a nimbler organization, what do you mean? When you say you want to create a culture of innovation, what does that mean? And how do you know that you don’t have one already? How are you measuring your current innovative or change capacity? If you’re like 99% of the organizations I talk to, you don’t. So, we have to start there. We have to define what we’re after in really specific terms, and then use those outcomes as guides for what we actually need to do to make the outcomes happen. It’s basic systems design thinking but not often applied by organizations seeking to change their capacity to change.
After years of working at this What are we after? question, I have come to believe that the measures of a more change capable, innovative, nimble organization are both functional and behavioral. Sure, the old measures of revenue and profit growth are still valid, but they don’t really capture whether the organization is better at creating, connecting, and manifesting value out of the aforementioned swirl. Remember an organization is nothing but an aggregation of individuals. So, if we want it to be more innovative and nimbler, then we want/need them and us to be more innovative and nimbler, and that should be the focus of our outcome definition and what we’re measuring.
I call my measurement dashboard for an organization seeking to be better at change, at innovating, the Latitude Index. It’s an amalgam of hopefully positive movement measures across multiple dimensions that measures how people (leaders, managers, employees, and customers) feel, think, behave, and are able to actualize their potential for positive change, i.e. latitude. The Latitude Index looks at structural, cultural and individual components of the organization, from how aligned the leadership team is around the vision and values of the organization to how safe individual employees feel regarding their ability to tell the truth about what’s working and what’s not, and how to make it better. It looks at things like learning growth, personal happiness, definitional clarity, and cross-organizational collaboration or the lack thereof. It seeks to measure not just how an organization works but how good it is at working to work better.
For our organizations to become better at change, to become more innovative and adaptive to the swirl around us, we have to start by doing the hard work of defining what better is. And then working at each of the attributes and variables. The Latitude Index is just one approach, but it does underscore another essential truth. If we want to create new change amenable behaviors within our organizations, we have to measure the behaviors that will result in those behaviors. Including yours and mine.
I hope this helps. I’ll be in touch next week with some follow-on thoughts.
Chris
October 17th, 2019
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: one plan
There’s a lot of chatter right now about a (g)looming global recession which to my mind puts even more of a heat lamp on this question of how we can increase our organizations’ capacities to change and innovate in response to the change “out there.” The changes that arrive with a recession will only make our jobs harder and the job of creating a culture of innovation that much more essential. So, as they say, times a wasting.
In my last letter I shared a view that the essential first step is to define what we’re after, exactly. The idea is that you cannot make something better, you cannot lead an organization to better, if you don’t first define what better is. Or said another way, we have to design the output before we design the input or actions we need to take. What is the output of a culture of innovation? What does it look like? How does it perform? How do people feel within it? Fundamentally, what are the measures of it. Defining that set of metrics (and how we’re going to measure them) is job one in the quest to move our organizations from change-averse to change driven, from innovative on rainy days to innovative every day of the week. I call my dashboard the Latitude Index. You can call yours whatever you want, I just encourage you and your team to create one.
The right culture of innovation dashboard is more than a collection of success metrics. Practically speaking it should expose the gaps in your organizations’ innovation capacity, gaps that can only be filled with the right combo platter of strategies, tactics, and behaviors. Let’s call that combo platter “the plan.” Now I know you already have an annual and maybe even multi-year planning process. What I am proposing here is that you modify that process to incorporate these new metrics and from that the thinking and tasks required to achieve them. Whatever you do DO NOT create a separate plan. DO NOT create an innovation task force. DO NOT treat this effort as a discrete thing. The way of an organization is its way. If we want to change its way the annual plan, the way it plans, must be used as the process backbone. And another DO NOT: do not make this a Human Resources project. It will fail. That’s not a shot at HR, it’s just an acknowledgment that changing an organization’s capacity to change is an all-in leadership and management job. It can’t be delegated, everybody needs to be involved, and the task never ends.
Two other things about the planning process. It has to be completely transparent, top-down, bottom-up and sideways in its development and it should be wrapped in a motivating theme. The words Annual Plan won’t excite anybody, including your Board. At Harvard I called our multi-year plan The Journey to I. “I” stood for innovation, for impact, and for the individual. Which brings me to my second point. You’re after linkage. The organization’s metrics and strategies should inform each department’s plan, metrics and strategies which should inform each employee’s personal and professional development plan. Remember that the way of the organization is the way of its employees. Improve their way, you improve your way. Motivate and enable them to become more innovative, more adept at dealing with change, and you just got what you’re after.
Of course, it’s not quite that simple, which is why you’ll get another letter from me next week. Stay tuned, and as always, thanks for thinking about this stuff. It’s important.
Chris
October 24th, 2019
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: remind me
Your pen pal is back. It’s week four and time for a gentle reminder, which is a perfect foreshadowing of the point of my fourth letter in this series. Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve been exploring how to lead and manage your organization to a nimbler, more innovative, more change capable place not because you want to but because you have to. We both know that if we don’t figure this out we’re going to wake up one day to our lunch being eaten, Chapter 7, or a revolting shareholder revolt. Thus far we’ve covered the why we need to do this, we’ve called out the importance of creating a dashboard of the outcomes we’re after, and we’ve framed why a top-down and bottom-up integrated plan is key. Now comes the hard part. The reminding refrain…
Here’s the rub. Employees need reminding and they need constant reinforcement and motivation to change, to try harder, to stay on strategy, on plan. People used to ask me what a CEO did. I said, “I remind people.” Absent reminding, employees will get lost, become stuck, forget what you are trying to do, forget their role in it, or simply choose not to do it. You and I are responsible for reminding our employees of why we must change, how we must change, how the Journey to I (or your equivalent) plan is going to get us there, and perhaps most importantly, what’s in it for them.
What’s in it for them is opportunity. The change agenda is as much about changing the trajectory of employees’ lives as it is the life of the organization. If you want them to embrace blowing up their comfort zones and working differently you have got to present the upside as far greater than the downside. And the upside is their ability to get ahead, to grow, to get a better job either inside or outside the organization. Yes, I said outside. The truly enlightened CEO understands that people give you their all when you treat their future, their life, as thoughtfully and objectively as your own.
The reminding task takes many forms, and it should. It must be presented as motivation, education, and challenge. Every time I speak to the entire organization, in email or in person, I use the opportunity to remind them why this work is so important to our future and their future. In smaller group discussions, when I see confusion or a lack of clarity about what we’re doing, I remind attendees through education, explaining how it all fits together and how to look at the work to be done through that lens. And when I hold individuals or small teams accountable for what they said they were going to do but didn’t, I am reminding them that we’re not screwing around here. That this journey thing is everything, for us and for them.
Funnily enough reminding takes practice. We need to remind ourselves to work at reminding others. And because it takes practice it takes patience and resolve. There is good reminding and bad reminding, and there is the noise of reminding that can start to drive us nuts, unless we remind ourselves that reminding is an essential role to ensure that we get where we want to get to.
The need for a reminding refrain reflects another truth in all this and that is the importance of unwavering focus. Perhaps ironically you cannot create a culture of innovation, an organization adept at adaptation, without crystal clear clarity of intention and consistent and even repetitive communication and management protocols. Attempting to foster innovation on a bed of confusion is tantamount to seeding chaos. We need solid foundations to create the comfort that creates the capacity to change, to think differently, to innovate. And we need constant reminding.
I hope this is helpful. You can always reach me at chris@chriscolbert.com.
Chris
November 3, 2019
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: teach me
Let’s stop for a minute and think about what we’re really trying to do here. Our organizations are nothing but the people within them. Our employees’ capacity to create more value than they currently create, to be more innovative than they currently are, cannot be treated as the consequence of a sort of immaculate conception. The way to get them to change their output is to motivate and teach them to change their output. Teach. As in develop. As in prepare. As in intentionally give our employees the understanding, the knowledge, the skills, and the sensibilities they need to think bigger, to connect heretofore unconnected dots, to solve seemingly intractable problems, the list goes on and on. As teachers we must prod, encourage and exemplify the essential behaviors that result in active learning, in more effective collaborations, more grounded ideas, more bold experiments that just might result in breakthrough something or others.
This stuff is teachable. We just need to commit to being teachers and good ones at that.
The oddities of this are many. First, most leaders and managers are not tasked with or held accountable to being teachers. Second, most employees don’t actively seek to learn or even expect to be taught. Third, the stuff they need to learn is the stuff generally declared as essential but treated as not. It’s the stuff called “soft skills.” Everyone agrees that they are critical skills but few corporations (and universities) want to invest money or time in them. Fourth, the vast majority of organizations have no real commitment to learning. Sure, there might be a “training and development” budget but it’s paltry and probably focused on business basics, not on how to become an innovator. And fifth, the biggest oddity of them all: If we don’t commit to teaching and training as a central tenet of our organizations, we’ll have to start letting go of huge swaths of our workforces because they will be/are under-skilled, aka not keeping up. And that makes no sense.
Like the importance of reminding (re-read my last letter), the task of teaching can be achieved in many forms. We can teach in the moment; we can teach when we are wearing our management hats and we can teach via formal learning systems. Teaching in the moment means taking every opportunity we can to explain the Why of a situation. Why it is happening or did happen, why we should approach it a certain way, and why it will benefit the organization, the department or the individual involved. As Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle reveals, Why is more important than How which is more important than What. Why makes the learning stick.
Teaching via the management function means exactly that. It means working with every one of our direct reports to develop a formal personal and professional development plan. And then using any and all interactions with each individual to teach to their improved capacities and behaviors that the plan calls for. I know it's daunting to do this, but since they're giving us 65% of their waking hours shouldn't we give them more than a paycheck in return?
The third form, the creation of formal learning systems, is the hardest one not just because of the investment and commitment required but because in order for the systems to be effective you have to start with your desired outcomes, i.e. what skills and sensibilities do you want your employees to develop? It turns out that most organizations, and most people, are really bad at defining outcomes, particularly involving a task as obtuse as creating a culture of innovation. But you have to force the question and the answers and then build structured systems of learning and engagement to help deliver them.
The final, perhaps scary, thought is that the learning thing also applies to you and your executive team. In fact, you might want to start there. Most CEOs and c-suite inhabitants have been in their jobs for years, even decades. And we all grew up thinking that once we got here we would know everything we needed to know. Well, we don’t. The rate of change is leaving us in the dust. And in order to be able to guide our companies effectively, we have to catch up. Fast. In order to create cultures of innovation in our companies our personal cultures need to become more innovative. First. And learning (and teaching) is the primary way to do that. I know you don't want to, but it's kind of our only choice.
Until next week.
Chris
November 10th, 2019
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: safety first
Remember when we were both brand spanking new to the business world, sitting in our first meetings, listening to the more senior people, including our boss, yammer about this and that, and we were afraid to speak? We were trying to figure out what was going on, why people were talking or not talking the way they were, while we tried to look intelligent and not embarrass ourselves.
Remember?
Well, it turns out that keep-your-mouth shut fear for some, in fact, most employees, never goes away, they never get over it. The vast majority and therefore the vast majority of organizations are riddled with fear. People are afraid to speak their minds, to share their ideas, to step forward and challenge what is going on, including the absurd directive that just popped out of the CEO’s mouth. And it’s most likely true of your organization. Yes indeed.
It’s also true that this fear of speaking our minds is a societal thing, one that goes back to the first societies. Off with their heads ring a bell? While I’m not sure it was ever a positive thing, it has become more problematic as the challenges we face organizationally have grown in complexity and therefore need more perspectives and voices to solve them. While it may not seem like a life and death issue, sometimes it can actually be a life and death issue. In his recent book Rebel Ideas, Matthew Syed shares the story of the 1996 Everest expedition that ended up with eight people dead, in large part because the more junior members of the climb knew what was going wrong but were afraid to challenge the group leader. And the group leader was a very competent and caring guy.
Fear, particularly hierarchical fear, kills people and kills innovation. And that second part was pretty much proven by Google through a 2012 internal study they did dubbed Project Aristotle. They wanted to understand why some Google teams significantly outperformed other teams both in terms of productivity and innovative capacity. They pulled together their best and brightest statisticians, organizational psychologists, sociologists, and engineers to survey and examine the specific dynamics and attributes of hundreds of different teams. And after munching and crunching the data they determine this:
The most important characteristic of innovative teams is a feeling of psychological safety
The best teams felt completely safe to share, to challenge each other, to put crazy ideas on the table and not fear castigation, retribution, ridicule or blowback from the boss. They collaborated not as stratified functions but as peers, as humans, trusting each other and believing that nothing spoken would be used against them.
So, in an oddly simple way, the key to creating a higher-performing, more innovative organization that is wonderfully capable of getting ahead of the never ebbing tsunami of disruption, is to suck fear out of it, to create an environment that is psychologically safe. The complexity is in how exactly to do that. And the answer will come in my next letter, the last letter in this series.
Until next week.
Chris
Any questions, write me at chris@chriscolbert.com
December 20th, 2019
Dear CEO, Letters to the reluctant: Letting go of ego
I apologize for the months that have gone by since last I wrote. The simple truth is that I was afraid of writing again, and more specifically, afraid that I could not really deliver on the promise I made in my last letter, the promise to explain how to engender psychological safety in your organization in order to unleash its full innovative capacity. Well, I’ve been thinking hard (and long) and finally feel ready to share a prescription. But before I do I want to quickly recap the logic, my so-called six-letter method that got us to here:
Letter #1: We must do this. If we don’t innovate we will die, figuratively or literally. And the only way to become more innovative is to become more innovative, to actually change our behavior and the behavior of those who work for us. As I wrote, “Innovation is not a thing, getting better at change is not a thing, it’s a behavior. I know you don’t want to hear this. Nobody does. But it’s true.”
Letter #2: Define what more innovative means. For our organizations to become better at change, to become more innovative and adaptive to the swirl around us, we have to start by doing the hard work of defining what better is. And then working at each of the attributes and variables. If we want to create new change amenable behaviors within our organizations, we have to measure the behaviors that will result in those behaviors. Including yours and mine.
Letter #3: One plan. With our measures of innovation success in place, we can and must then develop a plan to realize them. But not a separate plan, instead a plan that integrates into our standard planning process, that links metrics with actions, corporate initiatives with individual development efforts. A plan that achieves alignment upside down and sideways. A plan that is the clarion cry of the organization, the motivating refrain of the day to day. Remember The Journey to I?
Letter #4: Remind them. The consummate execution of anything change effort, any plan, requires constant reminding and unrelenting focus. You cannot create a culture of innovation, an organization adept at adaptation, without crystal clear clarity of intention and consistent and even repetitive communication and management protocols. Attempting to foster innovation on a bed of confusion is tantamount to seeding chaos. We need solid foundations to create the comfort that creates the capacity to change, to think differently, to innovate. And we need constant reminding.
Letter #5: We must teach and learn. Our organizations are nothing but the people within them. Our employees’ capacity to create more value than they currently create, to be more innovative than they currently are, cannot be treated as the consequence of a sort of immaculate conception. The way to get them to change their output is to motivate and teach them to change their output. Teach. As in develop. As in prepare. As in intentionally give our employees the understanding, the knowledge, the skills and the sensibilities they need to think bigger, to connect heretofore unconnected dots, to solve seemingly intractable problems, the list goes on and on. Oh, and we must commit to learning ourselves.
Letter #6: Make it safe to take risk. The most innovative feel completely safe to share, to challenge each other, to put crazy ideas on the table and not fear castigation, retribution, ridicule or blowback from the boss. They collaborate not as stratified functions but as peers, as humans, trusting each other and believing that nothing spoken would be used against them.
So, in an oddly simple way, the key to creating a higher-performing, more innovative organization that is wonderfully capable of getting ahead of the never ebbing tsunami of disruption, is to suck fear out of it, to create an environment that is psychologically safe. The complexity is in how exactly to do that. And the answer on how to do that, finally, is here:
Let go of your ego.
Yup. Your ego. The part of you that cherishes hierarchy, that needs to be right, that fears vulnerability, and the possibility of it being revealed that you don’t have all the answers and that you actually have a track record of failures that goes along with your successes. Banish that bastard to the hinterlands and replace him(her) with a newfound view of what it means to lead, which is to love. I know, new age-y right? But not really. Enlightened leaders understand that their primary role is to enable those around them to soar, to realize their full potential as people and professionals both because it benefits their organization and because it’s the human thing to do, the loving thing to do. When you approach every interaction with your organization from a position of unconditional love it is virtually impossible for that organization to respond from a position of fear or distrust. Safety will be realized and with that a culture of profound meaning and capacity, a culture of innovation.
That’s it. I hope my seven letters and the thoughts they contained have been of help. I wish your journey to be one full of positive learning and growth, for you, your company and the people you care for.
Chris