Connected Conference Takeaway : Dinosaur inner Disruption, the Lego way
One of my most important takeaways from Connected Conference would be this one. David Gram from Lego was showcasing the Future Lab work inside of Lego. This personally affected me on multiple levels. I have always been trying to bring change wherever I happen to be. And always, when trying to move the lines, you hit a wall. I used not to understand that wall, and blame the wall itself. Here is a clear view from David on how to do that.
Disclaimer : This is more my understanding and my opinions than a record or a debriefing of the talk.
This is a show !
David’s team is really well branded. Those guys have the same awesomeness as the Expandables. I would picture them with so much badass attitude that even Chuck Norris would bow down in front of them. And yet, they still have lego friendly faces.
Future Lab is basically an innovation unit like you can find in any big corporation. Usually, when a Dinosaur is frightened to be disrupted, he builds a team in charge of innovation. So while those guys are okay, you can tell that the company is innovating. On the other hand, if some competitors innovate faster, you have somebody to blame. This is usually a bad seat.
But David’s team has an awesome branding. They are the “Rebels”, they are going against the mainstream. And the message they send to the rest of the company is pretty simple : They are there “to disrupt Lego from inside before anyone does it from outside”.
They are there “to disrupt Lego from inside before anyone does it from outside”.
This is like sending a message to everyone : “I’m going to be a pain in your ass, but this is for the best”. I like this. How badass is it?
Fun idea : They are uberizing Lego. I like that this buzzword is now used for anything. Like SNCF (french railway company, which is uberzing itself : http://www.latribune.fr/entreprises-finance/services/transport-logistique/pourquoi-la-sncf-s-uberise-t-elle-a-marche-forcee-477042.html — french article).
Customer Focus, MVP, Fail fast : this is Lean
This was a great show again. Like amazon’s “Customer focus forever” talk, he showed us how focused they are. They do in-house immersion. This means that they spend weeks in an actual family’s home, watching them play with many toys, not only legos. And they had an awesome video to show that.
Once they identified what could be Lego in the future, without losing their core value, they try to make a MVP (Minimum Viable Product). They do a lot of MVPs. Prototype, prove your point and fail fast. To them MVP is the key to their “failing fast” strategy.
Failure in a Danish company might not have been an easy thing to settle. David admitted that it was hard to do. MVPs help them to fail fast and cheaply. They want to limit the cash damage. They had to learn how to accept failure, gain insight from it, make it constructive and move forward.
Yeah that’s a lean way to do it. And they even identified a process for “Intrapreneurship”
Intrapreneurship ain’t Entrepreneurship
This is it. All in one slide. First do a proof of concept or fail learning.
Then you have to take some distance and imagine how to make it fit into the organization. It must not make your company lose its focus on its core business and so on. This is where you evaluate what is key to be internalized and what is key to be outsourced. He also mentioned working with agile external partners. To him, it was more than outsourcing. He wants to work with an other company, only if they have both something to learn. This is more a partnership than a client-provider relationship. And Agility is rather a necessity, a commodity than a service.
To internalize change and disruption, first know and love the company
Obviously, the Future Lab team has a clear understanding what Lego is about. There is a Lego way to do things. Their company has a mission and a spirit. This Spirit of perfectionism makes it hard for Lego to accept changes and to take risks — and that’s why they need a B4dass team.
David is such a brand ambassador! He understands that the core value proposition of Lego is aligned with their core business. Their value proposition is that those bricks are compatible forwards and backwards. When you buy a Lego set it just never stops working. And that’s core to their value proposition.
To keep selling new products, they had to understand how to make them. David told a story where, in the 90s, numbers weren’t that good and strategy consultants told them to diversify their products like were doing competitors (Hasbro…). This wasn’t working, so the consultant advised to sell the company. But the founding family came back and decided to focus everything on the brick and especially the Lego City series. He poured a lot of money back into the company and keep it going. Now Lego is out-performing. And they learned from that, that they need to keep the focus on it.
“Stick to the Brick” is the Lego way to say keep focus on the core business.
Now when they make a new product, they are careful. They want it recognizable as a Lego product miles away, and yet to be totally unseen. That’s how they protect the brand and the core value, the brick.
Recognizable as a Lego product miles away, and yet totally unseen
So when David’s team wants to disrupt lego, they come from Lego to the point they want. This is the “internalize it” part of the intrapreneurship process.
Then comes the “Scaling”. Moving the line is not enough. You have to care about them and keep pushing. Make sure that the change propagates and reachs its goal.
5 Tips to be a Rebel
“People will hate your project. Accept it”. This is right. This is why you are a rebel. Actually, you have first to be okay with it. Then you will be able to change your point of view and undestand how to move the line. Else, you are stuck on a personal fight.
“Only break the rules you understand”. Once, a wise co-worker told me : “You have to understand that when you throw things away, saying it’s bullshit, you hurt people that made those at first”. This was right, but it wasn’t enough. David told that you have to find the one that is making this line and speak with them. Try to understand why this is important to them. Make him speak about it. You want to know the story. There is an event that made them learn and care about this line. Most of the time, making him tell that story just with a loud voice will make this line useless. Because the story shows that there was a different context at the time and that this line is obsolete. If it’s not enough, you will precisely know what proof of concept you need to make. Make a deal “If I show you that we can do it this way, are you okay to move ?”. And you just won a new supporter !
“Build a tribe”. This is fun. It sounds like a quote from Seth Godin’s Tribe. There was so much from this book in David’s talk that I was surprised that it doesn’t compare himself to a unicorn in a balloon factory. In his book, Mr Godin tells a story where he is a young product manager in an overstuffed video games company. He had 2 games to deliver and not enough developers to do it. He made a newsletter. He made sure that everybody read it. In this one he was putting forward how the games were innovative, how the gameplay was different and how great it was for the people to be working on it. After a few weeks, most of the company was working on his projects and they were shipped on time! If you want to lead change, you have to build this tribe: here are your early adopters. When people get into the tribe, its identity tells them they have to be change-compliant. This is definitely key.
“Write love letters”. This part of it. If you want to make everybody to accept the change, you have to recruit ambassadors for your project. Take somebody who hates your project, send them a love letter, and now they are an ambassador. People need to see some consideration, they need to feel involved. And this is how you do it!
“Make people shine”. Being a rebel is cool. But it doesn’t mean you have to be alone against everybody. At first, Apple began with a few Crazy Ones, the misfits, the rebels. Those who doesn’t accept the status quo. Nowadays, everybody wants to be one of them. Everybody wants to be an Apple Fanboy. The rebel thing is just a way to make it cool to be change-friendly. And you have to make people shine to reward them for being a rebel. This feeds their needs of identity. And they will thank you.
There are other ways of doing it
This was astonishing. It’s great way of doing it. And in itself, being able to stand and say it with such a conviction is an achievement and show awesomeness. But aren’t there other way of doing it ?
I have something in mind. I think about Disney. They made a video “Why Disney does not have a CTO” : http://for.tn/13XfA69
Their way to do it is very different. They are fostering everybody to experiment and then gather them to show off, to exchange feedback about what they discovered. Actually, their “innovation department” is just focused in facilitating, animating a community of innovative people. All in all, it’s the same objective as Lego’s Future Lab, build a tribe of change-friendly people. But the way is very different.
I’m pretty sure that Future Lab is a solution that suits the very monolithic structure of Lego. And I’m pretty sure that there are other ways to do this work and I’m eager to know them !
I will have two more Takeaway from Connected Conference stories on Medium during the week. Make sure you follow my profile to read them and click on the recommend button if you like this one =D
