Bernarda’s Nine
Recently I shared the story of how I met my innovation mentor, Greg Bernarda. Now I want to zoom in on one project we did together. Earlier this year I received an invitation to join forces with a global team of designers and IMD MBA students led by Greg to turn a business idea into a tested business model in just 5 weeks.
I checked with my colleagues at wheretofromhere? that they could back me up during my absence and with their full support (#grateful) I accepted Greg’s invitation and took a plane to Lausanne, Switzerland in July. I want to share here the key learnings and innovation insights gained from joining a fascinating team adventure that had me use the business model innovation toolkit once more, but this time as the innovator, not the coach.
Genesis of mission 21st century business models
It all started from a realisation by Greg, business model innovation expert and co-author of bestselling book Value Proposition Design. He had witnessed multiple times how the stories and case studies he shares in innovation workshops create lasting memories for participants and often inspire them with a sense of new possibilities. The reason is that the stories Greg tells are quite different. Sadly, most of the stories of the business world tell a templated romanticised tale of accelerated growth and heroic capitalistic journey culminating in the delivery of value, often restricted to a very narrow financial view. The shiny paint that professional storytellers spray over those successful businesses and their leaders turn them into models and heroes for the masses, into employers of choice and CEOs of the year.
But are those really the only business stories worth sharing?
Greg and I thought otherwise. We know that every day, somewhere on our planet, there are people busy bringing into the world new ways of working, being, and living. New solutions, business models and organisations are advancing our society far from the spotlights. We’ve fallen in love with these stories. Because they speak of a new possibility for all of us: to become the architects of our own future. To be the leaders who create -in the words of Pixar executives- a future we want to belong to.
Ever since Greg had shared his realisation with me, a question lingered at the back of our mind: if those stories were so successful, could we build a scalable business around inspiring stories and innovation case studies?
That question remained in the air for a long time, as our agendas often rule our busy lives. But in spring 2017 wheels suddenly started to get in motion. Greg and Alex Osterwalder gave a lecture on entrepreneurship and innovation to IMD students as part of their MBA cursus. They got a great response from the audience and some students reached out after the lecture asking for more and investigating whether they could use the 5-week break in their MBA programme in the summer for an internship focused on learning more on innovation and entrepreneurship.
Greg saw the opportunity there to kill two birds with one stroke. First with the help of MBA students we would have enough research capacity to properly investigate the business idea we had been discussing. And then we could also test a hands-on entrepreneurship programme for IMD MBA students that would complement their classroom teaching. With that in mind, Greg designed a 5-week internship programme for IMD MBA students passionate about entrepreneurship, and he selected 3 students to join our business model exploration: Tiago from Portugal, Rory from Botswana and Zehra from Pakistan.
Moreover, Greg reached out to his close team of innovation coaches, designers, writers, friends that he has been regularly working with on innovation projects and offered them to work on a 5-week business exploration. Alvaro from Spain, Augustin from Switzerland, Lucy from China and myself from Australia, all said yes. Finally, he asked Alex Osterwalder, inventor of Business Model Canvas and co-author of Business Model Generation and Value Proposition Design, to act as our innovation coach along the way.
If you get a kind of Ocean’s Eleven feeling at this stage, that is absolutely normal…
Lessons from the other side of the fence
In my consulting work I have spent many days using the business model innovation toolkit to help clients on their innovation efforts but this was the first time I was applying the tools and framework I use with our clients on one of my own ideas. As you know now it was originally an idea from Greg but it didn’t take me long to embrace it and make it my own. I found the experience of being on the other side of the innovation coaching fence truly fascinating.
1. Depth & speed
One of the key things that teams that are new to innovation need to learn is to work iteratively. In your typical 2–3 day innovation ideation workshop in a corporate environment, teams are forced by design to work in ridiculously short time boxes at a breakneck pace. The idea behind this typical design is to embed the learning on working iteratively in order to have regular feedback loops and opportunities to course correct. The downside of this approach when taken to the extreme is that even with great tools in their hands teams can get used to producing mediocre outcomes.
When working as a team on the 21st century business models project and documenting the first versions of the value proposition canvas for our various customer segments, Greg and I were the two polar opposites on depth and speed. Greg’s preference is for depth, and getting to meaningful insights often takes longer than a 50 minute time box. Greg can become frustrated when a shallow outcome is produced with the tools he helped build, so he’s willing to spend the time required to get enough depth, and having witnessed him in action I fully understand that this approach works for him. But my personal preference is for speed. I like to get through an iteration on the value proposition canvas quickly with all my current ideas, let it rest, sleep on it and come back to the canvas for another rapid iteration the next day, and then another one, etc. until I have reached a feeling of clarity and depth.
Which approach is the best?
I learnt in Switzerland that this question is irrelevant. The reality is that to be successful in the innovation game you need both speed and depth. Focus on speed only and you’ll have teams of innovators with a false sense of progress when all they do is treading water. Focus on depth only and you’ll lose yourself in an idea maze. Innovators must learn to manage this paradox to progress. And innovation coaches need to observe, sense and adapt their design and coaching to find the right dosage of depth and speed based on individuals and teams’ preferences and needs.
2. On the criticality of coaching
One of the most terrifying realisation for me in this project was how oblivious a group of professional innovation coaches was to the most common advice we give to our clients. I won’t go into the most humiliating details but on that side of the fence I realised how easy it is to fall in love with your idea and to stay in the comfy room provided by the IMD with a lot of wall space, large windows on a beautiful park and free coffee. Lucky for us we had Alex Osterwalder acting as our innovation coach and he reminded us with his typical gentle touch to “get out of the building” and to not fall in love with our ideas… with a few more expletives that unfortunately I can’t publish here.
I knew from experience with clients that my role as an innovation coach was important but over there in Lausanne I realised that this coaching role is absolutely critical. Even when entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs “know”, when they have been trained, when they have experience, the coaching is critical to unlock them at times and prevent them from losing their most precious resources: time, energy and money.
3. Finding the right distance with feedback
My professional life started in a management consulting company that no longer exists called Gemini Consulting. One of the mantra at Gemini Consulting was “feedback is a gift”. As a young consultant going through Gemini University I was taught how to offer that gift to other people and how to receive that gift. I can trace back all the incredible things that happened in my own personal and professional development journey to that one skill I learnt: to give and receive feedback. And for that I will be forever grateful to my former colleagues at Gemini Consulting.
Earlier on in that article I explained that one key thing “would be intrapreneurs” and entrepreneurs need to learn is to work in short iterations in order to multiply the opportunities for feedback and course correction. From that you could easily take a shortcut to conclude that feedback is the lifeblood of innovation work, and that every feedback makes you closer to the success line. Unfortunately things are not as simple as that. A long habit of collecting feedback on my work has shown me that you don’t always have to use this gift you receive. The most obvious example is feedback on a draft document. Send it to a few people and you’re guaranteed to get contradicting feedback on a particular paragraph or sentence. If you accept the feedback and suggestions literally the readability of your document is compromised. So overtime I learnt to use critical thinking when dealing with feedback in order to decide when to take it into account and when not, and how to respect the intent behind the feedback when I can’t apply it literally. And in the innovation game, where you’re so dependent on access to customer feedback, finding the right distance with feedback by using critical thinking is also a key skill.
Moreover, in the innovation world, observation is often a better route to customer insights than direct feedback. Alex Osterwalder often says that “customers are experts of jobs, pains and gains, not the solutions to them”. Indeed customers are often not very reliable on assessing and sharing their intents, or providing feedback on innovation ideas. To tap into their expertise in jobs, pains and gains, I find observation to be as important as conversation, and a useful safeguard against potentially misleading customer feedback.
“If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse” Henry Ford
In our 21st century business models project we had a lot of requests by customers to just provide them with slightly better case studies, a bit more engaging for the audience, a bit more in synch with key business trends (growth in China, gender equality, etc.) and above all more recent. For us this sounded a lot like faster horses.
The things that were critical to us, having a strong point of view, a new language to talk about business stories, business success and a radically new way of taking the audience to the insights were not yet on our customers’ radar.
Were we on the wrong track? Should we immediately adapt our value proposition to the expectations of the few representatives of our customer segment we had talked to?
Or should we selectively ignore the feedback and give our strong point of view a chance? Should we try and convince? Find champions for our voice and point of view to be heard?
Were we innovators in denial of customer feedback? Were we delusional? Or ahead of the curve sensing and seeing something before anyone else?
Now is not the time to answer those questions as we are still progressing our exploration of a business around inspiring stories and case studies for innovation coaches and educators. But the key take-away from this part of our experience is that innovators have to handle that immense tension and apply critical thinking to find the right distance with feedback. Too much distance with feedback and you’re in denial, not enough distance and you could end up like a weather vane following the wind, a clear pathway to suboptimal outcomes. Moreover, on the path ahead of us, I’m now convinced that via observations and tests we need to search for evidence that validate or invalidate our critical assumptions even more than we need to collect feedback.
At the end of this story you need to picture us all facing the Jet d’Eau fountain in Geneva. We are all so much richer from the learning of this 5-week programme, proud to have been part of this and happy to have lived a meaningful experience. Tiago, Rory, Zehra, Lucy, Alvaro, Augustin, Greg and myself.
My gratitude goes to them as we all leave this 5-week adventure one by one. Greg is the last one to leave, one last look at the Jet d’Eau and with a smile on his face he’s gone. And if you get another Ocean’s Eleven feeling here that is again normal!
