This document discusses strategies for fostering change, innovation and strategy. It emphasizes that organizations must be resilient, nimble and evolving to succeed. Leaders should encourage experimentation, give permission to try new things, and celebrate both success and failure. Innovation is powered by understanding user needs through direct observation and collaboration across networks. Leaders must have the courage to innovate and foster a culture where employees feel empowered to question the status quo and take risks.

1. Change, Innovation and
Strategy
Insights for Emerging Leaders
Jack Jordan

2. Questions to Run on
• What can you do you to encourage more
innovation?
• Directly
• Indirectly
• What does culture have to do with it and
how do you foster it?
• Transparency
• Shared vision
• Permission to act

3. Type of Organizations that
Succeed
• Resilient
• Nimble
• Evolving
• Innovative
• The challenge is what do you to to foster
those aspects?

4. How do you Speed
Change?
• Know who you want to change
• Know where your client is at related to
change
• Listen to reasons for resistance
• Be patient and step thru the process

5. Prochaska’s Change
Model
• Pre-contemplation (Not Ready)- People are not intending to take
action in the foreseeable future, and are unaware the opportunity
• Contemplation (Getting Ready)- People are beginning to recognize
that an opportunity exists, and start to look at the pros and cons of
their continued actions
• Preparation (Ready)- People are intending to take action in the
immediate future, and may begin taking small steps toward change
• Action – People are actively using new process or method
• Maintenance – People have been able to sustain action tracking
results and developing new rationalization of situation
• Termination – Individuals have developed a new world view related
to the topic

6. Evert Rodgers Diffusion of
Innovation
• Five Items Speed diffusion
• Relative advantage
• Compatibility
• Simplicity
• Trialability
• Observeability

7. Taylor Strategy to
Situation

8. Taylor Strategy to
Situation

9. How do you Improve
Innovation?
• Experiment
• Give Permission
• Expect Experimentation (Make it risky to not try new
things)
• Cheerlead for Change (Praise and reward trying,
Celebrate failure)
• Broad Points of view
• Collaborate with others
• Look for people with unusual connections
• Read broadly
• Encourage Collaboration

10. Model for Generating Innovative
Ideas
Courage to
innovate
Behavioral
skills
Cognitive skill to
synthesize novel
inputs
Questioning
Observing
Networking
Experimentin
g
Challenging
the
status quo;
Taking risks
Associational
thinking
Innovativ
e
business
idea
Adapted from Christensen, Clayton M.; Jeff Dyer; Hal Gregersen, The Innovator's DNA:
Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators. Harvard Business Review Press, July,
2011.

11. “What a person does on his own, without being
stimulated by the thoughts and experiences of
others, is even in the best of cases rather paltry and
monotonous.”
—Albert Einstein
“Successful innovation is not a single
breakthrough. It is not a sprint. It is not an event
for the solo runner. Successful innovation is a
team sport.”
—Quyen Nguyen
The Lone Innovator

12. Observe Real People in Real-life
Situations
“Innovation is powered by a thorough
understanding , through direct observation, of
what people want and need in their lives and
what they like or dislike about the way particular
products are made, packaged, marketed, sold, and
supported.”
Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

13. Input
s
Production
processes
Distributi
on
Customer
s
Design &
Redesig
n Custome
r
feedback
Custome
r
research
Suppor
t
Need
s
Adapted from Figure 6, p. 58
The New Economics, 2nd
Ed.
Customer Research - Deming

14. Customer Research
“It’s not the customers’ job to be visionaries.
Customers may lack the vocabulary to
explain what’s wrong, or what’s missing.”
- Tom Kelley, IDEO

15. “Every company prides itself on giving customers
what they ask for, but the problem with listening to
customers is that when companies ask customers
what they like, customers are sure to answer by
naming products and services that already exist.
This form of research is really just being an order
taker, not an innovator.”
̶ Thomas Lockwood, Design Thinking: Integrating Innovation,
Customer Experience, and Brand Value, Skyhorse Publishing, April
2013.
Customer Research

16. “We have found that observers are more
successful at figuring out jobs to be done and
better ways to do them when they… actively
watch customers to see what products they [use]
to do what jobs, …”
Customer Research
̶ Christensen, Dyer, and Gregersen, The Innovator's
DNA

17. - Tom Kelley, The Art of
Innovation
IDEO’s Five Step
Methodology for
Innovation
1. Understand the market, the client, the
technology, and perceived constraints.
2. Observe real people in real-life situations.
3. Visualize new-to-the-world concepts and the
customers who will use them.
4. Evaluate and refine prototypes
5. Implement the new concept

18. “I haven’t failed . . . I’ve just found 10,000
ways that do not work.”
—Thomas Edison
Experimenting
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of
ideas.
- Linus Pauling

19. “Experiments are key to innovation because they
rarely turn out as you expect, and you learn so
much… I encourage our employees to … experiment.
If you can increase the number of experiments you
try from a hundred to a thousand, you dramatically
increase the number of innovations you produce.”
̶ Jeff Bezos, Amazon
Experimenting

20. Thank you
• Special thank you to Dr. Gipsie Ranney for her
conversations on innovation and sharing
content from her InThinking Network lecture

21. “They will not let us”
• Organizational myths keep people from trying
things
• Who is the “Boogie Man” in organizations
• Transforming care at the bedside was a
program to kill this myth.

22. Experimenting
Structured
• Focused
• Rigorous
• Documented
• Limited
Unstructured
• Free Form
• May lack rigor
• Varied
Documentation
• Nimble

23. P
D
S
A
The Shewhart Cycle for Learning and Improvement
The P D S A Cycle
Act – Adopt the
change, or abandon it
or run through the
cycle again.
Study the results
What did we learn?
What went wrong?
Plan a change or a test,
aimed at improvement
Do – Carry out the
change of the test
(preferably on a small
scale).
Deming, The New Economics

25. Richard Farson and Ralph Keyes, “The Failure
Tolerant Leader,” Harvard Business Review,
August 2002
Competition within
Organizations
“The idea that achievement is maximized when we go at
one another tooth and nail is engraved on our national
psyche. But when the road to success requires making
others fail, innovation gets left by the wayside.
Competition infects coworkers with a desire to win rather
than to solve problems and move projects forward. In the
process, employees inhibit the free flow of information so
vital to innovation.
Those who feel their work is being judged on conventional
concepts of success and failure, and who feel they're
competing with coworkers for the brass ring, will want to
protect information rather than share it. This is a textbook
way to squelch innovation.”

26. Complicated vs.
Complex
Complicated
• May have many steps
and components
• Many actors may need to
accomplish role in the
work
• Results are replicable
• Building a Building etc.
Complex
• May have many steps
and components
• Actors need to
accomplish tasks with
communication and
feedback loops
• Results are not replicable
• Raising a child

27. How are the two managed
differently?
• Complicated problems benefit from tight
definition
• Complicated problems can be planned many
steps in advance
• Complex problems can be fundamentally
changed by over definition
• Complex problems require course corrections
and solutions to issues emerge from
observation

28. Constancy of Purpose –
Test of a Leader
• Deming’s first Point
• “All human organizations will disappoint” –
Nadia Bolz-Webber
• You will have to make decisions that take you
away from your core values. The test of a leader
is not abandoning those values.

29. Strategy
Staying a Step Ahead
• Connect yourself with broad set of ideas
• Read many points of view
• Hire people different from yourself
• Listen to those resisting you
• Look for the subtle
• Lead and crime / test scores
• Single use zoning and sprawl
• Common is not always better
• Deming and batteries

30. Connections Matter
• “Disruptive innovators shine best at associating
when actively crossing all kinds of borders
(geographic, industry, company, profession,
discipline, and so on) …”
• ̶ Christensen, Clayton M., Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, The Innovator's
DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, Harvard
Business Review Press, July, 2012.

31. Connections Matter
“Many companies rigidly separate functions such as
research, design, marketing, and manufacturing,
creating walls between groups that have much to
teach one another.”
“Build bridges from one department to another,
from your company to your prospective
customers, and ultimately from the present to
the future.”
̶ Tom Kelley, IDEO

32. Leverage Points for
Engagement and
Innovation
• What connects people to a larger
purpose?
• How do they keep tapped in to
discovery?
• How are they connected?
• What are the implications?

33. Loss of Community
“Beneath the current economic crisis lies another
crisis of far greater proportions: the
depreciation in companies of community –
people’s sense of belonging to and caring for
something larger than themselves.”
Henry Mintzberg, “Rebuilding Companies as
Communities,” Harvard Business Review, July-Aug, 2009.

34. ̶ Christensen, Clayton M., Jeff Dyer, and Hal Gregersen,
The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive
Innovators. Harvard Business Review Press, July 2012.
Delivery versus Discovery
“…large companies typically fail at disruptive
innovation because the top management team
is dominated by individuals who have been
selected for delivery skills, not discovery skills.
As a result, most executives at large
organizations don’t know how to ‘think
different.’”

35. ̶ Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004
Structural Holes
“… behavior, opinion, and information, broadly
conceived, are more homogeneous within than
between groups. People focus on activities
inside their own group, which creates holes in
the information flow between groups, or more
simply, structural holes.”

36. Networks in Organizations
- Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004

37. “People with connections across structural holes [gaps in
social networks] have early access to diverse, often
contradictory, information and interpretations, which gives
them a competitive advantage in seeing and developing good
ideas.
… People connected to groups beyond their own can expect
to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be
gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius; it is
creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in
one group can be a valuable insight in another.”
Import - Export
̶ Ronald S. Burt, “Structural Holes and Good Ideas”
American Journal of Sociology, September, 2004

38. Networks in Organizations

39. What Education Does an
Emerging Leader Need?
• System of Profound Knowledge
(Deming ~1990)
• Understanding Variation
• Psychology
• Appreciation for a System
• Theory of Knowledge

40. Discussion
• What did you hear that is actionable?
• What challenges do you have to change
and innovation?
• What can you do you have to do
experience more innovation?
• Directly
• Indirectly