In this episode of Boardroom 180, Munir Haque sits down with innovation strategist Ed Bernacki to challenge the traditional assumptions around innovation. From international consulting to developing idea journals used by thousands, Ed shares how innovation isn’t about flashy tech or radical disruption, it’s a disciplined mindset rooted in trust, collaboration, and a deep understanding of problem-solving.
Together, they explore why service-based innovation is often misunderstood, how cognitive diversity drives better decisions, and what it really takes to create value in new ways. Whether you're a board member, leader, or curious thinker, this conversation will reshape how you view innovation in your organization.
Innovation Isn’t Disruption, It’s Discipline"
About the Guest:
Ed Bernacki is an internationally recognized innovation strategist, writer, and developer of practical tools that help leaders turn ideas into action.
Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Ed has worked across Canada, New Zealand, Singapore, and Australia—guiding both public and private sector organizations to build their capacity for innovation.
He’s the creator of the Navigator Journal series, has trained over 4,000 professionals in innovation skills, and has worked with governments, cities, and global leadership programs to design systems that support meaningful change.
Ed is also one of Canada’s most published voices on innovation—and a passionate advocate for reframing innovation not as disruption, but as a discipline rooted in mindset, structure, and trust.
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Contact Munir Haque | ActionEdge Executive Development:Website:
AEEDNow.comLinkedIn: Action Edge Executive Development Inc.
Podcast Production:
Recording: Pushysix Studios
Transcript:
innovation is more than improvement.
(...)
I mean, improvements are important, but innovations are like a quantum improvement that breaks new ground to create value in new ways.
(...)
And I thought this is just brilliant because it starts a conversation.
(...)
Hey everyone and welcome to another episode of the Boardroom 180 podcast. I'm your host Manir Haq, an executive coach and senior board strategist. I've partnered with Action Edge Executive Development to lead their governance and political acumen division.(...) In each episode we meet with governance leaders and step into their boardrooms where decisions shape the world around us.
Today's guest is Ed Bernanke, an internationally recognized innovation strategist, writer and developer of practical tools that help leaders turn ideas into action. Based in Ottawa, Ontario, Ed has worked across Canada, New Zealand, the Middle East, Singapore, and Australia, guiding both public and private sector organizations to build their capacity for innovation.
(...)
He's the creator of the Navigator Journal Series, has trained over 4,000 professionals in innovation skills, and has worked with governments, cities, and global leadership programs to design systems that support meaningful change. Ed is also one of Canada's most published voices in innovation and a passion advocate for reframing innovation, not as disruption,
(...)
but as a disciplined, rooted in mindset, structure, and trust.(...) So welcome to the boardroom. Ed, how are you doing?
Well, thanks very much. It's doing well, thank you.
Sounds good.
(...)
So I just start a little bit like you were introduced to me and suggested to be on the podcast by Don Jones as he was on our last episode,(...) I think it's episode 24, and he talked a little bit about kind of the human potential. And I think that might be kind of a good segue into the stuff we're working on talking about today.
(...)
As well, I think during our pre-interview, he kind of said it as a bit of a small world that you knew one of my previous guests as well,(...) Bruce Anderson.
Yeah. Yeah.
(...) So Bruce Anderson, he was in episode 14, and he talked about nonprofit,
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kind of nonprofit governance.
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So are you telling me how, I think there's a bit of a story there on how you know each other and might lead into kind of our first line of questions.
(...)
Okay, sure.
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Man, I have to say it's an extraordinary coincidence that two of your previous speakers were in fact, we all went to university together.
(...)
And all of three of us were in the sports management program at Laurentian University.(...) And basically we went there because it was the only place in Canada that in those days that actually offered a program in sports management. I mean, I had an interest in sport, but I knew I didn't wanna be like a coach. That just wasn't my thing at all.
And what we studied essentially was a four year commerce degree.
(...)
And then on top of that, all our minor courses were essentially the business of amateur and professional sport.
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And so you kind of learned about associations, nonprofit management.
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And I think once we got out of there, people kind of went in different directions, but I have the same sort of background. I started with, as Bruce did, is working in the nonprofit sector for five years and my was in soccer association.
(...)
And then many years later, Don Jones and I collaborated on a project in the 2000s.
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I kind of create these innovation journals(...) and we collaborated on pretty one for some of his programs.
(...) So it's amazing. Well, we'll get into that a little bit later, hopefully.(...) So you kind of started out your career, it sounds like in sports management and kind of led up into kind of where your focus is today on innovation. So why don't you tell us, as I say, a little bit of your evolutionist or innovationist kind of origin story.
(...) Well, I was kind of thinking about this idea.
(...)
Now looking back, I was always kind of the ideas guy, whether it was in university or high school,
But I learned two things. My first job with the soccer association,
(...)
my boss got it and he started to harness that. So he would give me like little thinking jobs, thinking about improving this next year. There were five ways that we could do this.
(...)
And I would just go away and think about this up and give him a list of probably 10 things to do.(...) And I realized that I'm really good at doing this.
(...)
But second story was though, after book five or six years, I thought I need to more like get a real job. I ended up joining one of those big international consulting firms,(...) sort of a national marketing role.
(...)
And I was all enthusiastic about this.(...) And I certainly realized that not every organization wants you to be an ideas guy.
(...)
My Tiffany was going into a strategic planning session for our group.(...) And the director looked at the plan we did last year and all the things that were accomplished and said, you know what, this is all great. Let's just do it all again next year.
(...)
And I sat there and I was just dumbstruck because at a whole list of things that I thought could improve what we're doing.
(...)
And so I started to really explore some of these issues about what it's like, like why people think so differently to me. I didn't have a clue then, but this was what started getting me interested. Now, same time, because it was an international firm,
(...)
I got really curious on some of the internationalness of it. I wanted to travel on one hand, I thought I'd really like to go somewhere. The other hand, I wanted to do an MBA,
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put those two together and thought, this is an honorable way to quit.(...) You know, I'm not quitting. I'm actually going back to university to do an MBA.
(...)
And that's how I ended up by chance discovering an executive MBA program in New Zealand.(...) And I went there and absolutely loved it. It was,
(...)
I guess from a Canadian perspective,
(...)
when you go to a different foreign country like that, everything's different.(...) And so half the things you learn about society are nothing that you're expecting to learn.
(...)
You know, I mean, technically it's a similar type country, but so many things were different. But the one that really hit me from this kind of work was this is what it feels like to live in a country that's not next to the USA.
(...)
And I realized that we are in Canada so bombarded with American advertising, television, radio, media, everything.
(...)
Well, I got down there and realized that interest and what goes on in this space because we do it ourselves.
(...)
And I just, for me, that was just a really eye-opening experience. And I think the second part of that would be,
(...)
I keep hearing in Canada that we're a small country.
(...)
I'm thinking, what planet are we a small country? We're a giant country. We have 40 million people.(...) If you want to know what a small country is, look at New Zealand. It's a skinny island that would be part of us, a small part of a province.
(...)
Then it had three and a half million. I think now it's close to five million. That's a small country.
(...)
And I think one of the things I keep seeing is that(...) we have to stop saying we're a small country and start thinking we're actually a big platform to take on the world. At the moment, the US looks hard.
(...)
Well,
(...)
move into another direction.(...) You have Asia on one side. You have Europe on the other side.
(...)
These are big markets. We should be looking at for our products and services as well.
I was given an opportunity to stay if I wanted to get a job with New Zealand Post.
(...)
And it wouldn't have occurred to me to work in public service and for a post office.(...) But when someone at the very top suggests, asks you if you'd like to work here, I thought, this is a good idea, just say yes.
(...)
And this ended up being what they called it, a new group called Total Quality Service. I think in this era, it would be the equivalent of an innovation team. Our job was to look at all their kind of core services and think how could we improve these?
(...)
And that led into studying processes, tools.
(...)
And I think that sort of closed its whole spoons, first part of it. The big insight we had there was within a big organization of any kind, a small team is not gonna solve all the problems.
(...)
There's organizations today that set up an innovation lab to solve challenges.(...) Yeah, they'll do a few.
(...)
What we realized was, this is, I started playing with, well, we had about 600 managers at the time. And I just thought, well,(...) who would it take to have 600 managers call a staff meeting to solve one problem every week?
(...)
How could that happen? How can we create that? And this led down to a path of creating materials, some guides and booklets I wrote, creating work like training sessions, kind of empowering our managers to say,(...) you can solve these things, you don't need, if you see something that's wrong, you can fix it. And I was putting all these words together and giving the managers kind of confidence that,
(...)
if you see something that's not right, go for it. Like we need improvements.
(...)
We're doing that at the same time though, is also looking at what new services could we be reinventing.
(...)
And it became to me, this is great way to put some of my,
(...)
like theory into practice, because the postal service, I mean, there's technology and there's other things involved, but it's a core service.
(...)
And it's a little bit different now
(...)
because just sheer volumes are down,(...) but it was just really interesting to see that they had a big interest in like creating new,
(...)
this capacity to innovate, starting to solve problems.(...) They, people at the very top bought right into this, around, yep, we need all staff to be more innovative than what they do. Now they weren't talking about technology. It was like, if we could help people solve problems better, we're way ahead now.
You said that was in New Zealand? Yes, New Zealand Post. So do you think there was anything like that was culturally significant about either New Zealand that kind of differentiates it from between kind of, a lot of the other places you've worked, you've worked all over the world?
(...)
Well, I have to say what I found there,
(...)
now again, I was coming from working in downtown Toronto at Van King and like say one of those big towers and big consulting firms.
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What I found there was just a real interest in new ways of thinking. The country was also evolving a lot.
(...)
There was a lot of things changing
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and with New Zealand Post, I don't know what a government department is supposed to feel like because it felt very entrepreneurial to me.
(...)
No, we were looking for new revenue sources. We were, they were upgrading everything, like all the postal shops.(...) A few years after I left, they did something which a number of post offices have done, they launched a bank.
(...)
So like in Canada, Canada Post kind of outsourced a lot of the retail, little kiosks and drug stores. It's the only post with the other direction.
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They started to upgrade their retail. At first it was just two really nice postal shops.
(...)
But clearly what they were putting in place was to have the facilities to have post offices that were also bank retail outlets.
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And so that became a full new revenue source. And my gut feeling is that the bank is what's kind of carrying it now, I would think.
(...) So just for reference, like what year are we talking about?
Mid 90s.
Mid 90s, okay.
Yeah, that was a long time ago.
Yeah.
(...)
And the world's, a lot's changed since then, right? Oh yeah.
(...)
I think part of the stuff that you're right about and the way you think is that, now there are a lot of misconceptions around innovation.
(...)
So I thought maybe we could dig into those a little bit.
(...)
I think you, in your introduction, and it's not you, I kind of mentioned that it's not just about technology and disruption, it's a little bit more of a mindset. So why don't you kind of dig into that a little bit?
Sure.
(...)
Well, when you look at the history, and this keeps being quoted every time you have(...) an academic who writes policy on innovation,
(...)
all of their work goes back to definitions that were essentially product development.(...) It was set in that context of creating new products. And then how do we do that? We need R&D and that involves technology. And we're still talking like this now, but it just didn't fit what I was seeing.
(...)
And I'll give you an example of something.
(...)
Risk management,(...) okay? Something boards and executives needs to deal with. Well, measuring the risk of a product
(...)
that you have to spend five million to invest in, and it might not sell, okay? That kind of makes sense. There's a risk there that if you get it wrong,(...) well, I start, how does that work in services? Well,
(...)
almost everything that I've experienced in services, it's almost rare if ever, do you actually launch a new service as you would launch a new product, okay?(...) Almost, every service organization basically already exists. They are providing a service.
(...)
Okay, I hope you see where I'm going with this. Now I've worked later with law firms and we would launch a new service,
(...)
but that was not really innovation. They already had six services. All they were doing is, okay, we're not gonna work on real estate. It's basically a new market.
(...)
But some of these notions, I think,
(...)
this concept of failure and risk,
(...)
I think we just spent too much, there's just too much thinking from the product world that doesn't make sense in the services. And I figured it out once when I was reading a public service article about guy and manager and writing about success and failure. And it's so obvious that we could have these two things. And I went, hang on, I don't think it is that obvious.
(...)
I kind of created this argument that there's a big gap between success and failure. And it's this murky,(...) muddy kind of mediocrity where it doesn't fail,
(...)
but honestly, the service is pretty poor.
(...)
You know, it might be good enough and it's been good enough, but is it great?
(...)
Okay, I'll give you kind of a practical example of this.(...) I also lived in Australia for a while. And then the 2000 Starbucks went into Australia.(...) And Australia loves coffee. They have quite a sophisticated coffee culture.(...) And Starbucks thought that they could just ride in and take over.(...) That's what they kind of do in countries, except they wrote in, launched 80 franchises, units in a couple of cities.
(...)
And essentially within a year, year and a half, they started to close them.
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And within about two, three years later, they had shut down 60 outlets.
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And I don't think people kind of get this because Starbucks has this amazing record of its success.
(...)
Well, it was to me, one of the factors of the research that the University of Melbourne did was on service levels.
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In North America, we're kind of trained on what I would call the no service service model. We go in, we get in line to pay,
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and then we stand around, huddle around while we get in another line, while they make your coffee. And then you walk and you carry it on and you take it to where you're sitting.
(...)
Well, people could go to Starbucks to do that in Australia, or they could go next door, where they sat down and they just said, "I have a lot of type of foods."
(...)
And they would bring it to you.(...) And Starbucks seemed unable to grasp that difference of service.(...) And in Australia, that service just called Raconess 2 Mediocre.
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And in fact, that was one of the few cases where that is a true service failure.
(...)
I don't know what it costs to lease about 60 retail outfits, outfit them, and then shut them down and break contracts. But I suspect it was millions.
(...)
And fast forward, the last time I was there,(...) there's still only about 15 Starbucks in the country, and they are in the main cities, and essentially they target the tourists,
(...)
whether both foreign students and Americans coming there.
(...)
Locals don't go.
(...)
And that kind of goes with franchising too, because individual units are just well done. So I guess my kind of point about this is that(...) I think the failure around service innovation was that
(...)
we copied product innovation concepts and assumed they would work in the service center.
(...)
What we should have done is trashed all those product concepts and said, "Okay, let's start with services. What's unique about services?(...) What does it mean? What would innovation mean?"(...) And I think we would have been far better off to kind of, you know, every assumption you make about what innovation is and isn't, doesn't really apply to the service sector.
(...)
And there's so much more about service design, and there's so many other kinds of tools.
(...)
Some of the new work on design thinking is becoming really this kind of this technique of the day.(...) It kind of addresses some of that too. The, that this is a different world now compared to like, the service world is not like product development. And I think we just, and I'm still saying this with the academics today,
(...)
they still always kind of link it back
(...)
to some of the product concepts.
(...)
And you see it with some of the,
(...)
you see it with some of the industry bodies who, I mean, go into this,(...) but things could fail for all kinds of reasons. And it kind of comes down to the question I often ask was, can innovation fail?
(...)
And I would argue, no.
(...)
Marketing can fail. Your launch could fail. Sales could fail. You could do all kinds of things that help you fail. Well, that doesn't mean innovation failed. It means you failed to innovate.
(...)
And I think we could use, I hope that does that make some sense, but I think that we need to kind of come up with some new ways of thinking here. An analogy I often use is around fitness.
(...)
And I kind of have the standard line that I quite use for doing a presentation around, that some people talk about fitness as if talking about fitness makes you fit.
(...)
I think that's what we do with innovation. If I use, I talk about innovation, therefore I am innovative.(...) No,(...) it's not the same. And I think it's a pretty good analogy that within the concept around fitness,
(...)
I wish we could do one thing that could get our head around that in the world of fitness, we have a, I think,(...) this might just be Ontario, an organization called Participaction.
(...)
It's across Canada. I remember the commercials from when I was a kid. So it's been around for a long time.
This was about getting everyone more fit.
(...)
Then we also have the much more elite kind of fitness,(...) going for the Olympics, we're going for the gold medals.
(...)
I wish that we would think of innovation in the same way.(...) Okay,(...) the top R&D centers are like going for gold medals. But we also need like a participation version of innovation.
(...)
All those little companies in the suburbs of Calgary, the ones here, they all have to have the ability to generate ideas to solve problems. I mean, no business can afford not to solve problems and deal with change.
(...)
And I think that's one thing. You asked me about New Zealand.(...) I actually think New Zealand kind of got that. There was a lot more talk about being innovative,(...) creating cultures that are open to new thinking.(...) I just don't see enough of that here.
(...)
So I guess that kind of gives you a sense of my thinking on that. I could trust that, I could go on much longer on this.
Well, I want to dig into a little bit more about kind of creating that culture innovation maybe before we get there.(...) Not everybody is as creative or developed an innovation as other people. Like how can it be a learned skill or can it be?(...) Not everybody is creative or has the innate ability to innovate or be innovative.(...) Is that something that can be taught or learned?
(...)
I'm gonna say yes.
(...)
I'll kind of jump around here a little bit.
(...)
I think if we, again,
(...)
kind of hone in on the essence of this work.
(...)
The thinking around creativity and organization, look at an organizational sense. I mean, this is coming from people like Edward de Bono who talked about, you know, we have artistic creativity and we have idea creativity.(...) And he is a big believer like I am that in fact, yes, there's a great deal. You can learn about idea creativity.
(...)
Will that help you paint? No.
(...)
But likewise, to be an artist,(...) there's a toolkit you have to learn.
(...)
No great artists started painting great art. They did a lot of, I'm sure they did a lot of bad art.(...) And you had to learn all the technique and brushstroke. It's more different on this side.
(...)
So on one hand, yes. The, I've kind of, I'll sort of bring it back to you around a little bit. Part of this has asked you to create a meaning of what it means to be innovative in an organization.
(...)
When the public service a few years ago in Canada launched some innovation programs,
(...)
one of the findings afterwards is that all the banners and everything were launched, but people really didn't understand what do I do different now?
(...)
And it's not unlike,
(...)
I'm guessing here, it was 20 years ago, I had a meeting in the lobby(...) with one of those big technology companies that had banners everywhere that innovation is who we are.(...) And so it's just tongue in cheek. I asked the person I was meeting with, what does that mean?
(...)
And she kind of looked at me because I have no idea. And it was like, you're a tech company and you're using that as a banner. And I think that lack of understanding(...) is what really, it kind of creates a block to a lot of things.
(...)
Maybe it could be, at a fundamental level, you can't even agree what innovation is, okay? Like as a working definition.
(...)
And what I thought this would come up, I just want to,
(...)
I could take a quote from something that I wrote many years ago.(...) And this is what I was working on, an innovation guide in Singapore for the government.
(...)
And this is not my words. This is brilliant, but this was their words. And they wanted to make some distinctions.
(...)
And these are the words I was given to use.(...) And it said this,
innovation is more than improvement.
(...)
I mean, improvements are important, but innovations are like a quantum improvement that breaks new ground to create value in new ways.
(...)
And I thought this is just brilliant because it starts a conversation.
(...)
Okay, innovation and improvement are two different things.
(...)
That's good to know. Both are useful.
(...)
In the innovation work, you'll sometimes hear a churn called incremental innovation.
(...)
And if you think about that and go, what the heck is that?(...) Well, the definition of incremental innovation is improvement.
(...)
Well, call it improvement, okay? And you see my point here.
(...)
The notion of some of those distinctions that they went a quantum improvement.
(...)
I had, that is really interesting. That means you're kind of reinventing something.(...) Now, it seems that something I was thinking about
(...)
were candidates too slow, but it's going through the process of going from analog applications to get your passport renewed to be able to do it digitally online.
(...)
Is that innovation?
(...)
Yeah.
It's just to me, it's an improvement.
(...)
Okay, we're gonna use technology, but I still have to fill it out.
No.
And it's much faster, but I still need to get my passport.(...) You know, that's one way you think, yeah, it's not to me, not really. It's just going to analog to digital. I don't think that's really innovation somehow.
(...)
Breaks new ground.(...) I think this is also really interesting.
(...)
When you get into some of the true innovations out there, they often create unexpected value in some way. They do things that were beyond what was first expected.
(...)
And I think that this becomes a great test of if you're a group working with a definition,
(...)
did it break new ground? Are we doing something the whole new way? Can you see what I'm getting at here? The words actually can be used and creates value in new ways.
(...)
I think that is really interesting. Okay. If you're not creating value in new ways, you're just solving a problem.
(...)
There's nothing wrong with just solving problems.(...) But if you want to get up to that category where something is deemed to be innovation, you have to create new things. There's two that I'm thinking at, and something on my wall here was when I was kind of traveling through New Zealand, it was a company that had a lot of clay, historic. They were basically a factory that was set up in the country that had tons of clay, and they were making bricks.
(...)
For a long time. But bricks are really low value. At some point, someone thought, I don't know its story,(...) but they started to take those bricks and turn them into garden pots. That's a little bit of value.
(...)
But then they realized that they took those garden pots and then painted them.(...) And the price went up a lot because they were like little bits of artwork now.
(...)
Then they started to think, what I ended up buying was what essentially is a clay tablet,
(...)
almost like a computer tablet, clay that has been painted,
(...)
and I hang it on the wall.
(...)
The thick of that is we went from brick to something that looks like artwork on the wall.(...) That same amount of clay that was probably, I'm guessing a dollar as a brick, it was 80 bucks on my wall now. I consider that as this notion of creating more value.
(...)
In my own idea journals,
(...)
one of the things I was trying to drive for is that why are my journals different to say all those notebooks you can buy?(...) Well, I wanted to kind of create a concept that does kind of break me ground, creates new value. So I want to take people from taking notes and notebooks
(...)
to managing ideas in their journals.(...) Okay, yes, they're going to make notes. That's not the point. The point is to sort of work on problems, work on ideas, and then when you're ready, when that idea has enough momentum, you go from the journal to your computer or whatever it is that you need to do further planning on it. So does that make some sense?
It does, but I'd like to kind of maybe walk us through that a little bit more, like with these idea journals.
(...)
I think during our conversation,
(...)
our pre-interview, you mentioned a bit about, and I'm not sure if it's associated with, you know,
(...)
journals that you've put together to prefer specific conferences and stuff like that, where the leaders that come to those conferences, they're given this journal, as you said, not to necessarily take notes, but to come out possibly with kind of actionable items. So why don't you walk us through that a little bit on how-
(...) The whole idea started originally working with the editor of Inc. Magazine in Boston.
(...)
And he's basically a speaker. Inc. Magazine also has conferences.
(...)
And he said to a partner I was working with at the time, kind of tongue in cheek that says, oh, I have to speak at our conference next week. And what's the point? Nobody does anything with their ideas anyways.
(...)
And it was like a little epiphany went off and saying, well,(...) is this a problem worthy of solving?
(...)
And he gave it to kind of us to play with in terms of how can we make their conferences more effective?
(...)
So the first solution kind of came to just looking at the format of the events.
(...)
They were already, they had the top business speakers in the country there. Okay, you're not gonna get better. They were already at the most beautiful resorts. So it's not gonna get any better.
(...)
So we still had some recommendations for that in terms of just how they shape some of their content. But then we sort of sat back and thought, well, hang on, maybe the problem's not the content. Maybe the problem are the participants.(...) Now we just started joking about, so maybe we should just advertise only innovative thinkers need to apply to this conference. Kind of joking around like that. And that's when it kind of hit me around,
(...)
maybe people don't have the skills to be effective conference participants.
(...)
And then we thought, what does that even mean? And then,
(...)
this is kind of a trail of how ideas develop here as you're managing an idea about, you did a brainstorm.
(...)
What are all the elements of a conference that you could be trained to do better?
(...)
And that led into things like,(...) not just note-taking.
(...)
How can we invent a new model for note-taking(...) and then teach people this new model?(...) And essentially, okay, that was one piece of it. And that was essentially, instead of just summarizing what the speaker says,
(...)
start listening for what you can do with that content. And we kind of came up with a model of, if you hear an idea or an insight that just goes, "Wow, write it down."(...) And if you have to tune out for a couple of minutes to capture a full idea that came to you, do it, because that's worth more than anything else.(...) Questions, what pops up that as a question that if you answered it later, might trigger an idea?(...) Now, what's our company doing about this? Or how can I apply that to my team? You don't have an idea. But if you answer that, you may get one. Third one was around quotes, references.
(...)
A speaker says something interesting and you go,
(...)
I once saw,(...) "Rosabeth Moss-Kamtzer, she was the former editor of the Harvard Business Review Speak.(...) And she said the simple line about, well, to have a learning organization, you have to create a teaching organization.
(...)
And I thought, "Oh God, that is so right." Like, you can't have good of a learning if you don't have good teachers within an organization.
(...)
That became one of my pages in a future issue.
(...)
But the final part that we just said, anything that resembles an action that you could do, capture it.
(...)
And we kind of created this as one of the skill sets. But other skill sets were just how to listen for ideas,
(...)
how to pick workshops, how to listen to different kinds of keynoters.(...)
So many people have said, "Oh my God, that was a dull speaker. I never heard." Okay, that's not a useful criticism of a speaker unless they're a motivational speaker. Okay, they're a dull motivational speaker. That's a problem. But most people who have an expertise are not trained professional speakers. So give them a break. They're probably nervous up there. They're there for their thinking, their ideas.
(...)
And we also added some skills around turning those ideas into actions back at work. So that became then, how do we deliver that?
(...)
And that's when our own little epiphany was, well, people tend to get notepads at conferences.(...) Often from a hotel,
(...)
Delta Hotel, notepad. You said, "Well, what if we replace that
(...)
with this thing that's sort of a half notebook, half guide on being more innovative at the conference?" The editor in club that idea
(...)
and said, "We'll take 4,000."(...) We had no concept. We didn't have anything. We just had an idea.(...) They committed to use them for the first year.(...) And that became like, I guess you could call it the seed capital to actually have to deliver something.
(...)
And that's when it become,
(...)
moving down this chain of idea management, we actually had to create the damn thing. And I created a design and that's what we delivered. And Inc. loved the idea.
(...)
They found that over 80% of their participants said it helped them get more value from the events. And they were blown away by that. And I think the simple reason was the vast majority of people never even think about how they make notes. Like, and I think I may have mentioned before, I needed a way to introduce this concept to people.
(...)
And I realized that you had to show them and make them laugh at their own behavior.
(...)
And the way I quite often did it or coached people to do it, at the beginning of the conference,
(...)
that people have this thing and they don't quite understand what it is in their hand. So you just say that we were,(...) before we get this conference started, want to give you some ideas on how to get more value from this event. So it all sounds positive. We said, just check, how many of you come to conferences like this, take notes and ever look at them again?
(...)
And you just put your hand up as a speaker
(...)
and eventually about three quarters of the audience agrees. They put up the hand and they laugh. They think it's quite funny.
(...)
Because you've just showed them a problem.
(...)
They have the solution in their hand.
(...)
And that's why we just found was probably the best way to kind of promote the use of something they had never seen before. So now, that was original. Then over the years, this evolved into customizing them.
(...)
A lot of corporate events were quasi, yes, they were conferences, but they're in fact like wanted to do leadership development.(...) I ended up doing quite a few like that, where they would take the speakers, some of the trainers notes or models, whatever they were doing and kind of incorporate that to the extreme side of this became an anchor tool as a journal for year long leadership development programs.
(...)
And in that it isn't just about learning, that's a third of the purposes or a better way to capture what they learn.
(...)
But what we built into there is, okay, over 12 months, you need to work on three things. So you need to work on four challenges.(...) And essentially there's three or four innovation processes that they're gonna work on to kind of make a real change in their organization.
(...)
And so the whole concept became prompting them to model this approach of continually looking for things to improve or change or anything.
(...)
And so it became like the anchor. But again, it's an analog tool,
(...)
but it's a thing that they carry around with them. It's what they travel with. And again,(...) once you've got a concept,
(...)
like once you've identified a problem, okay, that's easy to pick, want to develop something new for this
(...)
and you start to sketch it out, okay, this could have this element, I need to talk to this person. Once you've got enough points written down, you kind of know when it's time to quote it's like a more formal approach.
(...)
This is that fuzzy front-end work. That's what I think is the most important. And I think the hardest quite honestly, it's like that silly quote that people say, don't come to me with problems, come to me with solutions.
(...) You know,
(...)
the different kinds of cognitive skills that when they play together during innovation and you know, sometimes there's two different types will create friction. I think friction is part of innovation.
(...)
So can you talk us through that a little bit?
(...) Well,
(...)
a key element for I think, if anything that happens to an organization
(...)
is kind of captured by the culture of the organization.
(...)
All of the research that I have seen on this that the number one factor, in fact it's the number one predictor
(...)
of innovation in an organization's trust.
(...)
As a board member or a senior executive, it is something you can look at and measure.
(...)
This is that going back to something we already talked about. Can I trust my manager if I go to them with an idea?
(...)
Do I trust my coworkers?(...) If I try to do something, do I believe here? But that notion around trust, there's lots written on this, but from what they keep finding over and over again, if that trust is not there,(...) that needs to come first before a lot of this other work, because what's the point of all this? They're not gonna listen to me anyways. That kind of a,(...) yeah. But I wanna go into maybe just dive into one other element of this.
(...)
So far we've talked a lot about innovations about problem solving.
(...)
I've also done a lot of study with a guy named Dr. Michael Curtin, who also said, well, our problems are so complex, essentially the paraphrasing, he said our problems have been so complex that we have to study the problems, but we also have to study the problem solvers.
(...)
And I just wanna spend a couple of minutes on this notion of the problem solvers in our organizations. And I've kind of set it up, the simple question is do all people think alike?
(...)
You'd have to say, well, of course not.
(...)
But yet,(...) do we recognize these differences and use them in any way? And I'm gonna say, no, not really.(...) This kind of led into a lot of work on cognitive diversity, a concept around cognitive diversity. Now, I need to make, because suddenly diversity has become kind of a dirty word lately.
(...)
This has nothing to do with that kind of diversity that they're talking about. This is a simple notion that if we kind of get that people don't think alike,
(...)
how can we see those differences?(...) And then how can we use those differences?(...) And I think that this is probably the most interesting part of all of this work.
(...)
I think this diversity is ignored virtually by almost everything.
(...)
And it's not just staff issues. Let's remember that when you're designing something for customers or the markets,
(...)
they don't think alike either.
(...)
Everything I'll just say for a couple minutes requires as much to staff, suppliers, to customers, to stakeholders.
(...)
And it kind of goes around this, if you've ever thought to yourself, for example, some of the people on a board or something, or if you've ever thought, I kind of get this job done in half the town if I didn't have to work with these people.(...) If you've ever thought that, or something along the lines of what were they thinking?
(...)
Those are clues that there's a problem here with the collaboration and the key style.
(...)
In my own work, I guess, with working with,
(...)
working with the theory from Dr. Curtin, I've applied this to kind of use some of the models with all kinds of organizations.(...) And the key focus of this is something that it helps you to solve, if you understand your style of thinking,
(...)
that's really useful for you. The next level up is understanding your style of thinking(...) as compared to the people you work with.
(...)
That is suddenly where the gold is in something.
(...)
And when we do that, it helps you, it helps with collaboration, but it also helps us to see our own kind of biases.
There's a little bit of a kind of a skill that is kind of required of leaders or even facilitators to be able to kind of read the room, judge the type of personalities that we have.(...) And where you can't, as a leader, you can't necessarily influence the way somebody behaves, but you can influence how you interact with them. And by knowing that about them, you can improve your kind of leadership or your ability to draw those innovative, adaptive ideas over them.
In a more technical sense, we can measure this. There's indicators I've used to do this in a less kind of informal way.
(...)
I've actually asked that question. So who hears makes to-do lists every day when they get up?
(...)
A third of the people kind of put up their hand. Who thinks that's absolutely ridiculous to do that and you get another third?
(...)
And what you're doing is you're kind of, you talked about attention. It's almost to me the reverse of attention.(...) It because suddenly, oh, I kind of understand why they have that need to do that.(...) So when I collaborate with you, I'm not trying to force you to think like me.
(...)
Now linking this back to say that board work, all of this research was not done on low-level management teams. This research was all done on executive teams who made decisions for big change.(...) And right back to the very, very original work was,(...) like who was doing this research was also a psychologist.
(...)
He'd be interviewing the whole team who were part of a decision process, not individually, so they didn't see each other. But he would study the problem, study the solution, and then interview them. And what he found over and over again where people were not even aware of what their style of thinking was,(...) they just assumed other people on the team thought like them and people who were a problem kept questioning me. I don't know why they questioned me. This is so obvious. We do it this way.
(...)
That's what led into some of this foundation. Now, just to kind of summarize it all, all of those skills and training and all those kind of problem solving models that we want,
(...)
they have to be used. That becomes your ability to collaborate effectively.
(...)
And when you get right down to it, it's the bigger challenge often is effective collaboration with people.
Okay, well, if I had to kind of summarize, I think a lot of this work,
(...)
I think it'd be to instill and understanding that innovation is a lot more than just technology.
(...)
I think it's much better if we think about it in terms of how we innovate and how we build capacity to innovate.(...) And I don't care what sector you're in.(...) You're in a cement business, you need to be innovative. You need to solve your problems. And if we get away from the jargon,(...) if we deal with to improve the way we can solve our problems,(...) that improves how we make decisions and that improves how we can deal with change.
(...)
There is no one in any organization that is immune to those three, the problem solving, decision making, change.
(...)
In the work that I've done, I've tried always walked the talk to kind of bring people this kind of, take a complex concept, deliver it in a simple way.
(...)
I've always one of the talks that I've done, I've done maybe 500 workshops and briefings,
(...)
always talked about,
(...)
every organization needs to clip it of an idea factory.
(...)
And to me, what I'm actually saying is that people understand and kind of make things in factories. Well, think about internally in your inner meeting room and you're gonna set up a virtual idea factory. Now, like every factory, you need to have raw materials come in.(...) Now that's the people, time,
(...)
but most importantly, a well-defined challenge.
(...)
You know, you have to have to do the upfront work is the well-defined problem.
(...)
Now, part of that also includes is what's your process going to be? If you think about a factory, you know, it moves from, there's a process within a factory. What's your problem solving process gonna be?
(...)
A common one is design thinking. There's just so many different kinds of processes.
(...)
Second part of that sort of analogy is, okay, you come into the factory, you have to work on that problem. You need to go through the issues with your team to come up with options, to manage those ideas from creating options, solving them, judging them worthy of action.(...) But the third part of that analogy is around, you have to ship a result.(...) You know, if you don't ship a result, you just had a meeting. This is an idea factory. Like a factory, you have to ship a result. Now that result is final part of your session of the recommendations, your solutions, the next plans, so that you're actively going forward with something. Now, that simple notion of an idea factory works for an awful lot of people. That it's not a meeting we're having, we're gonna have, I don't quite know, so I don't care what people call it. But that notion of having something that's gonna be around solving a problem, and it's kind of an event, that actually works for a lot of people.
(...)
As you know, and once you get good at doing this, the next level up is before people show up for something,(...) they're getting a one pager about this idea factory has this challenge, we're working on this. Think about this and come prepared to generate, just to contribute a starting idea each.
(...)
And that's about getting inside of planting those seeds and incubating those issues and getting people talking. And there's just something that happens, like you said,
(...)
someone in every organization is actually pretty good at leading a group, this doesn't have to be the boss, this is someone who can kind of see those sides(...) and recognize it, this sounds like one adaptive thing, it just sounds more like an innovative thing.(...) But I just think that you need to be able to keep creating value in new ways like that.
One of the thoughts that I have from any of the work that I've done, whether it's through workshops, that I've tried to distill some of the essence of this work down into these idea journals I use. If you have nowhere else where to start, just buy some of these journals. There's enough, the one that's posted on,(...) I'm working on now, that's selling now.
(...)
It has about 25 pages of these core concepts that are really important for managing ideas. This is not a conference version. This was my version for people who work at home, you work in a cafe, you work in an office.(...) This is your kind of toolkit that you can kind of pick solutions or kind of pick challenges you want to solve.(...) You can start to plan forward. There's a section there for 12 months of ideas, like what's coming up in six or eight or nine months where you could use some new thinking on something. And the rest of it's like a notebook, but there's enough in there to kind of prompt your thinking.(...) That's availed by just navigatorjournals.com. It's with a plural in the journals.
(...)
The other thing from that website, I mentioned that Idea Factor. I've got a couple of books people could just download for free. There's no cost to these,(...) but there's a learning tab at the navigatorjournals.com. And there's a small graphic book called, I Have an Idea Factory.(...) It's pretty much exactly,(...) I took a big fat book and it's read it into about 30 pages of graphics. It's just much easier to read, but it gives you the example of the steps of having a well-defined journal.
(...)
Raw materials, processing those, getting a result. And I just poke some of the fun quotes, the interesting things. And this applies whether you're talking about a board meeting level,
(...)
honestly, it's the same issues.
(...)
Do not be worried about sounding not professional by talking about ideas rather than innovation.
(...)
And I think it's just really important that we kind of focus, going back to that definition I gave before, around creating value in new ways.
(...)
Incremental is okay because we need to sell problems, but we also then have to give, we need big ideas too.
(...)
This was our current Prime Minister who's basically challenging us to think big.
I usually end up with asking where people can find out more about you. We already talked about the journals and the articles that are available online, but where else can people find out more about you?
(...)
I've found about 50 articles that I've written on LinkedIn just through that. And if you want the buzzword, if you look up innovation list,
(...)
that's just kind of quirky term I kind of covered for this. And that's an article I once read after reading about David Suzuki,(...) and he was an environmentalist.
(...)
And he said what he believed is important and often gets criticized for it. And I thought this is exactly what this innovation work needs.(...) We need people who say what needs to be said, even if he had criticized for it, and I have been. So that's why I kind of took this title of innovation list.
No, thanks. I'd like to thank you for joining us on the Boardroom 180 podcast, and I hope you enjoyed yourself. And I know our listeners get a lot out of it.
Thank you. That was great.
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