[00:00:00] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Hi, I am Andrew. Welcome to the Work Unraveled podcast. In each episode, we break down a piece of the workplace puzzle, providing practical insights, fresh perspectives, and actionable solutions to help you navigate the ever-changing world of work. 

[00:00:15] **Scott:** And I'm Scott, whether you are a leader, a professional, or simply curious about what makes organizations tick, this show offers strategies to think smarter, work better, and lead boldly join us as we turn workplace complexity into clarity.

One episode at a time.

Today we are talking about something really vital, and that is how to make innovation part of the every day, not something that's an add-on, but actually embedding it in your business and your culture. And I'd ask our listeners to. So just have a think. Is innovation of your workplace a buzzword or actually a behavior? think of the last time that somebody raised a suggestion in your team or in your organization. And did it get buried in the bureaucracy of the culture? Or was it actually given room to breathe? You know, was it heard? Was it tried out? Was it tested? Uh, and. innovation is sporadic or non-existent, that is when organizations are going to fall behind and struggle against the other organizations that do encourage that innovation and that that continual improvement and that discovery of, of new ways of working and new ways of thinking and delivering value to customers. Today we're gonna demystify innovation. See it not as a lightning bolt, but as a capability that anybody can build within the organization. We want to help you do that today. So Andrew, you work with teams that make things happen every day. Why do you think organizations struggle so often to innovate continuously and bring that into the organization?

[00:01:47] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Great question Scott. And you're right, A lot of organizations that I work with, and I'm sure you are the same, innovation is, is one of those buzz phrases. That people throw around in organizations and, and leaders. And managers often say that they want their teams to be more innovative, and we want you to be more creative.

And I think one of the core problems and why it, why it falls down, and this is what we can talk about in this episode, is there's a difference between if you like creativity and idea generation. And innovation. So idea generation, is that spark, you know, that light bulb moment. Have you, have you ever noticed on any presentation, if anybody suggests the idea of innovation, they always have a light bulb.

You know,

[00:02:31] **Scott:** Oh

[00:02:31] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** it's that light.

[00:02:32] **Scott:** the clip art.

[00:02:33] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** For the thumb, the Microsoft stock images on PowerPoint is always a light bulb. So there's this, there's this concept of, of creativity, which is where you suddenly go, I know it's that sort of eureka moment. You have an idea in the shower or wherever. It's always in the shower as well.

If you notice, people say Always some of my best ideas in the shower, we should have meetings. No, I was gonna say we have meetings in the shower that, that sounds bad. That wouldn't be allowed in the modern workplace. But, um, so creativity is this idea of having sparks of ideas and. That's brilliant.

Innovation though, and, and we're gonna talk about this, I think is, is a process. So innovation is, is a systematic process. It's defined, you know, we start middle and end of this process. So there's, there's a confusion. So, going back to your question, I think that's why innovation is, is often sought out by organizations.

It's often demanded by leaders and managers. We need to be more innovative, but it, it, it fails because we don't understand that distinction between the spark. And the process. And, and can I give you a personal example? I, I worked in an organization a few years ago and they got all of us into a conference center and it must have cost a fortune 'cause there were several, several, probably hundred of us I suppose.

And we had this whole day classic, you know, whiteboards, flip charts, um, post-it notes, pens on the table, you know, the sort of thing I'm talking about. And there was a demand. Lots of biscuits, uh, which is great, you know, breakout. Everybody loved it. It was a good day actually. We all enjoyed ourselves, but the, the thing that the organization wanted was ideas.

And the ideas were all for revenue generation. And we came up with ideas. You know, we came up with loads of ideas and we spent the entire day coming up with ideas. Now. Uh, the shortened version of this is that nothing actually happened because innovation is also around execution. So what we're talking about on this particular episode is understanding what innovation is.

And what I'd say, um, before I ask your opinion is, I mean, there's a, a statistic that, you know, um, managers and leaders realize or, or, or say that innovation comes from culture. And people. Um, so really what we need to think about is how do we get culture and people to work together to, to generate that process of innovation.

So, um, so if I asked you, Scott, in your experience, how would leaders and and organizations model that behavior so that they actually start getting this kind of innovative culture?

[00:05:12] **Scott:** Well, think people need to see, firstly, the key thing is in my view, is only innovation. If it actually delivers something at the end, we can be, and again, I think the term is misused, as you said, and so well, we're innovative if we've created something new and creative. And that's fine. But if you launch something new and creative and you spend thousands of pounds on it and you deliver it and you launch it and the customers don't use it, is it still innovative? argue it's only innovative if it actually makes a difference and it delivers. And we talk quite a lot on this show about outcomes over output. Something I'm really passionate about, and I think the same applies to innovation. It actually has to be something that delivers the value at the end of the day and can be measured Leaders, as you say, will throw around, will be more innovative. And then you come to the challenge, well, okay, are we clear on what the outcome should be? And might be, may not be, and that's fine. We may need to test that idea and we'll touch on today how we do that, uh, using a six stage cycle, talk about that in a minute. But also have leaders given the culture and trust that needs to happen for that, uh, for those ideas to flourish because. I'm sure in your experience in that, you know, a lot of those ideas are probably poo-pooed and people thought, oh, we can't do that. That's too risky, or, oh, that's gonna cost too much money.

Or, what about our bureaucracy that's gonna get in the way of that and, and that's how innovation can be killed before it

[00:06:41] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yes.

[00:06:42] **Scott:** out the door. 

[00:06:43] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Well it's funny you said about some of those ideas. Uh, I can, as you were talking, I, I remember that day very fondly 'cause it was such a good day with lots of biscuits. But people came up with ideas such as, why don't we, we run, um, a petrol station because petrol stations make a lot of money. I dunno whether they do or not.

And then there was another idea of why don't we open a golf course now I'm not. I'm not exaggerating. These were some of the ideas that people came up with. Um, but they weren't particularly innovative. They were just creative in a sense of, well, that'd be different for this organization to run a golf course, wouldn't it?

But they weren't innovative, they didn't really add any value to the end customer that we had. They didn't add any value to the value proposition for the organization. So yeah, there's, there's absolutely got to be a clarity in between what, what is really different, but makes a difference to the business, makes a difference to the customer.

That, that's something that we have to really be focused on and, and we need to understand. I think what we're, we're sort of in this conversation already identifying, there's a confusion here about what innovation actually means. Would, would you agree in your experience with organizations that is that definite confusion about what we mean to be innovative?

[00:07:51] **Scott:** Yeah, it, it's become for many, I think just that another term that gets thrown around. yeah, you can be, again, I come back to innovative, but only if it is the right thing to do and it

[00:08:01] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:08:02] **Scott:** at the end. 

[00:08:03] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Scott, you've got your six, um, stage cycle of innovation. What, what is that? I've, I've heard of this before.

[00:08:09] **Scott:** Yep. So the first thing is capture. So capture those ideas because great ideas go nowhere without an

[00:08:16] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** I.

[00:08:16] **Scott:** Actually, we want to develop something called idea management and management could have some negative connotations, but it actually providing a structure and a cycle where these ideas can. The valid ideas that are going to be powerful, the innovation that's gonna be effective can flourish.

So first they just capture, so capture those ideas in a place where they're visible and it's accessible and people can understand it and start to have conversations, evaluate those ideas. So starting to kind of first pass at them and say, you know, do we think there's something here? Yeah, we. We think there's something, you know, maybe some competitors have done something similar that's worked, or just a gut feeling that actually, that actually this might be the right thing for us to do. And then of course, we've talked about this before, prioritize because as you've said, your experience, I. Hundreds of ideas were generated. You can't do them all. So you then need to prioritize based on the criteria that we've talked about before and other shows around, you know, viability, capacity, all those other things, then develop those ideas to start to develop them, start to try them out. I. And get them out as early as possible. So again,

[00:09:24] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:09:25] **Scott:** our previous episode about agility testing, implementing things, getting a rough version out there to try and get some early feedback and then review that and say, do we think this? Has some potential, and then you will go through that cycle again of, do we want to build on that?

How do we improve, how do we iterate again, and then continue reprioritization. So again,

[00:09:47] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:09:47] **Scott:** in a bit of agility here. so just to summarize again, capture, evaluate, prioritize, develop, implement, and review.

[00:09:56] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah. I, I, I think that's brilliant. And, and going back to my experience there with the golf course, and these are genuine ideas that people had, there was definitely a, a capture process there. We were capturing pro uh, ideas. There wasn't really a great evaluation process, and then it just tailed off. And I'm not exaggerating when I say nothing came from that day.

Nothing at all. Nothing of value because we, we had this frothy generation and it was just, it was a lot of fun and people were laughing and enjoying themselves and it, you know, we all had a good time, but nothing came out that day. What a waste of energy. And I think, I suppose the danger here is that innovation itself gets a bad name.

Would you agree? You know, it, it, it,

[00:10:38] **Scott:** Yeah. How many

[00:10:39] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** we,

[00:10:40] **Scott:** left and thought, well, that was a waste of our time. There's no

[00:10:43] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** it was a waste of time.

[00:10:43] **Scott:** with another good idea again, so I'm not going to bother.

[00:10:46] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** I. Uh, I think if people said we're gonna have another away day, they, they could have come up with another a hundred i ideas, but the organization didn't have this process, so I love that. So again, just just to remind me, you've got your capture process. You then evaluate, so you capture the ideas, you evaluate, you prioritize, you develop the ideas.

How would you develop those ideas? Then how could you talk through how, how you think you'd develop those ideas then?

[00:11:10] **Scott:** So again, that's down to actually getting, say, a small team together. Um, giving them permission to take some risks to try and experiment is again, back to that culture of experimentation and testing to fail, almost to say how, you know, test it, try it out, get some early feedback as early as possible, and. Without the bureaucracy that normally

[00:11:33] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:11:33] **Scott:** these things, and that is hard for leadership to let go of because

[00:11:37] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:11:37] **Scott:** we need to have a paper trail. We need to have countless meetings about this to, you know, make sure we're safe. But I would

[00:11:44] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yes.

[00:11:45] **Scott:** that the risk is not taking action, not trying these ideas out. risk isn't spending 12 months. Beating an idea to death before you even try to

[00:11:54] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:11:54] **Scott:** something. So I think implement out of the two, out of the six implement and review are probably the two most important parts, is

[00:12:01] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Hmm.

[00:12:01] **Scott:** getting something out there and making sure you then review and get feedback on that and say, has this thing we're testing got legs?

If not, try

[00:12:09] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:12:10] **Scott:** Test that, has that got legs? If not, try something else.

[00:12:13] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah,

[00:12:13] **Scott:** bite-sized chunks.

[00:12:15] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** that's right. I, it reminded of something I, I, I do a bit of comedy improv, um, would you believe,

[00:12:22] **Scott:** I am gonna have to

[00:12:22] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** in improv, I. We'd have to have a separate show for that. Definitely. I'm not very good. But one of the core tenets of improv is the yes and statement. So if you, if you've never done any improv or you've never seen any improv, if I throw you an idea, you don't say.

No, you say yes and, and it's that attitude and, and I sort of wanna come onto this in terms of the culture. You mentioned organizations need to have a yes and attitude rather than a no. But, and, and many organizations in my experience are idea killing machines. You know, a good idea. Going back to my experience with that away day, a lot of them were not good ideas.

They were not good ideas. But I'm sure there was a few nuggets of. Of decent ideas in there. So yeah, I think this process that you've, you've outlined and I think is really, really rare for organizations to have a process. I dunno about you, but I, I dunno. Many organizations I've worked with have a process for innovation.

Do, do you, do you have that experience, that teams have process for innovation?

[00:13:21] **Scott:** No, the only, I loosely would use the word process. It's they have to submit a very big, long, bureaucratic business case for any idea, and it goes to the boardroom and then it dies, or it gets kicked around and then find many reasons not to do something. There's just

[00:13:37] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Uh,

[00:13:37] **Scott:** the barrier to entry. Is the hurdle that so many of these good ideas, I think don't even get that far because the employees are just, they got no hope.

It's like why bother and then compound on top. The stuff that we talk about in other shows around bureaucracy and

[00:13:53] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** yeah,

[00:13:53] **Scott:** and all those things, they just haven't got anything left to give and they know

[00:13:58] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** that's.

[00:13:58] **Scott:** I pull that effort into this bureaucracy to get an idea that I know will be really good? 'cause there's no point. So,

[00:14:04] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** That's right. That's, that's so right Scott. Now I'm reminded of, of, of, uh, another story for my long, long, and glorious career. When I was doing my, uh, degree, I, I did a internship. It wasn't called an internship then with Ford and I, I worked for four months at a car plant and if you've ever had the chance to go around, if you ever have the chance to go around a car plant, it's fascinating to go around and see cars being produced.

But I worked in the HR department and one of our functions and one of our jobs was to manage the idea schemes, the, the, the employee suggestion scheme. And it was a bit like the process you outlined there. There was a capture process. And at that time, people can actually put. Suggestions in a suggestions box.

This is how long ago this was. This is like 25, 30 years ago. But some of the ideas were, were really good. And one of the ideas that came up, and this is what I want to lead onto in terms of culture, is if you, if you, it came up with a good idea and it actually saved the organization money, you'd get, I think it was like 5% of the savings and one of the best ideas, one of the, the most, um, cost saving ideas, the, the best cost saving idea that I saw was.

They used to have these huge sort of warehouses with parts for the, for the factory floor, and at that time the lights were on 24 7. So guess what Somebody came up with? I. Motion sensors for the lights. And I, off the top of my head, I think it saved the business like quarter of a million pounds. I mean, electricity prices are even higher now, but it saved that one plant, like a quarter of a million pounds from just turning the lights off when nobody was walking around that part of the warehouse.

And that guy got, I think it was like 5% of that you to do the maths. It was worth having. So, and that leads me on to something else that you, you touched upon is leadership is so important in this. You have to have leaders that are going to create, first of all, my favorite term, which is psychological safety.

And if you, if you dunno that term, it's the idea that people feel safe within the organization. Don't just literally mean from physical violence, but they trust each other. So as a leader, for you to get innovation, true innovation in your organization, you have to generate that culture of trust. And you have to sort of have everybody feeling that innovation is everybody's job.

It's not just, you know, somebody over there is the innovator and I just get on with my job as a leader, you want to encourage your team to feel that anybody can innovate at any level. And I was working with a team just recently. And you know, one of those meetings where there's always one or two people who talk the most.

I think most meetings, there's somebody that talks an awful lot and I was, I was sort of managing this meeting and I noticed in, in the meeting there was this quite junior person and she had said very little, she's quite shy. So I actually stopped the meeting or stopped the flow of conversation, and I turned to this person and I said, have you got anything?

You know, I'd like your contribution. And she had one of those, what you'd call drop the mic moments. She just paused and she'd clearly been thinking about this for some time, but hadn't got the confidence to, to say and, and to contribute at that point. And she just came up with. A suggestion. And you know when you've had one of those moments where everybody just like stops.

It's like an intake of breath when we just sort of reflect upon the genius of what somebody's just said. It's never happened to me, by the way. It's never happened to me. Never. I never get that. But she said she came up with this idea and we just all went, wow, that's really good. And it was a genius idea.

Like I, I can't obviously share what it was, but it was an absolutely fantastic idea. So the point I'm making is we need leaders to create that culture of safety and trust, but also encourage everybody to feel that they can contribute. Everybody can actually contribute to this, this process of innovation, IT ideas can come from anywhere.

So if I asked you then, Scott, how, how would you see that culture translating into actual innovation workflows? Have you got any sort of, you know, little tips and tricks that people can start with? Any sort of tools or, you mentioned that overall process, but are there any sort of other workflows that you, you would recommend?

[00:18:16] **Scott:** Yeah. So we talked about leaders in respect to employees suggesting ideas to leaders and how leaders embrace that or kill that idea before I come on to some more of those. I also wanna point out that I've seen many times, and I'm sure you have as well, Andrew, that the leaders themselves fall into what I call the shiny trap. So on the basis of that example, you've just given how quite a junior member of the organization came up with a killer idea. I've seen quite often that, and I've said this before, closer the person is the customer, the more knowledgeable they are, the more experienced they are. And what tends to happen is they're the ones who have the best ideas. What can happen is the leaders think they should have the best ideas, and the leaders quite often are the most out of touch. I've seen all too often where leaders fall into the shiny trap and say, well, this is shiny. This is the latest cool tech, for example. 'cause I've worked in the tech space quite a lot. I've seen leaders fall into that trap and think, well, this is the cool thing that everyone's shouting about. So we must use that without realizing. Or even questioning themselves. Is it the right thing for us? Is it the right thing for our organization? Is it still in the hype cycle? And actually, I've seen all too often where the leaders are doing the shiny thing because it looks cool and it makes them look good in the boardroom because they're talking about this fancy tech or a shiny idea. And then the rest of the organization just get told, this is what we're doing. And you've got the quieter voices who are closer going, no, no, no, this is not gonna work for our customers. We know this is not gonna land with our customers. So actually there's like this enforced, and I'm gonna not call it innovation because the leaders think it is, but it's not. and they can make it worse because they're falling into that shiny trap. Does that make sense?

[00:20:06] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah, it does. And I, you just made me think that I, I think there's psychological reasons why leaders do that often. We're looking outwards. As a leader, and that's our job. If we are, if anybody's listening to this, and you are a leader, you know, part of your job is to look outwards, is to look at the, you know, the, you know, the peal, uh, analysis.

PI can never even put all the letters. Stand for peal, uh, politics, e economic. Societal, I probably got that totally wrong, but people are, as leaders, encouraged to look outwards. And the trouble is, if you're looking outwards completely, you're not looking back at the organization, you're not seeing the resource that you have.

So sometimes leaders feel that pressure to look outwards rather than inwards. And I think we also take what we've got for granted. You know, we, we, we don't, we forget how talented the people that we have are, and they can innovate. But they just need a bit of help. They might need a process. You mentioned they need some tools, which I think you're gonna talk about.

Yeah. But we forget the quality of the people that we've already got. And I think the other thing psychologically, before I hand back to what, you know, you were gonna talk about in terms of, of the process is that imposter syndrome. And you and I are often hard on, on leaders 'cause, but then again, we've both been leaders.

We know how difficult it can be to be a leader is leaders and managers have that imposter thing where. They think their job is to be a genius. They think their job is to have all of the ideas. Sure. There's some leaders that have the ego that they think they have all the ideas, but they feel the pressure to be special.

They feel the pressure to come up with those sparks of genius, and that forces them sometimes to try and tell people what to do. So I think there's, there's probably a lot of reasons, but yeah, you're right. I think leaders can end up chasing the latest fad, the number of companies that must be having discussions about AI implementation at the moment.

And maybe if people listen to this in like 10 years time, they go, yeah, 'cause they were right. I.

[00:22:03] **Scott:** Hmm.

[00:22:03] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** And AI's replaced all of us, but there are so many leaders now chasing the ai, uh, you know, down the AI rabbit hole.

[00:22:10] **Scott:** Yeah.

[00:22:11] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah. So yeah, the leaders have got a key responsibility in, in, in creating this innovation process.

Have you got some sort of simple things or straightforward things people can do to start being more innovative?

[00:22:21] **Scott:** So the first thing is to. Try and put yourself in the customer's perspective. And, uh, there's something called jobs to be Done theory, which is actually the, you know, the example given is the customer doesn't want a hammer and a nail. They want to put, they want a picture on the wall to look at. So it's, again, it's not just about the tools, it's about the outcome the customer wants and solving customer problems. And finding innovative ways to do that is key and not just build the shiny stuff that that I've been talking about. And too many leaders, I think fall into. The safe bet. So it's actually what, oh, this one's? Yeah. We've kind of done this before, so this is not risky. So we'll do that one. But you could be missing an opportunity. So I think the best leaders, their job, as we talked about, you were saying about the leaders think they have to be, you know, and have all the answers. And again, very early in my career, I've shared this before in other episodes, that. I thought I had to have all the answers. Now I say, no team. You have the answers.

You are the smart people. You tell me my job as a leader is to ask the right questions actually, you know, give the team the safe place and to, to flourish these ideas, to try them out, to test them. But also challenge some of those ideas and say, well, what job is this really solving? What problem is this solving for our customers?

How can we prove that? How can we test it? How can we get customer feedback? Involve them in the process, depending on the nature of the organization, involve them in those innovation discussions. I. But again, you have to have the awareness that what customers say in a workshop environment or survey is quite often different to reality, which is back to what we've been talking about before, is get into the hands.

So get those ideas into the hands. And then we've talked again about prioritization. So is there a framework in place where you can actually prioritize these ideas? So there's a prioritization framework around scoring ideas versus effort and impact. So actually, if it requires a lot of effort and low impact, compare that to something that's minimal effort and high impact. You know which one you would prioritize higher.

So using different ways to prioritize again. Some people may have heard of squads within Spotify. I dunno if they still use it the same way they did, but, um, just building small, innovative teams, giving them permission to try and experiment again without that bureaucracy at the top. there's a stat that I. can use the agile term again, but agile organizations are 60% more likely to see innovation, success. There's a, and I've been there and I've helped nurture that with teams in the past. There's this buzz, there's this feeling of excitement and shared ownership and collaborative working, which is this blend of autonomy and alignment in terms of we're on this mission together.

We've got the safety, the overhead protection to. Be innovative and the danger of overusing the word here, but to actually try those things out and be creative. Sometimes you may have these pet projects where a senior leader has said, this is what we're gonna do. And they just get stuck on it and well, we've come so far, we're gonna keep going and not actually reviewing what's working, what isn't what, what have you seen happen in your experience?

[00:25:31] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Uh, yeah, I, I have seen, uh, organizations chase ideas that I think almost at the start, most people realize was a bad idea, but they continue. The number of times I've been involved in organizations that have done a rebrand, how many times have we tried, how many rebrands are we gonna have it? This is not a great idea.

The rebrand isn't going to, isn't gonna fix the, the core problem, and, and you are a big fan of. Customer value. I'm, I'm, I'm obviously a big fan too. What's, what matters to the customer? What's gonna increase the value proposition for the organization? Those are the ideas that we should focus on those.

That's, that's where the innovation process should be focused, is on that customer value. So I think what happens is you get something called in psychology, um, the sunk cost fallacy, and if you've heard of this, this term, but the sunk cost fallacy is once we've started down a particular path and it's human nature.

But organizations obviously are full of people, is we tend to carry on with it. Often. It might be a good idea and they're great, but often we realize that this isn't a great idea, but we put so much time in, we put so much effort in, we put so much money in, we carry on anyway. Uh, and, and the, the sunk cost fallacies, we've sunk costs into this.

It's a bit like the classic example is you never joined a queue in the post office and there's like three lines to join. And you join this one 'cause you think it's gonna be the quickest, and then the other line starts to move quicker than yours and you think, oh, I've been standing in this line now for.

For five minutes, I'm gonna stay in this line. So I think that's one of the key problems and that's, that's a human fallacy. And so really what we're talking here is that leaders have to understand innovation, they have to understand it's a process, but they have to invest in that innovation process. They have to protect the innovation process.

And what that means is. We are going to have this process. We're gonna give airtime to it. We're gonna give resources to it. We're gonna give training to, to people to do this, and we're gonna accept that some of these ideas will not work. But we're gonna have like, like you've mentioned, very helpfully, things like prioritization frameworks.

We're gonna try agile, we're gonna do test and learn, but it really depends on those leaders. Believing in innovation and protecting the process of innovation. And, and the, the other job of leaders is to encourage people to understand why we're trying to be innovative. I mentioned that that away day that, that I talk about, I.

There wasn't really a sort of reason why. And you know, Simon Sinek, uh, the, the Thought Leader, he talks about having a, a why, why do you want your teams to be innovative? Why do we need to be innovative? You need to sell that as a leader. There has to be something in it for the.

The team. So this conference I talk about there was, there was a desperation pretty much on the organization's part to generate more revenue. But that revenue wasn't gonna be shared with the team. Now you might say, well, it's their job to come up with ideas. But in PE, the back of people's minds is, why should I give you a good idea?

If it's not gonna make my job easier, why should I give you a good idea? Unless I'm going to get some sort of maybe financial benefit or a promotion. So leadership has to have that vision. It has to have that process, but it also has to have that re reciprocal arrangement. We want you to be innovative, you will benefit as well.

You know, we both benefit the organization and the individual, and that's the job of the leader.

Do you got any sort of final ideas that we can offer people to, to start getting that innovation process working in their teams?

[00:29:01] **Scott:** Yeah, so some suggestions include blocking out 30 minutes this week for the team to have an idea session you know, just make it a small team, low pressure, high energy, maybe some biscuits. They always get unwell or they're always caveat out there. Then people have a crash afterwards. So maybe some healthy fruit, I dunno. But

[00:29:20] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah.

[00:29:20] **Scott:** that space and, but that has to, as we've said, come with support. And not just be, oh, here we go again. We're just being asked for ideas because the organization keeps saying that, you know, we keep telling the organization is not listening to us. But actually, you know, this brief idea session. Capture the ideas, go through the six stages that we've talked about and we'll, we'll list those six stages in the show notes for you, for easy reference and ask the team for a challenge. You know, for example, if we have a had to double our impact without doubling our budget, what would we try? Also innovation is gonna have to have some guardrails around it. So some constraints, and I don't want constraint to sound negative, but as you've said in the example you gave of the golf course idea, that just wasn't feasible. So actually putting some guidance around, you know, what ideas and innovation is likely to be welcomed and acceptable, but balancing that with the creative freedom to encourage people to, I say the cliche, think outside the box. there's a tension there, but I think it's, it's just landing that right as well. Andrew, do you have any final thoughts that we can wrap this topic up with today?

[00:30:25] **Andrew Lloyd Gordon:** Yeah, we are in a very, very difficult business environment. The world is crazy. It seems to get crazier. By the minute, if don't, don't watch the news. It's so depressing. So organizations have to be more innovative. They have to understand what innovation is, they have to build it into processes. So for me, and, and what you and I have been talking about is we have to understand that innovation is a mindset I.

It's, it's an attitude within the organization. It's about having that curiosity. It's about encouraging people to be creative. It's about having a bit of courage as well within the organization, and certainly from the leadership about being brave, trying new things out, being agile, but primarily it's for the team to feel safe and building that.

Sense of psychological safety. We are allowed to try things out. We are allowed to try to try new, uh, ideas out. Maybe there's a bit of a budget to try things out, doing that agile test and learn thing. And if, if all you can start with is just saying to your team, what's one idea this week? We can try just one idea.

And as a manager and if you are a manager or a leader, have that yes and attitude rather than the No, but, and over time, I think you'll see that innovation becomes normal in your organization, and you'll start to move forward in so many ways.

Thank you for listening to the Work Unraveled podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Be sure to subscribe to the show so you don't miss the next one. 

[00:31:53] **Scott:** If you'd like Andrew or me to help you or your business, whether it is for team productivity, leadership, coaching, or communication skills, our website addresses are in the show notes.

Thanks, and until the next time.