Episode #465: Leaders Must Sell The Need For Innovation

“It’s obvious, we need to be continually innovating”, we say to our team. But is it obvious to them and do they believe it? Also are they really interested or motivated to do anything about it? They may feel they are super busy already, with what they have on their plate. Then, the boss turns up talking about better, higher, further, faster and the eyes start to glaze over. “Here we go again”, they are thinking and recalling the last time this big innovation push petered out and went nowhere. Further, most people in Japan are not that keen on change, because with it comes risk. We all get into our routines of work and we are comfortable and competent in the way we do things, so changing what we do now isn’t that attractive. We are in our Comfort Zone and we like it right here thank you.

In order to sell the innovation idea to our team, there are some key stages we need to go through. Now, counterintuitively, we have to remember that our innnovation design phase order is different to the presentation phase order which we will show to the team. There are seven stages in the design phase.

1. Preparation

We have to think about the target audience for our presentation on the need for further innovation. How much knowledge, expertise and experience do they have? Do they have any biases or prejudices, which may need to be addressed during the presentation? Where will the resistance come from and on what basis?

2. Closing

It sounds a bit strange, but we should begin our design process with how we are going to finish the presentation. We need to be very clear about what final impression we want. We need perfect clarity around what is our key message. By starting with designing the close, we are forced to get a better picture of what we will need to cover in the presentation, in order to prove what we are suggesting is a good idea. We have to boil the ocean of possibilities down to the one key thing, which will be crucial to getting everyone on board.

3. Statement of Organisational Need For Innovation

Having worked hard to refine our key message, we need to get it into one short paragraph that states the problem and the objective we have. We are looking for clarity at this point. This statement is just that, a statement and the detailed proof comes in the next phase, but we want this statement to be unambiguous and capable of being comprehended within two seconds.

4. Example Of Need For Innovation

Our storytelling skills are useful here for us to describe an example of the need, in a way which will get people motivated to fix it. We go straight into the background, we paint a picture of the context. In our story, we involve some key elements - people they know who were involved, the location where we first realised the need, the season it occurred and the underlying situation. The story cannot be too long or our listeners will lose patience, so it has to be brief and compelling. If we can paint the picture of the context well enough, there is a very strong possibility our listeners will leap ahead of us and come to the same conclusion we have come to.

5. We Offer Up Alternatives As Our Solution To The Problem

We take a strategic approach at this point. We don’t come with a single solution to the problem. We come armed with viable, workable alternatives.

We list up three credible solutions with tons of evidence. We then go through the pros and cons of each idea in depth.

6. Best Solution Announcement

We purposely make the last one, Solution Three, advocating spending team time and resources on innovation, the preferred one, the one we think is best. We do this because for most people, recency means they remember best what they heard last. We explain why this is the best choice compared to the other viable solutions.

7. Opening

Finally, we design the opening. We leave this until the last, because the opening has a specific function. In this Age of Distraction and Era of Cynicism, we know that when people join the meeting, they will have a lot of competing thoughts in their minds. We must make sure that our message gets through to them, despite all of the distraction. This is where the opening comes in. We might ask a question, which really makes people think. We might make a startling or puzzling statement that grabs attention. We might offer a quotation from an expert or some statistics which are very powerful. It must be so strong that they forget whatever was on their mind and they give us their full attention.

Now that we have completed the design phase, we need to rearrange it all into the order we will deliver the talk to the team. The talk is broken into chapters and presented in this order: Opening, Statement of Organisational Need For innovation, Example of Need For Innovation, Our Alternative Solutions To The Problem, Our Best Solution Announcement, Close.

One critical thing, which often gets overlooked, is that we need to treat this like any other major presentation. That means we have to rehearse it, before we give the actual talk. Just thinking “it is only the team, so it doesn't have to be rehearsed” is very self-indulgent. This is a key presentation we are giving, one where we are trying to move the team behind us and lead them into unchartered territory. We need to ensure we are as convincing and as effective with this talk, as we would be doing a huge deal with a major client.