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As someone who develops programming to foster more inclusive workplaces, the biggest challenge I face is tailoring conversations about diversity and inclusion to everybody in the room. So I created this chart to give leaders a framework for how to best utilize each one of these archetypes to advance diversity and inclusion (D&I) goals.
(courtesy of Amber Madison)
Here’s who those four archetypes are, and how your company can approach each one.
THE CHAMPION
Who: The experts in the space–corporate heads of diversity and inclusion, D&I consultants, HR and People Ops folks, and allies who are informed and outspoken about these issues.
How to utilize them: These people are going to be your best soldiers, the ones you can mobilize to reach your diversity and inclusion goals. But they’re not always getting credit for this work. We know that diverse and inclusive companies make more money–so are you rewarding the fact that these employees are volunteering their time to help you build a more profitable business? And just as important, are there systems in place to incentivize them to continue to do this work?
THE NEWBIE
Who: Well-intentioned yet uninformed, these people might include your CEO who drops a tone-deaf remark at an all-hands meeting, your caring but dopey manager, Ashton Kutcher, and all those who are waking up to issues of systemic injustice but aren’t yet “woke”
How to respond to them: It’s easy to get upset when people say ignorant things, but it’s important to remember that we’re all still learning. Everyone has said the wrong thing at some point or another, so we can all have some empathy for what it feels like to mess up. Furthermore, when people witness someone who’s misinformed but well-intentioned get roasted for mistakenly saying something offensive, it can create a widespread fear of being judged harshly for screwing up. And that can make people avoid engaging in real conversations about these topics at all. Of course, problematic thoughts and ideas need to be corrected, but doing so with kindness and empathy encourages everyone to stay involved.
THE BYSTANDER
Who: In all likelihood half of your company, these are the people who feel indifferent to diversity and inclusion issues. Maybe they’re “too busy” to think about these things, or they wonder, “What does this have to do with me?”
How to win them over: This group is our untapped market–our “undecided voters”–and our biggest opportunity to deepen support for D&I interventions. These are people who haven’t spent much time thinking about these issues, and likely haven’t had to be confronted with them. To turn bystanders into allies, you need to make a compelling case for why they should care. Listen to their concerns if they have them, respond thoughtfully to misguided thinking, and engage in a dialogue about these issues.
THE BIGOT
Who: Those who identify with the views expressed in last summer’s infamous “Google memo,” and Reddit or Twitter users who feel emboldened to be outspoken sexists, racists, homophobes, and so on.
How to leverage their opposition: If we want to win this battle for equality, then like any good team we need to study our opposition. Even if we never change the minds of many people in this category, understanding why they feel what they feel will help us better target our efforts to those who are undecided. Whatever extreme viewpoints opponents may have, those indifferent to these issues likely have shades of the same ones. By gaining insight into our opposition’s motivations and thought processes, we can frame our messages for the broadest possible appeal.
Our culture has filled us with offensive, problematic, and misguided ideas about gender, race, sexuality–you name it. Everyone is at a different place with how deeply they believe these ideas (consciously or otherwise), and how much time they’ve spent challenging them. Rather than just knowing how to preach to the choir, the better we can meet people where they are, and escort them on their journey forward, the more impact we’ll make in the long run.
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Hard as it is for organizations to innovate, large ones as diverse as Alcoa, the Discovery Group, and NASA’s Ames Research Center are actually doing so. What can other companies learn from their approaches and attributes? That question formed the core of a multiyear study comprising in-depth interviews, workshops, and surveys of more than 2,500 executives in over 300 companies, including both performance leaders and laggards, in a broad set of industries and countries. What we found were a set of eight essential attributes that are present, either in part or in full, at every big company that’s a high performer in product, process, or business-model innovation.
Aspire
President John F. Kennedy’s bold aspiration, in 1962, to “go to the moon in this decade” motivated a nation to unprecedented levels of innovation. A far-reaching vision can be a compelling catalyst, provided it’s realistic enough to stimulate action today.
But in a corporate setting, as many CEOs have discovered, even the most inspiring words often are insufficient, no matter how many times they are repeated. It helps to combine high-level aspirations with estimates of the value that innovation should generate to meet financial-growth objectives. Quantifying an “innovation target for growth,” and making it an explicit part of future strategic plans, helps solidify the importance of and accountability for innovation. The target itself must be large enough to force managers to include innovation investments in their business plans. If they can make their numbers using other, less risky tactics, our experience suggests that they will.
Establishing a quantitative innovation aspiration is not enough, however. The target value needs to be apportioned to relevant business “owners” and cascaded down to their organizations in the form of performance targets and timelines. Anything less risks encouraging inaction or the belief that innovation is someone else’s job.
Choose
Fresh, creative insights are invaluable, but in our experience many companies run into difficulty less from a scarcity of new ideas than from the struggle to determine which ideas to support and scale.
Innovation is inherently risky, to be sure, and getting the most from a portfolio of innovation initiatives is more about managing risk than eliminating it. Since no one knows exactly where valuable innovations will emerge, and searching everywhere is impractical, executives must create some boundary conditions for the opportunity spaces they want to explore.
Once the opportunities are defined, companies need transparency into what people are working on and a governance process that constantly assesses not only the expected value, timing, and risk of the initiatives in the portfolio but also its overall composition. There’s no single mix that’s universally right.
Discover
Innovation also requires actionable and differentiated insights—the kind that excite customers and bring new categories and markets into being. How do companies develop them? Genius is always an appealing approach, if you have or can get it. Fortunately, innovation yields to other approaches besides exceptional creativity.
The rest of us can look for insights by methodically and systematically scrutinizing three areas: a valuable problem to solve, a technology that enables a solution, and a business model that generates money from it. Discovery is iterative, and the active use of prototypes can help companies continue to learn as they develop, test, validate, and refine their innovations. Moreover, we firmly believe that without a fully developed innovation system encompassing the other elements described in this article, large organizations probably won’t innovate successfully, no matter how effective their insight-generation process.
Evolve
Business-model innovations—which change the economics of the value chain, diversify profit streams, and/or modify delivery models—have always been a vital part of a strong innovation portfolio. As smartphones and mobile apps threaten to upend oldline industries, business-model innovation has become all the more urgent: established companies must reinvent their businesses before technology-driven upstarts do. Why, then, do most innovation systems so squarely emphasize new products? The reason, of course, is that most big companies are reluctant to risk tampering with their core business model until it’s visibly under threat. At that point, they can only hope it’s not too late.
Leading companies combat this troubling tendency in a number of ways. They up their game in market intelligence, the better to separate signal from noise. They establish funding vehicles for new businesses that don’t fit into the current structure. They constantly reevaluate their position in the value chain, carefully considering business models that might deliver value to priority groups of new customers. They sponsor pilot projects and experiments away from the core business to help combat narrow conceptions of what they are and do. And they stress-test newly emerging value propositions and operating models against countermoves by competitors.
Accelerate
A surprising number of impressive innovations from companies were actually the fruit of their mavericks, who succeeded in bypassing their early-approval processes. Clearly, there’s a balance to be maintained: bureaucracy must be held in check, yet the rush to market should not undermine the cross-functional collaboration, continuous learning cycles, and clear decision pathways that help enable innovation.
To end up with the innovation initially envisioned, it’s necessary to knock down the barriers that stand between a great idea and the end user. Companies need a well-connected manager to take charge of a project and be responsible for the budget, time to market, and key specifications—a person who can say yes rather than no. In addition, the project team needs to be cross-functional in reality, not just on paper. This means locating its members in a single place and ensuring that they give the project a significant amount of their time (at least half) to support a culture that puts the innovation project’s success above the success of each function. Cross-functional collaboration can help ensure end-user involvement throughout the development process.
Scale
Some ideas, such as luxury goods and many smartphone apps, are destined for niche markets. Others, like social networks, work at global scale. Explicitly considering the appropriate magnitude and reach of a given idea is important to ensuring that the right resources and risks are involved in pursuing it.
Resources and capabilities must be marshaled to make sure a new product or service can be delivered quickly at the desired volume and quality. Manufacturing facilities, suppliers, distributors, and others must be prepared to execute a rapid and full rollout.
Extend
In the space of only a few years, companies in nearly every sector have conceded that innovation requires external collaborators. Flows of talent and knowledge increasingly transcend company and geographic boundaries. Successful innovators achieve significant multiples for every dollar invested in innovation by accessing the skills and talents of others.
High-performing innovators work hard to develop the ecosystems that help deliver these benefits. Indeed, they strive to become partners of choice, increasing the likelihood that the best ideas and people will come their way. That requires a systematic approach. First, these companies find out which partners they are already working with; surprisingly few companies know this. Then they decide which networks—say, four or five of them—they ideally need to support their innovation strategies. This step helps them to narrow and focus their collaboration efforts and to manage the flow of possibilities from outside the company. Strong innovators also regularly review their networks, extending and pruning them as appropriate and using sophisticated incentives and contractual structures to motivate high-performing business partners. Becoming a true partner of choice is, among other things, about clarifying what a partnership can offer the junior member: brand, reach, or access, perhaps. It is also about behavior. Partners of choice are fair and transparent in their dealings.
Moreover, companies that make the most of external networks have a good idea of what’s most useful at which stages of the innovation process. In general, they cast a relatively wide net in the early going. But as they come closer to commercializing a new product or service, they become narrower and more specific in their sourcing, since by then the new offering’s design is relatively set.
Mobilize
How do leading companies stimulate, encourage, support, and reward innovative behavior and thinking among the right groups of people? The best companies find ways to embed innovation into the fibers of their culture, from the core to the periphery.
They start back where we began: with aspirations that forge tight connections among innovation, strategy, and performance. When a company sets financial targets for innovation and defines market spaces, minds become far more focused. As those aspirations come to life through individual projects across the company, innovation leaders clarify responsibilities using the appropriate incentives and rewards.
Internal collaboration and experimentation can take years to establish, particularly in large, mature companies with strong cultures and ways of working that, in other respects, may have served them well. Some companies set up “innovation garages” where small groups can work on important projects unconstrained by the normal working environment while building new ways of working that can be scaled up and absorbed into the larger organization.
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Big companies do not easily reinvent themselves as leading innovators. Too many fixed routines and cultural factors can get in the way. For those that do make the attempt, innovation excellence is often built in a multiyear effort that touches most, if not all, parts of the organization. Our experience and research suggest that any company looking to make this journey will maximize its probability of success by closely studying and appropriately assimilating the leading practices of high-performing innovators. Taken together, these form an essential operating system for innovation within a company’s organizational structure and culture.
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