IDL86 Season 2: The Innovation Mindset with Lorraine Marchand

Are visionaries instinctive innovators? Why do unhealthy leaders unintentionally stop innovation within their businesses? Do you listen to your customers, and innovate your business to align with and solve their needs?

I have had the great opportunity to read The Innovation Mindset by today’s guest, Lorraine Marchand. We have an exciting conversation about leaders’ abilities to create an innovative business culture. We look at how an innovative culture can help change your business’s problems into opportunities. Being a well established innovator in her own field, Lorraine shares her insights about how an innovative business culture fosters solutions-oriented mindsets.

Meet Lorraine Marchand

Lorraine Marchand is a passionate business leader, advisor and innovator in the life sciences and healthcare. Her teaching, consulting and business endeavors focus on the design and development of new products and services and the business and marketing models that enable their successful adoption.

Lorraine has helped countless business executives and scientists overcome their fear of innovating through her seminal talk, “How to Innovate without Fear of Failure,” first produced by Johnson & Johnson TedX in 2014 and now a platform for talks, workshops, curricula and publications over the past 6 years.

Highly creative and innovative in the design of projects and workshops, Lorraine developed a course on accelerating the commercialization of new technologies for Princeton University where she served as James Wei Visiting Professor of Entrepreneurship.  She is adjunct professor and advisory board member at Columbia Business School.  

Visit Lorraine Marchand’s website and connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

IN THIS EPISODE WE DISCUSS:

• Can an innovative culture be created by the leader? - 03:02

• Innovators are visionaries - 14:51

• Use needs as clues - 22:10

• Values are integral to your innovation - 39:00

Can an innovative culture be created by the leader?

Innovation, creativity, and problem-solving are innately human characteristics.

In the correct environment, these skills are skills that each person can develop, especially when their leader encourages them to do so.

It benefits the team and therefore the success of the business. So, yes. A leader can create an innovative culture in their company, but they need to model it and applaud it when it happens.

Healthy and vulnerable leaders create innovation because they welcome and appreciate a challenge, healthy conflict, and change.

Unhealthy leaders who are controlled by their fears and insecurities can curb innovation because it may make them feel threatened.

Innovators are visionaries

Visionaries can look out and beyond and make relatively accurate predictions about what their customers might need in the future.

They can therefore direct the progression of their business to continually meet their client's needs over time, leading to constant innovation as they pivot.

Use needs as clues

Innovation is often stronger and more successful when it is used to solve a customer’s needs or problems.

If you innovate for the sake of remaining relevant, or new, you may lose out on valuable effort and money. Direct your progress to serve your clients, help them to solve their problems, and fulfill the needs that they need help fulfilling.

Values are integral to your innovation

Your values will inform the direction that your innovation takes, and your innovation will either affirm or disregard your values.

Align your actions with what is important to you, the employees, and the company as a whole.

Resources, books, and links mentioned in this episode:

BOOK | Lorraine Marchand - The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry

Visit Lorraine Marchand’s website and connect on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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Email Tyler: tyler@tylerdickerhoof.com

About the Impact Driven Leader Podcast

The Impact Driven Leader Podcast, hosted by Tyler Dickerhoof, is for Xillennial leaders who have felt alone and ill-equipped to lead in today's world. Through inspiring interviews with authors from around the world, Tyler uncovers how unique leadership strengths can empower others to achieve so much more, with real impact.

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Pivoting is a natural part of the innovation process.

Lorraine Marchand

Podcast Transcription

[TYLER DICKERHOOF] Welcome back to the Impact Driven Leader podcast. This is your host, Tyler Dickerhoof. So glad you're here. So glad you're watching on YouTube. Every week we get more and more subscribers on YouTube. I love it. Glad to see you here. No mustache this week. If you're on YouTube, you see that. Anyways, I am excited to share with you this conversation. I had the great opportunity to be introduced and take a look and read The Innovation Mindset by Lorraine Marchand, just such a wonderful conversation. But this is what it's exciting to me as a leader, you have the ability, you have the ability to make an innovative culture. You know what happens when you make an innovative culture? Problems don't become problems. Problems become opportunities to serve. There's problems in your organization. Well, you can focus on the problems and let that just continue to stifle you or say, great, there's problems. I can solve those. Let's focus on solutions. Well, those innovations, the solutions to those problems come from thinking. You're going to hear Lorraine talk about that today. I'm excited to have her share with you. She is an established, a well healed innovator in her own field, working in pharmaceutical, doing a lot of amazing technical stuff, she talks about in this interview. I'd love for you to check out more what she has to offer. Thank you so much for listening in. As always, if you get value from today's episode, I'd love for you to leave us a rating, leave a review, know what's going on. If you want to subscribe to the Impact Driven Leader community, there's an link to do that in the show notes as well. Would love for you to be a part of what we're doing. My desire is to help other leaders get healthy too. For me, that was working on the emotional, the relational side for me. It was also learning how, as Lorraine and I talk about my style of leadership didn't stifle innovation. You're going to learn more about that. Excited for you to do so. I'll catch you at the end. Lorraine, welcome to the podcast. I am so excited to have this conversation. We chatted for a few moments before, just getting to know each other a little bit and there's already some great sparks that are flying in, so I can't wait to continue to have that and thankful to have you as a guest. [LORRAINE MARCHAND] Well, thank you, Tyler. The pleasure is all mine. I've really been looking forward to this dialogue with you because it's clearly my favorite topic. I know with your focus on impact leadership, the synergies are just going to be tremendous, and I hope they'll really be beneficial to your audience. [TYLER] So let's start with that one. I mean, you asked me this, it's like, Tyler, where do you think your innovation comes from? I answered that, but I want to throw that back on you and just say, can an innovative culture be curated by a leader? [LORRAINE] My short answer to that is, yes, absolutely. I believe that we've got some innate creativity, the ability to be problem solvers, passion, adaptability to change. I believe that those are innate human behaviors and responses and I think with the right leadership, the right model, we can help emulate and role model creativity, innovation. We can create a safe environment for it where it can be incentivized and we can definitely help it to be explored and expanded in a corporation, in a team, and at an individual level. [TYLER] You mentioned that there in a safe environment, and to me that has to be probably the catalystic piece that determines is innovation embraced or is it just said, oh, we need to be innovative, but leaders don't really want innovation because of their own fears and insecurities? [LORRAINE] Yes, I think that this is why it can be so difficult to innovate within a corporation because a corporation is set up in order to enforce a system of predictability. We want the repeated product benefits and certain metrics and so we want repeatability. So it's almost an oxymoron to try to encourage innovation in a corporation. However, that said, I have seen companies do this very well when the leadership at the top, and I mean at the very top, no matter how large or small the corporation, it has to be something that's embraced by the CEO. It has to be spread and inculcated throughout the leadership team throughout the culture. This idea of a safe environment is so critical because innovation by its nature is experimentation. Sometimes our experiments are going to succeed, sometimes they're going to be neutral, and we're not sure if they really went anywhere and sometimes, they won't be successful, and we may need to pivot. I like to say that if you're in the sport of innovation, you never fail because as long as you're learning, it's all about continuous improvement and if you pivot into a new direction without changing or compromising your vision or your strategy, that pivoting is a natural part of the innovation process. [TYLER] Yes, I mean, this has hit me the last few weeks, and I'm not sure if I shared on my last podcast or not, but this is something that ties into. It's like when you take a chance, there's two options that come of it. You either fail and by that you learn or you build a relationship. To me, those are both valuable. It's that idea of, oh, if we experiment, we try, well, we may pivot from it. Well, to me that has to be, when you go through the innovation process, the safety that you develop through that process is like, oh, we failed. Well, you didn't chop my head off. You didn't fire me. You didn't open up the trap door in the boardroom and I'm gone. We learned together. I understood more of what you're good at, maybe what your limitations are. To me, those are the results of any type of endeavor where you could possibly experiment and fail that are so worthwhile. [LORRAINE] I absolutely agree with you and it's one of the reasons that, for example, Jeff Bezos at Amazon has been credited with a strong innovation culture at that behemoth of a company, which is really in the logistics business. That doesn't sound particularly innovative to be in logistics but because he actually encourages, and we can use the word failure, he encourages failure. He encourages the pivot, and in fact, he incentivizes and rewards it as much as he does those whose efforts end up succeeding or leading to an improvement in a product or a service. So I think by showcasing what was learned when something didn't work, I know, I don't know about you Tyler, but in my own personal experience, I have learned so much more from what didn't work out In my life, in my choices in my career than I did when everything was working out beautifully. So yes, I think that's really important that leaders feel comfortable not having all the answers, being able to say that it's okay to fail or not get this right, and that they create that safe environment and encourage people to take those chances. Again, it's okay if it doesn't work out the way you plan. That is the scientific process. [TYLER] So before we pivot to your early history in innovation and what started that, there's something that you mentioned there that I think is so important. We talk about innovative cultures and you made the comment there of getting the credit. I can't help but think that the cultures where innovation is not embraced is when a leader must take the credit where they feel like, if I'm not bringing the innovation, then I'm not doing my job. So break that down in regards to a leader. It's like, is it their job to bring all the innovation or is it to guide the innovation towards the solution? [LORRAINE] I think that the role of the innovator should be to set the expectation, to set the culture, to set the incentive structure to inculcate the right values. We really can't talk about an innovative culture without talking about values and then get the hell out of the way. Like give people the latitude to go off and create and innovate and team and try it and bring it back to you. You do not micromanage. You don't have them reporting in. You give them the latitude to do their jobs and check in and provide resources as necessary. [TYLER] Let's go back, and you shared this at the opening of your book, where you learned to be innovative. [LORRAINE] Well, I think what I learned was a real embracing of change, which I think is a really important value within an innovation. I'll use the word ecosystem, not to sound too philosophical but I learned to embrace change. I had a driving curiosity and a passion for problem-solving. Those were inculcated at an early age by my dad, who was a serial inventor, always experimenting, always tinkering. Even when my bro, my brother and I were growing up around the house, no matter what problem we encountered, we always had to bring him three solutions. So everything was just a fascinating experiment in why is it like that? How could it be different? What solutions would fix this? What are the pros and cons of the different solutions? It all came to the four one experience that I had over the summer when he took us to a diner. Our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. We had to have our marble notebooks and our pens, and we interviewed the waitresses and the bus boys, and we timed everything and we determined that it was the sugar packets that people were pouring into their coffee or their tea and they were spewing the remaining empty packets all over the table and the floor and it took extra time for everybody to clean those up. But we didn't stop there because once we confirmed that that was the problem, we came up with different prototypes of solutions. As we came up with the prototypes, we had conversations with the waitress, with the bus boys. We tested the ideas with them in order to figure out which one best fit that particular situation. We ended up developing a product and at the age of 12, guided by my dad, I learned that I loved the problem-solving. I loved everything that went into creating that product and I didn't want to look back. It was just a behavior or an approach that I took forward with me throughout my career. [TYLER] So there's two things there as you share that about the sugar packets and I can't, you know the times that all of a sudden the table gets wet and you're trying to pick up all those packets and the pieces of paper, how time consuming and frustrating that is. But this is something that I think is interesting. So the solution you guys came up with was just sugar cube, correct and that's what you ended up selling to the staff, is that's their solution? [LORRAINE] That's correct. [TYLER] Now, you guys didn't, did you invent the sugar cube or did you just see where it could be applied? [LORRAINE] Well, we invented the sugar cube because what it ended up being was a four-sided plastic container that could hold the sugar packets in the one side and the disposed packets on the other side but then we designed it so that it had an insert and so you could put advertising in it. So the restaurant was actually able to go out to some of its sponsors and put advertising in the sugar packet. So it was practical, it was functional, but it had some additional benefits. That was another reason why they ended up liking it so much. It addressed additional needs. [TYLER] Well, what I think is great about that is you saw a problem, you saw a way to solve that, but then you saw how to me, this is innovate. It's you could have said, "Hey just go find a square or a dish or something like that to be the solution." But you're like, no, let's take that a step further and then take this that's already established. You could have a little rectangular structure, but let's make it more, let's do more. Let's solve more problems with it. To me, that's what excites me when you bring up innovation, it's beyond invention. It is, let's think of the next steps and what that creates. [LORRAINE] Yes, I would agree with you. When folks talk about design thinking, like that's what design thinking is to me, it's designing the solution around the problem, thinking about the additional features and benefits, the way people work, what it is they do, and making sure that that design, as you point out, goes a couple steps further. It doesn't just solve that immediate problem but it's anticipating what's next or what could be novel or really interesting about it. [TYLER] I mean, which again, as I think from a leadership perspective, it's leaders see more and before, and that ability to innovate isn't just solving the first level of problems. It's saying, okay, what does that then lead to next and then next and next? To me, that gets into part of the vision of leadership and how innovation ties into us. Like, no, we're going to do more. How we get there, I don't know. We're going to have to innovate, figure out the way, and that's why we have the people on the team. But that, as I think about that and share that and just wonder how much of that is essential for organizations and corporations to live past their first product. [LORRAINE] Yes, that's a really terrific point because I do think that the best leaders of innovation are visionaries. They think what I might call laterally, sort of across the plane. They're able to look out to the next three products to what those customer needs might be in three to five years, or once they're already using the product, what could they need next? So they do have an ability to look out. Again, some people are born with that naturally, others aren't but you can absolutely be encouraged and sort of you can be encouraged and molded, if you will. In doing that if you learn the questioning technique, so it's really important that you're always asking the right questions. If you're armed with the right questions and you have a questioning culture that you create, and the team is always asking questions about the culture, about the environment, about the market, about the competition, you will get to a place where you have the ability to look out further. Because I believe that the right questions enable you to look out further. Sometimes when people get a little too limited in their thinking, it's because the questions that they were following just weren't broad enough. [TYLER] Well, that makes me think, you mentioned this book, and I've read the stories of it before, how 3M how the Post-It note was developed and discovered. To me those are examples of pivots. Yet those only come because people start asking questions, what if, and then framing in the, well, what could it be like? So to me, and maybe this is a good time to go through the laws that you have, the eight laws of innovation and the steps to it but how each one of those connect to each other to further along the pathway. [LORRAINE] That's a great point. I think that in terms of, first of all, maybe how to frame this out a little bit, I believe that there is a best practice approach to innovation. I talk about this in the book a little bit as well. I give an example of the hair growth product called Rogain, which has been around for 25 years. When the Upjohn company was initially exploring uses of Rogain, it was actually for cardiovascular disease but what they noticed was in their studies, they had recruited middle-aged white men who happened to have cardiovascular disease and their hair was growing. So they were able to see that sign. They pivoted, they ended up putting the studies together for hair growth ahead of the cardiovascular indication. Rogain obviously for hair growth became phenomenally successful. They still moved forward on the cardiovascular indication, but a huge market was created because they saw that opportunity. They pivoted and they took advantage of it. To me, and maybe it's a little bit like the 3M example, that's serendipity. It's great when it happens. I think you have to have your surveillance on and notice it, but it doesn't happen most of the time. It's actually a rather rare form of innovation. Another type of innovation that I see all too frequently, probably 99% of the time, is an example that I provide where I was working with a colleague who had licensed a technology from a lab that could measure a certain chemical component in the body. It was really cool that it could measure it in literally any type of body fluid, et cetera. The only problem with that was it was a really cool technology that could measure something but at the end of the day, we didn't know what problem we were solving with this really cool technology. So I call that the field of dreams, build it and hope that they will come. We see a lot of this in technology innovation, that people are in their engineering lab or in their computer science lab generating the next device or app or whatever it is. It's great that they get that developed but then they're looking around saying, well, is there a customer? Am I solving their problem? Is somebody going to pay for me to bring this to the market? Oftentimes that answer is no. So the best innovation in my opinion, is similar to what we learned at that diner that week in August that I described, which is evidence-based, observe the problem, really be able to quantify it, to qualify it, to talk to customers about it, to have your evidence and observation that it exists, to make sure that it's repeatable because you don't want a problem that just occurs once. Once you have that problem to come up with the process of developing the solutions, testing them for fit until you get the right one, you do the proper customer research and you can really accelerate getting your product to the marketplace when you follow this process that I outlined in the book, [TYLER] You make mention to it and is realized, there's so many companies that start with, oh, this grand great idea, oh, we're going to revolutionize the world, but no one cares. It doesn't matter to anyone. It's like, oh, okay. I can name it, whatever it may be and yet there's not a customer there. I think that's too often in different organizations where, oh, we'll force innovation just to have innovation, but yet did we make it better? Or did we just create more work to justify ourselves? You see that a lot of times in manufacturing. I was talking to a gentleman today. He was getting his refrigerator repaired and he asked the repairman, it's like, "Why is it taking so long?" He goes, "All of these products have different parts and so many components and there's so many different models." You stop and think, is that innovation really solving the problem the customer needs or is it just, hey, that's what we're doing to stay ahead of our competition, just to stay ahead of our competition, but we're not really solving a problem the customer has? [LORRAINE] You couldn't have said it better. For me, Tyler, I can share an example of a company that I work for right now. It's got a wonderful, wonderful research legacy, really strong in engineering and computer science and it's just been known for its research chops for many, many years. That's fantastic but what's been challenging is as innovations are developing within the research lab, they're being spun up. Then after they're spun up, then they go to the business units and they say, we've got this really cool piece of technology, could you now go out to your customers and find out if they're willing to try it. Are they willing to be a reference? Can we create really a business opportunity around that? So again, that innovation, just for the sake of doing a research project or innovating, but not doing it purposeful to solve a client's problem means that unfortunately a lot of products end up getting invested in over even a two-year period of time. Like a lot of money is spent only to try to get to the marketplace and find out that this isn't solving a customer need. Then it has to be sunset and a lot of time and effort in dollars have been wasted in something. So you can have companies that are a little bit like too liberal with that. I think you need a portfolio approach. I think you want to encourage some of that. But I think most of your innovation, I would say 70% of it needs to be focused. It needs to be targeted. You need to have a customer in mind, if again, your goal is to get something to the market commercially successful. At the end of the day, like if you don't get it to the market and it can improve somebody's life, as you pointed out, what's the point? So I like to think about innovations that get to market and they can make life better. They can make somebody healthier, they can make somebody more productive. They can make somebody happier. So I think it's important to have that distinction among those at least three types of innovation. [TYLER] Yes, I mean, it's there, there's other examples that I'm coming up in my life. One time in my career I was formulating products and my boss at that point's like, "Hey, we always have to constantly reformulate so we keep our competition on their toes." As I think about that, it's like, that's just a bunch of busy work. Are we changing our service? Are we solving a different problem? It's like, no. As I think back about it now, it's like, why not find a way to solve the next problem, solve the next problem, you're always going to have a place, you're always going to be one step ahead of the competitions. If you're imitating what I did yesterday, well that's fine. If you imitate it and make it better, make it easier, make it simpler that's where you're going to have success. I think you talk much about that. But there's one piece in there that I think back and you write a little bit about it and yet we all experienced everyone listening to it, how Covid-19, how the pandemic, how this two-year stretched made things that our customers didn't really know they needed into burgeoning industries because they're like, oh wow, this is a tool I can use. So how much in your experience is there, understanding the timing, there's a great idea, but if the customer doesn't need it yet or doesn't know they need it, how much is it just a matter of understanding or communicating that problem that the customer really has so they're looking for the solution? [LORRAINE] That's a terrific question and Covid definitely pressed us on that in terms of the timing. I think again, it was around understanding the constraints that we were under when we were trying to solve problems. I think a great example of this customer influenced innovation is Covid-19 related. It was like being on the scene and trying to innovate and solve customer problems and it's now led to an improved product. I really like this very old company called Ecolabs. Not like a household name, but what I really like about them is they have about 3000 people in the field that are like research scientist salespeople and they're constantly calling on the customers who use their products. During Covid, as they were calling on their hospital customers and even hotel and cafeteria customers, they were selling them a sanitation product that they would spray on stainless steel surfaces so that they could do whatever they were going to do, chop the food or in the case of a hospital, put their put the patient on it or put their supplies on it, et cetera. But the only problem was it was taking 20 minutes to dry and, in a situation, where we had to really be able to quickly clean and sanitize, that was too long. They found this out in the field, the scientists came back to the lab, they had some other technology that had quick drying components to it, they applied that to this particular solution and they ended up designing a spray that could dry within three seconds. They went back out to the field, they released it in time for Covid and the Marriotts and the Hiltons of the world and the hospitals, it was a game changer because now they could turn over the rooms faster, they could turn over the beds faster, they could really get back to being productive and they didn't have to have this like, artificial 20-minute delay between when they could turn over the patient in the hospital or the individual in the hotel room. I just really love that one because as you point out, the timing was absolutely perfect. If they had tried to do that and it wasn't covid, somebody might have said, well three seconds, 20 minutes, it doesn't really matter to me right now. But during Covid it sure as heck did. I just love the mindset and that they were ready in the lab to fix that problem and do it fast and get it out in a way where could make an impact. Again, it's part of their new product line today. [TYLER] The lesson there that I just, it happens so often and is reminding ourselves the best solutions come from the field. As one person said is that the people that are using it will tell you what they need. Are you willing to listen to them or do you feel like I know better? I know that isn't true. I know that isn't the case. And you just resoundingly shared it and I believe it. It's the solution that is required is what the customer feels they need. Now you can think, no, that's dumb, that doesn't make sense but that doesn't matter. That's what they need in understanding sometimes somebody's asking for a red Popsicle, but what they really want is they want something cold that's going to refresh them. Okay, well there's a pivot but yet understanding that if they want a Popsicle and you tell them, well hey, I'll make you Kool-Aid, that's good enough, they're like, no, that isn't what I want. [LORRAINE] I think that so often, even though we act as though we're listening to the customer, we do all the research, we bring it all to the fore, as you point out, it can be really easy to get locked into a narrow mindset and either think that you know better than the customer, you've maybe misunderstood what the customer asked you to do, or you completely ignore it. I see a lot of corporations do that because they might be on a path with a product roadmap. They're planning to do this next, they've invested in it next. So I think, and you asked about the steps in the book, problem solving is number one in getting the right solution fit and then being able to test it in the market, your minimal viable product but lesson four or law four is probably the most important one after identifying the right problem and that is listening to the customer. I share some of the voice of the customer questions that you need to be asking. You've got to ask the right questions. There can be killer questions that you ask in terms of understanding how the customer does their work, what they're not satisfied with, listening to what it is they think that would make life better for them. But you've got to then be true and authentic to incorporating all of that feedback into your product roadmap, into the design, testing it back with the customer, or you will just fail. I think that in the book I share a story about Phil McKinney and Phil was the chief technology officer at Hewlett Packard, large corporation. He was so keen on driving innovation because he ran the innovation center and the customer experience center at HP that on his own time on the weekends, he would go to the electronics aisle. Back then it was a circuit city or a radio shack because they were trying to build tablets and games, et cetera. He'd go stand in the aisles and he would watch the games and the tablets that the customers would pick up and he'd study how they interacted with it, how long they interacted with it, if they put it down. Sometimes he'd be in intrusive and he'd say, why are you playing that game? What is it that you like about it? He'd go back to the team on Monday and he'd share his in the field experience watching the customer, talking the customer. Then he would use that in order to help direct the team in some of the tweaks or new innovation that they were going to tackle. There is nothing more powerful than having a boss that does that. He is walking the talk, walking the walk and giving the talk and really just helping to train and mentor his team into that very authentic behavior of really listening to the customer and making sure it gets incorporated in the product design. So it's critical. [TYLER] I'm going to break my own rule and try not to share more than one question at once, but I'm going to frame it in you. You talk about that how great a boss who had that innovative mind to work with to solve that problem. We're blessed listening to you, you've had a tremendous amount of success in the businesses that you've been involved with in a tremendous amount of leadership. I want to ask you how much of that is your calling card but then, hold on because I want you to frame that in as well. How much of a challenge have you gotten by having that, especially as a female leading especially, oh, then you whatever those conditions may be. I'd love to just get deeper into that as well. [LORRAINE] I think that having an innovation mindset can be a blessing and a curse as you're coming through your career. I mean, there are times when the corporation wants you to be in lockstep, do things the way they've been done, not ask a lot of questions. But if you're true to yourself as a leader of change, if you have the driving curiosity, if you're a problem solver, you can't follow somebody else's marching orders and do that just because it's the way we've always done it. You're constantly challenging the status quo. There are constructive ways to do that and destructive ways to do that. Sometimes if you're destructive, you walk away like a Steve Jobs or a Bill Gates or the list can go on when someone just didn't feel like they fit the mold. But if ultimately you want to try to continue to innovate within that corporation and change the mindset, then you also have to be a good communicator. You have to be willing to be patient, to educate, to train, to show, and to help people, bring people along in terms of having more of an innovation mindset. I think for me, as somebody who was really driven at an early age, who had this philosophy from my dad, you mentioned being a woman, it hasn't always been easy because sometimes you're the lone voice and you don't want to be the token at the table. But I have chosen to follow a path where I wanted to bring people along. I didn't want to go rogue and run off and do my own thing. I thought that the way to build critical mass, the way to help other people the most and the way to make change in the organization was to try to bring people along with me. So if I found that my vision was too bold, too big, the organization couldn't keep pace, the talent wasn't ready to embrace it or they didn't know what to do with it, even though I might be at the goalpost sometimes I'd have to pull myself back to the 10 yard line and say, okay, let's huddle again everybody, and let me re-explain where the vision is, why the vision is, give you what it is you need to get your job done and help people along that path. Because I truly believe that innovation has got to be cultivated. It's a collaborative sport. If we're not bringing people along with us and if we're not spreading the innovation spirit, then we're not going to succeed as a culture. Because I really do believe that innovation has got to be or companies that have an innovative culture. We know, I mean, there's data that they perform better, they have more diversity in their working ranks, they are able to retain people longer, they're more profitable. So they're all these reasons why innovation, diversity, it sort of all fits together in terms of ultimately making companies, but also culture and society more successful and effective. [TYLER] There's an element there that I know we could go deeper into because you talked clearly enough about it. You get to the goalpost and everyone else is at the 10-yard line and you need to go back because you're already scoring but they haven't got there close. Share with us a a time where how did you recognize that and or what did you go do then to reconnect with them to, you talk about sharing the vision, it's like, was it that again, that courageous curiosity to say, hey, where are you guys at? Where are we missing each other here? [LORRAINE] Yes, and it happens a lot with visionary, innovative leaders because you know what you see and you're going down the, as we say, the football field. So in those situations I was creating a new model. I was in a company and I was creating a new service that we wanted to bring to market. I knew very clearly what it was I wanted to create, the problem we were solving was resonating with customers but the challenge was that the team didn't really understand how to connect with that vision in terms of their day-to-day job. Like, if my job is X and I'm responsible for Y do you want me to keep doing things the same way I'm doing it? How do I connect with the vision? What do you want me to do differently? So, without giving people like a recipe card for their job, I would sit one-on-one. I would talk a little bit more about the vision. I would help them understand how it related to their role, what their responsibility to the team was, how they could continue to progress us on that vision. So I would pause and make sure that we got line, they knew what they were doing, I was patient to help them understand how their job and their role related to that vision. Sometimes I think it's one-on-one conversations. A lot of times it's getting the team together, reconnecting, giving them examples, showing them the progress that they're making, celebrating success because I think you also have to keep people's spirits up. This is a, it's a marathon. It's not like a destination and we're done. If you really have an innovation mindset, you're constantly on a journey, you're on a journey of change. So again, you have to have that patience to know that everybody's on that journey at a different pace, maybe some are really embracing it, maybe some are coming at it a little bit slower, they're not really sure. So you've got to have a critical mass of talent moving quickly if you're going to come to the market nut you also have to have the patience to bring people that aren't quite at that frontline with you to try to bring them along to the best of your ability. [TYLER] I have to think there was two elements there that you mentioned at times previous in this conversation is you mentioned safety, the ability to have those conversations. But to me it comes back, and you said this earlier too, values innovation, those values of, I'm guessing you reestablished one, their value to the project as you mentioned, but also the values of, hey, what are we doing as an organization? What is important to us? I'm guessing you reestablish some of those or reaffirm those as part of that. [LORRAINE] Yes. I think values are absolutely critical and you've got to have, whether you want to call it honesty or truth or candor, but there's got to be a truthfulness and an authenticity to how you're leading, how you're working with people, where you're trying to lead them. I think the other one is respect. So there has to be a respect that just because person A is moving faster down the path of sort of getting the innovation and where we're trying to head than person B, that you respect person B for where they are. You know that you've got to meet them on the journey and bring them along at their pace, not exhaustively, but you want to try to do that. I think it's also encouraging collaboration, people learning from each other, working with each other work is always so much more fun, enjoyable, and you learn so much more if you're doing it as a team, so really creating that collaborative culture so that people are helping each other. Maybe person B isn't quite seeing it in the right way and person A can help show them something that they've learned through the process. So I think those are really important values. Then again, that eliminating any fear of failure and so it's okay, it's okay if you're coming at this at a slightly different pace. It's okay if what you produced today, isn't hitting the target, we're on this journey together, [TYLER] As we wrap up here in our time together, if there was one last place, if someone's listening and they're like, how can I be more innovative or why do I need to be more innovative, what would you say to that? [LORRAINE] Well, I suggest that individuals get themselves a notebook, a journal, their device, whatever it is. And I think you need to make yourself a student of observing at least three problems a day. Write it down. You could be stuck in traffic, you could be listened to a song that you don't like. You could be cooking and find something. You could find it in your kids' homework. But just always have that antenna up. If you know that every day, you're going to write down three problems that you observed, first of all you're going to be going to be a lot better problem identifier. But you might also find some of those problems are also meaningful enough that they become a little basket of ideas of things that you might actually want to innovate yourself. If that's the one thing I could leave people with, it would be try to find three things that aren't that could be better, that are the status quo that you think could be improved. No matter how trivial they are, write them down and at the end of a week, look back, see what you've observed, have conversations with people. Again, that little basket of things that you've observed, they're probably going to be opportunities to innovate in a way that was right in front of you and you never saw it. You don't have to run over here to try to do something disruptive. Sometimes the best innovations are things that you just tried to fix in your own family, in your own healthcare system, in your own community, in your own school and they were looking you right in the face and because you weren't taking the time to think and have an open mind, you just missed them. I love it when that happens. [TYLER] There's a piece there that I think undergirds all of that. Let's just take time to think, just take time to think rather than just hustle bustle and push. Man, Lorraine, thank you so much for this conversation. I loved the innovation mindset, loved the idea of having that as a mindset and really as a solution driving machine. You talk about, identify those problems and it's like, great, you have those problems. Now let's focus on the solutions. What possibilities lie there or what example from over here could apply there? To me that's that next step of it. Again, I thank you so much for your time and sharing it with us. [LORRAINE] Oh, it's been so much fun, Tyler. You've been terrific. I can tell that you embody the innovation mindset and you've got a great energy and a great spirit. So thank you for everything that you do to impact leaders in a very positive way and give them encouragement and support. [TYLER] Oh, thank you Lorraine. [TYLER] The big takeaway point for me that Lorraine shared was this idea of make yourself a student. Make yourself a student to the problems. Not to just harp on the problems, I think established that, but it's to understand what solution could be there. We talked a little bit in the interview about the 3m, the Post-It. That adhesive was never made to be used as a temporary adhesive that goes on the back of a Post-It or one of those 3M strips. It was used for another avenue. Yet that's what it became. CorningWare made fiber optic wire cable but it was never intended. They just produced glass. So I think that's where those innovations. Lorraine and I talked about before we recorded how Elon Musk, he deconstructed the battery that was just the long-term battery that we used in cars and said, well, how can this be different? How can we modify this? How can we innovate to create all sorts of new solutions? This is what I know. Wherever you lead, wherever you work, wherever at in life, there are problems that happen every day in your life. There are problems your customers have, there are problems that your children and that your family, that people around you have and they're just begging for a solution. The solution is there. Do you have a culture of innovation within your organization? Do you desire that to say, let's take these problems, let's throw them out on the table and let's see what solutions we can come up with. Yesterday's problems are today's innovations and it takes a mindset and a culture of allowing that and say, there are no mistakes. There are no screw-ups, there are no failures. We either going to learn, or as I said in this podcast, we're going to build a relationship. To me, sometimes that's the best solution that comes out of innovation. Hey, we just build a little bit stronger relationship. We trust each other a little bit more. There's a little bit more safety. That next problem that comes our way, man, we can surely overcome that. Thanks again, for being here, part of the Impact Driven Leader community. Appreciate you all. Until next time, have a good one.