Join Dr Alan Watkins and Katie Ledger as they explore what it takes to be truly innovative.
Katie : Hello, and welcome to Fit for the future, session three: Should I stay or should I grow? This is a bit of a metaphor. This is one of Alan's specials it may have been lost on some of them but is largely about growth and innovation. Should I stay in my comfort zone or should I get out of my comfort zone? How do I deal with that? So, good afternoon Alan.
Alan: Afternoon Katie, how are you?
Katie : I'm good. I'm good. Should I stay, or should I grow? what are your thoughts on that?
Alan: Well, of course, as you said, if we stay in our comfort zone, there's not much growth because we know what we know and we're comfortable where we are. And, one of the things that sort of prompted me to talk about this is that if you look at the research, the UK, world of corporations, wastes 65 billion every year on failed growth initiatives. So, it might be interesting just to start by asking people who are tuned in, how good is the innovation in their own business? Is it great? Is it not so great? So, I wonder if we could, I think we have a poll we can launch.
Katie : Yeah. I think Tom can bring that up to everybody.
Alan: So how, how good is your innovation? Is it outstanding? Is it excellent? Above average is average or below average? Is it poor? Is it very poor? So if you just click on how it goes in your company, are you going the same way? because when we're in turbulent times, there's a sort of implicit assumption that we're going to innovate our way out of the problem. So, a lot of people are talking about pivoting their business. through times of COVID and times of disruption. so, looks like most people are going it's average, whether we shouldn't have used the word average, because everybody says they're average. Nobody wants to admit. You know, they're below average. but people are trying to pivot their way out of the problem. You know, so it's sort of almost implicit, you know, so having just finished a book called "Innovation sucks".
I thought we'd talk about that. because the truth is that most companies are not average. Most companies are below average. And when we were talking to a ftse . 50 company who remain nameless, who over the last three years has spent 800 million pounds on innovation projects and they got no evidence that any of us has produced, any commercial revenue or revenue upswing for them. There's very clear evidence that actually most companies go on a lot about innovation, but they're not very good at it. And most of the time it fails. So, I thought we'd unpack that a little bit.
Katie : What do you mean by innovation? Sucks.
Alan: Well, it sucks in the American vernacular when it's really bad and companies are bad at it. You know, something sucks cause it's terrible. But also, there's a sort of double entendre, as you might, may have guessed. Or a wortspeil as the Germans would say, a joke in innovation sucks because actually what most companies do is, they follow the sort of R&D funnel. So when they think about, innovation, they have this kind of thing in mind is they have this sort of funnel, R&D funnel with a number of, stage gates as they're called, where you put a lot of stuff in the top of the hopper and it kind of over the next sort of five or 10 years, things get processed and they've got to clear various hurdles and eventually a product comes out the bottom end.
And in actual fact, you know, this is how confused people are. This is not even a funnel. It's just a filter because you see how many things at the top and the bottom end one comes out. So that's actually a filter, not a funnel. If it was a true funnel, all these things at the top would come out at the bottom.
Yeah. So even talking about the R and D funnel is a misnomer, it's actually an R&D filter, right? This is how confused people are. So, so all these statements, this is what most companies do.
Katie : Yeah,
Alan: they have a lot of ideas
Katie : Still the filter doesn't work, whatever you call it, it doesn't work.
Alan: Yeah, right. So, it just doesn't work. And, you know, 50 ideas generated 20 harvested, 10 develop 5 tested, 1 launched. So, we kind of do this and you're rewarded essentially is if you can get through that funnel in five years, not 10 years for 5 million pounds, not 10 million pounds. You're a genius. So, the reward is how little money you manage to spend and how quickly you get it through.
Well, that's strikes me as sort of back to front. You shouldn't be rewarded on how little money you spend. You should be rewarded on how much money you make, right? Not on how little you spend. and so, it's back to front in my view, and you shouldn't be pushing an idea to the market. So, this is, the notion that, in the innovation funnel, you've basically got, a propeller if you'd like. So, these are propellers. So, boat propellers and plane propellers, and what you can see from them propeller, is it's angled. It's not flat either the boat propeller or the plane propeller. So, you've got all these ideas that go into the top of the funnel with their own propeller. And there, propelled through the funnel, to try and come at the end. And our view, is the innovation funnel should rather than push ideas into the market? The market should suck the ideas and innovation sucks for two reasons. Number one, we're bad at it. And number two, we should reverse the funnel and we should get the market to suck the idea. And in order to do that, you actually have to start with the answer.
So, if we want to innovate innovation, we've got to get it to suck, not push. so that's the idea of moving from a propeller to this thing here? This is what's called an impeller. So, I don't know whether those people who, when, when flying was still allowed, look at these outside the window. When you see these big jet engines, these jet engines work very differently to these propeller engines.
so basically, the air is taken in, and then it's compressed and then it's ignited and then it's exploded. what's called in the vernacular "Suck, Squeeze, Bang then Blow". So, you suck the air in, you squeeze it out in this compression, you explode it with a bang and then you blow it out the back. So, you've create propulsion in the aircraft really by sucking.
So, this is an impeller rather than a propeller.
Katie : So, what are you impelling? You're impelling a final, a final service or product?
Alan: Yeah. So, when you reverse the funnel, right, and innovate innovation, you start with an answer and you get the market to suck the answer towards the market and it then becomes elaborated. So, then the innovation team is rewarded on how many money makes not on how much it spends. So, innovation is really the commercialization of a novel idea. That's the definition we use for innovation, right? It's innovation is not ideation. Ideation is you come up with the idea and you try and force it into the market, try and propel it into the market.
No, no innovation is starting with the idea and getting it to be commercialized and scale. So, you completely reverse the R&D funnel. And the reason we're wasting 65 billion a year in the UK is we've got totally the wrong model and we need to reverse the model and the model needs to suck, not blow.
Katie : So, this is, particularly I can remember when the iPhone was launched. For example, nobody knew that they needed all that functionality in a small little box to carry around, but we did.
Alan: Yeah and the market sucked it .So this whole notion of failing fast, right? Is you, you get the market to suck. So, you don't need a fully formed product. If you want to fail fast, what you do is you start with an 80% version launch on the market, create a load of hype, get the market to suck and get the customers themselves to modify what you're doing, fail fast, and then it will scale. So, when we usually sort of tell people this, they go, well, hang on a minute.
If you haven't got all this R&D stuff going on, right. How are you actually, you know, gonna start with the answer if you haven't done the R&D. So, if this is your start point here, and you, haven't got all those stage gates and all those experts doing it, how do you start with the answer? Which is a very good question. And the answer to that is you need a new player. You need a new player in the team now we've been lacking this player, right. And this came out when we were writing this book called "Innovation sucks" is we were having a beer talking about why there's a problem with innovation UK and frankly, globally. And somebody asked the question well, you know, when you've got a bunch of experts in the room, what's the collective noun for a bunch of experts.
Katie : I'm sure there's a number of answers to that. So, please put them in the chat. If you've got some good examples there.
Alan: What's your idea is it a murder? You know cause they're murdering some good ideas. Is it a parliament? Is it? We said, no, no, there is basically there isn't one. So, we invented one. So, our view is a bunch of experts is a "meadow". You have a meadow of experts. So, stay with me, I'll explain the metaphor, right? When you have a meadow of experts, like this is each expert, like this thistle here is rooted to the spot.
So, they know a huge amount about the small area just directly around them. So, they often have a deep root, a lot of knowledge about a very small area. And then you have the adjacent flower. Likewise, a lot of knowledge about the area. So, we get all these experts. They've each got different expertise, but they're all rooted to the spot.
And that is the problem. We have a meadow of experts and the new player in the team is a honeybee. Now what happens is the honeybee a honeybee buzzes around the meadow of experts, collecting nectar to take back to the hive here. And they'll already have a sort of partly formed answer to any question before the question even arises.
Why? Because they're constantly buzzing around the meadow gathering knowledge, information, insight, wisdom from the meadow of experts. So, they don't have the depth of knowledge of an expert, but they've got the breadth and depth. So, they have breadth and depth. So, a generalist-
Katie : is it just breadth and depth? Or is there something else?
Alan: No. No. So, you've got basically, if you look into organizations in schools, right? What happens is you have a generalist teacher. So, this is this lovely lady here. So up to the age of about 8, we have one general teacher that teaches us math and geography and history, and that teaches everything.
And then we get to a certain level of sophistication here in secondary school, where we need a chemistry teacher. And then we need a biology teacher, a math teacher. So, we have a load of expert teachers. So, we've all the way through our schooling years. We've learned that we, either have a generalist or an expert in my own field medicine. You know, you would have a GP. who's a generalist, and then you'd have a surgeon who is an expert. So again, in business you have a general manager of this hotel, and then you have a, an expert technical guy on operations or production. So, all of these systems, whether it's schools or science and medicine or business operate on a two-legged stool, generalists and experts.
So, we've come, you know, to sort of think in these terms that in order to solve any problem, no matter what that problem is, you'll probably need the expert. You go to the generalist, they have a little bit of knowledge about many things, but they've got no depth. You know, they sort of cover a large terrain, but they haven't got the depth so they can't come up with an integrated answer. So we go to the expert with the trouble is we go to the expert, they know a massive amount about a tiny area. So, we're missing this, third person. And this third person is this sort of, you know, honeybee essentially that flies around the meadow of experts or to give it a different name; and I mean, there are lots of names for it. It's a polymath. Or what I prefer to call it. The technically it's a polymath integrator. So, it's somebody-
Katie : A polymathic integrator may be a better word.
Alan: Yeah, so whether you call it. I mean, there's lots of things. You know, some people mistakenly call it Neo-generalist. There's actually a book called Neo-generalism, but it's not a generalist. It's somebody who has depth, not quite as much depth as an expert, but it's got depth in multiple fields. And breadth, not quite as much breadth as a generalist. So, it bridges somewhere in between. So, you, in organizations, you really have three types of people, is you have generalists and experts, and everybody knows who they are. And then you've got these bunch of weirdos who don't fit in. They don't fit the mold
Katie : Are they always weirdos?
Alan: Well that's how people perceive them, right. Is they're the ones, you know, they don't quite fit the mold. They don't seem to be a general person. And they certainly don't. And the trouble with many businesses try to force them to be a generalist or force them to be an expert. And they don't want to be either these people they're sort of Mavericks. If you will, would be a slightly kinder word.
Katie : Aiden here is saying "E" shaped people.
Alan: "E" shaped? Yeah, I'm not sure... What does that mean "E" shaped?
Katie : Maybe Aden. You can give us a bit more detail on, on what is shaped is I'm intrigued. So please, please give us a bit more on that.
Alan: Yeah. So, it's these people who don't fit the mold now what's happened historically is companies have often, you know, just excluded these people or, you know, cause they're sort of cultural outliers. And so, they just get spat out. They get graft rejected from the company cause they don't, they're not generalists, they're not experts, what are they?
They don't really know what they are and what to do with them. Get rid of them. So, companies have killed the bees if you will killed off the bees. And so, there's a bee shortage. Now, interestingly as the world gets more complicated and more difficult, we need the bees back. We need the crosspollination that bees provide. Where they can make links between different types of phenomena.
So, we've seen time and again, in problems where there's wicked problems is when you've got a very narrow expertise. They don't understand the complexity. So, if you take the global pandemic, you've got virologists advocating one thing, then you've got epidemiologists advocating a different thing, and then you've got politicians and they've all got narrow expertise. You've got very few people, people who understand, you know, economics at the same time as healthcare at the same time as political dimensions at the same time as the virology. Those people don't exist. Well, there's one or two of them, but most of the time we just talked to a single expert and we have to rely on them.
And they're making calls about things that are beyond their competency level, so we miss these people. Now as the world becomes more complicated, we need these people back. Now, the good news is in the millennial and gen-Z. There are much more of these people. Much more polymathic capability, but if we don't understand we'll force them into generalist or experts, which they're neither. And we'll kill the bees again. And what we need is the bees back, and we need to understand the bees. We need to develop the bees and nurture the bees in an organization. So, we'll need all three types. We need experts, generalist and polymath integrators.
Katie : So, couple of questions kind of occurred to me. We still haven't got, if anybody knows what an E shaped person is, I would love to know what that is. Just in terms of, you know, the, this sounds like it's kind of one, you're looking for this in one person. Haven't, isn't that the point of having the diverse diversity of perspectives of getting groups of people together and actually having those, Perspectives and diversity of perspectives so that you get to a better answer.
Alan: Well, you can do it that way. So, if you can't find any bees, how do you create wisdom and wisdom requires diversity. The trouble is when you get a diverse bunch of people in the room. you get a fight. Right because people are stuck and attached to their views. which is why, without the, you know, careful and skillful guidance, the collective becomes the mob and it dumbs down, you know, most people in their career have experienced this where they've been sat in a room with some really clever experts in the room.
Trying to problem solve. You know, I don't have the stress in this organization. And after three hours, they come up with a name dribble, like we must learn to say no. Really? Three hours and that's what you came out with. My God what's happened here. you know, it sort of dumbs down to the lowest common denominator. So, something mysteriously happens in sort of group think, and it gets worse and worse and you got very bright people, sort of embarrassed with their output. And it's because we don't really know how to unlock the wisdom because when you get a load of experts, you end up having an arm wrestle. You know, I'm right your wrong, who's got the right answer. Dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. So, in the absence of bees, if you can skillfully facilitate the crowd, you can unlock the wisdom of the crowd, but you have to know how to do that. Alternatively, you know, with some polymaths, you know, polymath can more effectively cause they they've already accessed the crowd, the crowd of experts. They've already done that for you. So, you it's much quicker go to the polymath and they'll give you your starter for 10. They'll give you an 80% version on any question.
Katie : This is good question from Rupert. So, what's easier to find bees or skilled facilitators.
Alan: Well, it depends, I guess what, you know, how perceptive you are at knowing which ones, which. So, you know, we've seen many companies who couldn't tell the difference between skilled facilitator and extremely unskilled facilitator, and some organizations can't tell the difference between a Bee you know, and a generalist. So really the person who's inbounding, the, the facilitator or the Bee it's their perceptual ability. so, some companies might be able to tell the difference between a really good facilitator and one is not so good. Some companies might. You know, already be aware that we've got some weirdos that do really, really well.
We want a few more of those, these Maverick outlier’s integrator polymaths. Let's get a few more of those in, so-
Katie : So, it sorts of requires quite a, quite a depth of understanding and maturity of the person that's onboarding or bringing. that into the organization.
Alan: Right. And that starts with a recognition that, you know what for most of our innovation average isn't good enough. We ain't gonna beat competition if we're just average aren’t, we? So, we got to do something different, right. So, you know, we've got to listen to people who were saying something we haven't heard before. Yeah, maybe listen to them, be a bit more open, be a bit more because the more insular as a, as you know, I've done a blog on insularity as a predictor of failure, right?
The more insular we are, the more likely we are to fail. So, if we can be mature enough to open up and start to listen to these different views and these different opinions, there might be some real magic in there. So, get the facilitators and get the honeybees in.
Katie : Comment here. I think Edward de Bono has been providing the tool to facilitate innovation for 40 to 50 years.
Alan: Yeah. So, Edward de Bono, you know, a bit of an early polymath, with his thinking hats, but he was in my view was privileging cognitive capability. whereas actually, you know, certainly in the C suite companies are not held back by cognition. The people in most C-suites and most companies we've ever encountered are smart enough.
so, he was really tall talking about something that's called conceptual flexing. This is the hats of de Bono. So, the ability to come up with an idea and then not get stuck on that idea and be able to flex. That's one of a number of skills, that de Bono wrote about, but it's only one of 11 behaviors. You really need in an organization. So yes, it's useful, but you need more than just cognitive flexibility. You know, you can have cognitive flexibility to come up with a load of ideas, but then how do you commercialize the idea? So again, innovation is the commercialization, of a novel idea. So, in de Bono can come up with 10 ideas, but can you commercialize it? So, you need a different skill set. In addition to the ideation.
Katie : I found out what the "E" is about. the "E-shaped people" have a combination of four "E's" experience, expertise, exploration, and execution.
Alan: Yes. well, let's if we depack those, I mean, it was very interesting when I was a doctor is two people can have the same experience ,one can learn something. The other one learns nothing. so just because, I mean, experience is a sort of very blunt proxy for wisdom. Right. But it doesn't necessarily follow. you can have a lot of experience and still be an idiot, right? Cause you go through your life learning very little stumbling around and fumbling around.
Right. So just because you've had an experience doesn't mean you've gained from it just because you went to Harvard on the advanced leadership course doesn't mean you've matured as a human being, you know, you went in arrogant, you came out arrogant. So, you haven't really developed as a human being.
You're just a bit more knowledgeable in your arrogance. So, experience per se may be helpful, but maybe not. you know, so actually, what were the other "E's"? So that was experience. We had, expertise.
Katie : Expertise exploration and execution.
Alan: Yes. and again, expertise, but what we're sort of saying is the new model, needs to deprivilege.
You know, we're excessively privileged on experts, the cult of the experts. You know, we think that when we're encountering a problem, we need an expert. And we're saying the opposite to that the experts got their place in the system, but we're way too dependent on the expert, you know? So actually, we need the polymath Bee and the expert and the generalist.
And we need all of those, not only in terms of, the construction of the idea, but to take it through to execution. And what you often have is the person who created the idea is ending up the person who does the execution, which is a profound mistake. You know, it's boffin led execution. Well, number one, the boffins no at good execution.
They're a boffin, they want to just come up with the ideas. Why are you letting them execute it? Why are you letting the person who, and usually the reason companies do that is that most passionate? Cause it was their idea was their baby. Now you have to pass it over because they're there. Then there's been lots of examples.
I mean, Kodak is the most famous, right. They came up with a digital camera and, you know, they never took it through, so you either get people who won't commercialize the idea cause they don't know how to. And that's an example. Or, you know, and we wrote about in the books and amazing examples of people who were attached to their idea clearly when it was killing the company and they pushed it through all the way through and it killed the company.
Motorola had some experiences like that. So, you need a combination of these people. We needed a whole team to commercialize a novel idea.
Katie : Rupert is suggesting that empathy is missing from those E's. Most of which came from Jack Welsh at DE.
Alan: Yeah. And, and again, if we over privileged cognitive flexibility and we underprivileged empathic connecting.
So, if you look at the 11 behaviors on the research that really moved the dial. in most companies, most companies aren't even aware that there are 11 behaviors. So what happens in most companies is they, come up with a list of four behaviors, then try to impose them, you know, in order to succeed, we want these four behaviors, not realizing that in the millions of behaviors, there are for human beings that they could do.
There are any 11 letters in the alphabet. The behavioral alphabet is 11 letters. So, all other million behaviors are combinations of the 11 letters. So, we saw a financial company last week, where we looked at the four behaviors, they came up with what they thought were necessary for their own growth.
And we analyze them against the 11 actual behaviors. One of their behaviors had five letters. So, we would point it out to them. Look, you haven't got a cat in hell's chance of actually making that behavior come alive in your organization. Cause it's, it's a sort of alloy of five different things at different levels of sophistication, you won't be able to track it, you won't be able to trace it. You won't better measure it. You won't better develop it. You won't better to embed it. So, it's not going to work. So, companies need to understand this level of precision in order to move and grow forward. So, to drive growth, one has to understand all of these sort of nuances and complexities of growth and what stops us growing in order to grow successfully, you have to understand what's holding you back.
Katie : Could you please elaborate on what innovation means for professional services, such as law firms? differences you get when you didn't get what you wanted. so, I think this was about professional services, especially law firms. What does, can you elaborate on what innovation means for professional services?
Alan: Yeah. So, in professional services you might be innovating the delivery model. You know, in the same way, as you know, AI doctoring. So doctoring is doctoring, and law is law, but lot of those, it's an algorithm.
So, you know, when I was doctoring and you saw a patient, they present with seven different symptoms and you do an algorithmic kind of thing in your mind and end up with a diagnosis. Well, it's already been proven that an AI algorithm can diagnose faster and more safely than those doctors. So, a lot of the doctoring will go out the window it'll change dramatically in the next 10 years as will the law, you know, so that would be an innovation it's innovation and service provision.
A little bit sort of apply the rules of Uber or Airbnb to the medical profession or to the legal profession. So, you innovate that you don't innovate the law, or you might. I mean, you could even innovate the law, which is, hang on a minute. Are these laws really moving society forward or are they constraining society?
So how do we come up with more agile laws that aren't constraining our own evolution? I mean, we've seen this in the, in the medical profession, and it came, in the late sort of early sixties when one of the, anti-sickness, drugs in pregnancy was Thalidomide and it caused all of those terrible, birth defects.
and as a result of that, we put a load of legal processes and safety checks in, the consequences of which it killed all drug discovery. Because you have to know clear, so many safety hurdles is it took you now 250 million pounds, not 5 million pounds to get a drug to market. And it took you 10 years.
So that effectively killed off drug discovery. Which you know, so in a, how do we innovate a law where we can pull back and see, you want a light touch that doesn't constrain evolution. We have to create safety, but not at the expense of evolution. So, you could say the well intention to prevent birth defects.
Actually, prevented the evolution of cancer drugs for a considerable time. And to some extent is still doing so because it's so expensive and takes such a long time. So, one could innovate the actual law as well as innovate. The service provision would be my answer to that question.
Katie : Okay. All right. Fantastic.
Alan: Does That makes sense?
Katie : Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so comeback, Ari fit, there's a little bit more that you want to understand on those. The, the 11 behaviors don't want to kind of go into them and in. Too much depth.
Alan: Yes, so they, they come into four, four clusters, if you will. in terms of the 11 behaviors.
So, they come into clusters and these are behaviors. So, when I first encountered this, these were, I thought, well, these aren't behaviors, but they are behaviors because you can observe people doing them.
Right.These are the 11 letters, the alphabet, if you will. so, there's what call the imagined cluster. So, start here. So, these are the behaviors where you can see somebody going around seeking information . Now, if they just search on Google, they're not very good at searching information.
If they search on Google, ask their friends, looking at trade journal, flick through a magazine, ask an expert. And so on, then they're seeking much more widely. So, they're quite sophisticated in their search. So, they found some information. Now, can they use that information and form a concept so you can see Post-its going up on the wall and brainstorms happening and you can observe these behaviors in concept formation.
Once they've come up with an idea, can they do the de Bono move, which is flex. So, they don't get T.I.N.A, There Is No Alternative. As a shorthand for when you get stuck on the first four concepts you came up with, you've got a T.I.N.A, There Is No Alternative. That's what T.I.N.A stands for. So, can we conceptual flex?
Yeah. Once we've got a breakthrough, you know, we've ideated a breakthrough in, you know, the law or whatever it is, we've got to involve people. So, there's the empathic connecting. You know, can we reach out to others? Can we understand where they're coming from? Can we get them involved? And in order to get yeah, involved, we've gotta be able to facilitate the interaction between the people.
So, people feel like they're part. And then can we develop people into much more sophisticated human beings were. engaging with others becomes easy, not a fight and battle. So that's the involve cluster of behaviors. then we've got to tell our story with impact, build confidence in, you know, get people confident in us, but also build their confidence in themselves in order to influence them.
That's all that ignition. And then. continuously improve what we're doing and be proactive in our implementation. So those are the 11 letters of the alphabet, if you will. so, all millions of behaviors or either one letter, but labeled as something else or a combination of these letters. So, if you look at this. Care about people say it straight reach for better, make it happen. So, this is a behavior where there's five letters in the alphabet. So, what you can see is those 11 behaviors, makeup, all other behaviors. So when you're trying to innovate, you need to, you know, come up with the idea is that the imagine then involve others in the team, the innovation team, then ignite the confidence and then go into the execution.
So, the four "E's" that were mentioned earlier on will spread around those four clusters, or, you know, that will be combinations of those 11 behaviors.
Katie : So, every single behavior that's in an organization, you think we'll be able to map from those 11 letters?
Alan: Yes. It's just, I think a bit like, there are four base pairs in our DNA, so all of our genes are based on just four base pairs.
So, the genetic code is just four base pairs. The behavioral code is, 11 behaviors, make up the behavioral complexity in organizations. And so, when organizations don't understand that they classically, they invent four behaviors like care for others and you go, well, what exactly do you mean by care for others?
It turns out it's a bit of empathic connecting. It's a bit of developing people. It's a bit about building confidence. Okay. So. When you go measure it, you know, and there are six levels of sophistication, you know, if you haven't got the precision and the understanding of that behavior, It will be difficult to measure. It would difficult to improve it, difficult to embed it, difficult to see that it's getting better in your organization.
So, organizations have to stop inventing things and imposing them. Right. It just doesn't work.
Katie : One question. One last question. I think, are we not discounting and attitude to risk as a key barrier to the commercialization of new ideas, experts are often highly invested in the old, not the new that's what makes them experts.
Alan: So, if that means, do we need to have. You know, more caution. well, I think we're generally as a species and again, we go about, we go into this in the book is we're highly cautious. You know, one of the reasons innovation fail is, you know, you'd be don't get promoted for making a balls up of it. You know, actually, so people are incredibly risk averse. You know, your career doesn't flourish when you spent 5 million pounds and it's been a complete disaster. So, you know, so most organizations are very intolerant of failure. Whereas actually we need to get much more tolerant cause you can, you know, one of the ways you're learning and evolving and innovating is you'll fail fast.
So, you've got to fail, fail cheaply, fail quickly. Learn from that, fold it in so you can get closer and closer to the answer and experts are themselves a bit averse to failure because, "Hey, I'm an expert" and it doesn't fit with my self-identity that I might get it wrong. Well, polymath integrators don't have any such constraints. you know, cause they're buzzing around the meadow. and failure is not a problem for them. So actually, we want to be much more, you know, comfortable with risk and with change and with failure. I've got a sort of take away slide. So, here's, the innovation sucks basically. Why? Cause we're wasting 65 billion in the UK and we're trapped by the R&D funnel. We go to reverse the funnel. We need impellers, not pro propellers to move the ideas into the market and commercialize them. There's a new player we needed in the team.
we've got to reduce the dependency on the meadow of experts. And then we need these honeybees or polymath integrators. If you prefer, you know, who buzz around the meadow gathering uploads of information, connect them at a deep level, not just a surface level. And so, organizations need to find the bees is or develop the polymathic capability. And as I said, gen Y and gen Z, they're naturally more polymathic in their capability than a gen X or baby boomers. So, we need to find the bees or develop the polymathic capability in our people. And you know, you can grow your business by doing that right from where you are. So, in the, you know, to the punchline, should I stay, or should I grow actually stay where you are, understand what you're really doing. Understand what's holding you back. And you can grow it from your desk. You don't need to launch out so you can stay where you are and grow. Growth doesn't require you to move around that much, if you know how to access the stuff that you need to access.
Katie: Okay, thanks for that Alan. just to let people know that in a, in two weeks’ time we have, our next webinar, that's on the 6th of August and it's called, if, if I could turn back time, turn back the clock 10 years and be happy. Alan, this is, this is one of your titles, elaborate a little bit more for us.
Alan: Yeah so turning back time. Most people when they're in business, realize that it's exhausting, right? Cause, partly because we live in such a complicated world and there's a thousand things to do and we're swamped with task and targets and metrics and goals and all that sort of stuff, is it's exhausting.
God only I had the energy I had 10 years ago. So next week or two weeks’ time. How'd you get the energy you had 10 years ago. If that's the goal, you know, how do I have the energy I had when I was 10 years younger? So that's what we're going to share.
Katie: And that's possible?
Alan: It's entirely possible. In fact, as you know, Katie, we have actually measured it in executives where we've, you can quantify energy levels, and we can quantify and correlate that to the energy of a certain age point.
And as you know, when we coach people, we have literally made them 10 years younger and giving them the energy and an earlier version of themselves, you can actually objectively quantify that. some people we've got more than 10 years, but the average improvement across the people. we coach as you know, is, they have an energy increase of literally 10 years.
So that's what we were talking about. How'd you do that?
Katie: All right, brilliant. So if you've got any friends or colleagues that would be interested in turning back the clock 10 years and having the energy that you had 10 years ago, then please do get into sign up where you signed up for the webinars beyond the sixth of all risks.
So, thanks for joining us. Thanks to Alan. thanks, with Tom who we don't always see, but he does put in job and thanks for joining us and have 2 weeks see you.
Alan: Bye guys.