Unlock the secrets to transforming corporate culture through authenticity and innovation with my esteemed guest Tendayi Viki. As we sit across from each other, you'll gain invaluable insights into the role of psychological safety, the freedom to embrace mistakes, and the impact of discarding the stifling "mask of correctness."
It's a candid exploration of how shedding these facades can propel not only personal growth but also inject much-needed agility into the traditional corporate structure.
Explore the dynamics of leadership and diversity in a nuanced conversation about fostering creativity in the workplace. Learn practical strategies for cultivating environments where authenticity thrives, driving innovation forward.
Key Takeaways:
Tendayi Viki's links:
Hi, I'm your podcast host Keita Demming: Author, Advisor, Thought Partner & Coach.
I'm an award-winning educator and coach with a PhD in Adult Education and Workplace Learning who works to transform companies into places that are idea-driven and people-centered.
At The Covenant Group, I design training programs and coach entrepreneurs and business leaders to meet their strategic goals and build their businesses.
In my book, Strategy to Action: Run Your Business Without It Running You, I introduce an effective and straightforward tool to elevate your skills as a business professional and navigate the corporate world. The book offers practical insights on transforming strategies into tangible results.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and subscribe to my Newsletter.
Unlock the secrets to transforming corporate culture through authenticity and innovation with my esteemed guest Tendayi Viki. As we sit across from each other, you'll gain invaluable insights into the role of psychological safety, the freedom to embrace mistakes, and the impact of discarding the stifling "mask of correctness."
It's a candid exploration of how shedding these facades can propel not only personal growth but also inject much-needed agility into the traditional corporate structure.
Explore the dynamics of leadership and diversity in a nuanced conversation about fostering creativity in the workplace. Learn practical strategies for cultivating environments where authenticity thrives, driving innovation forward.
Key Takeaways:
Tendayi Viki's links:
Hi, I'm your podcast host Keita Demming: Author, Advisor, Thought Partner & Coach.
I'm an award-winning educator and coach with a PhD in Adult Education and Workplace Learning who works to transform companies into places that are idea-driven and people-centered.
At The Covenant Group, I design training programs and coach entrepreneurs and business leaders to meet their strategic goals and build their businesses.
In my book, Strategy to Action: Run Your Business Without It Running You, I introduce an effective and straightforward tool to elevate your skills as a business professional and navigate the corporate world. The book offers practical insights on transforming strategies into tangible results.
Follow me on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, and subscribe to my Newsletter.
In our organizations we punish people who do hero projects and reward people who do health seeking and help giving and reflexively frame.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to another episode of Conversations with Keter Deming. In today's episode we're going to be in conversation with Tennai Vicky. Now. Tennai also is the key endorser of my book Strategy to Action, but he's a longtime friend and I've always loved the work that he does. He helps big companies act and be more like startups. He helps them be more agile. In this conversation we explore a wide array of topics that explore our two main questions how do we become better people in business and how to become better business people? I hope you enjoyed today's episode with Tennai Vicky and if you'd like to subscribe to this podcast, just hit subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also join my mailing list at KeterDemingcom or support my work by checking out my book Strategy to Action. Hope you enjoyed today's episode. Tennai, for people who have no idea who you are and what you do, can you just share a little bit about yourself?
Speaker 1:Yeah cool. I sometimes describe myself as helping elephants do ballet. Then my seven-year-old was watching a video where I say that and he turned and looked at me and was like, is that what you're really doing? He was really excited. He was more impressed if I worked with real elephants than actual metaphorical elephants that I worked with. I work with large companies and I help them set up the infrastructure and processes they need to be able to drive innovation and prepare for the future.
Speaker 2:Yeah, first of all, let's just take a moment, and I love how kids take things so literally. I've been tracking metaphors of my kid with my son and it's so funny. But yeah, it's crazy. The funniest one I can remember is saying dad, we need to catch light. He's like how do you catch light, daddy?
Speaker 1:She sings like that. We need to put lightning in a bottle.
Speaker 2:Exactly so, tennai. The focus of what I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to explore two main questions how do we have people be better people in business and how do we make people into better business people? You, I think, can probably talk about your better business people from an innovation lens, because that's welcome to your work, but talk to us a little bit about what are your thoughts on how to make people better people in business.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's fascinating, right? Because I think the hard thing about business is people kind of wear a mask as they go into the office, so they never bring their full selves to work. And so it's a fascinating challenge right, because, like a lot of the, and there's a lot of masculinity right, work spaces are masculine spaces and businesses are like a masculine, you know even like strategies, like a masculine thing is like like war metaphors, right?
Speaker 1:So yeah, so it's really tough for people to become better at work, because to become a better person at work, you have to uncover any of your internal insecurity, any of the things that are our hindrances to you showing up in full and then work on that stuff. And if you're successful already and I love what Marshall Goldsmith says about this I see things like successful leaders develop like a like, a like, almost like a like, like a mythical kind of superstitious belief about themselves, where they believe that they're successful because of their characteristics and not in spite of their characteristics. And so they feel like you're a poor listener or you're bad at people management, like, yeah, well, I became the CEO, so bad people, people management must be the reason, and if I stop becoming good at like listening to all this touchy-feely stuff, it might harm my capability to be a great CEO. And so it's fascinating that people still become successful but they don't become better people. In essence, business doesn't extract that. That's like that, I agree with you.
Speaker 2:I don't think business extracts that. But my question is, how do we do that, how do we sort of craft that, what are your best ideas and how we craft in that that? I'm helping people to be better business people within this context. So you talk about two great things out. What love to double click on them individually. What is about a mask? And the other one is about patriarchy or masculinity, and then and every I think we can even unpack that Marshall Gorshmann thing that you just talked about there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, cool. So I mean, how do you take off the mask? Well, in the space where I work, you take off the mask by creating an environment where it doesn't matter if you're wrong. So a lot of people think psychological safety is about being accepted right, but actually psychological safety is truly in place when you know that if you're wrong and you make a mistake, the people around you and it's not going to be career defining or career limiting for you. So you don't go to work to avoid making mistakes.
Speaker 1:And in the space where I work, with innovation and creativity, making mistakes is exactly what you should be doing.
Speaker 1:And so, to show up with our creative selves at work, we need to stop trying to be right or stop trying to be correct. I think we should stop trying to be correct if that's trying to be right Actually, that's the better way to describe it so being corrected, being safe and making sure that all the numbers line up and all that, whereas being right means making, running multiple versions of tests and experiments and finding what works. So if the goal is to find what works, then you have to search for what works, and in searching for what works, you'll run down rabbit holes and blind alleys, but if the goal is to know what works, then you just keep doing what you've been doing in the business all these years. That it's worked. You will always be right. So the other two choices you have to make when you're finishing up work. So I think, taking off this mask of trying to always be correct but start looking for the right thing to do, like that future-facing For my world, that's what I would love.
Speaker 2:What I love about that is that you just apply the whole innovation lens to how do we become better people in business. You just took, like your whole innovation lens and you make a distinction between finding what works versus knowing what works. That's a subtle distinction, I think. I love that you just apply that lens there. So we just talked about the mask and that's a powerful way for you to think about the masks. But let's get personal here. So you and I, people of color in this space of authors and so-called thought leaders, etc. What are some of the masks that people like you and I struggle with? So I can't take off my mask, the one that makes me stand out. How do we become better people in that respect? And I know that's a very tricky one.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So it's kind of tricky because I mean, if you're showing up in like the dominant, white, dominated spaces, to what extent do you fit in by being as white as possible? To what extent do you wear a European mask or a white American mask or a white Canadian mask, speak like, sound like, act like, dress like, in order to be accepted in those spaces, and that's a mask that you're going to wear in those spaces in order to sort of blend in. And so that's a challenge, right, because you need that to be a success. What I found was and I remember saying this to Jeff, to Jeff Gothoff once in an interview was I decided quite early in my career, but I wanted my reputation to enter the door before I did.
Speaker 1:I don't know if you know what I mean. Oh yeah, 100%. I want it to be known as great at my work before I enter the door. So that is that when I enter the door, my race is two or three Great, and so I really focused on writing well, speaking well, doing really great work, working on concept sharing, building my reputation, because I'm not a, you know, like if you're working in the spaces where we work so leadership, consulting, advisory, people, people. People don't Google you the same way they Google like a plumber, right, like. Everything is like two reference thing and people who do you know who does this well.
Speaker 1:So I needed like a mark of excellence that enters the door before I show up, so that people are like asking for me to show up and then when I show up, they've asked me to show up. I'm not knocking on the door asking to be accepted, because I think when you're knocking on the door asking to be accepted, you might just straightjacketed into the condition, and so that's allowed me more and more to show up as just me. So the extent that you can show up with you, right, socialization, education, relationships, etc. So that's allowed me to show up and feel more secure as well, showing up in those spaces and having to let leaving less to justify my being there, because the people that are there have already justified my being there, right. So that was something I felt I needed as a person of color I don't know, I mean I'm sure I don't know how many white colleagues need that before they show up in places.
Speaker 2:What's interesting is, I think, the idea of letting your reputation proceed. You could benefit anybody, but particularly for people of color. Having a strategy around that is even additionally helpful. So what's like one or two things you did to help build your reputation before you even got in the door?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's something I teach my children and my first born son was. I went for a parent teacher meeting and the physics teacher was like your son says, you put him under a lot of pressure. He could be like maybe I should lighten up a bit. So one of the things that I tell my kids is if you're black and you wanted to show up in those spaces, you have to be undeniable. You have to be like Barack Obama level, undeniably comfortable.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And so and so like go ahead.
Speaker 2:No, no, no, you got it, you got it. I follow up also.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so everything I did was to show up like that.
Speaker 1:So I worked really hard on the corporate startup, right, I tried to make it a really like almost like the war and people of innovation, right, like I worked so hard on that.
Speaker 1:And then, as you said, a winning awards and like one, like you know, best book from the, from the, from the, from the Charter Institute of Marketing, and all of these things, like it became like something that was really great for me, right, and that's how the reputation starts proceeding you, when you're speaking, when you're writing for Forbes, when you have a Stanford fellow tag, right, and then you know, things like that are like things that open doors before you before you show up and what's interesting, right, and I can ask you a question. But there's something that inverts as well. Like, if you're black and you show up with that high level of reputation, there's also like an over compensation of how good people think you are, like they then over index on this, on the surprised part of that, like wow, you're Stanford and you're from Zimbabwe, you've come a long way, yeah, yeah, so there's also like an over correction. But I think that if you don't show up with those things everybody had a white mentor was like don't lead with anything about your racial background, lead with your reputation.
Speaker 2:Well, I was right back to the mutton was. A thing is like we're judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin. That was. That was exactly what he was asking.
Speaker 1:So just listen, listen, just let me just say something about that. I know that's what my little king was asking for, but we're not there. And the reason we're not there is because the content of our character has to hear a higher threshold than the content of the character of a similar white male.
Speaker 2:Right. So that that kind of leads to my next question, which is the demand to be so excellent and, see, be so good. I think there's a challenge there. So, for example, the whole idea of, hey, you have to be twice as good as other people, and that's a very common it's called a trope that puts a certain level of pressure on people of color, which, which I think there's a conversation to be out there as well. What are your thoughts on that?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I mean, it does put a lot of pressure. I can't remember who it was, man, I can't remember who it was. There's an investor, who, who, who, who, who, who, who, who's hedge fund investing. The opposite, because there's like a stereotypical male white CEO, like you know, square jaw or toll, whatever it is right, cool head here, and and and apparently those companies don't necessarily perform as well as companies that don't have that have a non stereotypical male CEO, and so what they decided to do was they decided to hedge against that.
Speaker 1:So if they look at the profile of the leaders and they're too stereotypical, they don't invest in those. They hedge against those companies and they invest in companies that have a non stereotypical CEO, because you have to be really competent to overcome the stereotype of incompetence and getting those positions, and so it's a currency that sometimes, in you know, people can use to sort of judge your, your level of competence. But for the recipients of that expectation, it's really daunting, right, it's an added level of pressure. I think it's one of those things where and the fear is that and I know that this shows up in people the fear is that if you show up as competent, it could end up being connected to your racial background or your cultural background.
Speaker 1:And so you're on one level representing yourself and you're on another level representing your heritage, and there's very few white males that walk around with that right. They're representing themselves. They're getting into the world representing themselves. So, it's like a double way to carry that stuff, and so I try not to think about it too much now, but earlier on in my career I used to think about it.
Speaker 2:I really appreciate how candid you are being about this particular topic and there are very few people like I haven't broadcasted like Top Morris, but yes, sure.
Speaker 1:But I'm sure I'm going to get trolled. I'm sure they'll be thumbed.
Speaker 2:We might get cancelled and stuff. Let's switch the focuses on how to become better people in business and talk a little about the masculinity piece. So let's talk about how masculinity shows up in the business world and what are your thoughts there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know, like, especially in a world where there's change happening all the time and you're needing to admit that you don't know of things, and you're needing to own mistakes, and you're needing to ask questions and be curious, it doesn't really that world does not bend, it doesn't bend itself to command and control. And so masculinity shows up in workspaces with leaders that know everything, leaders that give instructions, leaders that know they can pick the winning ideas, leaders that, and so all of that, like you know, call it like bravado, macho, aggression, emotionally retarded way of approaching work, like that kind of not sufficient emotional intelligence. And what we know is that the best, the best creative environment is multiple inputs from people with multiple personalities and the view, and so you want to bring all those people in that space and make them feel safe and welcome in that space. And so if the environment is too one-sided culturally, people will self-select themselves out of those environments and then you don't get the benefit of their inputs, their intelligence and their talents.
Speaker 1:And so, because my work is around helping companies create the best environment for the best ideas to emerge, what we know is you can't pick winning ideas on day one. You can only create the context in which the best ideas emerge, and so if you're going to create that context, then that context cannot be heavily command and control. Did you hit the numbers this week? Are we on the plan with the roadmap? People throwing pencils at Zoom on Zoom calls because they're upset that one of their direct report answered back. You know those kinds of behaviors.
Speaker 1:Any behavior that makes any person at work shrink Right. That's when you start making mistakes, because now the people that are closest to the world are not telling you, as leaders, what's coming Right. Because, they're too worried about how you're going to respond. So that's my. That's kind of like a feeling I have about that yeah.
Speaker 2:So I think I think we're just parked that a little bit till we get to how we become better business people, because I think that in your work it's so connected. So what I love about what you just talked about is is let's use Amy Edmondsson or I forgot her name we talked about a radical candor.
Speaker 1:Yes, oh man, what's her name? Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about, kim.
Speaker 2:Scott, yeah, kim Scott, so that was all it took.
Speaker 1:a lot about radical candor yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so, but the way anyway, let's table that for when we go to the other conversation on how to become better business people, because there's a piece that I think you're connecting the humanity of it, or people being able to show up without fear, not being in this masculine world, and I think there's a piece that you can talk about how that creates it makes you a better business person. And then let's define a piece I just want to touch on as well. You talked about this Marshall Goldsmith idea where people are the best because of, not in spite of, so let's double click on that a bit.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I don't think that you know. As a person, you show up in various ways and the people that know you best know the things you're good at and the things you're not so great at, and so some of the stuff that some of the mistakes that leaders make is maybe they believe too much in their own ability to control events. They believe too much in how their own personality drives success. They will not take advice from other people, and if they do take advice, they'll take it only from people that think they think measure up to their standard.
Speaker 1:So all of these things are all like characteristics that can get in the way of great leadership, and one of the funny things about the masculine environment that we were talking about is that it rewards those kinds of behaviors. So those people are also more likely to be promoted, and so they start to believe that they're successful because of their characteristics rather than in spite of their characteristics. Because I say, you've been married 20 years and your wife knows that you're not a good listener, like, are you still married because you're not a good listener, or are you still married in spite of the fact they should not have a good listener? All right. So the superstitious belief that if I listened well, my marriage would have ended. It's the same thing that people think well, if I listened too much to my direct reports, you know I wouldn't be such a great leader. It's better for me to just give direction. And I'm really successful in spite of your characteristics, not because of them.
Speaker 2:Right Interesting. So I'm really curious because that comes from Marshall Goldsmith, who's like one of the most famous coaches, kind of thing. So in a development perspective, so we want to do personal development, professional development I'm curious how that would play out, because you're successful in spite of. So what are you working on? Do you work on the strengths? Do you work on your? I'm a strengths guy. I work on your strengths. Hi, I have real weaknesses, that's my thing. But within that context, I still think each of us has work to do. So if I'm successful in spite of, I'm curious around what the development conversation there is.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so what's interesting is that, like I think people should work on their strengths and work to get better on their strengths, but if you overindex on your strengths, your strength is your weakness, right yeah.
Speaker 1:So, the question is like what are the negative outcomes that are produced by some of your strengths and how do you mitigate against those? That's the development question. It's not for you to give up on the things that you're great at so that you can just focus on each of these things that you're not great. But everybody knows that. Like, for example, one of the things Marshall Goldsmith talks about is because winning too much winning at all costs Like, certainly I'm so used to winning at the game of life. Now they have to win at everything, and so that's an overindexing on a strength and then that becomes your weakness. That's the reason why companies get disrupted right in the first place. They overindex on their strengths and then they're strengthened because it, right there in your success is your if, a seed or the thing that might derail you, and so just constantly paying attention to that. Okay, If, in addition to the things I'm good at, I became great at listening, taking feedback and using that feedback, Can you imagine what kind of like, what superpower combination that would create?
Speaker 2:But I want to go back to this idea of so you win in work and effort, you have to win in all aspects of your life. I can think of clients that I have. They're divorced because of that Right. They need to like, they need to win at home and win at work. So they're very, very successful in the workplace but they're not successful in their personal life. And then the lack of success in their personal life absolutely crumbles the success that they had professionally right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no. But the interesting thing is how many people in their workplace would show up to their funeral if they weren't being obligated to.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:So actually, the thing that caused their marriage to divorce is also burning relationships at work. Like they're the same person, they're overindicating or winning at work, overindicating and winning at home, except that at work you don't get fired for winning too much, but you're not anyone's favorite person and you're not building great relationships, and there's something about having a great place to work that just produces even more excellent Right, yeah, yeah, yeah, and so, yeah, too much winning can create places that are not great places to work.
Speaker 2:And I think that's also kind of the premise of this podcast. My assumption is that if you become better people in business, you create better businesses, exactly.
Speaker 1:And I was going to say that earlier when you were like, let's talk about that later, when we talk about better business people. I actually think that, especially in my world, being a better person in business makes you a better business person, yeah, so let's switch to that conversation.
Speaker 2:Let's switch to that conversation, and the conversation that I sort of tabled was the heart of your work, which is that innovation conversation around. I mean the soft skills that create the conditions for innovation to happen, or create the conditions so that you're less likely to be disrupted. So let's talk a little bit about like one or two or three of the key observations you've seen there that people need to dig into or foster if they're going to create. Let's go to high performing organizations or organizations that are full-time for innovation.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. Let's imagine a CEO. This is an example of a situation that I was in where the CEO is like don't come to me unless you have a 10x idea. And I'm like running this workshop, but the CEO just keeps saying this to the team like listen, I only want 10x idea. Unless you have a 10x idea, don't come.
Speaker 1:So we go to coffee break and I like to describe myself as my job is to have awkward conversations with really important people. So I like go up to the CEO and I'm like please stop saying 10x idea, because, like it's impossible to know a 10x idea on day one. It's impossible, like you will never know it, and the thing you assume will be a 10x idea might turn out to not be, and the thing you dismiss is not a 10x idea might turn out to be a 10x idea If you already know an idea that's a 10x idea on day one. It's not an innovation, it is an extension of something you've already been doing Right, and so I actually stopped them from doing that. And it's this expectation that you have to get it right on day one, whereas what we're trying to say to people is the best way to find good ideas is to have loads of ideas and then figure out a methodology for systematically finding out whether or not any of the ideas have legs, and then you just scrap the ideas that don't have legs and double down on the ideas that do have legs.
Speaker 1:But this forces you to show up in this one way that people don't show up in business a lot, which is to disconnect your personal to your ideas, and you cannot take the success and failure of your ideas personally Right. You cannot be committed to the success of your ideas so much so that you push it up the hill despite the evidence, despite the progress and what we've learned in business. Which is really toxic is that a lot of us know how to cover our back. So if we start to get a sense that what we're working on may not be successful, we find ways to shift that blame to other parts of the business so that we look like we've completed. So if you're working on a product development, you complete it to the roadmap and then you hand it over to sales, and if it doesn't sell, it's because sales doesn't know how to sell the thing that I worked.
Speaker 1:But in terms of my goals. I was on time and on budget for the roadmap. With shifting that goalpost, we're saying, as an innovator, you don't own the on time and on budget roadmap. You own the success of the business idea here in the market. So don't give to sales teams things that you don't know that they're going to work on. Find that out and if it's not going to work, kill it. So that's one half of how you show up personally to that. The other half is how they're going to respond to you. But yeah, we can talk.
Speaker 2:So what's something else that stands out for you there in terms of creating those environments that ideas land on fertile ground?
Speaker 1:Right. So the flip side of that right is, if you're not going to be personally attached to your idea, then the flip side of that is the organization cannot attach that idea to their evaluation of you. So the success and failure of an idea cannot be the success and failure of your career or reputation or promotion prospects within the business. That's something that's really hard for leaders, because we reward people that have succeeded, and so I was in the US last week with the sweet of a bank there and the conversation was please don't police ideas, don't be suggestive, as leaders, on what should happen to an idea. What we want you to do is to police how closely people follow the innovation process. Are they checking whether or not their product is a value proposition? Because having a cool product is not the same thing as having a great value proposition. You only have a great value proposition when the product you're working on addresses customer needs, helps customers accomplish the gains they want to create in their life.
Speaker 1:So are your teams working on creating the product or are they working on creating a value proposition? Because those two things will work out different, and so, as leaders, you should be checking the behaviors of your teams and rewarding those teams that are really concerned about value creation. So that's different. So now, when you show up at work, what I want to know is what have you done this week to discover exactly what customers need, and to what extent is what you're building a line to what customers need? I don't show up at work and go. I was playing golf with Kata, and I think that you should add this feature to that application, which is how leaders show up all the time giving instructions, right, right, lorde and mercy, and so it's a way of approaching work that then allows people to become better people at work, because they understand that they're being evaluated and rewarded for behaviors that are conducive to creating innovation, versus being rewarded for wearing this mask of always being correct on time on budget roadmap.
Speaker 2:So let me let me throw an idea out to you that I've I think the first person asked. I've been thinking about this for a while and then I heard Adam Grant talking about it, etc. But this idea of rewarding teams instead of individuals, how does that fit into all of what we're talking about here?
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, I think it fits well, but rewarding team is a way of like incentivizing collaboration. So now we have a shared outcome and so we can, we can, we can, we can actually collaborate. But here's what's interesting when it comes to innovation. When it comes to innovation, you don't get ROI. You don't measure the success of the ROI on a single investment, because it's impossible, right? So certain ideas you're going to invest in are actually going to fail. So what you get is a return on a portfolio of ideas. The best way to find good ideas. If they have many ideas, which is what that's an Adam Grant right. The thoughts, right, it's something book originals. So if you have many ideas, so means you have multiple teams working on those ideas how do you actually reward the portfolio of teams, including the ones that have succeeded and the ones that have failed? How do they all gain?
Speaker 2:Because the ones who failed also contributed to the success in helping us know what road not to go down to.
Speaker 1:Exactly and that small bet, especially if they failed early, and they give us really great information. We know that they've already saved us 2 million, that we would have invested in that if we were going to work on it all the way to then and then find out that it doesn't work. And so how do you actually reward this collaborative environment? And there's a really great paper actually called how a Collection of Creatives Become the Creative Collective, something like that or the other way around, I don't care if enough, but it's a fantastic paper and it describes like 4 behaviors that I think are needed.
Speaker 1:One is help seeking so if you're working on something, don't find like be a hero, try and like bring other inputs in. So help seeking behavior. And then help giving is the second one. And then, for the person who's seeking help, there's a third behavior they need, which is called reflective reframing, which is taking the feedback and reflecting on your idea and iterating on your idea. So you have to reflectively reframe. It's leadership support, which means that in our organizations we punish people who do hero projects and reward people who do help seeking and help giving and reflective reframing, and so it's a way again of like rewarding team collaboration.
Speaker 2:But I'm so curious, like how do we do that? So I understand that's a piece I get, but it's, how do we do that? Do we? Does the whole team get a bonus, Do we? Like, how does that work out? Are you or we still? Or that is still a nebulous spot.
Speaker 1:Yeah, if to the nebulous spot, especially when it comes to innovation. So I think that the lowest hanging fruit innovation is the innovation award, where you get like a trophy or like some sort of recognition, the failure, the heroic failure award, or whatever it is right. So that's like the low hanging fruit. And then, as you move up the full chain, you get to bonuses and promotions and all these things Right.
Speaker 2:But promotions don't work, though, because who are you promoting?
Speaker 1:Especially in a team context.
Speaker 2:In a portfolio context. That's my point, exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's not going to work, but you can certainly do financial incentives around bonusing. Companies like 3M and other companies have set up this or used to. I don't know if they still do it. But this concept of the stretch goal where they say like 25% of your revenue must come from new projects launched within the last three years or whatever, and that's all part of your bonus calculation. And then, at the furthest extreme, I've been in a bank where if you're a team and you're working on an idea, all of you have to take a 40% pay cut in return for a stake in the idea, and so it's a way of mimicking entrepreneurs.
Speaker 1:You can see the scale of reward and recognition that you can give innovators.
Speaker 2:But depending on how big that bank is, the reward, and that could be outrageous.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, if you launch something on the banking platform that's like a multi-million dollar, then yeah, I think the question is, if you give out 40% of your paycheck and your idea fails, then there's nothing for you.
Speaker 2:But what you lost is the 40% in cut.
Speaker 1:Yes, and you can go back to your job. But, there's nothing for you there in terms of your reward for having tried, but the teams that do succeed get a big reward and so sometimes can create tensions again with who's getting the opportunity to get those big returns.
Speaker 2:Well, it creates a tension Like suppose I'm on the team that took a 40% cut and we failed and found a big insight that created the next thing. That was success. I don't get rewarded for that, but that person got a million dollar payout and I don't. I'd be resentful for that for sure. Exactly.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's a really tough one to manage it. Any one of these there is laws and challenges that organization.
Speaker 2:But here's what I think is at the bottom of all of this. The question we're explaining is how to become better people in business so that we can have better businesses. That's the essential we're doing. Everything we've been talking about is what's fair. We've been talking about is this fair or not Fair that a CEO gets let's say, on a conservative side 30 times what the people who are managers when it manages it wants to come and help the innovations and sometimes that's you is getting that massive paycheck regardless of performance. Right, and there are versions of that throughout our business world that are not a helping the end user, because we often end up with crappy products. We have overpaid executives and CEOs and none of it is fair for anybody, and if people are doing real grunt work, they're struggling to pay them more. Everything we're talking about here talks about fairness. In my mind, yeah, no, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I think you're right about that. I think one of the problems with capitalism and disruption and entrepreneurship is that it's always got the potential to produce asymmetric outcomes.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so the question is just like do you want to redistribute the asymmetric outcomes, and is it fair on the person who created the asymmetric outcome to get the asymmetric outcome redistributed to people who didn't contribute to the creation of asymmetric outcomes? And so I believe that, from where I stand, the best thing you can do is create opportunity Right. So the lower the barriers of people participating in innovation, the easier it is to, at least if you have an equal opportunity to start. I think that's probably the best cultural thing you can do in an online.
Speaker 2:It kind of stands back to one of the things that I my son is pretty young, so he's not quite there yet, but teaching your kids. The world is not fair. I don't expect it to be. Stuff is going to happen, it's going to be unfair, and you got to pull up your bootstabs and keep going. But, you know what's really unfair, Kater.
Speaker 1:Do you know what's truly, truly unfair.
Speaker 2:What's that?
Speaker 1:Is that your children right? No choice of their own, became your children Like they have an advantage that a child who's born in a different context, with an alcoholic parent or a criminal parent, there's kids that are born in prison. There's kids that are born so like already. Your kids are already of an unfair advantage by being your kids.
Speaker 2:So I have a friend who's so pissed off on me because we only have one kid. He's like, of all the people who should have like five or six kids, you are one of those people and I'm like, first of all, that's a compliment, I understand that, but there's no way I'm going to have six kids in my life.
Speaker 1:This is not like a way, you know, I'm not saying you should have six kids.
Speaker 2:You remind me of that friend. His point is that the people who have lots and lots of kids are not often the people who help kids set kids up best for success. But having said that, there's some research that talks about and I'm not supporting this, but it's a very small population but there's a group of kids who are born in struggle. Because they're born in an absolute kind of struggling situation. They're more resilient in some ways in life. Kids who are born with all of the comforts of the world. They don't have that grittiness and that struggle because everything has been given to them right. So even life is unfair like that, so you're born in the comforts of it, but then the thing that you need, which is grit, perseverance, strength, etc. Because you were born with a simple privilege, you have less of that and that's a very hard thing for a lot of people to cultivate, or fast Like you get struggle.
Speaker 1:Yeah, no, but I mean parenting, right, you can teach your kid, you can have your kids develop grit and whatever, and persistence, but the statistics just don't support that right, Because the outcomes for people who don't have a cater as a parent are just not like a few people that ever do. Exactly. I think this to you, by the way. The reason why I say this to you, by the way, is that sometimes we are philosophically having the wrong argument. So asymmetric outcomes are kind of just a part of how life works, how evolution is elected, just random, right.
Speaker 1:But in terms of producing asymmetric outcomes, what we should be fighting is rent seeking, which is, people that are extracting value from society without giving value back.
Speaker 1:That's really the bigger challenge, which is and that's what we teach when we're teaching innovation, which is the first thing you work on, is making sure that you're creating products and services that people want.
Speaker 1:And I have a really great colleague his name is Greg Bernada who's like let's even go beyond creating products and services that people want and creating products and services that help people thrive, things that are actually good for people to thrive as people, and then we get value back for that value that we've put into society and that exchange of value is the measure of a successful innovation. But then if the person has that exchange of value back, we can't then say, well, you've got the value back, and that's unfair. What's unfair is if you give no value but somehow you're rent seeking and you get value back. And that's a big, big challenge in, especially in like developing countries. Like it's a really tough challenge. Business folks use blame politicians for their behavior. When their behavior is rent seeking, they're extracting well from the companies they run without putting value back into the countries that they live in.
Speaker 2:So what I love about what you just said is that I think in. So both of us have an academic background. Like I did a PhD you've done, you've worked in universities and all of that. The most powerful concept that I think we ignore is the idea of framing, and if you frame the problem wrong, no matter how you come out of it, you're never going to succeed. In that, like it's, you're backing up your own treaty, but you've framed the problem wrong, and I think what you're getting at there is that it's not that we so.
Speaker 2:For example, one of the things that I talk about in my book, which is often people talk about unintended consequences, and when you look at unintended consequences, most times the way they approach your problem, there was a wrong set of assumptions going into the first place, so it wasn't. The unintended consequences is that you assume that problem was easy to solve, which is very different from assuming hey, this is a complex problem, let's take a complex approach, an approach that's compatible with complex problems. That and that's a very different. It sounds small, it sounds subtle, but it determines the trajectory in which you go. It's like if you're traveling to the North Pole and you're off by four degrees, you die period. Yeah Right, you got to be on time.
Speaker 1:Because they're compounding. Like you go further and further.
Speaker 2:Exactly, it's further and further, you die, you die. But if you're starting a problem solving approach and you start with the wrong question, that's equivalent of being five degrees off heading to the North Pole. It's the same thing Right, Exactly, and framing so, for example, is a great example of building managers. They were having this problem where tenants were complaining about how long the elevator was taking. The elevator was taking too long, so they looked into replacing the elevator. Then they decided you know what we're going to do. We're going to put mirrors at the bottom of the elevator and the mirrors address the problem. People stopped complaining. They were looking at themselves. They were like, oh, I'd awaited.
Speaker 1:So I'm flying. I'm flying with your big vein.
Speaker 2:Exactly right. I was in a slugs in the apartment thing, it was that, and all I took was looking at the problem differently. And now that's a silly example. And in design you do things like put countdown timers so people know where they are, and all of that kind of thing.
Speaker 1:Right. But think about it this way, right? Like if you are an innovation team and you and your framing is wrong and your leader is treating it as an execution challenge not a testing challenge.
Speaker 2:Not a testing challenge not an experimentation challenge.
Speaker 1:So you frame the problem wrong. Your leader expects you to execute on your framing, whereas with innovation, if you frame the problem wrong and we run an experiment and we learn that we're wrong, it doesn't matter, and so that's why it's really important for leaders to understand that they cannot pick the winning at zero day one. The world does not belong to the person with the best PowerPoint slides right. It belongs to the person who's got customer money in the bank, and so it's a totally different framing and a totally different way of thinking about it.
Speaker 2:If that's the objective, we're going up. Yes, if that's the objective we're going up. Yeah, tenda, I feel like you and I can talk forever, forever, forever, forever. So what are the questions I've been asking? Everybody who comes on to this podcast is a coaching question that I love. Where is somewhere that you are seeking comfort when you should be seeking discomfort?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's interesting. Could. I have been thinking about that a lot for the last few days and actually for the last year and I'll struggle with it a lot actually. So I mean, like this real, like nice comfort level, like I have a book out, I get to give keynote speeches or the strategize, all right, and it's really hard for me right now to figure out what was my next contribution. But even worse and that's where the complacency gets, thinking, do I have to have a next contribution? I mean, things are going well and so like, because I remember like I used to wake up at 5am every day to write and that just feels like, am I over that now? Like, am I successful? And so it is.
Speaker 1:I'm finding it really hard to inspire myself, to have the mind of a beginner again and jump into something. And, by the way, in my success right, if you want to call it success there's daily things that I have to deal with. You know, inquiries from people who want me to speak, clients who need me to do something as CEO that wants me to give them advice. So I can stay busy and never address this existential question of do I need to create something new? And I do know that a muscle that doesn't get exercised becomes that begins to atrophy, an inevitable part of how nature works. And so I don't know what muscle I'm losing right now by not pushing myself further, and I'm even scared to start Like. I can even feel the fear in my gut of, like leaving this comfort zone and going to this other, like unknown space. You know that's amazing.
Speaker 2:So, and do you have a favorite quote or something, a quote that resonates with you today?
Speaker 1:Yeah, though I forget who said it, but if a flower fails to bloom, right, you don't like. Stop blaming the flower, right, you examine the environment that is sitting in. And that's one of my favorite quotes. I say that a lot to leaders, especially around creativity and innovation.
Speaker 2:Oh, tendai, thank you for being on this, on this in this conversation with me. I think we get carried on for about two or three hours.
Speaker 1:Yes, thank you for having me.
Speaker 2:We are coming up to the top of the hour. How can people find out about you and more of your work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, strategizercom, so S-T-R-A-G-Y-V-E-Rcom, and then today Vickycom as well. Awesome.
Speaker 2:All right folks. Thank you for joining me on another episode of Conversations with Keith Adumming, where I explore two questions how do we become better people in business and how do we become better business people? And next time, when I'm interviewing another person, we'll be unpacking these two questions. Hope you enjoy and follow me for more. Thank you for listening to Conversations with Keith Adumming. Over the years, I've learned that few things will impact or improve your life more than improving your strategies and having better conversations with people you wish to serve. If you like today's guest and the idea is shared, please like, follow and provide a review wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also visit my website to sign up for my newsletter and learn about the release of my upcoming book. I look forward to the next episode where we'll be in conversation with someone who will help you become a better business person, and a better person in business. See you next time.