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By Luke Whitworth
On the 26 April, Leaders Performance Institute members met for the inaugural Performance in Practice session hosted in collaboration with the Premier League.

The theme for the afternoon, as indicated by the title, was Leading Innovation & Problem-Solving. The session included a case study and conversation from both inside and outside of sport, as well as exploring the skills and tools to ‘develop the muscle’ of innovation both individually and collectively.

“If the rate of change within an organisation is slower than the pace of change within its external environment – it will die” – Jack Welch, former CEO & Chair of General Electric

Performance in Practice – Part I: Insights on Innovation in Sport

Guest: Scott Drawer, Head of Sport, Millfield School

When do you know you are getting innovation right:

  • There will be haters.
  • Startup mindset.
  • Step change.
  • Behaviour change.
  • Diversion & deception.

What is creativity, research & innovation?

Creativity:

  • Creativity is ‘novelty, utility, surprise’ (US Patent Office).
  • ‘An idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements and the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships’ (James Webb Young, 1939).
  • ‘Creativity is just connecting things… creative people were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesise new things… they’ve had more experiences… they have thought more about their experiences than other people (Steve Jobs, Apple).

The science of creativity (Kaufman 2016):

  1. Creativity is often unpredictable. The ten-year rule is NOT a rule.
  2. Creative people often have messy processes. Creators rarely receive helpful feedback.
  3. Talent is relevant to creative accomplishment. Personality is relevant.
  4. Genes are relevant. Environmental experiences matter.
  5. Creative people have broad interests. Too much expertise can be detrimental to creative greatness.
  6. Outsiders often have a creative advantage. Sometimes the creator needs to create a new path for others to deliberately practise.

Study: what are some of the commonalities of the most successful scientists in the world?

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Innovation = Ideas + Impact

  • Innovation is the concept of taking ideas and making a practical difference to the environment you are operating in.
  • What are the problems you are trying to solve?

Confusion is often caused by misunderstanding symptoms and causes. Creativity is a symptom of innovation not a cause.

3 necessary (but not sufficient) conditions for innovation:

  1. Starvation
  2. Pressure
  3. Conditions

Designing for innovation:

  • Shared problem.
  • ‘Under regulation’.
  • Leadership appetite for risk.
  • Freedom to explore and experiment.
  • ‘Rapid prototype’ environments.
  • Share and celebrate your failures.

Failing is your first attempt in learning – celebrate the process vs. the outcome. Closing doors is almost as important as opening them.

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Research:

  • The systematic gathering of data, information, and facts + advancement of knowledge (Cost of Federal Regulations).

Where does research fit in the innovation process?

  • It is one approach to support innovation but not the only one.
  • It can help understand the problem you are trying to solve.
  • Helps ask brilliant questions.
  • Observation and patterning skills.
  • Communication skills.
  • It can be slow: speedboats vs. super tankers.

‘Knowledge alone is not impact.’

Conclusions:

  • Innovation is shaped by the environment’s design.
  • Innovation is about solving real problems that make a practical difference.
  • Leadership approach – leader-leader model.
  • Organisational maturity – ‘Big Kids’
  • Diversity in networks and openness to experience.
  • Storytelling to share approaches.
  • Create fun as a catalyst for change.

Performance in Practice – Part I: Insights on Innovation, Creativity & Problem-Solving

Guests:

Scott Drawer, Head of Sport, Millfield School

Jonnie Noakes, Director of Teaching & Learning, Eton College

  • Innovation challenges in education: the school thinks about innovation in terms of internal and external. Externally, AI is getting teachers both excited and worried. The pupils are way ahead of the teachers, so the school has moved fast to educate its staffing group. Teachers have gone from 0-100 in a short time because outside circumstances have forced them to see what AI can do and how it can support them. Internally, there is a big emphasis on partnerships. There is also a big drive to rethink assessment with the belief that the current ways of assessing have a stranglehold on what and how we teach. The question being explored is: what are schools for and evolving the approach to assessment?
  • Balancing innovation and tradition: the model being used at Eton College is having a small group of people whose job it is to innovate. Two-thirds of Jonnie’s time is opened up for innovation work. If you have dedicated people to horizon-scan, you are able to influence things more quickly. Start talking to your colleagues when you can see a practical use that can be applied.
  • Required skillsets: there are particular skillsets required to do this type of work, notably logical thinking. To do deep intense thinking is difficult around day-to-day work. Innovation can stem from small things that accumulate over time and having a risk-taking ethos. Create headspace and an approach that does this and give the space to those that have a propensity for these. Prove this stuff works.

How do we create a culture of learning?

  • As a starting point 12 months is too short a time for a culture to truly change. The Innovation Centre at Eton College has been open for eight years – it took five years to see a culture of innovation begin to form. Set up a small group of people to test promising ideas. Get others onboard to trial them. Get them to report back to hear from each other. At the point where your colleagues are hearing what is going on, then you are beginning to get traction.
  • Organisationally, put everything on the biggest priority and do what you can to make it happen, but identify what is that most critical problem. Put all the eggs in this basket – the process you engage in with a startup mentality will move you along. There is an importance for clarity on what has the greatest room for innovation.

What holds back innovation:

  • Habit and comfort in doing and thinking in a certain way. Sometimes it takes external pressure. Days are full with things that need to be done, therefore being asked to do things and find headspace for experimentation is often what is needed. Fear – in education people are scared of what AI is going to mean as there is uncertainty. Show people why things are not to be feared.
  • The reality why people want to innovate is because there are solutions in there. There needs to be an acceptance that you need to fail to get there. Fear stops people putting themselves out there. Talk about the process and less about the outcome. Being comfortable with the confusion and not knowing.

Where to put the resource: find people who are innovative or develop their skills to be innovative?

  • Curiosity is coachable. In your environment, provide opportunities and a safe space to support people in being innovative. Most environments want to be better, there is an inherent propensity to want to do that – surface it and give people the skills to exploit. The environment is far better than the genetics. If senior people aren’t that open to innovation, they will crush it quite quickly.

Session 2: Leading Innovation & Effective Problem-Solving

Can you develop it and, if so, how can you develop it?

Rivers of thought:

Edward de Bono – when we step into an environment, what we do is absorb quickly and begin to form ideas, developing ‘rivers of thought’.

  • Ideas / Knowledge / Experience.
  • Streams of consciousness.
  • ‘Rivers of thought’, which we accept as reality and cease to challenge.

IDEAL Model for Problem-Solving:

Taking us back to a process of innovation. Can be obsessed with creativity as a concept vs. the process of creativity.

  • Identify potential problems and opportunities for improvement.
  • Define the problem. Seek to understand it. Gather relevant facts and views.
  • Explore its causes and potential impacts. Explore possible solutions. Using creative techniques to generate multiple options.
  • Assess these options. Choose the best one, and take it.
  • Action with a ‘test & learn’ mindset.
  • Look Back and debrief to driving learning and improvement.

Identify problems and opportunities

“The first and most important step towards innovation is identifying the problems you want to try and solve” – James Dyson.

Two types of innovation:

  1. Responsive: where we face a problem that is impossible to ignore.
  2. Front foot: where we proactively identify an opportunity for improvement, and solve for an issue everyone else is accepting or ignoring.

Traps to watch out for…

  1. Operating out of an out of date mental map of the world – who are you speaking to who will challenge our thinking of our current world?
  2. Boiled frog: change too gradual for us to notice.
  3. Denial: ostrich response – there is an issue which is uncomfortable to talk about.

Define the problem:

  • Articulate the gap, why it matters, the causes and your constraints.
  • A lot of teams jump too quickly to solving it vs. understanding the problems.

Key traps to avoid at this stage:

  • Failing to identify the real issue, root causes.
  • Failing to sell the problem effectively and create enough urgency.
  • Suggesting or hinting at a solution in your problem statement – narrowing people’s thinking ahead of the Explore stage.

Exploring possible strategies:

The more options you have, the better your chances of coming up with a game-changing idea.

5 Strategies:

  1. Redefine or reframe the problem with alternative goals: how can we think about this problem differently? Think of at least three different ways we could define our goal, to help open up new ways of thinking about the problem.
  2. Mind mapping: mapping out the different categories of possible solutions, so we don’t narrow in on one type of solution.
  3. Step-change thinking: set a very stretching goal, and then think how that could be possible.
  4. Ideal world: describe your absolute ideal outcome. Then ask yourself under what circumstances you would get this?
  5. Related world: key question – who’s already faced and solved this problem? And what did they do? Learning from others who have addressed a similar challenge. Staying open to insights from outside of our immediate sector.

Questions to help us apply these techniques:

  1. Reframing the problem with a different goal: what are at least three different ways to think about the problem and your goal here?
  2. Mind mapping: if you were to draw a mind map with the problem at the centre… what are the different types of solution we can think about?
  3. Step-change: pick a key area of performance related to this problem – what would be a ‘step change’ goal you could set for that measure? Assuming it is possible, ask yourself ‘what would we need to do to achieve this?’

Group insights: what are the key qualities of those who are good innovators?

  • Having time and space.
  • Create time to think.
  • Environment over personality.
  • Invite diverse opinions.
  • Accepting of risk.
  • Act quickly.
  • Live in the future.
  • Take people on the journey.
  • They do not give up.
  • Remove mundane distractions.
  • An ability to switch off.
  • Encourage creative thinking and supporting of ideas.
  • Secure enough to fail.
  • Find a different perspective.
  • Biased toward strategic not operational – thinking and seeing the bigger picture.
  • They know how to take ideas through trial to usable form.
  • Believing in the value of innovation.
  • Exploratory mindset.
  • Open-mindedness – not being attached to existing, familiar ways of doing things.