by Robyn Bolton | Nov 7, 2023 | Innovation, Leadership, Tips, Tricks, & Tools
or “Why Mandating a Return to the Office Destroys Safety”
In last week’s episode, we learned that psychological safety is more neuroscience than psychology and the huge role our nervous system plays in our experience of safety.
This week, we’re going deeper into our nervous system and how we can use our understanding of it to influence our psychology.
I’m sensing I can’t think my way to safety. So, can I fix my nervous system to feel safe and smart?
This is where I go beyond Dr. Amy Edmondson’s definition of psychological safety to incorporate neuroscience and how our nervous system works.
Our nervous system has three states:
- Immobilization or the freeze response, as you felt, is often accompanied by a sense of overwhelm
- Fight-and-flight when you try to either end the conversation or become more aggressive, resistant, and push back on exploring other alternatives.
- Rest-and-Digest when you feel safe, social, and connected to the people around you
This third state sets humans and mammals apart from other living things. Communicating and connecting serve as a survival mechanism and represent a safe state for our nervous system. When we communicate and connect, our tribe looks out for us and keeps us safe from threats like lions or unfriendly tribes.
So, the answer is to foster more profound connections among human beings, which requires going well beyond our work roles and activities.
Does it require hugging? I knew it would require hugging.
Don’t worry, hugging isn’t mandatory.
We, as individuals, have a strong desire to connect and communicate, but it doesn’t necessarily require physical proximity. Being physically together doesn’t guarantee anything.
But what about the push to return to the office? There’s even research to support executives’ claims that physical proximity is essential to culture, innovation, and connection.
Not only does physical proximity not guarantee anything, but being forced to return to the office causes more harm than good.
From a safety perspective, our nervous system doesn’t want to feel trapped. Being forced back to the office activates our flight-or-fight response and erodes safety. Because of how our nervous system perceives choices, the more choices people have, the safer they feel.
Even though I’m tempted to ask questions about building psychological safety at the team or company level, I want to stay on the individual level for a moment. We talked about how I wasn’t consciously unsafe during a phone call. How can I tell when I feel unsafe if I’m not conscious of it?
There’s physical science behind what happens when you feel unsafe. Your heart rate increases, you might hold your breath, and your body may tense up. Your thoughts might blank out, and your peripheral vision may narrow as your body prepares for fight or flight. Your body doesn’t differentiate; it treats any threat as a threatening event.
On the other hand, feeling safe doesn’t mean you lack emotions or feel calm. Feeling calm and internally relaxed signifies safety, but it’s more than that. When your nervous system is regulated, your emotions align with the situation. They’re not an extreme overreaction or underreaction. There’s congruence. If your emotional response matches the situation, your nervous system and brain feel safe.
That makes sense, but it’s not easy. We’re trained to hide our emotions and always appear calm. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard and said, “Be a duck. Calm on the surface and paddling like hell below it.”
And that is not congruent. But congruence doesn’t mean you act out like a toddler, either.
Step one in creating safety is calming your nervous system by verbalizing your feelings. If you say, “This conversation is overwhelming for me. I need a break. Let me get some water,” you’re safe and regulated at that moment. There’s nothing wrong.
But when you can’t verbalize what you’re experiencing and freeze, that’s a sign you’re no longer in a safe state. Your body starts pumping cortisol and adrenaline, preparing for whatever it perceives as a threat.
Even if you feel overwhelmed, if you’re aware of that feeling and can take some breaths or a short break and return to the conversation, you’re in a safe, regulated state.
I can’t imagine admitting to feeling overwhelmed or asking for a break! Plus, I work with so many people who say, “I feel overwhelmed, but I can’t take a moment for myself. I need to plow through and get this done.”
It takes a tremendous amount of self-awareness. If you want to create safety and emotional intelligence, you must know what you’re feeling and be able to name it. You also need to sense what others are feeling and understand your emotional impact on them.
For example, if you say, “I’m feeling overwhelmed right now,” and I respond calmly and slow my cadence of speech, your nervous system receives the message that everything is okay. However, if I’m in “fight or flight” mode and you’re overwhelmed, we’ll end up in a chaotic and unproductive cycle.
Self-awareness and understanding are essential to safety. Unfortunately, many organizations I speak with need help with this.
Amen, sister,
Stay tuned for next week’s exciting conclusion, 3 Steps to Building a Psychologically Safe Environment or The No-Cost, No-Hug Secret to Smarter Teams
by Robyn Bolton | Nov 2, 2023 | Innovation, Leadership
or Why the Lack of Psychological Safety Makes You Dumber
It’s been over 20 years since “Psychological Safety” exploded onto the scene and into the business lexicon. But as good as it sounded, I always felt like it was one of those “safe space, everyone gets a trophy, special snowflake” things we had to do to make the Millennials (and subsequent generations) happy.
Then I read Alla Weinberg’s book, A Culture of Safety, and realized I was very, very wrong.
It’s not the equivalent of an HR-approved hug and high-five.
It’s the foundation of what we do. Without it, there is no productivity, creativity, or progress.
Needing to know more, I reached out to Alla, who graciously agreed to teach me.
Thanks for speaking with me, Alla. Let’s get right to the point: why should I, or any business leader, care about psychological safety?
The short answer is that without psychological safety, you are dumber. When you feel unsafe, your operating IQ, which you use for daily tasks, drops in half.
Think about all the people you work with or all the people in your company. They’re there because they’re smart, have experience, and demonstrated that they can do the job. But then something goes wrong, and you wonder why they didn’t anticipate it or plan appropriately to avoid it. You start to question their competence when, in fact, it may be that they feel unsafe, so parts of their brain have gone offline. Their operating IQ isn’t operating at 100%.
I am so guilty of this. When things go wrong, I assume someone didn’t know what to do, so they need to be trained, or they did know what to do and decided not to do it. It never occurs to me that there could be something else, something not logical, going on.
We all forget that human beings are biological creatures, and survival is the number one evolutionary trait for all living beings. Our body and mind are wired to ensure our continued existence.
A part of the brain – the prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning, executive thought, and analysis – is unique to humans, and it goes offline when our body feels unsafe.
When we experience extreme stress, our body and mind cannot distinguish an impending deadline from a lunging tiger. Our body and mind prioritize survival, so we experience all the biological responses to a threat, like getting tunnel vision, losing peripheral vision, and perceiving limited options.
So, when you’re trying to meet a deadline, and your manager or supervisor asks why you didn’t consider alternatives or complete a specific task, it’s because you physically couldn’t think of it at that moment. This is how human beings operate.
My first reaction is to wonder who can’t tell the difference between a deadline and a tiger because if you can’t tell the difference between the two, you may have bigger problems. But when you mentioned the inability to perceive options, I immediately thought of something that happened yesterday.
I was on a call with a client, someone I’ve worked with for years and consider a friend, and we were trying to restructure a program to serve their client’s needs better. I didn’t feel under threat…
Consciously. You didn’t consciously feel under threat.
Right, I didn’t feel consciously under threat. But I froze. I absolutely couldn’t think. I put my head in my hands and tried to block out all the light and the noise, and I still couldn’t think of any option other than what we were already doing. My brain came to a screeching halt.
That’s your nervous system, and it’s a huge driver of psychological safety. 80% of the information our brain receives comes from our nervous system. So, while you didn’t consciously feel unsafe, your body felt unsafe and sent a signal to your brain to go into survival mode, and your brain chose to freeze.
But it was a Zoom call. I was sitting alone in my office. I wasn’t unsafe. Why would my nervous system think I was unsafe?
Your nervous system doesn’t think. It perceives and reacts. Let me give you a simple illustration that we’ve all experienced. When you touch something hot, your hand immediately pulls away. You say “ouch” after your hand is away from the heat source. When you felt the hot object, your nervous system entered survival mode and pulled away your hand. Your brain then had to catch up, so you saw “Ow” after the threat was over.
Hold up. We’re talking about psychological safety. What does my nervous system have to do with this?
I define psychological safety as a state of our nervous system with three states: safe, mobilized (fight or flight), and immobilized (freeze response). The tricky part is not psychological but neurobiological. You cannot think your way to safety or unfreeze yourself. The rational mind has no control over this. Mantras and mindsets won’t make you feel safe; it’s a neurobiological process.
That is a plot twist I did not see coming.
Stay tuned for Part 2:
How to Use Your Nervous System to Feel Psychologically Safe,
or “Why Mandating a Return to the Office Destroys Safety”
by Robyn Bolton | Oct 19, 2023 | Innovation, Leadership
AI is killing Corporate Innovation.
Last Friday, the brilliant minds of Scott Kirsner, Rita McGrath, and Alex Osterwalder (plus a few guest stars like me, no big deal) gathered to debate the truth of this statement.
Honestly, it was one of the smartest and most thoughtful debates on AI that I’ve heard (biased but right, as my husband would say), and you should definitely listen to the whole thing.
But if you don’t have time for the deep dive over your morning coffee, then here are the highlights (in my humble opinion)
Why this debate is important
Every quarter, InnoLead fields a survey to understand the issues and challenges facing corporate innovators. The results from their Q2 survey and anecdotal follow-on conversations were eye-opening:
- Resources are shifting from Innovation to AI: 61.5% of companies are increasing the resources allocated to AI, while 63.9% of companies are maintaining or decreasing their innovation investments
- IT is more likely to own AI than innovation: 61.5% of companies put IT in charge of exploring potential AI use cases, compared to 53.9% of Innovation departments (percentages sum to greater than 0 because multiple departments may have responsibility)
- Innovation departments are becoming AI departments. In fact, some former VPs and Directors of Innovation have been retitled to VPs or Directors of AI
So when Scott asked if AI was killing Corporate Innovation, the data said YES.
The people said NO.
What’s killing corporate innovation isn’t technology. It’s leadership.
Alex Osterwalder didn’t pull his punches and delivered a truth bomb right at the start. Like all the innovation tools and technologies that came before, the impact of AI on innovation isn’t about the technology itself—it’s about the leaders driving it.
If executives take the time to understand AI as a tool that enables successful outcomes and accelerates the accomplishment of key strategies, then there is no reason for it to threaten, let alone supplant, innovation.
But if they treat it like a shiny new toy or a silver bullet to solve all their growth needs, then it’s just “innovation theater” all over again.
AI is an Inflection Point that leaders need to approach strategically
As Rita wrote in her book Seeing Around Corners, an inflection point has a 10x impact on business, for example, 10x cheaper, 10x faster, or 10x easier. The emergence and large-scale adoption of AI is, without doubt, an inflection point for business.
Just like the internet and Netscape shook things up and changed the game, AI has the power to do the same—maybe even more. But, to Osterwalder’s point, leaders need to recognize AI as a strategic inflection point and proceed accordingly.
Leaders don’t need to have it all figured out yet, but they need a plan, and that’s where we come in.
This inflection point is our time to shine
From what I’ve seen, AI isn’t killing corporate innovation. It’s creating the biggest corporate innovation opportunity in decades. But it’s up to us, as corporate innovators, to seize the moment.
Unlike our colleagues in the core business, we are comfortable navigating ambiguity and uncertainty. We have experience creating order from what seems like chaos and using innovation to grow today’s business and create tomorrow’s.
We can do this because we’ve done it before. It’s exactly what we do,
AI is not a problem. It’s an opportunity. But only if we make it one.
AI is not the end of corporate innovation —it’s a tool, a powerful one at that.
As corporate innovators, we have the skills and knowledge required to steer businesses through uncertainty and drive meaningful change. So, let’s embrace AI strategically and unlock its full potential.
The path forward may not always be crystal clear, but that’s what makes it exciting. So, let’s seize the moment, navigate the chaos, and embrace AI as the innovation accelerant that it is.
by Robyn Bolton | Oct 11, 2023 | Customer Centricity, Innovation, Leadership
You know that customer insights are important.
You spend time and money to collect customer insights.
But are you using them?
And by “using,” I don’t mean summarizing, synthesizing, discussing, PowerPointing, and presenting the insights. I mean making decisions, changing strategies, and rethinking plans based on them.
I posed this question to a few dozen executives. The awkward silence spoke volumes.
Why do we talk to customers but not listen to them?
In a world of ever more constrained resources, why do we spend our limited time and money collecting insights that we don’t use meaningfully?
It seems wild to have an answer or an insight and not use it, especially if you spent valuable resources getting it. Can you imagine your high school self paying $50 for the answer key to the final in your most challenging class, then crumpling it up, throwing it away, and deciding to just wing the exam?
But this isn’t an exam. This is our job, profession, reputation, and maybe even identity. We have experience and expertise. We are problem solvers.
We have the answers (or believe that we do).
After all, customers can’t tell us what they want. We’re supposed to lead customers to where they should be. Waiting for insights or changing decisions based on what customers think slows us down, and isn’t innovation all about “failing fast,” minimal viable products, and agility?
So, we talk to customers because we know we should.
We use the answers and insights to ensure we have brilliant things to tell the bosses when they ask.
We also miss the opportunity to create something that changes the game.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
What do you NEED to learn?
It’s easy to rattle off a long list of things you want to learn from customers. You probably also know the things you should learn from customers. But what do you need to learn?
What do you need to know by the end of a conversation so that you can make a decision?
What is the missing piece in the puzzle that, without it, you can’t make progress?
What insight do you need so badly that you won’t end the conversation until you have it?
If the answer is “nothing,” why are you having the conversation?
Will you listen?
Hearing is the “process, function, or power of perceiving a sound,” while listening is “hearing things with thoughtful attention” and a critical first step in making a connection. It’s the difference between talking to Charlie Brown’s teacher and talking to someone you care about deeply. One is noise, the other is meaning.
You may hear everything in a conversation, but if you only listen to what you expect or want to hear, you’ll miss precious insights into situations, motivations, and social dynamics.
If you’re only going to listen to what you want to hear, why are you having the conversation?
Are you willing to be surprised?
We enter conversations to connect with others, and the best way to connect is to agree. Finding common ground is exciting, comforting, and reassuring. It’s great to meet someone from your hometown, who cheers for the same sports team, shares the same hobby, or loves the same restaurant.
When we find ourselves conversing with people who don’t share our beliefs, preferences, or experiences, our survival instincts kick in, and we fight, take flight, or (like my client) freeze.
But here’s the thing – you’re not being attacked by a different opinion. You’re being surprised by it. So, assuming you’re not under actual physical threat, are you willing to lean into the surprise, get curious, ask follow-up questions, and seek to understand it?
If you’re not, why are you having the conversation?
Just because you should doesn’t mean you must.
You know that customer insights are important.
You spend time and money to collect customer insights.
But are you using them to speed the path to product-market fit, establish competitive advantage, and create value?
If you’re not, why are you having the conversation?
by Robyn Bolton | Oct 4, 2023 | Innovation, Leadership, Stories & Examples
“Lego’s Latest Effort to Avoid Oil-Based Plastic Hits Brick Wall” – WSJ
“Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles” – BBC
“Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback” – The Financial Times
Last Monday, LEGO found itself doing the Walk of Atonement after announcing to The Financial Times that it was scrapping plans to make bricks from recycled bottles, and media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fast Company to WIRED were more than happy to play the Shame Nun.
And it wasn’t just media outlets ringing the Shame Bell:
- “In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements (prototype made from recyclable plastic) until they actually do it,” Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics
- “They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution,” Paolo Taticchi, corporate sustainability expert at University College London.
- “Lego undoubtedly had good intentions, but if you’re going to to (sic) announce a major environmental initiative like this—one that affects the core of your company—good intentions aren’t enough. And in this instance, it can even undermine progress.” Jesus Diaz, creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, writing forFast Company
As a LEGO lover, I am not unbiased, but WOW, the amount of hypocritical, self-righteous judgment is astounding! All these publications and pundits espouse the need for innovation, yet when a company falls even the tiniest bit short of aspirations, it’s just SHAME (clang) SHAME (clang) SHAME.
In 1946, LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen purchased Denmark’s first plastic injection molding machine. Today, 95% of the company’s 4,400 different bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a plastic that requires 4.4 pounds of oil to produce 2.2 pounds of brick. Admittedly, it’s not a great ratio, and it gets worse. The material isn’t biodegradable or easily recyclable, so when the 3% of bricks not handed down to the next generation end up in a landfill, they’ll break down into highly polluting microplastics.
With this context, it’s easy to understand why LEGO’s 2018 announcement that it will move to all non-plastic or recycled materials by 2030 and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% (from 2019’s 1.2 million tons) by 2032 was such big news.
Three years later, in 2021, LEGO announced that its prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles offered a promising alternative to its oil-based plastic bricks.
But last Monday, after two years of testing, the company shared that what was promising as a prototype isn’t possible at scale because the process required to produce PET-based bricks actually increases carbon emissions.
SHAME!
A LEGO Art World Map (i.e. massive) amount of praise for LEGO
LEGO is doing everything that innovation theorists, consultants, and practitioners recommend:
- Setting a clear vision and measurable goals so that people know what the priorities are (reduce carbon emissions), why they’re important (“playing our part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world for our children to inherit”), and the magnitude of change required
- Defining what is on and off the table in terms of innovation, specifically that they are not willing to compromise the quality, durability, or “clutch power” of bricks to improve sustainability
- Developing a portfolio of bets that includes new materials for products and packaging, new services to keep bricks out of landfills and in kids’ hands, new building and production processes, and active partnerships with suppliers to reduce their climate footprint
- Prototyping and learning before committing to scale because what is possible at a prototype level is different than what’s possible at pilot, which is different from what’s possible at scale.
- Focusing on the big picture and the long-term by not going for the near-term myopic win of declaring “we’re making bricks from more sustainable materials” and instead deciding “not to progress” with something that, when taken as a whole process, moves the company further away from its 2032 goal.
If we want companies to innovate (and we do), shaming them for falling short of perfection is the absolute wrong way to do it.
Is it disappointing that something that seemed promising didn’t work out? Of course. But it’s just one of many avenues and experiments being pursued. This project ended, but the pursuit of the goal hasn’t.
Is 2 years a long time to figure out that you can’t scale a prototype and still meet your goals? Maybe. But, then again, it took P&G 10 years to figure out how to develop and scale a perforation that improved one-handed toilet paper tearing.
Should LEGO have kept all its efforts and success a secret until everything was perfect and ready to launch? Absolutely not. Sharing its goals and priorities, experiments and results, learnings and decisions shows employees, partners, and other companies what it means to innovate and lead.
Is LEGO perfect? No.
Is it trying to be better? Yes.
Isn’t that what we want?
by Robyn Bolton | Aug 30, 2023 | Innovation, Leadership
If you’re like most people, you’ve faced disappointment. Maybe the love of your life didn’t return your affection, you didn’t get into your dream college, or you were passed over for promotion. It hurts. And sometimes, that hurt lingers for a long time.
Until one day, something happens, and you realize your disappointment was a gift. You meet the true love of your life while attending college at your fallback school, and years later, when you get passed over for promotion, the two of you quit your jobs, pursue your dreams, and live happily ever after. Or something like that.
We all experience disappointment. We also all get to choose whether we stay there, lamenting the loss of what coulda shoulda woulda been, or we can persevere, putting one foot in front of the other and playing The Rolling Stones on repeat:
“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, well, you might just find
You get what you need”
That’s life.
That’s also innovation.
As innovators, especially leaders of innovators, we rarely get what we want. But we always get what we need (whether we like it or not)
We want to know.
We need to be comfortable not knowing.
Most of us want to know the answer because if we know the answer, there is no risk. There is no chance of being wrong, embarrassed, judged, or punished. But if there is no risk, there is no growth, expansion, or discovery.
Innovation is something new that creates value. If you know everything, you can’t innovate.
As innovators, we need to be comfortable not knowing. When we admit to ourselves that we don’t know something, we open our minds to new information, new perspectives, and new opportunities. When we say we don’t know, we give others permission to be curious, learn, and create.
We want the creative genius and billion-dollar idea.
We need the team and the steady stream of big ideas.
We want to believe that one person blessed with sufficient time, money, and genius can change the world. Some people like to believe they are that person, and most of us think we can hire that person, and when we do find that person and give them the resources they need, they will give us the billion-dollar idea that transforms our company, disrupts the industry, and change the world.
Innovation isn’t magic. Innovation is team work.
We need other people to help us see what we can’t and do what we struggle to do. The idea-person needs the optimizer to bring her idea to life, and the optimizer needs the idea-person so he has a starting point. We need lots of ideas because most won’t work, but we don’t know which ones those are, so we prototype, experiment, assess, and refine our way to the ones that will succeed.
We want to be special.
We need to be equal.
We want to work on the latest and most cutting-edge technology and discuss it using terms that no one outside of Innovation understands. We want our work to be on stage, oohed and aahed over on analyst calls, and talked about with envy and reverence in every meeting. We want to be the cool kids, strutting around our super hip offices in our hoodies and flip-flops or calling into the meeting from Burning Man.
Innovation isn’t about you. It’s about serving others.
As innovators, we create value by solving problems. But we can’t do it alone. We need experienced operators who can quickly spot design flaws and propose modifications. We need accountants and attorneys who instantly see risks and help you navigate around them. We need people to help us bring our ideas to life, but that won’t happen if we act like we’re different or better. Just as we work in service to our customers, we must also work in service to our colleagues by working with them, listening, compromising, and offering help.
What about you?
What do you want?
What are you learning you need?
