The Long and The Short Of It

Episode 153 - Innovation

Transcript:

Jen: Hello there, Peter.

Pete: Hello there, Jennifer.

Jen: Oh my gosh. You know when you hear something and it's so mind blowing, and then in the aftermath of dealing with your mind blown-ness, you realize it was the most obvious thing ever, and why weren't you thinking it in the first place?

Pete: Oh, like every aha moment I've ever had that's been staring me right in the face. Yes, I know the feeling.

Jen: Well, today's aha moment lies at the intersection of innovation and infrastructure.

Pete: Innovation and infrastructure...I am interested. This is The Long and The Short Of It.

Jen: Okay, there is an epic woman named Kat Cole. Her bio is really too long for me to try to get into. She's amazing. Her life story is amazing. Everything she has to say is amazing. Anyway, she was the guest on The Knowledge Project this week, and she said something that like literally made me feel like an elephant had stomped on my chest and knocked the wind out of me. And she was describing all of the many, many times that she had moved into a new leadership position, and that the reason she was the one who was brought into this new leadership position is because the company she was working with needed someone innovative. And essentially what she said was, any time you are innovating, you have to go into it knowing there is no existing infrastructure in this organization to support your innovation. If there was infrastructure, the innovation would have already happened. And oh my gosh, this really hit me for so many reasons. But the most immediate one is, I'm in the process of preparing my studio, my in-person studio to reopen. And part of the process is looking at every single thing we do and trying to blow up the model, to see how we might innovate it. And it is expensive in every sense of the word. It costs money, of course, but the amount of energy, and creativity, and time that is going into building the infrastructure to support some of our innovative ideas...like, it is epic. And I had to have a check-in with myself about the judginess I've been feeling regarding some of my colleagues in the field, where I'm like, "I can't believe that person or that studio has reopened and is doing the exact same thing they were doing pre-pandemic." And now, I'm like, "Oh, I completely understand why they're doing it that way." It's just so hard to do it any other way, because you don't have systems or infrastructure in place to support it.

Pete: Woah. Okay. I want to like repeat back a little bit what you said and also just add something, so I'm clear and so the listener is clear. So I think about this in a corporate setting, or in a startup setting, or in any existing organization (like JWS and your studio), which is you have infrastructure. Everybody has infrastructure that has a business, and systems, and processes, and resources. And they are sometimes physical, they're sometimes digital, they're sometimes human. And so, infrastructure exists.

Jen: Right.

Pete: But it exists to deliver the outcome, or the output, or the services, or the products that you have already been delivering.

Jen: That's right. It serves the old stuff.

Pete: Exactly. Yeah. And so what we're talking about is, if we are to innovate (i.e. create something new that hasn't been created before, or an iteration on something that we've done but doing it differently), the infrastructure for that doesn't exist yet. And so, we need to create it. And so, that is why...wow, I'm having a slight aha moment here. I imagine that is one of the reasons that especially big, big, big organizations really struggle to innovate because you have decades upon decades in some cases, hundreds of thousands of employees in other cases, of existing infrastructure. And so to somewhat ignore that, to think about ignoring that, to even just like do the thought experiment of, "What if we started from scratch," that requires some serious space, emotional labor, stillness, whiteboarding. That's a big project. Yeah, that's a big, big project.

Jen: Yeah. And I've been trying to think about this in relationship to the concept of "ignore sunk costs".

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: And I'm like, "Should I be ignoring sunk costs?" And like, "Wow, these costs of existing infrastructure are actually not totally sunk." Like some of these things, if past me were to come to present me and say, "I have a gift for you. It's a system that works. It's a system that keeps your organization in the black. It's a system that allows you to onboard new teachers pretty effortlessly, and get people into your space pretty effortlessly. Would you like it?" I'm like, "Yes, I'd like it." So I'm having to find a new way of thinking about this. Because it's not that I have sunk costs, it's that I have old-school, perfectly functioning infrastructure to support the past. But I need to build something to support the innovation.

Pete: Hmm.

Jen: I am so all in on this. Like I am so fully committed to the idea that when we reopen, we are not doing anything the way we did it before. And in a recent episode, we talked about going faster. I'm realizing that I want to go fast, because I believe so much in the work we're doing and the people we're doing it with. But in order to build an infrastructure that will not collapse, I have to go a little bit slower than I'm comfortable with.

Pete: Yeah. It's almost like the metaphor of, "You've got to break when you're going into a corner, so that you can accelerate coming down the other side of the corner." You're like in the process of breaking as you go around this corner. I guess the question I have in that then, that maybe is helpful to unpack is: Knowing how hard it is, knowing there's all this emotional labor, knowing that innovation requires creation of new systems or new infrastructure, and yet you're still super jazzed and so committed about it, like what is it about the situation, or the dream, the vision that gives you the fire to know that it's worth, you know, all of the emotional labor, all of the resourcing? Like, is there something that you can pinpoint as like, "Oh, I know it's worth it because of this."

Jen: Well, in my case, the kind of work that I'm doing on a general level, on a macro level...acting training in the United States of America (which is where I live and work) has not been innovated in the 21st century. In fact, we are still working mostly with models from the mid-20th century. So, I mean, we just...we need it. We need it so badly. The artists are salivating at the thought of change. I mean, they are ready to do things differently. What's really interesting is that I realized that a lot of what we might have labeled constraints were actually restrictions that were putting a cap on our possibility. And now, I just have to like flip the cap off. Or like a bottle of champagne, I need to pop the possibility cork. Because like, as an example, any acting class I've ever been in ever (whether it's as a student, or as a teacher) has taken place in a single room. So, I just worked with that as a given. Like, that's the constraint, an acting class happens in single room. Well, in our new studio space, we have multiple studios. And I was like, "Well, what happens if it doesn't take place in one room? What happens if it takes place with two teachers in two separate rooms? And what if the teachers swap mid-way through? And what if it doesn't have to be four hours?" I mean, there's like so many ideas on like, "Oh, wow. I was so limiting the possibilities, just because I had fallen victim to, 'Because this is the way we've always done it.'"

Pete: Yes. Yes, yes, yes. There's like a general rule when you hear someone say, "We do this because it's the way we've always done it." That is like cause to just pause and question everything.

Jen: Yes. It is the last dying breath of an organization.

Pete: Right. You could ask Blockbuster. You could ask the New York Taxi Service before Uber came in. You could ask the Hilton Hotel before Airbnb was invented. "This is the way we've always done things." Yeah.

Jen: Yeah.

Pete: Yeah. Okay, a couple of things. One is I'm obsessed, absolutely obsessed with the idea of popping the possibility cork. I feel like I want that to be the motto of this podcast. That each episode, we're attempting to pop the possibility cork.

Jen: Yes.

Pete: So, that's just a great little takeaway. The other one is, I think there's something in what you said about the people you're serving, i.e. the actors. Your literal words were, "They are salivating for something different, for change." And so that, to me, I think that might be the answer that I was looking for when I asked you the question, which is, "What gives you the conviction, or the energy, or the gusto to know it's worth the emotional labor?" It's because you started with who. That is, an understanding of who are the people you are serving, and what they are looking for, and why they might be interested in that. And you have such an understanding of what they're looking for, that you know it's worth the emotional labor. So you're not just innovating because you want to innovate but none of your customers have actually said, "You know, we should really do things differently." You're doing it because of the people you serve, the story they're telling themselves, the situation they find themselves in. So it's rooted and grounded in empathy, which I just obviously am obsessed with.

Jen: Okay, this is making me think of another very closely related element. Any time there is innovation that would require infrastructural change, there is disruption. And when you were pointing out that the "who's it for" made it easier to activate or energize around innovating, it got me thinking about some of the people I know who have had really innovative ideas and brought them into spaces that didn't have the infrastructure to support their amazing idea, and were disruptive to the point that the people they were offering the innovation to felt threatened, or fearful, or just plain confused because they're used to things going a certain way. And so this is making me think, like if you are someone who has innovative ideas and wants to bring them into a place, potentially disrupting an existing infrastructure, part of how you do that in a way that is successful is by practicing empathy and imagining what it might feel like for someone else who doesn't understand how to build the infrastructure or how to implement your idea. Like, how do you get ahead of all of the objections that they're going to have, so that they're able to really see the thing that you're offering as useful instead of solely disruptive?

Pete: Wow. I think you need to tee up the "Pete's Being Called Out Song" again. Wow. I feel that so in my bones. Like, that was me in many contexts in the corporate world. Say six, seven, eight years ago? That was definitely me. Like, I was the person that was like, "We should be using Slack. Why are we using email? We should be using Zoom. Why are we doing face-to-face meetings? We should be doing our proposals this way. Why are we doing them the way we've always done them? They're so boring. No one wants to look at a slide deck." Like, I was just so (what I thought) innovative, and helpful, and enthusiastic. And I was met with constant (what I thought was) like unnecessary roadblocks from executives. But I totally see in hindsight, and to your point, I was not doing a good job of enrolling them in the change. I was not doing a good job of understanding what it might be like to be them, and to have any idea of like, "Who is this young person coming in with Slack? I don't even know what Slack is. What are you talking about? What is Zoom?" Like, this was six years ago. And, yeah, I did such a bad job of this. Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Called out. However, interestingly, the same company I was working for where I share these slightly ridiculous but very true anecdotes, we actually ended up doing a project that was probably one of my favorite projects I've ever worked on in corporate. Which was, literally, we carved out a team of twenty within the company. And we literally moved to a different side of the office. And we tried to mentally remove ourselves from every single thing that we had done to date, and how we operate, what our infrastructure is. And we were tasked with completely reinventing how this business might function. "How might we serve the people we want to serve? What technology do we need? What services do we wrap around that?" Like, it was a really cool, innovative project. And it's relevant because I think we literally had to remove ourselves and bring in external people that didn't know the existing infrastructure in order to even get productive in how we thought about this.

Jen: Mmm. Oh my gosh, I love that.

Pete: Yeah. And to your point, like it was disruptive as hell. Like, we almost broke ourselves and the business in the process. It was very disruptive. And it was hard to remove yourself from the existing infrastructure.

Jen: Totally. Totally. Because there's safety there. There is safety and comfort in knowing that A + B = C.

Pete: Yeah. Yeah.

Jen: And then suddenly, you're like, "Wait a minute. A + C now = Q. Like, I can't even wrap my brain around that."

Pete: Yeah.

Jen: Oh my gosh, I love this conversation so much. I'm excited to continue playing around with how I might be able to build a more supportive infrastructure for the innovation that I'm seeking to do within the studio. But like, the big aha moment, just in these last fifteen minutes, is empathy, empathy, empathy. If you want to do this in a way that enrolls other people in the change you are seeking to make, you must must must practice empathy.

Pete: And with that popping of the possibility cork, I want to say that that is The Long and The Short Of It.