The 4 Lenses of Innovation

I really actually went back through history, all the way back to the sort of Sumerians and the Egyptians and then Greeks and the Romans and all the way through, and then the Renaissance period and right up to today, the modern times, and looked at all those cases and tried to figure out, "How did the innovators actually come up with their breakthrough?" Because we often read about these things, these cases, these after-the-fact anecdotes about innovation but people rarely ever go back and say, "What were they thinking? How did they actually get to those discoveries?"

So that's what I was actually trying to find out and I was, surprisingly, able to identify four specific perspectives or thinking patterns that actually enabled those innovators to come up with those breakthroughs, and they're really common to all of those cases of great innovation.

Rachel Salaman: So, can you tell us about those four ways of thinking, or "lenses" as you call them, and perhaps give an example in each case?

Rowan Gibson: Yes, sure. They're called lenses because, by looking through those lenses or by taking on those particular, let's say, mental perspectives, you're able to see things you normally wouldn't see.

So the first one is called "Challenging Orthodoxies" and it's really about saying, "Okay, let's take a contrarian stance. Let's take a conventional wisdom or some common assumption and try to reverse it. Let's just do the opposite and see what would happen if we did that." So that's challenging orthodoxy and if you think about someone like Elon Musk, with Tesla Motors, he was told by literally everyone in Detroit, "You'll never be able to do this. You'll never be able to bring a high-performance, electric car to the market. Even if you did, nobody would buy it. You won't be able to sell it because you don't have any dealers. You certainly can't sell it on the Internet. You have to build a whole network of charging stations across America and, in fact, around the world. You're never going to do this. Never going to happen." And then you look at Tesla and now it's worth half of GM. It's a major electric shock to the industry. Well, you know, challenging orthodoxies.

The second lens is called "Harnessing Trends." So this is really about looking at what's going on in the world around us, whether it's technology or demographic changes or lifestyles or sustainability or whatever those changes are, and saying, "How do we harness the power of that? How do we ride that wave instead of being buried by it?" A very quick example that comes to mind is Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, who saw this oncoming tsunami, which was what we would call ‘On demand video streaming' via the Internet, and he says, "Wait a minute, I'm shipping out DVDs. So it's going to absolutely destroy my business model." So he sees the trend and he decides to shift the whole company really, the whole focus, from shipping DVDs to video streaming. And now he's a major player, where Blockbuster Video is completely out of business. So that's harnessing trends.

The third lens is called "Leveraging Resources in new Ways." So it's really about looking at your company as a portfolio of skills, core competencies, and assets, strategic assets, things you own, and saying, "How do we stretch or leverage those things into completely new opportunities?" So I think, for example, of Richard Branson in the UK, who started out with one record store in London and was able to stretch and leverage his skills and assets, not just his own personal ones but the company, Virgin Group, into, what is it now, 400 different companies, in a multitude of different industries. So that's leveraging resources.

And the fourth lens is called "Understanding Needs." So it's really about getting into the customer's skin and trying to figure out what the customer needs before the customer even knows what the customer needs. So someone like Steve Jobs. No one was crying out for a translucent desktop computer, the iMac. No one was asking for a really cool MP3 player or the iTunes store. No one was asking for a touch-screen smartphone or the iPad or the Apple Stores or the App store, any of those things. Yet Steve Jobs somehow knew we needed them and now we can't live without them. So that's the fourth lens of innovation.

Rachel Salaman: You mentioned the Renaissance earlier and, in your book, you talk about it too, to illustrate some of those ideas. What can a manager learn from the Renaissance when it comes to innovation?

Rowan Gibson: I think you can learn a lot, you can learn a whole lot. If you think about the Renaissance period, it was just truly amazing. This explosion of creativity and technological invention and innovation, and you have to kind of go back and go, "What happened? Is this the same question? What happened there? What were people thinking? What changed in terms of the cultural environment but, also, the mind-set, to enable this burst of creativity?"

And if you think about what happened, clearly the Renaissance happened at the end of a 1,000-year period of stagnation called the Middle Ages where, basically, progress, technological progress, and almost any other kind of progress, came to a grinding halt and the reason for that was management.

The world was being managed, well the western world, Western Europe, was being managed by the Roman Catholic Church and, no offense, but basically their management style was, "Keep your mouth shut. Don't challenge anything. Don't look at nature and try and figure out how you can manipulate it because that's God's domain, not man's, and if you do come up with a different kind of idea, we're likely to burn you at the stake as a heretic." So that kind of discouraged new thinking. Certainly, it would have discouraged me, anyway.

But then, along comes the Renaissance. What happens? We get this incredible cultural environment where we're suddenly mixing together the great scientists and artists and philosophers of the day, in Northern Italy initially and in Florence and Milan and Venice and those city states. And also the mind-set changed because we had this thing called "humanism," where suddenly we were no longer locked into these supernatural ideas from the Dark Ages but it was kind of like, we can all be geniuses, we can all use our own capabilities and unlock our brainpower to do new things. So this combination of cultural environment and mind-set and thinking patterns really resulted in this explosion of change and creativity.

So what's the lesson for us as managers? Do we want to be medieval-style managers, who shut people up and don't allow them to challenge the status quo and come up with ideas and experiment or whatever? Or do we want to be Renaissance leaders and managers, who enable that kind of environment and act as catalysts for creativity, rather than holding people back?

Rachel Salaman: How does the idea of patterns relate to your "4 Lenses of Innovation?"

Rowan Gibson: Yes, this actually was a very important part of the book, I thought, because you have to break it down and ask yourself, "How do we think? How does the human mind actually work if we're going to figure out how to be more creative?" And one of the things we know about the human brain is that it's kind of like this pattern recognition machine. That's what it does: it recognizes patterns. So, if you see a face in a crowd, you're recognizing a visual pattern. If you see a chair, you recognize it as a chair because you've learnt that that's what a chair looks like. If you hear a voice, I mean, I will now recognize your voice, you'll recognize mine. We're recognizing patterns. Music's a pattern, language is a pattern, images are patterns – that's why, if you look at a partial image, let's say of Marilyn Monroe, you still know. You fill in the gaps because you recognize the pattern. We even see patterns where they don't exist: like in the clouds and stuff.

So that's what our minds do: they form and they store patterns, and they use those patterns so that we can live our lives as normal human beings. Otherwise, we would just be inundated with all of this new information coming at us all the time. So we use those things, we store things as patterns. The problem with it is that, as we grow older, first of all in school we learn a whole bunch of patterns that rob us of our creativity, because they tell us there's only one right way and there's a wrong way of doing things and there's a place to go to find all the answers, in books or on the Internet or whatever, but also, as we go to work, we then learn new patterns. We learn the way things are done in a certain industry or inside a company, and we learn rules and regulations and standard operating procedures and then we get stuck in those patterns.

And, what happens is that they blind us to new opportunities because we get this kind of… You know we hear about "functional fixedness," where we're only capable of thinking of a particular thing in a particular way? So, if I pick up a toothbrush, I think of it as a… I don't really think about how I could, let's say potentially redesign a toothbrush but, funnily enough, I went online and I looked at all the innovations around toothbrushes and I found there's one you could wear on your tongue; there's a solar-powered ionic toothbrush which actually somebody sent me from Japan, that kind of picks up the plaque on your teeth like a magnet; there's toothbrushes that play Lady Gaga songs; there's a $4,000, luxury, titanium toothbrush. There's almost limitless things you could do with a toothbrush yet how many of us, when we pick it up every day in the morning or in the evening, how many of us look at it and go, "How can I reinvent this thing?"

So that's the real challenge with patterns: they condition us to think about things in certain ways in our lives and in our businesses, and we rarely ever go back and challenge those patterns that we've learned.

Rachel Salaman: Well let's look at the four lenses now in a bit more detail. And you mentioned the first one is Challenging Orthodoxies. So, how can a person know when an orthodoxy needs challenging?

Rowan Gibson: That's an incredibly good question because you can't say, "Okay. It's the ninth of March; it's time to challenge that particular orthodoxy." It really doesn't work that way but I think that we have to, first of all, regularly go back and ask ourselves if the way we're doing things is going to continue to be the right way of doing things.

I mentioned Reed Hastings with the video streaming. He could have said, "Our assumption, our orthodoxy, is people are going to want to get DVDs in the mail for the rest of time." But he didn't. he was able to go back and go, "Look what's happening in the world around us and how should we challenge what we're doing?"

Steve Jobs, by the way, is another great example. We think about the iPhone as being a great innovation, which it is, but really what Steve was doing was saying, "You know what? We're going to be flattened by mobile phones if we stick with the iPod." I mean, the iPod was incredibly successful, the whole of Apple was running from the success of the iPod, and he said, "Wait a minute. The next big tsunami is going to be, if people can download music onto an easy device like the iPod, they're going to download it onto their phones, and why would they want to have a phone and a music player in their pockets? So we're going to be killed by the mobile phone. We'd better come up with our own one."

So he was able to go back and challenge, basically, his own assumptions about the future of Apple and what would be successful, and I think the key with the book is, do it systematically. Sit down regularly with your teams and challenge your own assumptions about your products, your services, the kind of customers you're serving. Challenge your business model in the context of what's going on in the world.

Rachel Salaman: Would you say it's equally important, then, during a session when you were challenging your own orthodoxies to come away saying, "No, that orthodoxy is right. We're not going to try and change that one because it's working." Is that just as important as noticing when things can be changed for the better?

Rowan Gibson: Oh, absolutely, absolutely, but again I think there's a sort of timing issue. What usually happens is we figure out what works, and it really does work, it's successful, and we build the company around what works and then five years from now, 10 years from now, 15, we haven't really challenged those original assumptions because what works today may not work 10 years from now or 20 years from now or whatever.

And we come up with a strategy and that's great. A strategy could be really successful but then we want to say, ‘Okay. Five, 10 years from now or maybe sooner, let's go back and review the strategy. What works now? What's going to work in five years or 10 years from now?"

And so I think that's really what it is. My first book was called "Rethinking the Future," and the moral of the story is we have to continually rethink. Some things are great; some things are maybe not going to be so great a few years out from now.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and you say that people need to avoid the inhibiting trap of mental inertia, which in other words means we should be open to thinking differently about things. What tips can you give people to help them do that?

Rowan Gibson: Yes, and I think that's really the point with the book is that it's about doing it systematically. You have to intervene in your own thinking patterns, you have to be willing to say, "Okay, let's try to break some of our own patterns, the things that we've been doing for a long, long time that we believe may be successful forever but history teaches us that nothing's successful forever." So I think it really is about saying, "Look, let's not leave it to chance. Let's not leave it to serendipity. Let us continuously generate new kinds of insights that will feed the front end of our innovation process."

And I do this with companies, so we've got teams that actually regularly challenge conventional wisdom, assumptions in the industry or in the company. We've got teams that are harnessing the trends, looking at what's going on in the world, trying to open our minds to new ways of doing things; teams that are trying to leverage the company's resources, or even other people's resources, in new ways, and teams that are continuously looking at those emerging customer needs so that we don't get stuck in this mental, cognitive inertia that will basically lock us into a certain way of thinking and a way of doing things forever.

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Rachel Salaman: Well, moving onto the second lens, Harnessing Trends, what enables some people to spot meaningful trends and move forward with them?

Rowan Gibson: Well, I think that the trends are all there. They're all in the public domain, really. It's not like they're hidden from view but I think that a lot of us tend to overlook or ignore things, basically because of this inertia that we're in. We think, "Well, we're so successful, nothing's ever going to disrupt that. So, we can put our heads in the sand and carry on."

Again, business history teaches us that that doesn't work, so we need to be open to new things. I mentioned Steve Jobs, looking at what could possibly happen to the future of the iPod. It was pretty obvious, actually, if you were willing to look. And if you go back in time and you think about someone like Jeff Bezos, he literally read a report that lots of people read about the exponential growth of the Internet, but how many people reacted to that report? How many people said, "You know what? What kind of business model would make sense in the context of all that growth: that explosive growth? What could I do? What kind of a business could I set up to take advantage or exploit this opportunity in e-commerce?"

So I think, again, the trends are out there if we're willing to look, if we're willing to read, if we're willing to go out and see what's going on in the world. A lot of companies have trend scouts, who are out there in the world, figuring out what's going on. We have incredibly good websites these days like Trendwatching.com, Trendhunter.com. We have conferences about industry trends. So I think, if you take enough effort, you'll find what's going on.

The question really in my mind is, "Are you willing to do anything about these trends? Are you willing to ride that wave or are you going to lay back on the beach and wait for the tsunami to come up and hit you?"

Rachel Salaman: One of your tips for this lens is don't let internal issues blind you to what's happening in the outside world but, at the same time of course, you mustn't take your eye off your day-to-day performance or appear distracted by external issues. So, how difficult is it for leaders to find that balance?

Rowan Gibson: I think it's very difficult but I think it's kind of more difficult for some than for others, and what I'm getting at there is there are different levels in the organization. So we have leadership and we have middle management, and usually middle managers are very, very busy with operational day-to-day stuff and they've got performance metrics and numbers to reach. It's very much about continuity actually - keep doing what we're doing but do it more efficiently, pump out more product, whatever it is, but they're kind of locked into day-to-day stuff very much at the middle levels of a company. But, to me, the leader's role really is to be able to rise above all of that, climb the nearest tree, figure out what's going on, and think about change.

Do you remember Edward De Bono of the Six Thinking Hats? He said once, "I think we need two kinds of managers. We need managers of continuity and we need managers of change." Well, I think that managers at the middle levels usually are managing continuity really well, but I think the leader's role really is change and that's why some of the examples I already mentioned – people like Elon Musk, it's Reed Hastings, it's Richard Branson, it's leaders. It's the leaders who climb that tree and look down and they shout to the managers, "Hey! We're in the wrong jungle! Let's stop carving our way through the undergrowth. Let's make sure we're shifting and moving into a different space."

That's my answer really. It's leadership's role to think about change where people lower down the organization are maybe more focused on continuity.

Rachel Salaman: But those people who are focused on continuity, they probably still have scope to apply some of these ideas in their day-to-day work.

Rowan Gibson: Yes, and they should, they absolutely should. But to answer your question, "Is it difficult?" Yes, it's more difficult, I think, at the middle management layer or level than it is at the top of the organization. But, nevertheless, everyone, right down to the frontlines, should be thinking about ways to create new value for customers, do things differently, try new things.

So that's really what we want and I do that: I teach managers at the mid-levels to be able to meet that challenge of balancing those two things at once: the continuity and the change.

Rachel Salaman: Great. The third lens is Leveraging Resources and here you're particular referring to new ways of leveraging resources. What's a good starting point?

Rowan Gibson: I think a good starting point is actually figuring out what your resources are. Usually, I sit down with groups of people and say, "Okay, now think about your core competencies as an organization," and they all look at me with a blank stare. People are really not sometimes aware of what the unique skills of their organization actually are.

So let's, first of all, make a list of what those resources are. What are our unique skills, our core strengths? What are the things we do better than others in our space? What are the assets that we have: the things that we own, whether they're patents or certain technologies or the value of our brand name? And just start with listing that and then also looking outside at people maybe, across the value chain: the people that you work with as an organization in your ecosystem. What are their skills and assets? Could we maybe work together on certain things? And then, beyond the value chain, what's out there in the world? What are the things that are going on and what are the companies that are doing maybe cool things or things that would fit with what we're doing strategically, that we can either acquire or that we can partner with or we can maybe license some of their stuff?

And it's really, I think, first of all, creating that awareness of what's there. What's the Aladdin's cave and how could we then start to recombine and repurpose or redeploy some of those resources?

Rachel Salaman: And the fourth lens is Understanding Needs, which is principally customer needs, as you mentioned earlier. Is this more about what customers know they need or about what they don't know they need yet? You mentioned Apple in reference to that idea.

Rowan Gibson: Yes. I think it's both. There's a lot of stuff that we didn't know we needed. No one was crying out for Twitter or Facebook. Nobody was crying out for Uber or Airbnb or Nest Labs, these wonderful smart thermostats and smoke detectors. People weren't crying out for those things but, clearly, we needed them. Part of it is about trying to put yourself in the customer's shoes and see things from the customer's perspective. And, if you go back and think about things, we were all frustrated with bad taxi services. I, in particular, was really frustrated with how complicated and difficult the thermostat on the wall was. I used to have to ask the neighbor to come in and make some of those important changes that needed to be made. I was aware; you were, a lot of us were aware of some of these things but we never really thought about what the solutions could be.

So I think that's part of it, it's becoming aware of those needs and trying to design solutions from the customer, backward. But it's also very viable to go out and actually talk to customers about their needs. Usually, they're locked into those patterns I mentioned earlier so they've got this functional fixedness and they can't see a radically different way of doing things, but often it's about observing customers. Not necessarily asking them but just looking at what they're doing and how they do it and figuring out, "What are the patterns of customer behavior that reveal some unmet need?"

I remember, with one client, they were selling insulation material, cladding material, in long rolls. And, when they went out and looked at the way the builders were using it, the builders were actually cutting it into strips. And they thought, "Wouldn't it be better if we actually sold it in strips in the first place of various sizes? It's going to make life so much easier for the customer." But that's by going out and actually looking at what people are doing.

Rachel Salaman: In the book, you include one of Amazon's corporate slogans, which is, "If you don't listen to your customers, you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers, you will also fail." So could you elaborate on that idea?

Rowan Gibson: Well, yes. I think, particularly the second part of that, if you only listen, first of all customers, if you do go out and ask them, people fill in a questionnaire or something. Sometimes you'll find some useful stuff but quite often the customer's going to say, "Make it cheaper and make it faster," or whatever else and it's like I said earlier, we're all prisoners of our own experience. So the customer's a prisoner of his or her experience and they, we, are all victims of this situation where we get this functional fixedness, where we see things in a certain way, and we can't envisage any other way of doing things.

So I think you have to get the balance right. I know there was a wonderful, wonderful company in Ireland some years back called Superquinn. It was a supermarket and I met with Feargal Quinn, who was the founder and the CEO of the company, and he did a marvelous job of listening to customers. So, if a mother, for example, told him, "I find it very frustrating to shop with my kids," he set up a baby crèche there, at the front end of the supermarket, like Ikea, to look after the customers' children while the mothers were doing the shopping. Or if a mother said, "You know what? I hate it when I get to the checkout and there's all this candy there and my kid's jumping up and down, screaming at me, ‘Please buy me a Mars Bar' or something. Could you please remove it from the checkout?" And he said, "Okay." And everybody said, "You're crazy. This is unheard of in the supermarket business."

So, yes, there are occasions, certainly occasions, where we really want to listen to our customers. But there are other occasions where we actually want to ignore what the customer's telling us because there might be a much better way of doing things.

Rachel Salaman: In all the four lens categories, you still need to have a spark of creativity or ingenuity in order to have the great new ideas and move forward with them. Some people are just better at thinking outside the box than others, aren't they? Whether that's to do with their education or their upbringing or whatever.

Rowan Gibson: Absolutely true. There are always going to be people, either by nature or by nurture, that are just better than others at thinking creatively. I started out in an advertising agency and it was full of creative people. If you look at design agencies or the fashion world, they're full of creative people. I think the real message here in the book is that we can all improve our creative skills. We shouldn't think, "Okay. I'm not creative. That's something for other people." I've been amazed at some of the creativity that I've seen, especially in the sessions that I run around the world, from people that are not traditionally thought of – and they don't even think of themselves – as creative. Someone from HR, somebody from IT, somebody from finance, and they're coming up with more creative ideas than the people that are marketing and R&D and whatever, particularly if they're coming at something from a completely different perspective than those people who are stuck in that way of thinking.

Just one very quick anecdote: in the very, very old days, in the advertising agency, I was once a creative director and we had this Christmas party at the end of the year and the idea was, split the agency up into little five-person teams and give them all five minutes to come up with the best ad campaign. Now, I was hoping that they'd give me some of the best people in the agency: the creative people from New York and London and Sydney or whatever. They gave me the company cleaners. They said, "There's your team." And I thought, "Oh, well! That's the end of that." And that was the arrogance that I had at the time, until I sat with those people and in five minutes they came up with the idea that won the whole competition.

So, if you give people the opportunity to bring out their inner genius, literally anyone on this planet can be an innovator.

Rachel Salaman: In your book, you actually offer readers an eight-step process for reaching a breakthrough moment. Briefly, can you tell us about that?

Rowan Gibson: Yes. This is just based on looking at, if you're going to do this systematically, how have great innovators done this in the past? And, basically, we've been studying the creative process for over 100 years and, basically, all of that research has come up with a linear process that has certain steps to it.

So, basically, this eight-step process is: number one, frame a challenge. Frame the specific challenge that you want to address and then focus the mind or focus the team or focus maybe a whole crowd on solving that, and then research the subject. You don't want to trash everything that's ever been done before so learn from the work of others, see what's being done or has been done in the past.

And step three is to immerse yourself in the problem, try to explore possible solutions. So that's kind of opening your mind to what could be possible. Step four is usually a sort of a road block. We've reached this impasse, where we're feeling the creative frustration. You get that a lot in the advertising business, where you just can't come up with the answer, and sometimes the next step really should be to relax, detach, let it incubate in the mind, let the unconscious take over and be open to new insights. And that's step six, come to a new insight that really, fundamentally, shifts your perspective and you use that insight as a trigger basically to build a new idea, which is a leap of association, a new connection of different thoughts and concepts and domains. That's your idea, that's seven, and step eight is to test and validate that idea to try to make it work, and that's where you get into all the experimentation or prototyping and so on.

Rachel Salaman: And how often have you seen this process work, personally? What helps it go smoothly?

Rowan Gibson: Well, I see this work all the time because I get to work with companies all around the world. I've done this in 60 countries with hundreds of companies, thousands of people. And that's why I called the book "A Power Tool for Creative Thinking." It's like anything, if you give a human being a tool or we create a tool, it enhances our natural abilities and so I've seen this work just in the most amazing ways around the world.

My dad always used to say to me, when I tried to help him in the garden, in the garden shed, "Let the tool do the work." And I think it's probably the biggest thing I learnt from my dad, and it's true. "Let the tool do the work." And it really does work.

Rachel Salaman: So, finally, could you summarize effective ways managers can work with the four lenses?

Rowan Gibson: Absolutely. Key word: "systematically." So don't just leave things to chance; don't sit together, around a table and say, "Okay. Let's brainstorm," because, all you're going to get is ideas, usually, that are as dull as dishwater coming out of a thing like that.

So systematically use the lenses. I split up a group of people into smaller teams. I have, as I said, the Orthodoxies Team, the Trends Team, the Resources Team, and the Customer Needs Team, and then I give them a bunch of exercises that are going to stretch their thinking along new lines and enable them to use those lenses, those perspectives, to look at either the world or to look at a particular situation or a problem, or to look at their business model, systematically, across every component - who we serve, what we provide, how we provide it, how we go to market, how we differentiate. Or to focus down on a particular product or a particular service or, in one case, it was, "How do we reduce the waste that's going to the landfills? We want to reduce it to zero from where we are today," which was like a thousand tons a year or something.

This was a big chocolate company and we used the Four Lenses. We got together for two days, we totally solved the entire problem. Their waste going to the landfills went down to zero by using the lenses to come up with new ideas.

So use it systematically; develop new insights with the lenses, and then crash them together. Take an orthodoxy, a trend, a customer need, a different resource and see if you can. The intersection of those insights gives birth to some great new idea or opportunity. So that's the way I do things: systematically.

Rachel Salaman: Rowan Gibson, thanks very much for joining me today.

Rowan Gibson: It's been a pleasure, Rachel. Thank you.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Rowan's book, again, is, "The 4 Lenses of Innovation: a Power Tool for Creative Thinking." I'll be back in a few weeks with another Expert Interview. Until then, goodbye.