Dr. Ann Kowal Smith is Founder and Executive Director of Reflection Point, which facilitates story-based conversations in workplaces to foster inclusion and collaboration. Dr. Smith shares how creating environments outside of the framework of seniority creates ripples of empathy that drive lifelong learning.
Dr. Ann Kowal Smith is Founder and Executive Director of Reflection Point, which facilitates story-based conversations in workplaces to foster inclusion and collaboration. Dr. Smith shares how creating environments outside of the framework of seniority creates ripples of empathy that drive lifelong learning.
More about our guest:
Dr. Ann Kowal Smith serves as Founder & Executive Director of Reflection Point. Reflection Point facilitates story-based conversations that deepen the quality of relationships and foster inclusion and collaboration at every level of the workplace. Ann has also served as Principal with Heidrick & Struggles International and Strategy Expert with McKinsey & Company. Prior to joining McKinsey, Ann practiced corporate and securities law in private and corporate settings. Ann earned her AB from Bryn Mawr College, her MA from the University of Michigan, and both her JD and DBA from Case Western Reserve University. Her dissertation examined organizational learning and innovation.
------------------------------------------------------------
Episode Guide:
1:25 - What Is Innovation?
3:23 - Enabled by a Web of Social Networks
4:17 - The HUMAN social network
5:08 - Corporate ladders and disconnect
8:31 - Generalists vs Specialists
9:51 - Are we over-specializing?
10:56 - Establishing a common language: Specialists and Generalists
11:41 - What is Reflection Point?
16:22 - Technically inclined employees in Reflection Point environment
19:19 - Changing a leaders' comfort level of communication
23:51 - Empathy for people and not things
25:20 - Empathy: A driver
26:32 - Garnering insights through the years
28:03 - Reflection Point: The Origin
28:49 - Lifelong learning
32:22 - Hard and Soft Skills: Visible and Invisible
35:08 - Collective Sport: Immersive and Ongoing
37:17 - Effective Service: Iterative process
38:17 - Advice for Innovators
--------------------------
Resources Mentioned:
Book Mentioned:
--------------------------
OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.
/This transcript was automatically generated using AI; please forgive any inconsistencies. We are working to provide the correct and more concise copy of the transcript. For urgent need, please send us an email.
----------------------
Jared Simmons 00:05
Hello and welcome to What Is Innovation. The podcast that explores the reality of a word that is in danger of losing its meaning altogether. This podcast is produced by OUTLAST Consulting, LLC, a boutique consultancy that helps companies use innovation principles to solve their toughest business problems. I'm your host, Jared Simmons, and I'm so excited to have Dr. Anne Kowal Smith
Jared Simmons 00:30
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith serves as founder and executive director of Reflection Point. Reflection Point facilitates story-based conversations that deepen the quality of relationships, and foster inclusion and collaboration at every level of the workplace. Ann has also served as principal with Heidrick and Struggles International and strategy expert with McKinsey and Company. Prior to joining McKinsey, Ann practice corporate and securities law in private and corporate settings. Ann earned her AB from Bryn Mawr College, her MA from the University of Michigan, and both her JD and DBA from Case Western Reserve University. Her dissertation examined organizational learning and innovation. Dr. Smith, thank you so much for joining us on the show today, I'm excited to talk with you and as usual, we always have great discussions. I'm looking forward to another one.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 01:18
I'm really excited too, Jared. It's awesome to see you again and thank you for having me.
Jared Simmons 01:23
Of course, let's dive right in. So tell me what in your mind is innovation.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 01:30
Innovation is a collective sport. I say that because I feel like we live in a society where we have put so much emphasis on the individual, the rights of the individual, the powers of the individual. I firmly believe that what we can accomplish together at the intersection of our perspectives, our ideas, our experiences, and our expertise is far greater than what any individual can accomplish, whether it's innovation or anything else, for that matter. I believe that organizations have as their richest resources, the spaces between their people and if people can come together in an interesting way, they can be more innovative and more creative. But it takes a little work. It takes getting out of our own way, it takes letting go of our stories, it takes being humble and listening and connecting with people. But these are all critical insights and skills and practices that really make for innovative cultures.
Jared Simmons 02:36
That is well said. You pull that right out of my head, I couldn't agree more with seeing innovation is a collective sport. I really, really identify with and appreciate the concept of the spaces between the people being where innovation lives and where there a lot of the value is. Personally, I find that it's less about who knows what and more about who's connected to whom, in a constructive way. I often find that sitting in a seat in a corporate environment, in a court, in a company, there are people you can talk to and people you can't. There are people who will talk to you and people who won't. I think companies always underestimate the impact of that. I really, really, really love that collective sport analogy.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 03:23
It's interesting, I think you're absolutely right, that sometimes the most valuable people are the people with the most extensive, and now I'm going to date myself, rolodexes, because it's who they know and how they can put together something that you say with something that they know that somebody else is interested in and before you know it, you have a collision or connection that wouldn't have happened, but for that sort of intermediary. If we think of innovation as being enabled by a web of social networks, and I don't mean that in the in the social media sense, but a true sense of making connections with people with ideas, then I think we have the potential to do quite a bit. What is innovation, if it isn't a series of connections of disparate ideas that come together in a new way?
Jared Simmons 04:06
Yeah, that is it at its core, I think the analogy of it, we don't even capitalize it so I can't even say 'social network,' the generic term social network.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 04:16
The human one.
Jared Simmons 04:19
The human version of those things. I think we understand well, when we put the networking label on it, and when it's about career, and when it's cross company, and when it's industry related, I think people understand the value of those connections and the value of the connections themselves being as great if not greater than whom you're connected to. I don't think people necessarily apply that analogy in-house to how they think about product development, innovation, or even innovation on how you work in any function. As you're pointing it out, it really does feel like a natural analog to that if you think of the expertise sitting in the various functions, being sort of nodes and then disability to collaborate kind of connecting those nodes and unlocking some new potential to innovate.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 05:08
I think you're absolutely right, we have inherited this very outdated notion that I think we know is not helping us but it's hard to let it go. That internally a company is like a ladder. So you move up the ladder, there's so many ladder metaphors, you move up the ladder that, you know, you're down in the organization, or you're up in the management. What happens is there becomes these artificial layers that exist. I'll never forget, I was talking to an engineer at a manufacturing company once and he had been an operator on the shop floor, and then went to engineering school at night and became an engineer. He was struck by how infrequently the engineers and the operators would talk to each other. Even though the engineers had a very theoretical idea of what to do. The operators had a very practical idea of what wouldn't-would work, because they know the machines. The machines were organisms in many ways and they knew its tensile strengths, and they knew the works, and they knew exactly what would happen. But they stopped talking to each other because one was about one rung of the ladder and the next one was below. It's those distinctions that really hurt us and keep us from being able to innovate because we underestimate where the next really important good idea can come from.
Jared Simmons 06:31
That's exactly right. It really also underscores the point you were making earlier about the ladder metaphor, and how pervasive it is, because it's even invaded that unspoken space of, I'm responsible for this line. The design of it, the uptime of it, and all this other these other things, and I'm responsible for operating it and keeping it running, you would think that'd be a natural conversation there. In any other context, people with that relationship would have a natural conversation, but when you put it in a corporate environment, and apply that ladder analogy to it, the conversation really feels forced, almost, and regimented. As we look back in history, and I know, I'm not gonna embarrass myself talking, innovation and the history of innovation with a bonafide expert. But my little meandering through the history of innovation, you look at the late 60s, 70s, and early 80s, and how the Internet and then the World Wide Web came into being, you can't really put your finger on who invented the internet. This big joke about Al Gore. Some people raised their hand and say that they invented the internet. But it is amazing that one of the seminal creations of humanity, you can't really go back and say this person invented it. It's hard to even say what it is. But it's so pervasive and so useful and I wonder if we're losing the ability to innovate and create on that level. Walter Isaacson's book, The Innovators goes through that entire era, and looks at all the different players, and his whole thesis of the book. My interpretation of it is, just what you were saying, it's a collective sport, the hardware folks, the software folks, they all came together to innovate the way we collect and connect information.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 08:30
It's interesting, I haven't thought about this until you just mentioned it. But there's this ongoing tension between generalists and specialists. The downside of generalists is they don't have the depth of information that requires them to have the skills to take an idea and really turn it into something. The upside of generalists though, is that they can be more holistic, and they can have a bigger picture. They can pull people together in really meaningful ways where specialism or specialists can become entrenched in a very narrow sliver of what's important. When we focus so much on individuals and then we ask them to be specialists, and to go deeper, deeper, deeper, the potential entrenchment and the inability to see past the end of your nose becomes a potential obstacle to the kind of innovation that you're talking about where nobody has to take credit but we all benefit.
Jared Simmons 09:25
Just in thinking about that the distinctions in that world where hardware or software, not, I'm a Java person, or I write in this code, or I write in that code, or I work on this type of hardware. I wonder if we've crossed the peak of specialization as a benefit to innovation. Maybe we've reached a point of over specialization, as it relates to the ability to innovate on a broader scale.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 09:52
It's hard to say because I do think there are so many benefits to specialization, but we have a tendency to overlay everything was an either-or and when a both "and" is really such an important measure; I love the software hardware analysis, because I'm really specialized in soft skills in a world that prizes hard skills. I always wonder why people want to invest in software, but they don't want to invest in soft skills, I'm amused by that. But I do think that part of making sure that these specialists and technical skills and all of those very detailed pools of knowledge can stay connected in the bigger picture is by linking them together and making sure that people can poke holes in each other's ideas, they can engage with each other, they can ask questions, they can disagree in a generative way. Those are the overlaying skills that will keep specialists from getting out of control and generalists from getting out of control or even the war between the specialties from getting out of control.
Jared Simmons 10:55
Now, that's that's a great point. How do you establish a common language for those folks to really talk to each other?
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 11:02
That gets into what we do at Reflection Point.
Jared Simmons 11:07
Perfect, let's go right into it.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 11:09
Maybe we should talk a little bit about that because I think common language is at the core of all of it. The fact that we as human beings need a common language and at least a generalized sense of common pursuit, in order for us to work together in a really effective way. Let me just pause for a second and tell you what we do. Then maybe we can talk a little bit about how that actually enables people to develop their own language which I also think has to be created from whole cloth in order to fuel teams that way they need to be fueled.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 11:41
Reflection Point is an initiative or a program that's grounded in the belief that the most innovative the most inclusive, and the most collaborative organizations are those that invest in deepening the quality of relationships. For a lot of the things (and) reasons that we've already articulated. We believe that relationships are at the heart of the very activities that drive these collective outcomes. Collaboration isn't a single sport. Inclusion isn't a single sport. As I said at the outset, I don't believe that innovation is an individual sport. In order to develop those collective skills, we really need to build the skills of relationship. What we believe the skills and relationship look like and the science has supported us is listening with humility, asking good questions, suspending our assumptions long enough to entertain the ideas of others. That's a really important one that cuts across a lot, giving each other the benefit of the doubt, and the latitude to make mistakes. That's where psychological safety comes in. Then finally, according to each other, trust, respect, and mutual regard. These skills, they're like muscles, they need to be built, they need to be conditioned, they need to be continually practiced. If you can continually practice them and really embed them into the culture of a community or an organization, then I think you've got the beginnings of a space that can recognize the magic in between what people have to offer.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 13:23
What we do is we actually create that space, to build and condition and practice those skills in a really low stakes way. Knowing that when you tackle tough problems or workplace problems that often personal agendas and other challenges of hierarchy can get in the way. We do something really unorthodox, we start in a short story, usually a piece of fiction or a piece of narrative nonfiction and with an expert facilitator, we lead a discussion around that story. The story in the conversation invites colleagues at all levels, really, we've had people from management all the way down to the shop floor, share their stories, and take the conversation to the places that they would like and need that conversation to go and that's an important point. Because I think if you get a group of people together and they've got something that they're chewing on something that they're working on, if you present them with a common scenario set out by a story, they're going to see in that story, really interesting things that relate to the things that they're working on. At the same time, they're going to approach the story and enter it in really different ways. It's in those different ways that people enter a story and what they find important and what they don't. That's where the magic happens. Colleagues can see things in each other that they didn't know were there. It becomes a really powerful tool to build those relationships that then give rise to an innovative culture of connection and collective spirit. It's been very exciting.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 14:58
I can give you a great example. I was talking recently to a leader who use this quite a bit throughout his entire company. He's very fond of saying that what this work does, what Reflection Point does is, it enables people to practice separating their idea from their ego. If you can take yourself out of the idea and allow or offer up to a group, an idea that people can work with, and they can build on it, they can shape it, they can hone it and what they can build together is almost always greater than one person can do. But they have to disentangle their personality, their persona and their ego from that idea in order to let it be shaped and grown. It's almost a little bit like throwing a pot on a wheel, you can shape it right, but you can't do it unless you're willing to let go of something. It's practicing that letting go that's really important.
Jared Simmons 15:51
Yeah, separating idea from ego. If I take nothing else from this conversation, that's gold, I love that. You mentioned, from management to the shop floor. That, to me, implies that you've done this in manufacturing environments. I can imagine starting with a piece of fiction getting a group together in that environment and saying, we're going to read you know, Eudora Welty or something, I can imagine that going in a number of different potential ways. It sounds like it's been very useful. What do you find when you have folks at that shop floor level, maybe people who are more technically inclined and putting them into this environment, what happens?
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 16:33
One of the most magical things that happens is that it becomes very palpable, that life experience is a form of wisdom and that we prize credentials, we think a lot about education, we look at all the technical skills that people have ratcheted up on their resume or in their pedigree. But at the end of the day, it's the experiences that we have that often shape the way we see the world. The story is a leveler. There's nobody who's an expert in that story, not the CEO, not the lathe operator but the insights that emerge, are often completely non-hierarchical. What I'm always happy to say is that usually the most insightful comment in the room rarely comes from the person with the most education. Immediately, it debunks this idea that hierarchy, that education level, that these are the things that really matter. It allows you to really engage with ideas on an equal footing.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 17:33
I often used to say that when people would come into the room now, and people come into the Zoom, yeah, but when people come into the room, they leave their positions at the door, and they come as human beings, they come as individuals, and they get a chance to engage with each other as individuals, which I think is a really critical piece of those connections that we want to build if we want to know who to call when we've got a problem if we want to tap into somebody else's experience and expertise when we need it. That's one of the things that has been really, really powerful. One of the things that we measure as well but it's been fairly successful in creating a culture of safety, to speak up, psychological safety. A great example is in one particular manufacturing company, as you know, as you use manufacturing, as an example, is the President of this company who had done this work with many people in her organization, when she would go out onto the shop floor, she found that her shop floor colleagues would say to her, Oh, come let me show you something. This is bothering me. I'm seeing this happening and I'm convinced it's not the best way that this machine should be working. I wonder what you think? Or let me show you that this is not working very well and let's figure out what what we could do with it, or look at this, I'm so excited, we fixed this and it's working really, really well. This idea for somebody to feel so comfortable with somebody as a human being that they can bring a problem all the way up the chain to the to the president of the company, what company doesn't want that?
Jared Simmons 19:09
That's a great example of you know, the resident having created an environment through your program, create an environment where folks on the shop floor feel comfortable approaching her. I wonder if you've seen examples of where it's changed a leaders' a comfort level with communicating with people further down the chain, for lack of a better term?
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 19:28
Absolutely. We've got a lot of stories that I think assumptions tend to run in both directions. It always delights me when a leader says, Oh, my people don't want to read and then not only do they want to read they have so many really interesting things to say. It's the outcome of those interesting things to say that I think can be very rich. The example I was going to give you is we did some work in a distribution center. This was a pretty classic pick-pack-and-ship operation, the trucks would come then in the morning, drop things off, and then the morning shift would unpack the trucks and then the evening shift would repack the tracks, and then they would send them off. The afternoon shift, which tended to be the younger folks, and a fairly diverse group of people in this distribution center started to read stories together with facilitators and in their lunchbreak engage with each other in some really meaningful ways. It was an interesting group, because they came from all over the education spectrum. But several of them were not even comfortable native English speakers and yet, they were so engaged in the idea of the exchange of ideas that they participated. They invited the director of operations of that particular distribution center to participate with them. He participated on a regular basis. You really got to know them in a way that you don't usually get to know the the afternoon or the evening shift, because you're not always there. One day, he was traveling to one of the other distribution centers, and all of a sudden, his shift supervisor for the evening shift, quit, just didn't come in and quit and the rest of the group got together. They said, all right, we're not 100% sure what we should do, but we're going to do the best that we can and we'll sort of make a plan, and we'll get the trucks packed, and we'll do the best that we can to get them out and so they did well. The next day he came in and several of them said to him, ughh you must have been really worried that we weren't going to be able to do this. We did the best we could do and we got it done. When he told me the story, what he was struck by was the fact that they gambled a little bit, they took a little bit of trial and error to figure out how to do the things that they would have actually relied on the supervisor, but they knew that he had their back. They knew that if they did the best that they could do that he would engage with them as equals, and really give them credit for what they had tried to do and they had concerned themselves for him.
Jared Simmons 22:00
As a person and not an abstract.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 22:05
They knew that he must have been worried sick, how am I going to get these trucks out. He said, but we didn't want him to be worried sick so we did the best that we could do. That's not really just the the one level seeing the other level in a different way. It's taking it to the next level and saying, look, if we can work together, knowing that we've got the psychological safety to make a mistake once in a while knowing it comes from the heart and that we've done the best we can do, then we're going to be okay. Having both level see that was really, really a very powerful lesson in what's possible.
Jared Simmons 22:38
That's a great story, a great example. A very relevant example, as we record this in November of 2021. When everyone's supply chain, everyone's distribution centers, everyone's entire logistics network is just under siege. The stress is palpable when you talk with folks in those organizations and those are the types of organizations that have that natural sort of break between the people that make things happen and "management." That's a great example of how innovation in the classical sense can only take you so far into the real world without that collaboration across levels. That the trust, the respect and the mutual regard, that you build into those relationships, because they cared about the person that occupied the seat, not the seat, not the company, it was, and we operate differently when we can connect on a humanistic level, I think, innovation just looks different. You're not helping out the finance department. If I'm in research and development, helping out finance is one thing, but helping out, Jane, or John, is a different thing.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 23:50
Exactly. I think you're getting it, empathy, which I think we talk about a lot. We don't have empathy for things. We don't have empathy for a department, we have empathy for somebody that we feel a connection to. If we build those connections, then we expand the circle of our empathy. I don't care if it's a hospital or a manufacturing company or a tech company, empathy matters. Because that's the way we get new ideas. That's why the design world is so interested in looking empathetically at what needs to be designed, its innovation is so intricately connected to this empathic understanding of what people need for something to be successful.
Jared Simmons 24:35
You can almost you can almost feel and see in the experience and the user experience for things, things that were designed and developed by organizations that trust each other or understand each other, or have a more humanistic, empathetic connection. It feels more seamless, and more natural, I think. As you start there, I, because I'm a geek about these things, start to unpack. Okay, well, who designed this? What company did this come from? Has the company organized? How do they operate? What principles do they have? Themes start to emerge, things that have the power button in the wrong place, or don't have a feature that would make logical sense here, they typically placed less of an emphasis on the types of things that you describe.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 25:22
I love what you're saying, because it also speaks to once something is created, how does it continue to grow and iterate and be shaped based on empathy as a driver for what needs to be done. We talk a lot about releasing the minimum viable product, right. But if we don't open ourselves up to what our users tell us, or how people engage with us around the way a product or service is being used, and we don't change and adjust accordingly, then it doesn't become a very useful product for very long. To your point, those organizations that are really good at engaging with the public, and learning from them are also the signs of organization that have a lot of these connective skills in place because when you learn to connect with each other, you learn to connect with your customers.
Jared Simmons 26:18
Well said, you have clearly an amazing grasp on the collective nature of innovation, the role of the spaces between people, the role of trust and respect and mutual regard in this whole process. How did you come to these insights over the course of a career in such high pressure, elite delivery, impact-focused organizations, all the amazing things you've done, how did you come to these insights, that these are the things that really, really matter, and really move the needle?
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 26:51
Well, it starts in learning, I've always had a career with a steep learning curve. I've been in client service for the entirety of my career. The beauty of client service is that every time you find a new situation, you have to learn a new context, you have to learn new people, you have to learn new ways of thinking about things and new ways of knowing. When I hit the middle of my career and decided that I wanted to go back to school, and that's when I did my doctorate in organizational learning, one of the things that really struck me was that this idea of continuous learning as an engine for growth, it was at the core of everything that I had done. That's why when I when I started my dissertation, I started to look at how do leaders use conversation? How do leaders lead? How do leaders engage organizations to learn and is the learning top-down, is it bottom-up, is it side-to-side.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 27:46
Those kind of ideas from an academic perspective got me thinking differently about the experiences that I've had. It led quite naturally to, and I was also working on an initiative in the Northeast Ohio region, which is where I live that was looking at learning in a lifelong context. Where Reflection Point started a decade ago, it was called Books That Work when we started. It tells you a little bit about how I was thinking about it. What I really thought we were doing was going out into the world and creating access to really enriching learning style conversations for a lot of people who might not necessarily have had access to higher education in their past, because I firmly believe that much of American society has stopped its learning journey, not because they weren't capable of learning, but because there were other structural obstacles in their way, whether it was money for tuition or role models, or they have mouths to feed or any number of different things that made it hard for everybody to learn to the fullest extent or to continue.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 28:49
Lifelong learning, I think is a space that is it's got access challenges as well, because you need time you need money, you need the inclination, you need access to resources. When Books That Work was born, it was born of this idea that we could bring some of these learning ideas to people no matter where they were. But if that was our MVP, then what we've learned over the years is that the learning is so connected to all of these skills that enable us to be successful in the world, the navigation skills that allow us to build healthy cultures, cultures of innovation, cultures of inclusion, cultures of belonging, cultures of collaboration, and that it's when we learn together, that we learn so powerfully that we can fundamentally shape environments to allow us to continue to learn and grow in really interesting ways. When you learn things about people and with people, you don't unlearn them, they don't go away. It's not like you spend a day learning the 10 steps to fill out a form or learning the technical skills of something. You've really engaged with people in a much more sustainable way because you engaging with them from the heart. The kind of learning that we talk about is not only cognitive, but it's emotional and social. What we learned is that the thing that we started doing could morph into something so much greater once we understood its potential. I think it comes from taking an evidence based approach to the work.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 30:22
I interviewed a million people, we surveyed a lot of people, we observed as much as we could, we talk to our participants to understand what they felt and we slowly learned that the relationships so we're learning together, the people that we're learning together, we're building relationships that were standing the test of time and helping them to solve tough problems when they went back into the workplace. That's the way that we actually started to think about how we do this work. Companies that engage with us will engage with us to support teams and deepen collaborati on skills on teams, they'll use us to support value-based ideas that they want to engage people on, to help people understand the values of an organization or the values of a culture, and it can support cultural initiatives in that way. Then the thing that we learned as we were going part of the way was that these kinds of conversations, especially depending on the kinds of stories that we used, were really powerful ways to have the honest and open conversations around inclusion and belonging, that were very, very powerful to help everybody around the table feel like they had voice. What makes them a little bit different than traditional diversity and inclusion training programs is that they allow people at any step along the journey to come together and talk together about their own personal experiences, whether those experiences are based in deep knowledge or deep ignorance. They can connect in meaningful ways and start to be each other's resources when it comes to learning and growing together. It's so the learning was the starting point. But understanding the social nature of learning the network connections in our brains and how that leads to really connective, building the connective tissue of an organization, that's where I think the sweet spot has emerged over the years.
Jared Simmons 32:20
That makes a lot of sense. It strikes me, back to your hard skills, soft skills, the antibodies you have toward the that distinction. It to me, it feels more like as you're describing it, visible and invisible and really the things you can see, the skills of improving at fixing the line, sending emails, if you're a knowledge worker, putting the other documents, presentations, all that stuff is visible. There's a trail of some sort for you to be able to identify that. But the other skills, the invisible skills, those are the ones, they sit on par I think with the ones you can see, but they are harder too. It's the same with innovation. When I talk about innovation, it's hard to talk about metrics with folks and hard to draw the line for business people in terms of investment, how much should you invest in innovation? It's a difficult question to wrestle with, because you can't see the impact on the same scale of time that you can see investing in building a new plant, or adding capacity or things like that. In this visible-invisible framework, it's not less important, and it's not less impactful. It's just harder to identify and it's happening, probably over a slightly broader timescale in some sense. But some of it sounds like, just from your example, sounds like some of the impact can be realized in a short period of time.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 33:43
Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. We've seen in as few as four sessions were a group that come together on a regular basis have really significantly moved the needle on feeling that it's safe to take a risk, or even stating a position even though they know that other people disagree. We've settled on some of these metrics of psychological safety, along with metrics of social connection and feeling a sense of belonging. Because at the end of the day, I think that those are the best way to measure the extent to which somebody feels kinship and connection not only to a place but to the people around them. At the end of the day, organizations are just people. I mean, they're just collections of people and without the people, we can't do it. To your investments ,like that, I'm intrigued as well, because there's so little real radical innovation in the world, so much of the innovation that we lean on and rely on, is it incremental, or creative in some way. Investing in a culture that allows us to identify moments of potential for incremental innovation is a really valuable tool for organizations that aren't necessarily thinking they're going to invent the next iPhone, or that they're gonna create something that is so radically different and new to the world, but there's room for innovation everywhere. In fact, I would argue we live in a culture that says you either have to continue to grow or you don't go anywhere.
Jared Simmons 35:07
That's exactly right. The underlying point, I think, to this being a collective sport and to thinking about the spaces in between is that it is immersive and it's ongoing. It doesn't stop, there isn't an innovation department there isn't... you can give somebody a title with innovation in title. But innovation is something that happens and has happened long before there was a research and development group, long before they're really good corporate structures, people have been solving new problems in collective ways since the dawn of recorded history, and likely before. To your point, reducing innovation back down to the essence of what it is and what it has been, is more important now than ever, as we think about how to connect these nodes of expertise and experience and knowledge in ways that are accreted and don't reinforce the natural silos that come with specialization.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 36:01
Yeah, I totally agree. So maybe it's, it's about connecting the dots and the dots happened to be people.
Jared Simmons 36:09
Exactly. That is exactly right. I love that. One thing I was also struck by as you were talking about, you're commenting on your career journey and being in client service. You talked about in client service, you have to learn new people, you have to learn this, you have to learn that. I don't think everyone thinks about client service that way, I think you do. In terms of your natural inclinations, I think a lot of people think about it, if I look back at some of my colleagues and peers, a lot of people think about it as a delivering or imposing almost. Like, I have this thing and you need it, the primary mode isn't let me learn about these people and what their current situation is, it's more about, I know how to do this and you don't so let me show you how to do this, which is well intentioned, but has a cap on it for any impact standpoint. Your natural inclination for learning first informed your approach to client service in ways that you may not have even been consciously aware of.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 37:12
I like that thought and you're absolutely right. I mean, how many people are the hammer looking for the nail?
Jared Simmons 37:16
Yeah, exactly.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 37:18
I think that maybe that's the difference between really effective service of any kind really, is really saying to yourself, Okay, what do people need? What does this particular circumstance require? Then how, how do we bring the best of what we have to bear on that particular circumstance? It hasn't changed in the work that we do either, because it's not an off the shelf sort of a thing. I'm very intrigued by the fact that a story going to different groups with a different facilitator will reveal a very, very different conversation. We learn from each of those conversations so that we can better figure out how to apply it the next time around. It's an iterative process, it's really very much a mirror of what innovation has to be too, an iterative process that allows us to continue to take things that we didn't normally think would go together and put them together in a new way.
Jared Simmons 38:10
Interesting. My brain just spins every time we talk with things to talk about and discussed. Do you have any advice that you would offer up for innovators out there?
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 38:24
My best advice, from my experience is to listen to learn, you can see why I say that. But to explore connections with new ideas and new individuals with a sense of wonder and a sense of discovery. Because I think we don't know, I mean, one of the things that a lot of people think innovation is that I really firmly believe that it isn't, is an idea born fully formed out of the head of Zeus. It's rarely a thing that is just born and is perfect when it starts. If as innovators or creators, we can take a kernel of something and marry it to something else and engage a few experts and get a few people who maybe aren't experts at all, but get a sense of what they think, that what we can create could be really, really powerful but it requires us to get out of our own heads. It requires us to, to listen and to really connect with things, even if they at first don't necessarily meet our understanding of what we think we're doing. Those have always been the moments in my own journey, where I've learned the most, because it's come as a bit of a surprise, but the surprise element is exactly what it needs at the right moment to help me develop or think about some new thing.
Jared Simmons 39:47
Well, that approach has served you well. You're an amazing career and the impact you've chosen to have through Reflection Point, the world would be better for it, is already better for and it's clearly a point of passion for you and that comes through every time we talk. I'm sure it comes through to your clients. I just want to thank you for for choosing to do that for the world and choosing to do that for the corporate world in particular, because it's needed there as anywhere else these days. Thank you for your generosity and your time and your attention to join us on the podcast today. I look forward to our next conversation. We'll have to have you back because you sparked 1000 thoughts that I'd love to explore further with you but thank you so much for joining us.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 40:31
Thank you. Thank you for having me and I would be honored to come back and equally love our conversations and we could come up with some really interesting new ideas.
Jared Simmons 40:39
I bet you're right.
Dr. Anne Kowal Smith 40:42
Thank you. All right.
Jared Simmons 40:43
Take care.
Jared Simmons 40:49
We'd love to hear your thoughts about this week's show. You can drop us a line on Twitter at OUTLAST LLC, or follow us on LinkedIn where we're OUTLAST Consulting. Until next time, keep innovating. Whatever that means