Full Transcript Below

Jenn DeWall:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to The Leadership Habit podcast. It’s your host Jenn DeWall. And in today’s episode, we interview innovation thought leader Stephen Shapiro. You might remember him from a past episode that we did about a year ago, but for the refresh, Stephen cultivates innovation by showing leaders and their teams how to approach, tackle, and solve their business challenges. We all need that right now in light of COVID. And obviously, the drastically changing environment that we’re operating in today. He helps them by applying the knowledge that he’s accrued over decades in the industry. Stephen is able to see what others can’t- opportunities to improve innovation models and the cultures that support them. So enjoy today’s episode as we talk about asking better questions, and we also talk about a way that you could potentially get your own questions answered by Steve.

Welcome Back Stephen Shapiro, Innovation Expert

Jenn DeWall:

Hi everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into this week’s episode of The Leadership Habit. I am so excited to have back on the show for a second time. Stephen Shapiro. Now, if you weren’t blown away by the first episode that we had with him, where he gave you just such great valuable tools on your innovation efforts, like, I don’t know what it’s going to take, because I know this show is going to be that much better, but before we get into the content, Steve, let’s just go ahead. And I want you to introduce yourself to maybe our new listeners that didn’t have a chance to hear you the first time, but tell us who you are, what you do.

Stephen Shapiro:

Sure. Jenn. Well, first of all, let me say it was so much fun the first time I had to do it a second time! So I’m thrilled to be here. And I love the work that you do. So yeah, I’ve spent pretty much most of my life in innovation. I started working in innovation in the 1995-96 timeframe after having spent the first part of my career in business efficiency, business optimization. And I realized that people lost their jobs as companies started to make them more efficient. So I decided to shift away from people losing jobs to helping people create jobs, getting jobs. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since. So for 25 years, I’ve been focused on job growth innovation and helping companies grow so that they can be more successful.

Jenn DeWall:

Gotcha. And you do a great job. I mean, I’ve read, I’ve read the majority of your books, and there are just so many great insights. I’m curious. How have you seen innovation just change in the face of the pandemic? Well,

Innovation in Times of Crisis

Stephen Shapiro:

So there’s usually two phases of innovation in a time of crisis. And the first one is what we’ve seen over and over in the past, which is a reactive adoption. So it’s still a form of innovation, but it’s a mild form of innovation. And so what would end up happening is people would you know, they were trying to meet in person originally, and now they can’t meet in person. So the problem that we’re looking to solve is how can we do what we were supposed to do in person virtually? And so we then have everybody hop on zoom, but basically, we’re just replicating, and we’re just automating. And that’s when we’re in survival mode. And I think where we’re starting to get to right now is actually that second phase, which is a proactive innovation. So instead of a reactive adoption, it is really pushing the pause button and saying, what are we looking to do? How are we going to think differently about the world, and how can we really create something new and better rather than just try to repeat what we’ve done in the past. I think that’s the exciting thing. So as difficult as it’s been right now, I think we’re going to look back on this time and say, wow, there was some incredible innovation that took place. Maybe some of the greatest innovations in the history of business.

Jenn DeWall:

Oh my gosh. And people probably don’t even realize they were innovating, but I think that’s a really important point of emphasis. Is, are you still living in that reactive place of innovation? Are you still trying to force the things that you did in the past to make them work? How do you get people to wake up and recognize that it’s time to shift from that reactive place to more of that proactive strategic approach?

Stephen Shapiro:

I think it really comes down to where somebody is in their life and their business. If they are still in survival mode, then they’re going to take care of what they need to take care of from a survival perspective. It, it’s just a natural human instinct. We’re wired primarily for survival, and we’ll innovate either to help us survive or when we’re comfortable, and we don’t feel like we need to survive. And so it really is going to depend on each organization. Each individual’s going to be responding differently to the situation. But I think the key is just to tell people to take a breath, push the pause button, and ask a different question. That, to me, is the key to everything. So instead of asking the question, how can we do what we’ve always done- just online? Maybe we ask some provocative questions, which is like, what if we stopped doing what we used to do? What would happen if we eliminated meetings? What if we eliminated the need to be together all the time on zoom or whatever platform you’re using? Well, these are the types of things which we’ll start stimulating new types of conversations, which will lead to new types of solutions.

Jenn DeWall:

So that’s a big piece of, I think where your tools really frame things- is starting with the right question to find the right solution. Can you explain a little bit more about where people get innovation wrong in terms of maybe they’re trying to solve the wrong problem, or maybe they’re asking the wrong questions?

Are You Solving the Wrong Problem?

Stephen Shapiro:

I think the biggest issue is especially in organizations, is we’ve become so enamored with ideas that we ask people for their opinions. And look, there’s nothing wrong with asking somebody for their opinion. The problem is when you ask somebody for their opinion, and you have a large number of opinions. Now, all of a sudden, you just have a sea of opinions that may be good, may not be good. So it’s like a suggestion box. You know, there’s a default question associated with every suggestion boxes. How can I improve the business? The problem is if you ask a thousand people, how can you improve the business? You’ll get 10,000 ideas, of which maybe three have any value. So that’s why this shift is so important because we’re either not taking the time to really think about the problem in a structured way, or we’re just asking the wrong problem. And I remember this fortune cookie I once got. I love this. It said you always have the right answers. They just sometimes answer the wrong question. There you go. There, you’re solving the wrong problem. I don’t care how hard you work. The wrong problem, solved, doesn’t do any value. That doesn’t do anything good for you. It just has no value.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. And I can think of that all the time. I think, you know, people just saying, Oh, I want to grow sales. It’s got to be this. Or I want to make my employees happy maybe. And actually, that’s a big one. I think. How do you stop employee turnover? The first thing that people initially jumped to is only thinking it’s gotta be affiliated or associated with pay in some way. Well, we’ve got to pay them more, and then if we can’t pay them more, because right now we’re in a pandemic, we’re going into recession, then I guess we can’t do anything. Would that be an example of asking the wrong question?

Stephen Shapiro:

It’s, again, it’s a broad question. So they start off with, how do I retain my best talent, which is a great question, but it’s a broad question. So I, I always like to say, we tend to ask questions and one of two ways, either they’re really broad. Like how do I improve the business, or how do I keep my employees? Or we ask some that are so specific and narrowly defined that we don’t have a good chance of finding solutions. So in the case of retention, that’s not a bad question, but once we jumped to the solution of pay, well, now that we’ve gone from abstract to ridiculously specific, and to me, the question we want to start asking is what really would incentivize people to want to stay. And one of the things that we know is there tend to be three levels.

Stephen Shapiro:

At least when it comes to innovation work, which carries over in all work, there are three different categories that will keep people motivated to stay. Compensation is the lowest level. So you need to pay the bills. If you’re not able to pay the bills, then the money is important. But if you’re at least in that place where again, you’re not surviving from a financial perspective, the next two levels are much better at keeping people engaged in an organization. That second level is the community feeling like you’re part of something bigger, feeling like you’re engaged and involved with something. And then the last one is contribution, which is feeling as though you’re actually making an impact in the world. And so we have a lot of different levers, and you really need to just take the time to figure out what matters most. And that will then drive the right solutions.

Jenn DeWall:

So why are asking questions more important than answers for why are like the questions more important than the answers that you seek?

Are You Asking the Right Questions?

Stephen Shapiro:

Well, if you think about most leaders, most leaders think they need to have all the answers, but that’s really not the role of a leader. The role of a leader is to ask questions of the organization that gets everybody in the organization to ask better questions. And the reason for that is our answers. Our solutions tend to be built on a lot of assumptions. So you could be an expert in your industry, but it doesn’t mean you are an expert. It means you were an expert. So you knew your customers, you knew your competition, you knew your industry. It doesn’t mean, you know it, because it changes. And obviously, in recent times, it’s changed pretty much overnight. So we have to relearn pretty much everything. And if you think you have the answers, the odds are, those answers are built on faulty assumptions that you’ve made based on your past experience.

Jenn DeWall:

How do you double-check that? Like how, what are things that maybe you would recommend that clients do? If, you know, let’s say that someone hears this and they’re like, wow, okay, you’re right. I knew my customers. I don’t know them today. What would be a way that we could measure whether or not we’re behind the curve? Do you have any advice for that? Whether we, is it, should we be looking at metrics like sales to determine if we’re getting it wrong? Like what should we be looking at?

Stephen Shapiro:

So I think there’s a couple of different things at play here. One is the pause button. I talked about it before. Just, just stop, just stop. As soon as you think you have an answer, just stop and ask. What’s the question. What’s the problem that answer solves and then ask yourself, is that the right question? And in order to answer that part, we need to have data. And so one of the things you need to make sure is you recognize that innovation and creativity are not— we tend to think of it as just coming up with really cool ideas. It’s not. It is a problem-solving process. What we need to do is figure out what are the most important problems. So we need data, and there’s several different ways you can get data. One way to get data is to just gather data, gather insights, numbers, and hard metrics and things of that nature.

Stephen Shapiro:

But sometimes the best thing to do is softer ways of doing it, whether it’s observation and an innovation. We talk about ethnography, which is the process of observing people using your product or service. And I would say today that sometimes the best thing to do is quick check-ins. I mean, there’s so many great video tools out there where you can ask whether it’s customers or employees or others, how are you doing? Don’t lead the witness, don’t do surveys. Don’t ask them questions that are so specific that you lead them. But rather just say, what’s going on? What would you like to see? What aren’t we doing? What do you need? And just let them talk. And sometimes you’re going to get some really amazing insights by just allowing people to share where they are right now. And it has to be based on data.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah. And I think you’ve just simplify people’s surveys. It doesn’t have to be, did you like your meal? Did you like rate it one through five? Or what did you like about X? And it’s leading them towards that answer, but I like that you’re really just encouraging the open-ended curiosity of what do you like, what’s working for you. What do you dislike that we’re doing? I think you’ve just made someone’s job a lot easier to know that the questions, the easier that you make them, the more information you can find out.

Stephen Shapiro:

And, and sometimes here’s, if this is going to seem like a really goofy question, but it’s one that works really well because of the way the brain is wired. Once you get somebody to think about something that’s analogous to the current situation, they go off in a different place. So if you asked your customers or your employees, what color is our organization? Or what emotion is our organization and why? That’s like it, it stimulates a thought, it plants a seed in the brain. So that now all of a sudden like, okay, well, what color is it and why? And now they’re, they’re not thinking necessarily about their past experience, but they’re really trying to make connections to something different and deeper. So you can get really creative and provocative with the questions as a way of driving new insights also.

Jenn DeWall:

So go back to the questions, like, why do you think that organizations ask bad questions? I mean, maybe it ties back to the survey of, they just asked the wrong questions, but why do we ask bad question?

Get Out of Survival Mode

Stephen Shapiro:

Well, the reason why organizations ask bad questions is because individuals ask bad questions and it’s- look- part of it has to do with the fact that in business we’ve been told that we don’t want problems. We want solutions don’t bring me problems, bring me solutions. So that’s, but that’s, but that’s exactly the opposite of what we need organizations to be doing. We need people to step back and say, what’s the problem. Is there a bigger problem, a more important problem. And can I reframe that problem as a way of finding maybe potentially better solutions? And so part of it is education. Part of it is the way leadership operates, but part of it is just the human brain.

Again, we’re wired for survival. And so what ends up happening is we make instinctual decisions and decide to go running. So if you think about back in the days, when they’re saber tooth cats and you saw one, you wouldn’t sit there, you wouldn’t analyze it and ask a bunch of questions. If you saw something that was furry with big fangs, you would start running. And the problem is you start running probably in the wrong direction. Now from a safety perspective, going in any direction was good. But from a business perspective, if you start running in the wrong direction, you’re moving further and further away from your ultimate goals. So when you stop and make sure we’re all aligned and moving in the right direction, we will get much better results.

Jenn DeWall:

And that’s so true. I know that I’ve worked for organizations where you might have part of the company running in one direction and the other part of the company, trying to solve a different problem, or thinking that what they’re working on is the right thing to do. And then they’re another place. And I think that’s what you see a lot, probably right now with organizations that are really in that survival mode is that you might have these little microcosms within or departments that aren’t necessarily aligning. And so then they’re just wasting all your resources because they’re all focused on different things,

Stephen Shapiro:

Right? So we need to make sure that everybody’s rowing in the same direction. I mean, whatever, whatever metaphor you want to use. And that takes time for people to just breathe. Because again, our survival mentality is to run. And if we’re in survival mode, which many of us are right now, we’re just going to be running, but we’re probably running in the wrong direction. So we need to do a course correction and sometimes the best way to go fast. And there’s, there’s a difference between speed and velocity. And I think that’s really, the key here is speed is just doesn’t have direction. So I could be going 60 miles an hour, but it doesn’t matter if it’s North, South, East, or West. But velocity is relative to the direction we’re trying to go. And that’s really, to me, the key here is we don’t need speed. We need better velocity. We need people to move in the right direction, quickly, not any direction, because if I’m going South at 60 miles an hour and I need to go North, I’m going exactly the opposite of what I want to achieve.

Jenn DeWall:

So what’s the cost of doing that, or what’s the cost of asking bad questions, you know, of running in the wrong direction.

Stephen Shapiro:

It’s the biggest issue in the long run is irrelevance because if we’re not adapting and evolving, then we’re not going to meet the needs of the market, which means that we’re not going to have people who are going to buy our products and services. And so when people ask me, how do I define innovation? I use one word: relevance. To me a relevant organization is an organization that is constantly evolving to move in the direction of what the market needs and wants. And they are the aspirin right now. The other aspirin for the pains that people have, because people are going to make bigger decisions based on your ability to eliminate a pain. They have. That’s what they’re going to go after. And so if you look at, for example, we’re virtual right now, all of my speeches have gone virtual. All of my work has gone virtual. So why, if you look at the market cap of zoom in January, it was about $16 billion. A couple of weeks ago, when I last checked, it was $160 billion. It’s a 10 fold increase. If you try to buy a webcam, they’re now price gouging, because everybody wants one. So that’s a pain that people have and they’re willing to pay a premium to solve that pain.

Jenn DeWall:

Oh my gosh. I mean, this is probably a personal curiosity question, but where do you think retailers got it wrong? Because I, you know, I have a past in retail and I loved it. I love obviously, you know, working in that, but as we see right now, there’s a ton of retailers or brick and mortar stores that are closing. Where do you think they got it? Wrong terms of innovation because clearly a lot of those brick and mortar stores aren’t relevant anymore. I know that I personally, especially in the age of COVID, I’m not shopping in the same way that I once was like, where do you think that they got it wrong? I know that I threw you for a loop because that was my own personal curiosity, but I don’t know any, any insights on where you think maybe retail could have done it better to adapt.

Taking a Phygital Approach

Stephen Shapiro:

Look, this is, this is a challenging situation right now, in terms of, you know, there were times when malls were closed and stores were closed only so much you can do with that. I mean, you could argue in hindsight that having a better online presence and of course with Amazon and everything else that’s going on right now, that’s not a bad thing, but I do believe that there is still a need for physical retail. To me, it’s more about the phygital approach. And I love the word phygital, which is basically the blending. It sounds like you’ve got like an itch or something. I’m, I’m fidgety, I’m phygital. Phygital is the blend of physical and digital. And so we tend to think of either we’re digital or we’re analog, we’re physical or we’re online. But I don’t think that I think the opportunity for the retailers is to recognize when you can blend the best of digital technologies with the physical experience and being able to do things in the retail stores that you can’t do online.

Stephen Shapiro:

I think there’s a lot that can be done there. And what’s happening traditionally with a lot of retailers is the online presence was separate from the physical presence. And I just remember so many times in the past I would buy something they’ve corrected things slowly over time, but I’d buy something online and want to return it in the store. Or I’d buy something in the store and want to return it online. And they’re like, Oh no, you can’t do that. Or I remember one time I was buying an item and they wanted to refund a different price because the price was different online than it was in the store. And it just created so much confusion. So if you really think of it as a larger whole, and how does digital and physical blend together, I think that would be a very powerful way to look at it. Cause then you have a one, two punch that an online only, or a physical only retailer couldn’t handle.

Jenn DeWall:

I love that. I mean, how annoying as a customer to look online at any retailer, see that a price is significantly different, walk into the store and in the past they used to just, Nope, sorry. That’s online only. We would rather risk losing your sale or you can we’ll pay the shipping for none of that made sense to me, but I think you brought up a good point that in that industry, they really did look at the brick and mortar and the digital experience or e-commerce experience as completely separate entities when that did just cause more confusion or frustration like that. I would just find, I’ll go online. I’ll look for someone else that I can shop with. I know we went on a tangent. I’m just, you know, I do believe that we need standalone stories. So I’m anxious to see how retailers continue to adapt, because I like being to go to the store if I need something, I don’t want it to solely be online. So let’s go back to that, that approach. So we were talking about questions and now we’re thinking about what can we do so we know why it’s bad. We obviously know it can, you know, not serve our customer. It can make us not relevant anymore, but how do we start? How can we start to ask better questions?

Stephen Shapiro:

Well, so the first thing is just to recognize that all of our questions have built in assumptions. So when you hit the pause button and you say, okay, what am I really looking to do here? Then you say, well, what am I assuming? So if it’s a large organization, a lot of times we’ll, we’ve always done it this way. So we should continue to do it this way, or we’ve never done it this way. So we shouldn’t do it this way. Those are, those are just assumptions. They’re not truth. So that’s the first thing is just sort of look at what am I, what am I underlying assumptions? What do I believe to be true? What if they aren’t true? The other thing is I’ve developed some tools to help do that. And I think that in basically what these tools do is help question the assumptions in a very methodical way. And you can just ask, you know, a whole bunch of different questions. And sometimes the easiest thing to just ask yourself is what if I change the dimension of the question? What if I change the who dimension? Well, if we’re the ones doing the work, what if somebody else did the work? That’s a different way to look at it. So it’s, but it’s all comes down to assumptions and challenging those assumptions.

Jenn DeWall:

So it’s what assumptions am I making about this? But you just touched on who else could help me. That is one of my favorite parts of your book. Best practices are stupid, is really thinking about where we’re looking for innovation, what we’re doing. And one of the things that you talk about in your FAST innovation model is the shift approach. Can you share that with our audience that may not be familiar with that type of innovation technique, if you will?

Expertise is Often the Enemy of Innovation

Stephen Shapiro:

Sure. So I, I believe that expertise is often one of the enemies of innovation. It’s not the only one, but it’s often the enemy of certain types of innovation. And the reason for that is because we have all these past assumptions. And so we need to start making some shifts. And one of the things we know, one of the things we know, I mean, there’s, there’s scientific studies that have shown this, and we know this anecdotally to prove to be true, is that when you look outside of your industry or outside your function or your department, or your area of expertise, we’re going to get sometimes much better solutions. And in fact, there was one study done, which looked at it and basically found that most patents, most patents that are filed are based or were filed by an expert in a particular domain.

Stephen Shapiro:

So if it’s a chemistry problem, be solved by a chemist and almost every situation, the patent was a derivative of an earlier patent. So it was an incremental improvement. And when they looked at the patents that were just really fundamentally different, that is, they weren’t incremental. They weren’t based on past patents. They found that in almost every single situation, it was submitted by somebody from a completely different area of expertise. And so the simplest way to do this in practicality is to ask yourself two words, who else, who else has solved a similar problem, not the same problem. And when you ask those two words, now, all of a sudden you start looking at other places for potential solutions.

Jenn DeWall:

Yeah. Who else has done this? I thought of you because I saw- and I know that this is bad because it’s part of our headline culture- but I saw a headline and I’d never got back to reading it, but there was a 14 year old that had won a $25,000 grant for his insights in creating a cure for COVID. And that like made me immediately think about what you talked about as who else. And even that I think was probably the most unassuming thing. Like if there’s a 14 year old that we could tap into that could potentially have a new way of looking at it or just different experience. I mean, clearly he was able to win a $25,000 grant. That is, I think that the thing that we’re looking at is we don’t have to just go to the exact same person. And how can you disrupt who you ask? Or disrupt your own solutions by just inviting someone else to the table? Why do you think people don’t do that more knowing that there’s so much of a benefit and asking who else, why, what do you think holds people back from doing that?

Stephen Shapiro:

I think one of the other enemies of innovation is ego. So the reason why leaders believe they have to have all the answers is ego. Leaders don’t have the answers. They don’t, that’s not their role as leaders. Again, there that’s the role of the leader is to get to ask questions, to get others, to ask questions, that’s the role, but our ego gets in the way. And so we’re going to assume that we have the answers, whether it’s our company has the answers or our industry has the answers, or I, as a leader, have the answers. And that just is where we start to fall apart, because now we lose our curiosity, we lose our open-mindedness and we’re not looking elsewhere. And we know that if we use open innovation, for example, which is a way of tapping into larger crowds of people when done right, we can find solutions very, very quickly that have been out there that nobody’s been able to find.

Stephen Shapiro:

And one of my favorite stories is the Exxon Valdez oil spill from 1989 for nearly two decades, between 1989 and 2007, they tried to stop the problem, which was every time they’d extract the oil water mixture, because the temperatures were below freezing, it would solidify. It would freeze. And so they thought the problem was going to be solved by oil experts know when crowdsourcing was used and when they reframe the problem in a slightly different way, the solution was found by somebody who is not an oil expert, but rather chemists in the construction industry who worked with wet cement and had the same problem. And so he had a solution to a completely different industry, a completely different problem that actually solved that. And that to me is the key, but you have to be open to somebody else being smarter than you.

The Invisible Solution

Jenn DeWall:

You got to drop the ego. I think that’s so important. Don’t put the pressure on yourself to have all the answers, because by doing that, then you’re missing out on finding your own solutions. So in your newest book, Invisible Solutions, you talk about lenses, lenses that we can use to help us solve our innovation challenges. How can the lenses help reframe our problems? So we can make sure that we’re actually solving for the right challenge.

Stephen Shapiro:

So we tend to not take the time to ask good questions. And part of that again, is about, we believe if we move quickly, that’s good, but if we’re moving quickly in the wrong direction, that’s bad. The other thing is it’s just easy. Sometimes it’s just laziness. So it’s much easier to ask your organization, how can we improve revenues if that’s your target, but to take the time, to really dig into it a little bit and say, well, is it really revenues that we want? What if it’s about profitability? So maybe we don’t want more revenue. Maybe we want greater profits. Maybe we want more profitable customers, or maybe we want fewer, yet more profitable customers. Each of those are different questions that lead us down a different path. And so what the lenses do is they help you take either abstract questions and break them down into something smaller.

Stephen Shapiro:

So if I’m looking to improve revenues, the first lens is the leverage lens. And the leverage lens says, if I could only solve for one aspect of this, what would give me the greatest results? So if I’m trying to increase revenues, it might be who, who do I go after to get the greatest revenues? Where’s the greatest opportunity or where maybe it’s a geography question, where can I tap into to get the greatest results? So how can I start getting the best results for the least amount of energy? And so each of these lens helps to challenge an assumption that you have either deconstructing a big problem into something smaller or taking some that’s too specific and making it less. So yeah.

Innovation and the Goldilocks Principle

Jenn DeWall:

What, like no, making it less. So, I mean, I love that. And you talk about that in terms of the Goldilocks principle, right. And maybe, I guess that would be a good thing to explain, because I, I can say one thing, but I think it’s better coming from the man that wrote it, but Goldilocks principle, what is that? So that has to deal with how we ask our questions and how that then determines what type of solutions we uncover.

Stephen Shapiro:

Right? So the Goldilocks principle, as, as most people would probably guess is based on Goldilocks and the three bears, she goes into a house and there’s three beds. One’s too soft. One’s too hard. One’s just right. And this describes the way we tend to ask questions as sort of a default, our most natural way is to ask questions that are too, or too abstract or too broad. And so we have five lenses in the 25 lenses to break them down into something smaller. So we talked about the leverage lens, but there’s also like the deconstruct lens, which says, well, maybe we deconstruct it into parts or steps or pieces. And then we solve that smaller piece before we start to try to tackle the larger problem. The other part of the Goldilocks principle though, is sometimes we ask questions that are too hard. They’re too specific, they’re too narrowly defined.

Stephen Shapiro:

And so in the case of the Exxon Valdez, for example, it was assumed that the problem had to do with oil and freezing temperatures. But in fact, when you ask a less specific question in this case, it’s something called viscous shearing, which is a little technical, but basically it’s any dense liquid that’s put under forced acceleration will act like a solid. When the question was shifted to that, a less specific question, a less hard question that’s when a solution was found. So we tend to ask either questions that are too broad, too narrowly defined. And the goal is to ask ones that are just right, actually,

Jenn DeWall:

Steve and I just, I want to talk about this cause before we close, because you’ve given a lot of just different considerations, I love the lenses, too. Thinking about different ways that we can break down our innovation challenges and just different approaches. I think that look has been really helpful just in terms of me and how I can apply it to my own business. But one of the things I really do want to talk about, because I think it’s a big deal is your new podcast, because you not only are talking more about innovation, but you’re also giving the opportunity for people to call in, to write in, to have insight from you to help them solution their innovation challenges. I can’t even think of just how much I would say that’s invaluable. To have someone else, especially when you think about who else having someone else in that you can just tap into. But can you tell our listeners a little bit about your podcast? Because I would be remiss to not like actually, you know, encourage people to go there because I think it could just be of such value to those that are maybe struggling right now as a result of the pandemic or just struggling to stay relevant. Tell us a little bit about your podcast.

Stephen Shapiro:

Sure. So the podcast is called Invisible Solutions. Didn’t get very creative with that, because that’s the name of the book. If you want to learn more about it, it’s invisible solutions, podcast.com again, not very creative, but it works and it’s a short form, weekly podcasts. So basically every week what we’ll do is there’s two pieces to it. The first piece is the tip of the week. So I just share. What’s something that you can do to help solve problems in ways that probably weren’t obvious, but the core of it is going to be people who submit problems to me. I will then use the lenses from the book, Invisible Solutions, to reframe those problems and provide potentially interesting solutions. And so I just recorded the first handful of episodes. And so I had two people in particular who emailed me saying I’ve got a problem.

Stephen Shapiro:

And so I decide, okay, I’m going to record the episode. And I sent them, they’re not published yet, but I sent these individuals the episode and I’m like, Holy moly, you helped me in five minutes see things that I’ve not seen in years of thinking about this problem. And that to me is my goal is not just to solve the individual problem that somebody submits, but also then to show that whatever your problem is, you can have the tools to be able to do it. You don’t necessarily need outside help. It’s really a systematic process that works.

Jenn DeWall:

I love that. So, so what we can tell our listeners right now, if they have an innovation challenge that one of the things that they can do is go to invisible solutions, podcast.com, and that’s where they could actually submit that for an opportunity for you to potentially maybe select that and help them. Is that right?

Stephen Shapiro:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I would love that and you can submit them anonymously. So you don’t have to mention your name. Most of the cases, most of the time, people don’t want their names attached to a problem. But that’s the nice thing is it is anonymous. So people don’t know, but you know, if you do send me a problem, when that one goes live, I will send you, I will personally email you back with a link to that one, so you know that I’ve actually worked on your problem. .

What is Your Leadership Habit for Success?

Jenn DeWall:

I just think that’s such a great generous offer because again, I know that right now, people are really, we want to, how do we stay and navigate through the pandemic through these changing global circumstances? And I know that this podcast is just going to be of so much value. I just have to plug it because I think we all need to have that help and that connection, how can we stay afloat? How can we make sure to keep our employees on the payroll? How can we keep serving our customers and so on and so forth? Steve, I really enjoyed having you on the podcast today. Of course, I have to close with our final question that we end every single podcast with, which is what is your leadership habit for success? What do you do? How the heck do you stay abreast at a topic like innovation that I feel like probably changes by the minute?

Stephen Shapiro:

I think the key thing is having an open mind and asking a lot of questions. And then the other thing that’s really good is having a hot tub in your backyard where you can just close off the entire world and just sort of relax. I do find that for me, if I get so caught up in thinking all the time and I don’t take the chance to relax, I’m probably solving old problems or unimportant problems, or I’m solving them the way that I might’ve solved them last year, rather than the way they need to be solved this year. So it really is just taking that breath, whether it’s a hot tub, a shower, a walk, it’s going to be different for everybody. But that to me is one of the key things is just that time to breathe, to make sure we’re moving in the right direction.

Jenn DeWall:

And I feel like that’s how it started. We’ve got to take a time to pause, to breathe, to reflect, jump off of that scarcity autopilot. Yeah. It makes sure that you’re looking at things in a curious and new way. Well, Steve, thank you so much. Just investing your time with us for sharing your insights. I’m sorry. I know, I didn’t tell you that I wanted to plug the podcast, but I think it’s such a value add that I had to do it. So I’m sorry if that put you on the spot, but thank you so much for being on the podcast. I it’s, I’m just so happy to have you on for a second time. Thank you,

Stephen Shapiro:

Jenn, it was my pleasure. Thank you so much.

Jenn DeWall:

Thank you so much For listening to today’s episode of The Leadership Habit. If you want to learn more about Steve, check out his website, StephenShapiro.com. You can find his newest book, Invisible Solutions, as well as his game Personality Poker, which is a tool to help make your team more innovative and drive high performance. In addition, be on the lookout for Stephen’s podcast, Invisible Solutions, or you can go to InvisibleSolutionsPodcast.com. And there, just like you talked about on the show, you can go in and maybe submit your innovation challenges and see if Steve can help you solve them. I think that’s such a really neat thing that he’s doing. If you liked today’s episode, please don’t forget to share it with your friends and family, share it with your boss. And of course, write us a review on your favorite podcast streaming service. Thank you so much for tuning in until next time.

 

The post Episode 46: Find the Invisible Solutions to Innovation Challenges with Stephen Shapiro appeared first on Crestcom International.