Ep. 205 - Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Adaptation Advantage on Innovation, Agile Mindset & Being Uncomfortable

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger founder of InsideOutside.io, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I am your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Chris Shipley. She is the co-author of the new book, The Adaptation Advantage.  Welcome to the show, Chris. 

Chris Shipley: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I appreciate it. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on for a number of different reasons. You and I go back on number of years, mentoring Pipeline Entrepreneurs, and you were one of the first speakers at one of the first IO Summits that we had few years ago. So, I really appreciate you jumping back into the community to talk about your new book and everything that's going on in the world of technology, coronavirus and everything else it's happening. So, thank you very much for coming on. 

Chris Shipley: Is there anything else going on in the world, but coronavirus right now?

Brian Ardinger: I don't know. Probably not. 

Chris Shipley: Well, you know, it certainly contextualizes everything. I didn't plan to release a book in the middle of a pandemic, but it's put the writing and the thinking about future of work really in sharp definitions. Oddly, it's a good time. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, the timing is perfect for this and you and I have been in this space talking about disruption and startups, technology, and all of this. And we've been warning folks for a long time about the coming changes, whether it's new technology like AI or self-driving cars or global climate change, et cetera. And it seems like it's only now hitting folks that, oh yeah, this disruption thing might actually be real. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on that mind shift that a lot of people are going through right now. Like they may have heard about it change and, and talked about this, this rapid pace of change, but only now are beginning to see it. 

Chris Shipley: I think you hit it exactly right. It was easy before January to think about this future is something that's out there. It might be months or years or decades away, but it's, it's something I can deal with then. And very forward-thinking companies and individuals, of course, were doing strategic planning and doing longterm thinking, but again, it was very easy to focus on the immediate thing in front of you. What's been so important now is to see this acceleration that a lot of the things that we write about in the book, a lot of things that people have been concerned or working on strategic plans or longterm planning, it's just been compressed into a very short period of time where we've started to have to activate a lot of those plans or make plans and activate them very, very quickly. 

So, this time, whether it's the virus or our reaction to it, has been an accelerant to get to the kinds of transitions that we know we have to make that are really hard to do when you're very comfortable where you are. It's really difficult. If you're on firm ground to take a step onto something that might be a little uncertain. Now everything's uncertain. So, leaping from the one Lily pad to the next, starting to feel like it's not such a bad thing after all.  

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's also interesting to see which companies are jumping on that and adapting faster. I'm currently at Nelnet. Now we have 6,500 employees in multiple different states and we basically transitioned 6,000 of those employees to remote work in a matter of 10 days. And that's something that I think if you would've gone into the boardroom two weeks earlier and said, Hey, I think this is what we need to do, we just need to go remote. It would have never happened. 

Chris Shipley: Yeah. You would have said, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Think about what that could save us in real estate and HR costs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and let's form a committee. And we'll create a strategic plan and let's make that our goal for 2022. Instead, it was like, we gotta do it right now. So, what right now do we have to do? And I've seen a number of companies looking at that from we've got to make sure that every employee has the best possible bandwidth or one company that has been deploying their ergonomics specialist to FaceTime meetings where they say, well, point your camera at your work situation. Why do you have your laptop on a hamper? And you're sitting on a beach chair that really can't be healthy now, can it. Let's set up a pickup station so you can come by campus and get your office chair. I mean, they're doing things that are, we never think about, even in a very deliberate strategic plan they're making happen in matters of days. If not even faster. 

Brian Ardinger: It's not just the bigger corporations it's you and I both work with smaller startups. And a lot of times they're thought of as nimbler and things along those lines, but they're also struggling with the fact that our business model doesn't work right now, or the business model we are trying to evolve our work on is now totally disrupted for six months. And we don't have six months of runway to figure it out the next step. So, what do we do? 

Chris Shipley: You're telling the story that I'm living right now. I'm working with the company, tremendous potential, and you know, we've been able to make rudimentary progress over the last 18 months. We've made more progress in the last two weeks than we have in the prior, certainly six months in terms of understanding where we need to go focusing, being laser, you know, in our execution, because we know we've gotta be in a place to either extend the runway we have, or really be an attractive investment vehicle by mid summer. That doesn't give us time to, it was my father would say lollygag around, waiting to hope that something good is going to happen or that people are going to get around to figuring out what our brand strategy should be. Whatever. It had to happen like that. And so that's the positive that comes from this that we have become extraordinarily focused on. What's important, both in work and I would say argue in our personal lives as well. 

Brian Ardinger: So let's go back to the book. It's called Adaptation Advantage.  Can you give us a little thesis about it. And maybe how you got to write this book. 

Chris Shipley: On the way back machine a little bit, it was 2015 and I was speaking at a conference in Sydney, Australia, and another speaker, Heather McGowan, who gave a presentation. And afterward I approached, I said, well, you just talked about my life. And it was this presentation about how work is changing, how individual contributors play a different role on the corporation. And, and so we just, I got to talking and discovered that at the time, anyway, we were living about six miles apart, both in the Boston area.and a friendship formed. We spent a lot of time just having conver...