 I'm very happy to be here with Alex Osservard and then Pink and it's really an opportunity for us to talk about one of the key research we are doing now on transformation and talking about motivation and how to move people. So you early today Alex said about this concept of exploration and exploitation and in most of the incumbent organizations they are on this exploitation environment and it's so hard for them to shift the way they behave and the people think. So I would love to hear from you what would be your advice to C-Level executives to drive this kind of environment in the inside organizations. So I'll start with something very simple it might almost sound condescending but I think senior leaders and boards maybe even investors should start to understand what innovation really is because when I hear CEO say everybody needs to be an innovator I immediately know they don't really know what they are talking about because innovation as one word doesn't make sense. There is efficiency innovation which in exploitation you make better processes and that sometimes can look very sophisticated AI and so to make your existing business better that's good. But then on the other end we have growth innovation transformational innovation which is very different. So these are both used the word innovation but they are very different. Efficiency innovation is easier to do is more about management. Where it gets hard is transformational innovation. And now back to your question what can you do as a leader well understand and then commit at least 40% of your time in your agenda every week on innovation because if you just say it's important but you don't do it what's the symbolic message you are sending to the company right? So innovation needs more power and that's actually relatively easy to give right but it does mean you need to educate the board you need to educate investors that you're in it for the long term that in the short term you can't do transformation. So building this kind of dual culture yes I'm spending some time on my you know existing and managing that but at the same time really investing time energy money and mindset into growth and transformation that's a symbolic value to the company. And those who are at the very top of innovation Amazon Ping An they're doing that their leaders are investing their time and energy in innovation and that's a very symbolic value like Jebesis likes to say we need to keep a culture of day one when that doesn't come from the top guess what not going to happen it's as simple as that right then that comes back to motivation and we put in place the right incentive systems for those things to to actually take off. What are you you have an amazing research on motivation what would would be your advice for these leaders? Well I think it's not only motivation I think as Alex is saying it's structural too so what what's the structure and I think at a very top level if you if we go with Alex's idea of explore and exploit I think that the the one of the fears with putting an emphasis on the explore side is that they feel like it's always coming at the expense of exploit and I think what we need to do is say like we can do both of these things it often involves different structures it often involves different people and I think it also also involves different motivational schemes but to put time and effort and energy into exploration doesn't mean that we are going to deny the importance of exploitation so I think that's at a top level at the at the other level again I think there are two things structural and motivational what we know what what I think structurally is I agree with Alex mostly on on two big points one I not only doesn't have to come from the top it has to be honored it doesn't even have to come from the top it has to be honored at the top and has to be honored in the day to day behavior of the people at the top so if the people at the top are saying one thing and doing something else all that does is harden the cynicism and and and we all know that it seems self-evident yeah but the number of times that that happens yeah is so much greater than the number of times that it's actually actually the words and the deeds cohere the second thing is that I have become over time a bigger believer in starting small and and I think that instead of saying how do we become more innovative I think the question is reframe the question so what's one thing we can do tomorrow to be better at exploration and I think if you start thinking about it that way it becomes more do a little people so I don't know if it's 40% of the time maybe it's even a much much smaller percentage of of the time maybe it's one day or maybe it's one day a week so 20% of the time or maybe it's maybe it's one afternoon 10% of the time but actually something that is small and doable because what I have found is that in some level the way we think about organizations and I think it's true for project managers get it get a sense of this too is that we've kind of we've we've overvalued big hairy audacious goals and undervalued small winds and so small winds are actually really really important now when it comes to the motivational side once we have the structure what motivates explorers is different from what motivates exploiters and what motivates explorers is having a sense of autonomy some sovereignty over what you do how you do it who you do it with the chance to work on something insanely cool to make an impact and to work with great people and that's what that's what it is and it isn't about saying whoever has the best idea gets a bonus in fact I can that can actually there's a lot of there's a lot of research showing that that can actually inhibit performance I want just to build on yeah on what you just said and we did last year one one research and we came with some statements and we saw that one of the biggest roadblocks for organizations incumbent organizations to move and change it's on the people side and I'm saying people on their own interest yeah it's something like for example it's not a matter of putting money to transform the business but people need to feel how they fit on the future because if they see that the future is is really very scary for what they do today how to change this this behavior yeah if you are a large company I want to connect it back to what what Dan just said and what's important is people within the structure so I think you really hit the nail on the head because some people are better at managing right and exploitation and some people are better at exploration with uncertainty right but for those you know strengths to really emerge you need to put in place the structure so both can give their best right and what I think we don't have today is the space and that's not just a physical space we often have that but the mental space the metric space for innovators to really blossom right so many people will try once and it doesn't work they'll go to the competition they'll try it twice and then they become entrepreneurs so what established companies need to put in place is a structure where innovators and ideas can really bloom and then back to what you said about you know small matters I think that's actually one of the big challenges so what gives you prestige in an established company is a number of people you're managing yeah and the size of your budget now here's what happens in innovation actually a lot of in venture venture capitalists like Vinod Costa they say if I give a team too much money they're actually gonna blow it so the more money you give a team the likelier you are to decrease the success now why is that because in execution we need to build a new factor we need 500 million we need a billion there it works big numbers so we think oh we need to make a big splash new growth business we're gonna give them a lot of money what happens when you give a team a lot of money they actually build the thing Qualcomm is a good example they built something called flow TV beautiful idea on paper great business plan so they invested a lot they built it nobody came they had to fire the few customers so in innovation in growth innovation in particular better off sparting small with many many projects to help those ideas that can get traction those teams that contract get traction bubble up so you need to create an ecosystem where you invest in many teams yeah and small investments and then follow-up investments so the system will help you get the best out of people so people matter but people won't be able to matter as much if you don't put in place the structures that you were talking about me well but P I mean because people like everything we do in life is in context so it's not as if we behave in a vacuum we behave in particular context and the context drives our behavior more than we're willing to admit on almost every dimension of human behavior one of the you know it's what it's one of the core principle it's one of the the chief cognitive biases that human beings have particularly human beings in the west have is what's called the fundamental attribution error when we try to explain people's behavior predict people's behavior we over emphasize the importance of the personality who they are and under under weight the importance of the context that they're in and so you can have people who are extremely innovative in one context who will wither in another context so we have to think about people in contact the person in the in the situation and both are and I think both are really important and what we know about this is I think we know I think we know actually a decent amount about all I think we know how to do this more or less and Alex make some great points some the importance of some amount of constraints there's a sweet spot between two something that's too constraining doesn't foster innovation something that has no constraints lots of money lots of people doesn't have enough constraints so you want some and their ways to their ways to experiment with that I mean not to deify Jeff Bezos but Jeff Bezos has this idea of you know the two pizza theory of innovation where the number of people you want on a team is a number of people who could share two pizzas you have more people than that that's not you know and so I think literally heuristics little things like that are really important so put the right put the right people in the right context and try stuff and keep doing what's working and stop doing what's not working and you have to just you know you have to as Alex is saying you have to just let a lot of you have to let a lot of things a lot of things bloom and you also have to do it in a hard-headed way this is not kind of a hippie-dippy idea this is the idea that whoa wait a second if something does bloom wow wait a second this flower is actually blooming let's go gather the seeds and give it to the exploiters so that we have a forest of it rather than just a single bloom and let me build on that for a second because I think we always when we say innovation we think of creative genius you know the person who's going to be on the cover of a magazine you know actually when you do design you come up with new you know industrial designs or architecture you go through a training to go through a process of continuous destruction and reconfiguration till you figure it out so there's this myth that innovation is about creative genius or creativity there's part of that you know ideas are free and cheap there is a process that we now know how it works and we need to incentivize people in innovation to behave the right way it's not about giving them money and say hey have some fun experiment and figure it out there's a process of how you decrease risk and uncertainty of ideas the more you decrease risk the more you invest the more traction you get if you invest in 20 to 40 teams every year you will know that if they follow the process you will get some winners it's simple portfolio theory right now if you're too restrictive you actually kill the creative genius right so you need both but you need to figure out the right processes incentive systems so we can distinguish between vision and hallucination right so you get the right ideas to bubble up