From Frustration to Flow: The ‘Five Mindsets’ Framework for Innovation Effectiveness

Let’s face it — it’s 2024! Despite investing in Design capability, many organizations struggle with innovation implementation.

During the early 2010s, organizations looking to improve their innovation capability hired designers and researchers or acquired design agencies to support business growth, giving rise to the design acquisitions movement between 2010–2020. Organizations invested in two areas: 1/ They established an internal design capability that collaborates with their in-house R&D teams to develop new growth opportunities; 2/ For the first time, they appointed designers to take on senior leadership positions.

While this was a significant step towards building the capability, many business leaders had a limited view of the role of ‘Design’ in innovation, and many organizations still fail to recognize it today. Organizational leaders believed that perhaps adding an in-house innovation team would somehow help them become more customer-centric and consciously innovative. However, this did not happen.

So, what was the problem?

Most organizations did not invest in 1/ Aligning the organization’s legacy processes to newly formed aspirations, 2/collaborating between their existing wealth of knowledge and new capability, and 3/ shifting KPIs for leadership to align with those new aspirations. This led to what I call innovation bottlenecks, which I have covered in a previous article.

The BIG problem

The recurring problem I see is the lack of a reliable ‘innovation flow.’ Boundaries limit the transfer of knowledge about an idea as it moves from one functional silo to another, killing, changing, or slowing down the innovation. Some of these issues may be caused by misalignment between business strategy and new product development initiatives, loss of knowledge transfer between functions, redundancy in processes, or even lack of cooperation or internal competition. Tackling these bottlenecks in innovation implementation is the hardest part of innovation.

Let’s understand why this is so hard and what makes this problem severe.

Even though individuals are aware of these barriers, they are frustrated because the issues are:

1. Invisible — Identifying challenges and obstacles can be difficult when they fall outside the purview of any individual or team, making them impossible to address.
2. They are nobody’s job to solve — Such invisible and unacknowledged problems lie between disciplines, and no single individual is responsible for eliminating bottlenecks.
3. It requires skills beyond — strategizing at an organizational operational efficiency level requires different skills and often involves stepping out of one’s job boundaries. Rigid job descriptions isolate individuals and prevent them from taking positive risks.
4. No incentives — eliminating inefficiencies is not rewarded in most organizations as they don’t map to critical metrics.

Design is often associated with new and groundbreaking ideas. However, design can also foster flow across disciplines/functions to ensure sustained and successful growth. Identifying what we call “Innovation Catalysts,” can eliminate innovation bottlenecks in organizations. Catalysts are able to gain support, and turn the tide on slow innovation flow.

How might we empower and nurture Catalysts to eliminate problems systematically and make innovation efforts more effective?

At Khoj Lab, through multiple rounds of research and development, we defined five critical areas for organizations to maximize their value impact and build effectiveness in their innovation efforts, which we call the Five Mindsets framework. Each mindset has four key aspects that help organizational leaders take a holistic and systematic approach to improving conditions, broadening opportunities, advocating for change, and enhancing team impact.

#1 PURPOSE-DRIVEN MINDSET

A ‘Purpose-Driven Mindset’ is motivated by emotional energy, which fuels action toward desired impact. People with this mindset prioritize their purpose and values when making decisions on behalf of the business.

“The three things that motivate creative people — autonomy, mastery, purpose!” — Daniel H. Pink

Four aspects of this mindset are:

• Common Belief: aligned business values to an individual’s passion makes work more enjoyable
• Intent: Provide clarity and focus to make individuals feel closer to the impact of their work
• Autonomy: Empower employees to be proactive and risk-takers
• Motivation: Leverage self-driven behavior

Case Study:

Barrier: We often see a lack of alignment in how organizational leaders make decisions. Although many organizations are getting better at sharing their purpose at the organizational level, many still need help connecting purpose down at the team level.

Action: The 10 Design Tenets at Herman Miller are a great example of this mindset. Simple yet powerful, the tenets establish Herman Miller’s view of design, helping balance form and function, maintain quality standards, and educate the entire Herman Miller community about the company’s defining characteristic: beautiful and functional design- and why that matters.

Impact: These tenets provide a clear framework for business leaders to prioritize their values and approach in their day-to-day decision-making.

Takeaway: A Purpose-Driven Mindset helps organizations find ways to quickly align everyone with the innovation intent and ensure they understand the innovation goals and aspirations.

#2 OPERATIONAL MINDSET

An ‘Operational Mindset’ seeks constant improvement by finding creative ways to minimize variability. People with this mindset are always looking to explore new ways of doing business to support innovation goals.

“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.” -Shigeo Shingo.

Four aspects of this mindset are:

• Process: establish a well-understood and followed process across disciplines
• Resource Allocation: align human resources to the kind of innovation aspirations
• Metrics: reward efforts for removing innovation barriers.
• Risk Management: agree on a balanced portfolio to manage innovation risk

Case Study:

Barrier: The leadership directed our team at GE Transportation Digital to accelerate GE’s Digital Transformation and Innovation initiatives without additional funding.

Action: To identify resources to work on this, we compiled every part of the flow sucking up resources and organized them based on their impact on the customer journey. When we presented our documentation to our Chief Growth Officer, he asked us to identify initiatives to discontinue, and make room for new explorations.

Impact: We found that we could free up resources for new initiatives by eliminating 30–40% of the current flow, not creating actual consumer impact, allowing us to explore new initiatives.

Takeaway: It’s not always possible to add investment for new explorations. Having an operational mindset guides us to invest time in assessing what work needs to stop to repurpose funds into new things.

#3 INCLUSIVE MINDSET

An ‘Inclusive Mindset’ opens our minds to a worldview of cultural competence, kindness, and empathy for others to ensure robustness. People with this mindset can draw connections before anyone else does to enable better and quicker decisions.

“Diversity is the mix; Inclusion is making the mix work.”— Andres Tapia

Four aspects of this mindset are:

• Strategic Conversations: Orchestrating in-process conversations and building positive relationships with diverse people
• Participation: Make sure that the right people are involved in the process at the right places.
• Network: The ability to know who’s who and who’s working on what, and building relationships is critical
• Collaboration: Find synergies between legacy knowledge and new thinking

Case Study:

Barrier: In an industrial Digital Fortune 500 Company, eight versions of customer journey maps coexisted in the same organization. Every time a new team took over, they developed a discovery session with customers as if they were starting from scratch, leading to overall customer frustration. The chief executive was shocked to discover that such redundancy had happened without anybody noticing!

Action: We co-created a new product co-development process to achieve a seamless B2B customer experience. To do that, we engaged in 30–40 informal internal interviews and collaborations with individuals across the organization to create a unified process.

Impact: When our Chief Digital Officer launched the final process, they received 100% buy-in because stakeholders had created the process map. They felt they owned it and believed in it.

Takeaway: Instilling an inclusive mindset is an excellent way to overcome your organization’s “top-down culture,” which can often slow decisions and buy-in otherwise.

#4 GROWTH MINDSET

A ‘Growth Mindset’ enjoys challenges and strives to learn, consistently creating the potential for new skills and business opportunities. People with this mindset are passionate about experimenting and exploring with continuous learning as a goal. This mindset ensures we increase the organization’s knowledge with every failure, taking it closer to its growth goals.

“I haven’t failed; I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”— Thomas Edison

Four aspects of this mindset are:

• Trial & Error: Be comfortable with the messiness of the work in progress.
• Learning: Promote exploration and experimentation
• Critique: Be open to constructive criticism and actionable feedback
• Foresight: Ensure innovations are robust and evaluated through a diverse & future perspective.

Case Study:

Barrier: We commonly see leaders focused on achieving quarterly returns to meet their key performance indicators (KPIs) and cannot think ahead.

Action: Our insight and exploration team at Herman Miller launched an initiative that selected seven senior leaders from various fields to address this. Over three months, they participated in six facilitated and structured dialogues on a topic, covering different aspects such as context, problem, ambition, solution, what to do, and how to do it. We used creative thinking methods during each session to stimulate and inspire ideas for the future.

Impact: This initiative’s output was a tangible booklet containing a point of view on the subject. However, during the two-hour sessions, the most significant outcome was that the leaders could detach themselves from the present and focus on the organization’s future.

Takeaway: A growth mindset can help teams identify ways to strategically and creatively instill future-focused thinking into their organization.

#5 USER-CENTRIC MINDSET

A ‘User-Centric Mindset’ puts the user at the center of everything, enabling better decision-making for innovation. People with this mindset genuinely understand the customer and learn to anticipate their motivations, needs, and preferences to create meaningful experiences and build lasting relationships. Some examples of barriers are “Research under-resourced and outnumbered, which limits the discovery” or “Primarily engineering-driven or product-driven approach.”

“Get closer than ever to your customer. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves.”— Steve Jobs

Four aspects of this mindset are:

• User Research: keep user’s concerns and expectations at the forefront
• Active Listening: promote curiosity and concern about the users/customers among all employees
• Insight activation: use the customer lens to bring alignment on the problems to solve.
• Taxonomy & Storytelling: Use memorable and relatable stories to communicate insights to enable stakeholders to be user-centric in their work

Case Study:

Barrier: A large B2B organization recently promoted customer-centricity as its core value. However, employees had different understandings of what that meant. Many believed it was about giving customers exactly what they asked for without realizing it was about building empathy and understanding unarticulated needs.

Action: A team created an online document to define customer-centricity, consumer insight, and design principles. They also conducted workshops to help teams practice customer-centricity in their day-to-day work.

Impact: They had access to information that reminded them of these terms and guided them on what questions to ask the customer.

Takeaway: Strengthening a user-centric mindset helps align all employees and empowers them to make day-to-day decisions, keeping humans at the center of their thinking.

Ways in which organizations can implement the “Five Mindsets” framework.

Every organization has strong and weak mindsets, which co-exist and can evolve. The key is to align and develop a shared understanding of what works and doesn’t work for your organization.

Identify which mindset you are already working on to make stronger and which one is your weakest or the mindset your organization hasn’t even considered.

How to use the Five Mindsets Framework as a tool:

• diagnose your organization’s strengths and weaknesses, and identify gaps in innovation implementation
• generate ideas toward actionable changes and initiatives to eliminate or encourage specific behaviors
• broaden areas for investment to improve innovation effectiveness in your organization on all critical aspects.
• eliminate bottlenecks that are slowing down the flow of good ideas
• identify catalysts in your organization beyond their defined job description

You don’t need to set up a complex program or new processes if you’re a leader looking to boost your innovation efforts. The Five Mindsets Framework covers everything from idea generation to implementation and brings together the right people to overcome obstacles and ensure smooth progress.

Visit www.khojlab/workshop to learn how to set this up for your team and integrate the ‘Five Mindsets Framework’ into your organization.

In line with our vision to help all those who seek innovation effectiveness in their organization, we continue to learn about the challenges, key moments, best practices, and more through the perspective of business leaders, educators, and subject-matter experts. Through our research findings, we create actionable ways to foster an appetite for change to help organizational leaders identify catalysts and bring innovation flow. Here’s what we do at Khoj Lab.

I want to give a special thanks to Jim Long, Anijo Mathew and Cris Beilstein, who inspired the creation of this content and Nyurka Fernandes for all the illustrations.