hello and welcome to this podcast series up next up we have our innovation evangelist neris muklow talking with tom cheese wright an applied futurist over to you guys hello nerf hi tom how are you good thanks good so you've got innovation in your title it seems like an appropriate subject to talk about and particularly this current period where it feels like pretty much every organization in emirates had to innovate sort of driven by this shock of covid there's been an enormous amount of innovation in the technology we use the way we work and i guess my i i've been very impressed by that but i guess my concern is can we continue that momentum is there a possibility of maintaining that momentum of innovation are we just going to sort of snap back to old ways of doing things yeah i think uh i think there is a danger that you know when this is long forgotten if you like those old habits will start to creep back in but i was saying to someone the other day like what's going to happen and i love an analogy by the way but what's kind of happened is a bit like when somebody has a health scare right you know they've been kind of probably a little bit overweight maybe drinking too much not kind of doing any exercise you've been talking to my doctor they perhaps have a health scare and then suddenly it gives them that kind of momentum that compelling reason if you like to actually do something about it and i think you know businesses i've had this you know they've known for ages i need to innovate more i mean that's we talk to customers all the time yeah innovation is a kind of a top line agenda and we absolutely need to innovate but they perhaps haven't been kind of put it as much priority as they should have on it previously but now they have this kind of big health shock if you like um and it has forced them to innovate because it's kind of like innovate or die really for some some of these organizations recently so i think you know what in order to keep it going moving forward it's really important to kind of reinforce like the good things that came out of this um and by that i mean you know anything you can show around the fact that yes what we did was we you know we went to market with a whole new uh you know business uh line in a smaller amount of time they're not a kind of example of that or a new we embraced a new operating model an example of that would be if you look at kind of the lidls and the aldi's you know they very much have been around kind of low-priced supermarket shopping but they didn't have any delivery capability now clearly you know they've had to have that same delivery capability because we've seen you know tesco's and asda and sainsbury's and everybody they can't feel you know fulfill the demand for it and it was great because what they've done is they've actually partnered with i think it's delivery and they've actually said look you know you're delivering fast food how about delivering kind of supermarket food for us right and and you know they've now got and kind of an online delivery capability from that now why would you kind of do away with something that's just opened up a greater revenue stream so you know i think i think just kind of making sure that everybody's mindful of what those innovations drove and from a kind of a top line and bottom line perspective as well you know we grew more revenue or actually we were able to actually trade in some cases so you know i think it is kind of safe reinforcing that um and not letting those old habits kind of creep back in because this is a really good time now to kind of you know stay kind of like you know be fit if you like for the future um rather than actually creep back to those old ways of working well absolutely i think one of the really interesting things one of the real positives is that everyone seems to have surprised themselves at the speed they could innovate the speed they could change you know i think people have been putting these things off because they felt it was going to be difficult and it was going to be painful and maybe this project wouldn't succeed and actually under duress these massive transformations have been made and you know per your uh for the the new research you know 92 executives were kind of surprised at the speed that they that they made this transition i i'd hope that gives them some confidence they can keep it going yeah and again i think it's you know beforehand if you think about kind of rolling out a new technology there's like lots of planning going on into it and often kind of you know taking it to many different steering committee type things um and there's a lot of i don't know the momentum the the necessity um kind of perhaps isn't there to sort of drive them forwards and it's not saying that people have kind of cut corners but i think they may be taking a bit more of a pragmatic and measured approach to risk actually so yeah if you think about it when i was chatting to an engineering company not so long ago that said our team's rollout was scheduled for 18 months across you know across the globe we did it in 18 days right and that's because if we didn't we wouldn't have been able to kind of actually work with our colleagues globally and we need to and i actually had somebody the other day which was an engineering company that trump that completely they said you know we literally did it in a few days right and it was a case of okay you know that measured risk taking what's the risk of me not having it versus the risk of me having a you know a tried and tested best of breed solution at the end of the day right um rolled out so you know i think it shows you what you can do um when the when the need is there and i think it's you know we need to make sure we don't lose that sort of agility and we don't lose that sort of pragmatism as well and as i said if you if you're going with you know good best degree technology providers like ourselves right you know we we invest heavily into security because you know we need to make sure that our clients data is kept really really safe right so you know you're quite we're kind of taking some of that that risk if you like away from you really and some of those kind of concerns away from you um and then you know having a focus on it sometimes it just been good enough so that's the other thing people often focus i think on perfect and you know we all know if you've embraced kind of agile ways of working look at you know is it better than what i've got now is it an incremental improvement what is just good enough for that first rollout and then we can spend our time incrementally kind of adding to it and making it better and better so you know i think people have had to embrace that way um and i would yeah i do hope that they continue to do so and again it comes back to what i said earlier you need to kind of remind people next time you know when this is all sort of over and done with uh and you're looking at you know what you need to plan in your kind of um you know your your your backlog of work if you like um you know be a little bit more open-minded about what you can deliver um and do you think it'll change people's attitude to risk like the fact that they've that they've had to innovate and i think a lot of organizations recognize that they need to continue to innovate you know the the picture right now for uh this of the next 12 months is you know very challenging in some senses clearly a very different market going forward to what we experienced up to that uh that sort of disruption point of covet hitting would you think that there's a different attitude to risk uh appearing amongst particularly sort of executive class now to actually i will stake my name on making this project work yeah so i i think there's kind of two sort of views on that really in a way so i think in terms of uh looking at risk actually some of the areas of their business has been perhaps more broadly affected and exposed more of a risk actually in their business operations um so if i just start with that what i mean is if you look at things like the supply chain right so there's been a huge drive over the years to move to a very much adjusting time type supply chain model which is great when everything is working really well and you don't have a global pandemic going on but what it has done um is it's exposed a lot of weakness in that supply chain and so i think you know businesses are now having to look at okay how do i still have the efficiencies in you know just in time if you like from a sense of i'm not holding lots of inventory i'm not tying up a lot of my cost but i'm reducing the exposure to things like um you know another pandemic and borders being shut so do i start to look at a more of a multi-vendor supply chain type approach and you know another example of that i think is in the kind of uh outsourcing market so again if you look at uh particularly financial uh services institutes financial services companies sorry and you also look at kind of utility companies it was a big big drive um to use kind of outsourced uh contact centers and um again if you put it all in kind of one location then there was a you know potentially a big challenge there and i know you know certainly during you know some of the months in the pandemic some of the contexts and some of the smaller ones in some of the locations like south america and india have been massively impacted right because they kind of they didn't have quite the same infrastructure to enable people to kind of work from home um quite as easily so you know some of the challenge again when you're looking at the kind of the workforce is like the supply chain how can you de-risk that from a kind of a multi-region um perspective and how can you build a bit more choice and cope with those bear abilities if you like both from work on a workforce perspective but a supply chain perspective so that's where i think it's opened up how you know it's opened up organization's eyes to the fact that there is a lot of risk around their operations that perhaps um they they weren't haven't planned quite as well for there's a really nice illustrations of the shift from being concerned about the risk of innovating to being concerned about the risk of not innovating like actually there's there's a load of risk already and which we're exposed to if we don't change things rather than being overly focused on the risk of what we do is this is the risk of what we don't do i think those things are so often hidden and and as you say we've been going to organizations for years and saying you innovate innovate innovate and they say i know we need to but it's really exposed that hasn't it i thought one of the things that was really interesting that came out of the the survey results was the really different attitude to this sort of continuing innovation between employees and executives where actually a lot of execs were kind of happy with the way things were before like i think half it is say i want to go back to the way things were before and whereas you know 83 percent of employees yeah prefer we prefer the situation we've moved to prefer these new ways of working do you think do you think that mindset is is likely to be overcome do you think that's going to see certain people you're perhaps less suited to new ways of working what's good what's going to shift that intransigent half of executives you think yeah so i i found that stat really interesting as well and i thought well maybe it's a kind of it's a fear thing right so um if you're kind of you know an exec you've obviously got generally a lot of experience you're used to things being done in a certain way and this has come and kind of disrupted things so you know the fact that kind of 50 uh almost 50 percent of execs are kind of saying look you know they'd kind of like to go back to previous ways of working i think a lot of that is definitely rooted in fear um and it's the unknown right so we're asking a lot of people to step into the um to the unknown and then i think to myself again you know what's that you know how can we get over that and it's got to be backed up by data right it's got to be backed up by kind of data points and we need to start thinking much more about the kind of the output and the value rather than the productivity side of things i somebody can be really busy but you know we've all met people in life i'm sure that are brilliant at being busy but you know what are they actually delivering and i think you know for example to really feel comfortable about this way of working you need to have a way that you can measure the value that people are contributing to the organization rather than just the kind of just the sort of velocity or the pure productivity type metrics um and i think you know i'm a big fan actually of um okrs objectives and key results as a way of kind of getting everybody um sort of centered around what you're trying to do as a business giving them the autonomy to work in a way that um you know drives value against those key objectives for the business and they're completely outcome driven um as opposed to i've done you know 50 hours of training this month so therefore i've ticked my l d type um objective or you know i've answered you know this amount of emails or this amount of their phone calls and indeed you know we're seeing that in kind of service desks actually you know service desks now obviously with tools that service now you're automating um a lot of work away from agents so you know when you're measuring people you can't measure how many calls they're necessarily um uh you know responding to what you want to be measuring is the value of that customer interaction so i think yeah value driven metrics um really focused on the outcome is the is a way to help those execs in overcoming that fear that's i think that's a really interesting target for innovation i think you know we could talk about more but you know what do you see other sort of really obvious um targets that's an innovation investment right now that have maybe been thrown up by the crisis you know particularly around where would you be if you if you were in that executive's role now the one who's actually bought into the fact that we need to maintain this momentum of innovating you know where would you be thinking your your attention and your investment right now um i i i think again it will depend on the industry that you're you're in so um for example you know if you are in uh healthcare if you're in retail if you're in hospitality right um clearly that physical kind of interaction um is very minimized so you need to be looking at how you can still deliver those services you can still in this case of a revenue um a retail industry you can still you know keep and protect your revenue base so i would be looking at okay you know what what do we do oh we sell stuff okay if we don't have a good online presence then we need to be you know rapidly um you know rapidly investing in that and the same with um healthcare and hospitalities are a little bit trickier because obviously you know because of certain restrictions it means that people can't do it potentially be there in person but again you know what can you do and how can you if you like pivot your operating model to be more digital i suppose that's what it comes down to is like you know you understand what your business model is and how you make money but how can you invest in innovations in your in your operating model which will actually drive that business and it is going to vary totally as i said from industry to industry but you know digital is not going away so you know digital transformation and which we've been talking about for some time is clearly you know back firmly on the agenda and getting you know the focus it actually probably needed some time ago brilliant thanks very much guys i think we'll stop there but that was a really compelling conversation and i hope our listeners agree thank you very much