Scott Anthony, Paul Cobban, Rahul Nair and Natalie Painchaud have written a compelling article in the 2019 November/December edition of the Harvard Business Review titled Breaking Down the Barriers to Innovation. The authors write “To catalyze innovation, companies have invested billions in internal venture capital, incubators, accelerators and field trips to Silicon Valley. Yet according to a McKinsey survey, 94% of executives are dissatisfied with their firms’ innovation performance”. The authors believe this is true because business leaders “have failed to address a huge underlying obstacle: the day-to-day routines and rituals that stifle innovation”.

To address this problem, they “devised a practical way to break bad habits that squelch innovation and to develop new ones that inspire it…It involves setting up interventions we call BEANS, shorthand for behavior enablers, artifacts and nudges“:

  • Behavior enablers – tools or processes that make it easier for people to do something different
  • Artifacts – things you can see and touch that support the new behavior
  • Nudges – Promote change through indirect suggestions and reinforcement

The authors define innovation as “something different that creates value”. One of the biggest barriers to innovation is organizational inertia. They quote one executive who told them that businesses are “organized to deliver predictable, reliable results – and that’s exactly the problem…A major paradox managers face is that systems that enable success with today’s model reinforce behaviors that are inconsistent with discovering tomorrow’s model”. The authors prescribe BEANs as the method to combat organizational inertia.

Here are some examples they use of organizational BEANs:

  • DBS (bank): MOJO – This BEAN promotes “more efficient, effective, open and collaborative meetings”. The MO is the “meeting owner who’s responsible for ensuring that the meeting has a clear agenda, that it starts and ends on time and that all attendees are given an equal say”. The JO (joyful observer) “is assigned to help the meeting run crisply and to encourage broad participation”.
  • Adobe – To encourage experimentation and simplify innovation, this BEAN sees employees “apply to receive a red “kickbox” that contains do-it-yourself innovation training, including exercises to perform and a checklist for developing a new product or service idea and pitching it to management”.
  • Tata Group (India’s largest conglomerate) – This BEAN gives an award out at their annual ceremony that honors innovation accomplishments called “Dare to Try”. This award “goes to a team that failed but in an intelligent way”.
  • Spotify – To address employees’ fear of failure and to stress a need to learn from mistakes, this BEAN includes a “fail wall” – “a whiteboard with Post-Its that publicly celebrates project failures”.
  • Atlassian – To help identify threats to new initiatives and develop a defense against them, this BEAN sees teams, before starting a project, “meet to discuss how it could fail, doing a seven-step exercise that includes a structured cross-examination (in which a group arguing the “success” case questions a group arguing the “failure” case and vice versa), voting to gauge risk severity, assigning risk “owners” and planning how to minimize threats”.
  • Boehringer Ingelheim – To encourage collaboration and cross-pollination, this BEAN is called lunch roulette that is a company website that “randomly pairs employees for meals. Participants select a date and a location, click a “match me” button and simply show up with open minds and a willingness to network”.

The authors believe that BEANs help “dismantle blockers to innovation and encourage employees to experiment”. This is the key to see the “gap close between leaders’ innovation goals and reality”. The HBR article closes by stating “When the people in your organization were children, they were brimming with curiosity and creativity”. The leader’s job is to “bring that youthful spirit back to life”. BEANs are an effective way of doing just that.