Delivering Your Innovative Ideas - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review
Sunday, March 6, 2011 at 10:22PM The most valuable consulting lesson I ever received from a client came from being rewritten with neither my knowledge nor input. I'd been asked to run an innovation workshop for Procter & Gamble's R&D group because of a book I had written. While chatting with my managerial host, I noticed a neatly-typed three-page memo about my work attached to the invitation he'd sent to his Winton Hill colleagues.
I asked if I could read it.
My host had effectively "translated" my book's central insights into "P&G-ese." This went beyond edit or synthesis; he rewrote my words, phrases and recommendations in P&G research community language. While P&G-ese was recognizably a dialect of English, reading this translation was a bracing experience. Ah, so that's how they see it. While I disagreed with some parts, this was a fascinating glimpse into P&G's innovation aspirations.
Communicating advice is one thing, getting to see how that advice is actually interpreted and communicated is another. I immediately grasped that P&G's innovation vocabulary was far more important to my effectiveness than my own. Not only would I need to make an effort to talk differently, I now understood I'd have to listen differently, too. Words would speak as loudly as actions. I radically changed my workshop's design.
The workshop, and subsequent interactions, would never have gone as well if I hadn't read the memo. This serendipitous experience transformed how I professionally share expertise. Client-driven translation is the most cost-effective reality-check I know for assessing influence. When you're asking people to innovate beyond their existing experience and comfort zone, anything that facilitates how they better understand you in their own words is a huge win. All organizations speak their own language. How bilingual do you — or your translators — need to be?
On the surface, this is managerial communications cliché. "Speaking their language" or "putting things in terms they understand" is established best practice. But there's a crucial difference. Ordinarily, experts — I use that word broadly — either try to make their expertise more accessible to the target audience or try to "educate" or "train" people into understanding and acceptance. More crassly, the "experts" alternately try to dumb their material down or lift the intellectual capacity of their audience up. Sometimes both.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that. But what I've found works best is making clients (and students) partners in translation. That's achieved by doing by design what I benefited from by accident — explicitly ask people to translate. I give them a PowerPoint slide or a blog post and ask, "How would you explain this to your colleagues? Your boss? Your best customer? I avoid asking, "Could you explain this back to me?" or comparable forms of assessment questions. The issue is less how any given individual "understands" an innovative idea or technique than how the team or group translates it into their own language. Consequently, I'm always looking for easy opportunities to hear, see or experience how my "expertise" gets translated and interpreted for a lager team or group. Where are the gaps, oversimplifications and push-backs that signal misunderstandings that matter?
Anybody who's ever worked with a terrific — or a mediocre — simultaneous translator knows the feeling. You can tell in a quick five-minute conversation whether humor should be a part of your talk or whether you're better off playing it straight. You know if idioms and technical terms of art can be safely used, or whether your talk needs to be made as simple and straightforward as possible. Is the translation a conceptual/technical straitjacket? Or is it an expressive wardrobe that assures a memorable show?
The best lean manufacturing, agile programming, and kaizen workshops I've attended almost always reflect this translational sensibility: the trainers/facilitators move as efficaciously as possible to get their charges to collaborate with and educate each other. They're doing this with an eye and ear to how well their language is being reinterpreted into active learning. For example, the big "win" in the agile programming workshops I've seen come when attendees are critiquing each other's "pair programming" practices. The instructor/facilitator — and everyone else — gets to see just how well (and how poorly) the pair programming principles are translated into interpersonal action. That's when the learning that sticks occurs.
Precisely because all of these practices are inherently novel and innovative for the attendees, the transmission of knowledge is less important than its translation. This was my big "a-ha!" at P&G.
Translations always require translators. If you're an executive, an expert or an advisor seeking to innovate with people who literally understand key concepts differently than you do, then translation — not just teaching — needs to become a core competence. But is DIY translation the best — or even a good — way to go?
No. Just as my P&G host did serendipitously for me, conceive and contrive ways to get people to become your partners in translation. It forces you to pay attention in ways that will make you more sensitive to your clients' needs. That's a good thing.
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