August 13, 2026 • 41 mins
"Spreadsheets are a fantasy made explicit. They're not a metric. What you can measure is the evidence that the business case could work."
Alexander Osterwalder, creator of the Business Model Canvas, CEO of Strategyzer and author of The Invincible Company, Testing Business Ideas and Value Proposition Design, returns to The Innovation Show. He walks Aidan McCullen through the evidence-based innovation playbook he uses with companies like Honeywell to decide which growth projects to fund, which to change, and which to retire — so you get a real funnel, not a tunnel.
In this conversation, Alex reveals:
• Why every upfront business case is "pure fantasy" — and what to measure instead
• The five levels of evidence, from what customers say to what they actually do
• How Honeywell's Growth Symposiums fund projects on scorecards of evidence, not opinions
• Why LEGO Movies started at zero on every score while LEGO Friends started at level-five feasibility
• The explore vs exploit trap: why 90% of companies judge new ideas with "exploit glasses" on
• Amazon's scale from new warehouses to Kindle to AWS — and why AWS was never a business case
• Why engineers build too fast in the age of AI, and why needs and willingness to pay come first
• The "Mark said we know" technique that makes faith-based investing explicit
• What makes an entrepreneurial leader, from Jeff Bezos to Logitech's Bracken Darrell
• The move from books to playbooks: the say-do cycle and the market-readiness assessment, demonstrated live
Chapters:
00:00 Scorecard Of Evidence
02:00 Oscar The Cat
03:00 Welcoming Alex Osterwalder
04:00 From Books To Playbooks
06:00 Honeywell Growth Symposiums
08:00 Business Cases Are Fantasy
10:00 Test Needs And Willingness To Pay
13:00 Five Levels Of Evidence
16:00 Evidence Scorecards Per Idea
17:00 LEGO Movies Versus LEGO Friends
20:00 Explore Versus Exploit Mindset
24:00 The Dual Mindset Leader
27:00 Innovation Theatre Confession
30:00 Playbook Demo Market Readiness
32:38 Scoring Customer Evidence
34:09 Leader Evidence Conversations
36:19 Practical Wrap Up
39:00 Where To Find Alex
Find Alex and the Strategyzer playbook library at https://www.strategyzer.com
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.
Win a copy of one of Alex Osterwalder's books: sign up for the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com/institute and send us a screenshot to be in with a chance, with thanks to Kyndryl.
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
how do I know if I should invest in aproject or if I should kill a project?
(00:04):
Like what, how, how risky is that still?
Those are things that are technical thatyou can easily make the playbook for
What you really wanna do isbreak this down and have evidence
for the different aspects.
So evidence here for desirability.
Do I have evidence one, two,three, four, five for desirability?
(00:25):
Then we go to feasibility.
Do I have evidence levelone, two, three, four, five?
And same for viability.
So it's almost that we createa scorecard for each idea.
Now, to make it concrete, when a teampresents, and I talk, talked to you
about the Honeywell Growth Symposium,each team is not just going to present
(00:46):
the idea, they're gonna present theirscorecard of evidence, and it's the
scorecard of evidence that's gonnagive the leadership confidence.
So the idea per se, you can'tjudge if it's good or bad.
You can only judge, do we haveevidence that shows it's an
idea that is worth investing in?
(01:08):
And at, you know, you do this gradually.
So at the beginning, youmight have a zero everywhere.
Before we start, I wanna thankour sponsor, Kyndryl, who runs
and reimagines the technologysystems that drive advantage for
the world's leading businesses.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
(01:29):
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
Don't forget, sign up for the KyndrylInstitute, where you'll find so
many of the guests we've had onthe innovation show writing bespoke
pieces for the Kyndryl Institute.
And by signing up and sending me ascreenshot, you can be in with a chance
to win a copy of the books on the show.
(01:50):
You can find out more atKyndryl, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, .com.
There's a nursing home andrehabilitation center in Rhode Island
called Steere House, and back in2005, the staff adopted six cats.
One of them was Oscar, andOscar was not the friendly kind.
He kept to himself.
(02:10):
And he hissed at you if you annoyed him.
Then the staff noticed something.
Oscar would pick a patient, jump upon the bed, stamp out a place beside
them, and curl up, and within afew hours, that patient would die.
What I find most interesting isthat he could tell the difference
between a bad turn and the end.
(02:32):
One family described their mother havingseveral false alarms, and each time Oscar
came in, had a look, and left again.
On the last day, he pacedoutside the room for hours.
When nobody let him in, he went intothe room next door and scratched
at the adjoining wall untilsomebody understood what he wanted.
(02:53):
There's a science behind it.
It's called necromones,biochemicals released by dying
cells akin to pheromones.
And what the staff did with thisinformation is what's most interesting.
They didn't argue with the cat.
They rang the family so peoplehad a chance to say goodbye.
Last week, Antonio Nieto-Rodrigueztalked to us about killing projects.
(03:14):
Today, we're joined by the manwho decides which projects get
the money, and you'll notice hedoesn't much like the word killing.
He's the creator of the BusinessModel Canvas, author of The Invincible
Company (03:24):
Testing Business Ideas Value Proposition Design, and CEO of
Strategyzer, where he has moved thebusiness from books to playbooks, which
is something a lot of you have beenasking for on the Innovation Show.
He's a great friend of mine.
He's a great friend of the show.
Alexander Osterwalder, welcome back, sir
thanks for having me.
Great to be back
(03:45):
Always a pleasure, man.
Your shows always are like rocketfuel for the Innovation Show, so it's
always a pleasure to have you, man.
Firstly, before we get stuck intohow to kill projects, and you are the
Oscar, give you the Oscars of killingprojects, what have you been up to?
I know the business hasshifted a little bit.
(04:06):
You've been traveling all over theworld giving keynotes, but more
so giving workshops and teachingcompanies how to actually do this work
I'm passionate about getting peopleto work differently the right
way, , to make projects work.
But everybody's frustrated, inparticular around growth projects, right?
But it goes much further.
You know, new value propositions,strategy, et cetera.
(04:27):
So one of the things that, youknow, I was asking myself is why?
Why can't we make these things work?
Because you have allthese brilliant people.
Um, yeah, our organizations are complex,but, like, we know the tools now, we know
the techniques, we know the processes.
So what are we doing wrong?
And what I started to realize is that,well, we used to do e-learning, we
used to do workshops, we used to dotraining, we do coaching, you know,
(04:51):
consulting, all of it, but somehow itnever really took the r- the right way.
So what we started to do is put thatall together in what we call playbooks.
So instead of trying to teach content, youknow, do consulting, which can get very
expensive, we said, "Well, what if we tookeverything we know, you know, that works,
and we move from books to playbooks?" Youknow, the whole idea of books is around
(05:15):
content and coaching and consulting.
Playbooks is you have an objective,what's the playbook to get there?
Want a great value proposition.
How do I do that?
Oh, I want a great valueproposition with AI.
Well, how do I do that?
So it's just a step-by-step approach.
So we kind of figured out a reallygood way of getting teams to work
differently to get to resultsfaster with all the tools and
(05:35):
methods that are out there, right?
There are a lot of great thinkerswith a lot of great content.
So why aren't organizationsable to adopt them?
So it's not just aboutStrategyzer tools and content.
It's really, like, let's make… Youknow, let's turn all of this stuff into
playbooks that companies will actuallyadopt so that we work in a better way.
(05:56):
So that's been my passion over thelast, you know, two years or so, and
I think we got something that worksfor, for, for many different domains.
I know you can't talk about a lot ofthe brilliant companies you work with
and the successes they've had, andthe ability to kill projects as well.
That's gonna be the focusof this shorter episode.
So one of the things many peoplewho listen to the Innovation
(06:17):
Show, many viewers on YouTube haveasked for, is more of this type of
content, more of playbook style.
So thank you for doing that for us.
You're gonna take us through today how tokill projects, and actually really how to
set them up for success in the first place
and actually there'ssome we can talk about.
So when I say playbooks, weactually have two categories.
(06:38):
We created a playbook library whereanybody can a- get access to the
playbooks we put out there, andhopefully we'll get some thinkers
to put their playbooks in there.
That's publicly accessible for anybody, sosmall teams, startup entrepreneurs, SMEs.
But then we also do these customplaybooks, and the one I can
talk about, we've done manyof these, is for Honeywell.
(06:58):
So we're running their growth symposiumsaround the world, and the idea is exactly
what we're gonna talk about today.
Which projects do we investin, and which project, projects
should we change or retire?
So I'll, I'll, I'll move away fromthe idea of killing per se, and
ultimately the goal is to invest inthose few that can actually work, right?
(07:20):
So you get a real funnel, not a tunnel.
So with, the growth symposium, I'mjust back from Shanghai two weeks ago.
We do that in, in, Shanghai,we do it in India, we do it in
Europe, and we do it in the US.
And the senior leadership team isalways there to invest in the projects.
So the teams get to show these projectsin a very specific way, and I'll, I'll
(07:41):
walk you a little bit through that.
So I'm, I'm happy to reveal thosesecrets because they should be
accessible to everybody, right?
I'll link to all those resourcesthat are available on the Strategyzer
website as well, but Alex is gonnabring us through a few slides.
For those just listening to us, thisis probably gonna be more difficult
to grasp than a usual episode.
But Alex said he'd do his bestto describe this for you and let
(08:04):
you know what's on the screen.
Over to you, my man
I'll use words to describe the visualsso it's easier when you see the
visuals, but, you know, let's alsomake the slides accessible, right?
'Cause w- my goal is reallyto get this stuff to spread.
So, you know, a couple years ago, weworked with a consortium of businesses.
There was, Bosch, there was,Cargill, there was Nestlé.
(08:26):
We came together to ask, "How canwe actually score growth projects
to know which ones to invest in?"So that was the initial goal,
like, how can we create metrics?
Because if you can't measureit, well, you can't manage it.
It's, it's very simple.
So sometimes I'm a bit, you know,surprised how in the innovation and
growth world, we don't measure thatmuch, and we, you know, dole out
(08:48):
money for, you know, things thatpeople didn't show you the metrics.
And when I say metrics, it'snot an upfront business case.
I'll show you what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about measuring the evidencethat the business case could work.
So how should you do this?
So just quickly, fundamentals.
I'll go very quick.
When you start with an opportunity,you can come up with a business
(09:10):
case, but you know what?
It's a fantasy.
So what you really need to dois search for the right Business
Model and Value Propositions.
That's what we need to prove, okay?
So we can actually measure how closeare we to success, and then we kn-
when we're close, we start to scale.
So it's this whole thing, right?
We go from an idea opportunityto the real business.
Now, there are two big tasks there.
(09:30):
One, companies are really goodat designing the business logic.
So with these tools that you mightknow, like Business Model Canvas, Value
Proposition Canvas- Companies makebusiness cases, but here's the problem.
They invest in a businesscase that is a pure fantasy.
What they should do is admit, "Wedo not know if that's gonna work,
(09:50):
so we actually need to test andvalidate," you know, again and again
and again, and we kinda create thisdiscipline that is evidence-based.
So we design, we test, we design, wetest, and that's a gradual process.
Okay?
So that's the process.
So what do we need to test,and what do we need to measure?
(10:11):
So first thing, pretty straightforward.
Well, let's test if thosecustomer needs actually exist.
So sounds trivial, but instead ofgoing to talk to customers or run other
experiments, we're gonna focus, youknow, three weeks on a business case.
That's analysis paralysis.
So we tend to overthinkand under-experiment.
So what you wanna do is you wannathink for maybe a, a half a day, and
(10:36):
then you go and talk to customers.
Do they actually have those needs?
The second thing you immediatelywanna do is willingness to pay.
Do they have a budget?
Have they purchasedthings like that before?
So you're not gonna ask, "Whatwould you pay?" But you start
to investigate, will they pay?
And you can do that either with interviewsor more sophisticated experiments.
(10:57):
Then you start to look at the benefits.
Now you look at the solution, andall the way up to here, you don't,
you don't need to build anything.
So people say, "Yeah, we buildMVPs," minimal viable product.
Well, the problem is engineers loveto build, so they build too fast.
The first thing you wanna do,in particular in the age of AI,
is first test and validate theneeds and the willingness to pay.
(11:21):
Because we can build so fast, we tendto build first, and then we're gonna
build the, the wrong thing for 100 times.
So it's better to startactually with the needs.
Sounds trivial, not done.
Right?
Common sense, not common practice.
Then we go to, um, go to market, and thenwe start to really look at feasibility.
So it's a process.
So you put this together.
We test desirability.
(11:42):
We show the evidence.
That's what we can measure.
We can measure the evidencethat there is desirability.
We can measure the evidencethat there's feasibility.
That's the easiest one 'causeall the engineers are gonna get
excited about feasibility, so thisone we don't need to worry about.
Companies do this well.
But then viability.
We need to measure the evidence thatcustomers will pay, and sometimes
(12:04):
companies tell me, "Yeah, Alex,we actually measure viability."
"What do you do?" "We do spreadsheets."Spreadsheets are a fantasy made explicit.
They're not a metric.
What you can do is measure theevidence that supports the spreadsheet.
So you can say, "Hey, thisis the customer segment.
We talked to 10.
We talked to 1,000,"or, "We surveyed 1,000.
(12:26):
You know, like 50% actually alreadyspent on this type of solution."
That's what you callmeasuring kinda the evidence.
Okay.
So now I showed you the principle.
Let's look at the metrics.
So when we worked with this consortiumof companies, because we wanted to
make it applied, we said, "Well,how could we measure and what do
we measure so that we can applyit from B2C to B2B to government?"
(12:50):
We said, "Well, what we canmeasure is evidence." First rule
is business plans and high-levelmarket research is not evidence.
It's a hint that there's a market there,but just because some big consulting
firm or your internal analysis saidthere's a big market there, doesn't
mean they're gonna buy from you.
It doesn't mean they have theneed you're gonna address.
(13:12):
So that's not evidence yet.
So what is evidence?
Hey, we talked to, let's say,a couple of hundred, and we get
feedback from them, or we run…I'll show you some other experiments.
That's first light evidence.
We give that a score of one, and thenwe can have higher scores if we actually
go further, and they may be pre-purchaseor other experiments where it's
(13:32):
really proof that it's the real world.
Okay, so we score theevidence from one to five.
So let's go through this.
The first two levels is what people say.
So if I do an interview, soI'll make this concrete, okay?
So if I go and talk to people, but Idon't really have the solution yet,
I just do an interview, it's great.
(13:52):
It's a good start.
It's low level.
It's level one.
People, you know, in B2B, theycall this voice of customer.
You have market research firms.
That's great.
That's level one.
But what you then wanna do is, what ifyou showed them a data sheet, a storyboard
that made the solution concrete?
Now they react to a real thing.
That's already level two, butit's still just what they say.
(14:14):
"Oh, I love that solution." "Okay,great." So, so they just say, and then
you might ask, "Would you buy this?""Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." But they say
that, doesn't mean they're gonna do it.
So what you wanna do now is gofurther than just interviews, which
most companies stop there, and theywill invest a million, a hundred
million sometimes based on interviews.
Not good enough.
So then you say, "Well, could wedo a stronger experiment, slightly
(14:39):
stronger, where there's a bit moreskin in the game beyond saying?" So the
typical kinda thing is a landing page.
You put up a landing page with thestoryboard of the solution, and you get
people to sign up maybe for a sales call.
Well, you know what?
That's already more than themjust saying because they came to
you, they signed up for the salescall or for an email or whatever.
(15:01):
There's a small call to action.
That's stronger evidence thansaying, but it's still very weak.
Oh, what could we do?
Could we do something stronger?
Well, if we're in B2B, what if…
Let me get out of the way What if wegot them to sign a letter of intent?
What if we got the CEO of the potentialcustomer to join a co-creation workshop
(15:22):
where he flies over, the CEO fliesover, and we actually work together?
That's a stronger commitment.
Will they buy?
Not sure, but the fact thatthe CEO of a client shows up
is already a bigger commitment.
Oh, could we do something that's a five?
A whole series of experiments that,you know, either it can be a down
payment, it can be a real payment, itcould be some things where you just
(15:46):
go and, you know, watch them in theirplant, how they're actually working.
But the point is that we havelevels of evidence, okay?
So we know we need to gobeyond the interviews.
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
If you just stick to this, peoplewill say, "Oh, they're gonna try to
test the whole idea." But remember, Ishowed you, there are pieces to test.
(16:07):
You test the needs, you test willingnessto pay, you test the solution.
So what you really wanna do isbreak this down and have evidence
for the different aspects.
So evidence here for desirability.
Do I have evidence one, two,three, four, five for desirability?
(16:28):
Then we go to feasibility.
Do I have evidence levelone, two, three, four, five?
And same for viability.
So it's almost that we createa scorecard for each idea.
Now, to make it concrete, when a teampresents, and I talk, talked to you
about the Honeywell Growth Symposium,each team is not just going to present
(16:49):
the idea, they're gonna present theirscorecard of evidence, and it's the
scorecard of evidence that's gonnagive the leadership confidence.
So the idea per se, you can'tjudge if it's good or bad.
You can only judge, do we haveevidence that shows it's an
idea that is worth investing in?
(17:11):
And at, you know, you do this gradually.
So at the beginning, youmight have a zero everywhere.
That's okay Last, you know, the,the, the thing I show sometimes to
make it concrete, if you compareLEGO Friends to LEGO Movies, when
LEGO started to invest in LEGOMovies, all of it was actually zero.
(17:32):
They don't-- didn't know anything.
They didn't know how to make a movie.
They didn't know if the brand would work.
So they start from scratch.
When you take LEGO, uh, Friends, whichwere play box for girls, feasibility,
they had level five from the start.
They didn't need to run experimentsbecause they had the supply chain,
so were already starting at a five.
So you can see, you can alreadystart to compare ideas, which one
(17:54):
is riskier, which one is less risky.
But the point here is, is that we don'tstick to abstract stuff or our opinions,
we stick to more objective evidence.
So that is the theory or the technicalpart where we get very geeky around
these things because we know thatwe need to get to the metrics.
(18:15):
It's not a feeling.
Innovation is actually a process,growth project, and then we start
to build playbooks around it.
So this is a little bit of a veryconcrete content that we kinda give
away, we put them out there on slides,is the playbooks that we then use to
try to get people to the next level toactually doing this in an organization.
(18:35):
Man, I, I have PTSD now.
So it reminded me of my first career,which was in a media company where
I was head of transformation, ordigital transformation, and I was
constantly coming up with ideas,and the CFO would always kill them
by asking me to do a business plan.
And of course, I'd make itup, finger in the air, no idea
(18:56):
even how to do any of this.
And back then, I told you, that'swhen I discovered your work
on the Business Model Canvas.
I tried that, but this is Business ModelCanvas evolved and on steroids in a way.
But I just wanted it to go, okay,so so you're in any company.
Now, I know it might feeldifferent if you're in a services
(19:17):
company or a business co- a, aproduct, physical product company.
you're somebody in la- sector 7G and youhave an idea, what usually happens is
you try and get somebody with authorityto listen to you, or you might be lucky
or a bit more evolved where you mighthave one of those spark boxes where
you can come up and suggest an idea.
(19:38):
But usually they don't go anywhere.
So take us through somebodythere, somebody starting there.
'Cause y- you, youworked with these people.
You've helped these people.
You've actually helped people getall the way through the gates, but
also decide to actually just killthe project in the first place
Yeah.
So there's a bit of a, a,a tricky one there, right?
(19:58):
Because if you're in, what, what yousaid, , sector G7 wherever you are
that's where, HomerSimpson's, office was Sector
Okay.
Okay, got it.
But so the problem is w- you're actuallystarting from a difficult point because
if the company doesn't already understand,you evaluate and invest differently in
(20:20):
growth projects for a future that wedon't know compared to execution projects.
If the leaders don't know, you're alreadya little bit on a lost kinda track, right?
Because they're gonnathink in the exploit world.
So the first tactic I'd say is try toget them to understand that in an explore
(20:41):
world, we don't know if it's gonna work.
We have to be honest.
We do not know.
And then you show them, you know, thebest thing we can do is not a spreadsheet,
because a spreadsheet is a fantasy.
What I did is I startedto collect evidence.
So here's this process where we getmore and more evidence, and based
on the evidence, we should invest.
So you do need to get them intoa frame that how is working in
(21:05):
explore different from exploit?
Because what you need to understand--I do this with leaders all the time,
but it's the same if you're notthe leader making the decisions.
You need to realize in ninetypercent of the companies,
everybody's in an exploit mindset.
So if you don't take them out of theexploit mindset, they're gonna evaluate
(21:25):
everything with that lens, right?
They have the exploit glasses on, sothey're gonna want a business case.
They're going to want, youknow, the spreadsheet, you know,
for the next hundred years.
So what you wanna do is say, "Look,this is not about a business case.
I have one.
I made this, and it looks great.
But what's more important is I'm nowon track to find the evidence that
(21:48):
this business case could work." So youneed to bring them out of the exploit
mindset to show how exploration works.
That's the tough part.
So sometimes if you're in that little box,you can't get leaders to think like that.
But some actually naturally are inclinedto think like that, but nobody's
ever told them to think like that.
I know a ton of CEOs.
(22:09):
Like, I get to work witha ton of leadership teams.
I just start with,"Here's how explore works.
Here's how exploit works." And thenthey immediately realize, "That's why
none of our projects work, becausewe try to pick the right idea.
We had a great business case and,you know, then we poured, you know,
ten million or a hundred millionon the project." That doesn't work.
That works in the exploit world.
(22:31):
So that's the starting point.
That's the unfortunate part whenyou're at the bottom of the pyramid
I love the line that your mentorand friend of the show, Steve
Blank, has, "Exploitation paysyour salary, exploration pays your
pension." I absolutely love that.
It's at the start of
Lead and Disrupt, Tushman and O'Reilly's
book.
But that, that, that is a huge thing.
(22:53):
The last thing before we go on to e-evolve the idea a little bit further
is the, the, the lessons there.
So you talked about earlier on the,the move from books to playbooks.
One of the biggest and saddest things,I think, particularly in the age of AI,
is that we didn't read enough anyway.
We didn't evolve our lenses anyway toadd new lenses when the world changes,
(23:16):
so we're stuck with the lenses we have.
The business schools are teaching models.
Now, it's getting better.
I know, for example, your work, forexample, is taught in Trinity College,
where, business school, where I am,Now, it's getting better, but there's
still a lot of leaders in companieswho have been taught, if at all,
for the way of exploitation, and theworld has changed dramatically, and
(23:40):
the metrics they use to measure thatare so, so different than the metrics
needed for exploration or new ideas.
Maybe just a word on that, becausethat, for example, is a huge thing.
So you talked about lenses there, butthe lenses plus the metrics, of course
many ideas don't make it through thegates because they're measured so badly
(24:02):
Yes.
But so, so couple of things there.
The biggest challenge is indeedwhat you say is that established
companies are trimmed to execute.
And you know what?
That's actually a goodthing because they have to.
And if you're a publicly listedcompany, well, your first thing
is you need to really fight forthe survival of that company, so
you can never neglect execution.
(24:24):
So that's why when people say,"Oh, everybody needs to be an
innovator," I say, "Absolutely not.
You need to run the company." And,and that is a big task, right?
It's like the execution pays the salaries.
So what we need to have now is aneducation for leaders that shows
them they need a dual mindset.
They need to actuallythink, explore, and exploit.
(24:46):
The 19th century, you know, CEO, if I maygo all the way back, that was an exploit
CEO because better processes to run thecompany was the differentiator, right?
Today, the real differentiator isthe ability to constantly transform.
So if you look at the companies thatare at the top of the pyramid today, the
best performing companies, it's thosethat constantly reinvent themselves.
(25:10):
So they're world-class atrunning the business, and they're
world-class at reinventing.
So, you know, the usualsuspect is an Amazon.
Um, but now if the AI… Ifyou look at the AI companies,
which ones are surviving?
Those that can reinventthemselves faster than the others.
So that is a key, and it's not fullytaught yet But the worst thing is that
(25:31):
today we have, you know, heads of strategyand growth or heads of innovation that
have never done it before and thathave not gone through that education.
So sometimes CEOs or leadershipteams put people in place who
they're good with technology.
Well, guess what?
That does not equip youwith being a growth leader.
(25:52):
Growth is something that has processesand ways of doing, and the good
news is we now know how to do it.
So A, let's educate ourselves onhow it's being done, and let's
peop-p- put people in place who'vedone it once or twice, right?
So I still see major corporations,I will not name names, but they
(26:13):
put people in place who don't know.
And then they, you know, they call usand they say, "Alex, can you tell us?"
So we tell them, and then instead of, youknow, working with us so we can help them,
they go and do it themselves, and thenthey realize, "Oh, shoot, didn't work,"
and then they come back to us because,you know, we've done this 100 times.
We're not smarter.
We've just done it so many times thatwe're able to formulate how to do it
(26:36):
from the leadership level, that's whatwe call governance, all the way down to
the team level, which is the process.
Process is the easiest part.
The bastion that we now need to winover is the leadership, and that
means we need to get the boardsto hire already the right CEOs
because some CEOs, they don't know.
Once they know, they will do it.
But some CEOs are very stuck in, youknow, an execution mindset, and it's gonna
(27:01):
be very hard to turn them into what Ilike to call the entrepreneurial leader.
And you don't have to be a Jeff Bezosto be an entrepreneurial leader.
Bracken Darrell of Logitech wasa very entrepreneurial leader
without having been an entrepreneur.
He's been a corporate person forever,but he has that entrepreneurial
CEO mindset and has a dual mindset.
(27:21):
Exploit and explore atthe same time in harmony
I remember Gary Hamel used to say this,that, you know, in, in the way the world
is today, the business environment,you need the entrepreneurial leader.
Ideally, if it was somebody who actuallydid be an entrepreneur in the past,
but failing that, learning new things,learning new tools, learning new lenses.
(27:44):
Just a word on the head of innovationwho doesn't have the training.
I see this all the time.
I was that person, and actually,it's led to this brilliant v- journey
that I've been on to learn, becausewhen I was head of innovation for
the national broadcaster here inIreland, I did a lot of good things,
but they were all low-level things.
They were all… You know what?
It didn't really matterif they happened or not.
(28:06):
They were kind of innovation theater.
But I actually thought they were good,but then as I've learned more and more,
and I realize so much more content is outthere, I realized how little I knew, and
actually, it's why I do the show and whyI try and democratize this knowledge and
share it with the world, much like you do.
But it's to help almost the inner child,young Aidan, and go, "Here, reach out
(28:32):
and help people like me in the past."Because actually, they don't know what to
do, and they weren't taught what to do,and often you're put into that position
'cause your personality is right, you'reentrepreneurial, you have great ideas.
None of that is innovation.
It's highly, highly disciplined,and that's the biggest lesson I had.
And when I work with organizationsmyself, I'm telling them, "That's
(28:53):
the type of person you wanna tr- youwant in the role." It's almost like
the shift to data-based marketing.
You want a marketer that, yeah, hasgreat ideas and knows good brand and
knows good from bad, but actuallycan measure the life out of things
because actually that's the discipline
Yep.
And that's, again, the ideasare the easy part, right?
(29:13):
How to make that work is wh- whywe came up with playbooks also,
because the other thing is thatnobody has time for training.
Everybody's under huge pressure.
You know, big corporations, smallcorporations, they have to deliver.
There is very little time to learn.
So what if you could package thingsin a way that learning is a byproduct?
(29:34):
Because, you know, some peopleare passionate about learning per
se, but at the end of the day,when you have a job, learning is
just, you know, a means to an end.
So what if you can get to those skills?
That got us really passionate aboutplaybooks and, you know, one playbook
was explicitly on how do I knowif I should invest in a project
or if I should kill a project?
Like what, how, how risky is that still?
(29:57):
Those are things that are technical thatyou can easily make the playbook for
okay, man.
Well, we're gonna takepeople out of your misery.
Young Aidan, not that young, 20years ago Aidan, I'm gonna reach back
and go, "Here you go, man. Here's aplaybook. So Alex is gonna teach you
and hopefully help many other heads ofinnovation that listen to the show."
Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonnashow you a quick playbook.
(30:18):
Let me just switch here on myscreen, see if I can make it happen.
So we developed, a playbook librarywhere you have a ton of playbooks
because all of these are thingsyou need to know as, you know, head
of growth and strategy, et cetera.
So it's a library that you get access to.
(30:38):
Now, the playbook that we start tolook at, I, I just prepared this.
I made a project here for the innovationshow, and we just look at a playbook.
So playbook is basically a step-by-stepapproach that tells me a little bit, you
know, what to do, just like I did now,but then you immediately do it, right?
So say, do, say, do, say, do all the time.
(31:00):
So here I have one on howmarket-ready is your project.
So that's an assessment I can go through.
So first one here is, okay,navigating risk and uncertainty.
This is a video that, you know,first you watch and you get a little
bit of the stuff I just told you.
So you do need to learn a bit, but thepoint is, you don't learn for too long.
(31:22):
You immediately go and apply.
So what I mean with that isapply… Well, first, what if
we had a little theory thing?
So in this case, I clicked onthe second step, and the second
step brings us to an exercise.
But then we wanna go as fastas possible to our own project.
So here, just so we understand, let'stake these Amazon projects and put them
(31:43):
on a scale from explore to exploit.
Is this a new idea?
We have no clue if it's gonnawork, or is this managing
the existing business, right?
So pretty straightforward, youknow, start to offer Amazon Web
Services, launch the Amazon Kindle,open new distribution warehouses.
You can already see innovationis everywhere, but this
is much closer to exploit.
(32:04):
It's gonna be much easier toopen a new warehouse than to
start Amazon Web Services.
So guess what?
Amazon did not say, "Hey, give me abusiness case and I'm gonna invest in
the business case." They said, "Okay,the business case could be interesting.
Let's try it out." So theystarted to experiment, right?
So now if I go back and I showyou just exactly what I told you
(32:27):
theoretically, we can do it practically.
So I showed you levels of evidence.
Okay, so let me scroll down here somewherefurther down after I map my idea.
I have a step, step six herethat's called assess and score
the customer evidence that I have.
So I click on this step, andit immediately asks me to score
(32:50):
the evidence for my customer.
So let's say here I put up a stickynote, you know, I'm selling to
innovation, uh, uh, leaders, okay?
That's my first customer segment.
Now, I need to show the evidencethat I have, level one, what people
(33:12):
say, level two, three, four, five,that shows the needs that they have.
So, oh, you know what?
I actually, after the show with Aidan, Italked to a hun- let's say a 10, talked
to 10 innovation leaders, 10 interviewees,okay, um, said they have this problem.
(33:36):
Or let me make it more realisticand say five out of 10.
So I start to collectthe evidence that I have.
So right now, I'm just collecting theevidence, showing the evidence that
I have, that I understand my firstcustomer segment, innovation leaders.
And if I cannot show that evidence,I haven't done my homework yet, so I
(33:59):
shouldn't even start to think about thesolution because, you know, I need this.
So as a project doer, I need to collectthe evidence on customers first.
As a leader, I need to ask the team,"Hey, you're starting to work on
the solution. Do you have evidencethat you understand the problem the
customer needs?" So you go back andpush them back to show me the evidence.
(34:21):
So the key word here is show me theevidence on a scoring level from what
people say, reactions to artifacts.
Oh, I just made a mistake, right?
Because I said That I talked to f- 10people, five said they had this problem.
Did I actually show them somethingvery concrete, an artifact
(34:43):
that they could react to?
No, no, no.
So the leader just asked me, right?
Well, you know what, then it's actuallylevel one evidence because I didn't
show them a concrete situation.
Oh, when you were in this context, did youknow in which projects to invest or not?
So I just caught myself givingmyself a level two score when it
was actually a level one, right?
So you can start to have an objectiveconversation based on these levels.
(35:08):
So you move away the conversationaround evidence away from, "I think
this is a great idea," to, "Well,what's your evidence and what
score does that evidence have?"
So now the whole thing isless about leader's opinion
versus the team's opinion.
It's the team's evidence for the customerversus does the leader believe you
(35:33):
that that evidence is strong enough?
And now, of course, you'll always haveleaders that will say, "Well, I don't
really care what your evidence is," butthen you just have a bad leader, right?
The best leaders will start to havean evidence-based conversation.
So this was just scoring,around the, assessment of the
e- evidence for customers.
(35:53):
So then you do the same for the solution,you do the same for willingness to pay.
But we just walk you through kindagoing through collecting that
evidence and giving it a score.
So we make it ultra practical from a verytechnical thing away from educating you,
from getting you to do it on the spot.
(36:13):
Because this is, again,it's not rocket science.
We're not doing surgery.
We're scoring an idea.
So this is what our idea of playbooks isgetting people to do it, to work on their
project, not fictional stuff, on the spot.
So at the end, you have a scoreof where your project is today.
So that's just anillustration of a playbook
(36:34):
Absolutely love it, man.
I love it.
I, I was thinking about how, , we hadTimo Vuori and Quy Huy on the show
talking about Nokia's reinvention and howNokia moved into the networks business.
And what they said, essentially, wasthe whole company, firstly, they had
psychological safety, where it was okayto call out a bad idea or a good idea.
But more than that, they moved towardsa data-based approach to things.
(36:57):
And I always think of that brilliantline, one of my favorite lines ever,
Upton Sinclair, "It's difficult to geta man to understand something when their
salary depends on not understandingit." This takes that out of it.
I mean, this makes it data-based.
And, you the big thing is, I oftenthink about this, you're, you're
in a room, ideas are presented.
(37:18):
Maybe it's a brainstorming session.
S- the leader makes it very, very clearwhich ideas they prefer, and to go
against that and to be the person whogo, goes, "Yeah, yeah, sorry. Sorry,
boss. I, you know, I just think it'sa terrible idea," they're gonna keep
receipts on that, and they remember you.
And they're… You know, I've seenthis happen where in the, in the
(37:39):
hallway afterwards, getting coffee, theleader's like, "Yeah, Aidan was very
negative in that meeting, wasn't he?"
Here's, here, here's the thing thatgets really interesting, right?
Because those are real aspectsthat we're dealing with.
But, you know, let's take a sessionlike this where one leader might
say, "Well, we have the evidence thatcustomers care." Well, you know what
(38:01):
I say, and it's a bit harder for aninternal person, is to say, "Okay.
Well, tell me what that evidence is.""Well, we just know." Okay, so what
I'm gonna capture here is Mark said inthe meeting on this date that we know.
And then it's, you know,it's on the line, right?
So just bec- he said we know.
W- so it's okay, it's actually, it's okayto proceed without evidence, but it needs
(38:25):
to be explicit because I'm not dogmatic.
If you wanna do projects withzero evidence, be my guest.
If you have the moneyto waste, that's okay.
And sometimes you need to go fast,so you're gonna take a risk, right?
But it needs to be explicit.
Are we investing based on evidence orare we investing based on faith, right?
So, so when you get leaders to have to puttheir name on it, we just know, I believe
(38:51):
it's gonna work in an evidence-basedworld, it's gonna get very tricky, and
they usually backtrack very, very quickly
Fantastic.
And I led with the idea of the cat,Alex, Oscar the Cat jumping up on beds.
If companies wanna reach out to you andStrategyzer to come and jump on their
projects and let them know if they'vegot a hope or not, is the best place
(39:13):
for them to find you and the playbooks?
Everything's available on the website.
Just go , to Strategyzer.com.
Can Google my name also,you'll end up with Strategyzer.
We put a lot of stuff out there.
So typically, we make thetheory, the concepts accessible
because we want it to spread.
For those of, you know, who don't wannakinda figure out on their own how to
(39:34):
apply it, they just go and have a lookat the playbooks or get to talk to us.
So we're really in that.
We're passionate about gettingpeople to work the right way
Author of The Invincible Company,Testing Business Ideas, High Impact
Tools For Teams, Value PropositionDesign, and The Business Model Canvas.
And there's a business book for kidsthat Alex especially wrote for his
(39:56):
own kids, which I also have a copy of,which I'm, I haven't pulled it out yet.
They're not quite there yet,Alex, but they certainly will be.
They'll s- be sick of me.
They'll be going through allthese canvases to validate ideas.
But always a pleasure to have youon the show, and we'll be back.
Just let's give a littlepreview of what we'll be back
next week to talk about, Alex
I'd really love to talkabout value propositions.
(40:18):
Big theme and not a lot of companiesget their value propositions right
Author of Value Proposition Design,our next episode, Alex Osterwalder.
Thank you for joining us
Just to let you know, you can wina copy of one of Alex books just by
signing up to the Kyndryl Institute,K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L.com/institute.
(40:38):
Just send us a screenshot, let us knowthat you did sign up, and you will
be in with a chance to win a copy.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
You can find out more aboutKyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute
(40:59):
at K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, kyndryl.com
how do I know if I should invest in aproject or if I should kill a project?
(00:04):
Like what, how, how risky is that still?
Those are things that are technical thatyou can easily make the playbook for
What you really wanna do isbreak this down and have evidence
for the different aspects.
So evidence here for desirability.
Do I have evidence one, two,three, four, five for desirability?
(00:25):
Then we go to feasibility.
Do I have evidence levelone, two, three, four, five?
And same for viability.
So it's almost that we createa scorecard for each idea.
Now, to make it concrete, when a teampresents, and I talk, talked to you
about the Honeywell Growth Symposium,each team is not just going to present
(00:46):
the idea, they're gonna present theirscorecard of evidence, and it's the
scorecard of evidence that's gonnagive the leadership confidence.
So the idea per se, you can'tjudge if it's good or bad.
You can only judge, do we haveevidence that shows it's an
idea that is worth investing in?
(01:08):
And at, you know, you do this gradually.
So at the beginning, youmight have a zero everywhere.
Before we start, I wanna thankour sponsor, Kyndryl, who runs
and reimagines the technologysystems that drive advantage for
the world's leading businesses.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
(01:29):
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
Don't forget, sign up for the KyndrylInstitute, where you'll find so
many of the guests we've had onthe innovation show writing bespoke
pieces for the Kyndryl Institute.
And by signing up and sending me ascreenshot, you can be in with a chance
to win a copy of the books on the show.
(01:50):
You can find out more atKyndryl, K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, .com.
There's a nursing home andrehabilitation center in Rhode Island
called Steere House, and back in2005, the staff adopted six cats.
One of them was Oscar, andOscar was not the friendly kind.
He kept to himself.
(02:10):
And he hissed at you if you annoyed him.
Then the staff noticed something.
Oscar would pick a patient, jump upon the bed, stamp out a place beside
them, and curl up, and within afew hours, that patient would die.
What I find most interesting isthat he could tell the difference
between a bad turn and the end.
(02:32):
One family described their mother havingseveral false alarms, and each time Oscar
came in, had a look, and left again.
On the last day, he pacedoutside the room for hours.
When nobody let him in, he went intothe room next door and scratched
at the adjoining wall untilsomebody understood what he wanted.
(02:53):
There's a science behind it.
It's called necromones,biochemicals released by dying
cells akin to pheromones.
And what the staff did with thisinformation is what's most interesting.
They didn't argue with the cat.
They rang the family so peoplehad a chance to say goodbye.
Last week, Antonio Nieto-Rodrigueztalked to us about killing projects.
(03:14):
Today, we're joined by the manwho decides which projects get
the money, and you'll notice hedoesn't much like the word killing.
He's the creator of the BusinessModel Canvas, author of The Invincible
Company (03:24):
Testing Business Ideas Value Proposition Design, and CEO of
Strategyzer, where he has moved thebusiness from books to playbooks, which
is something a lot of you have beenasking for on the Innovation Show.
He's a great friend of mine.
He's a great friend of the show.
Alexander Osterwalder, welcome back, sir
thanks for having me.
Great to be back
(03:45):
Always a pleasure, man.
Your shows always are like rocketfuel for the Innovation Show, so it's
always a pleasure to have you, man.
Firstly, before we get stuck intohow to kill projects, and you are the
Oscar, give you the Oscars of killingprojects, what have you been up to?
I know the business hasshifted a little bit.
(04:06):
You've been traveling all over theworld giving keynotes, but more
so giving workshops and teachingcompanies how to actually do this work
I'm passionate about getting peopleto work differently the right
way, , to make projects work.
But everybody's frustrated, inparticular around growth projects, right?
But it goes much further.
You know, new value propositions,strategy, et cetera.
(04:27):
So one of the things that, youknow, I was asking myself is why?
Why can't we make these things work?
Because you have allthese brilliant people.
Um, yeah, our organizations are complex,but, like, we know the tools now, we know
the techniques, we know the processes.
So what are we doing wrong?
And what I started to realize is that,well, we used to do e-learning, we
used to do workshops, we used to dotraining, we do coaching, you know,
(04:51):
consulting, all of it, but somehow itnever really took the r- the right way.
So what we started to do is put thatall together in what we call playbooks.
So instead of trying to teach content, youknow, do consulting, which can get very
expensive, we said, "Well, what if we tookeverything we know, you know, that works,
and we move from books to playbooks?" Youknow, the whole idea of books is around
(05:15):
content and coaching and consulting.
Playbooks is you have an objective,what's the playbook to get there?
Want a great value proposition.
How do I do that?
Oh, I want a great valueproposition with AI.
Well, how do I do that?
So it's just a step-by-step approach.
So we kind of figured out a reallygood way of getting teams to work
differently to get to resultsfaster with all the tools and
(05:35):
methods that are out there, right?
There are a lot of great thinkerswith a lot of great content.
So why aren't organizationsable to adopt them?
So it's not just aboutStrategyzer tools and content.
It's really, like, let's make… Youknow, let's turn all of this stuff into
playbooks that companies will actuallyadopt so that we work in a better way.
(05:56):
So that's been my passion over thelast, you know, two years or so, and
I think we got something that worksfor, for, for many different domains.
I know you can't talk about a lot ofthe brilliant companies you work with
and the successes they've had, andthe ability to kill projects as well.
That's gonna be the focusof this shorter episode.
So one of the things many peoplewho listen to the Innovation
(06:17):
Show, many viewers on YouTube haveasked for, is more of this type of
content, more of playbook style.
So thank you for doing that for us.
You're gonna take us through today how tokill projects, and actually really how to
set them up for success in the first place
and actually there'ssome we can talk about.
So when I say playbooks, weactually have two categories.
(06:38):
We created a playbook library whereanybody can a- get access to the
playbooks we put out there, andhopefully we'll get some thinkers
to put their playbooks in there.
That's publicly accessible for anybody, sosmall teams, startup entrepreneurs, SMEs.
But then we also do these customplaybooks, and the one I can
talk about, we've done manyof these, is for Honeywell.
(06:58):
So we're running their growth symposiumsaround the world, and the idea is exactly
what we're gonna talk about today.
Which projects do we investin, and which project, projects
should we change or retire?
So I'll, I'll, I'll move away fromthe idea of killing per se, and
ultimately the goal is to invest inthose few that can actually work, right?
(07:20):
So you get a real funnel, not a tunnel.
So with, the growth symposium, I'mjust back from Shanghai two weeks ago.
We do that in, in, Shanghai,we do it in India, we do it in
Europe, and we do it in the US.
And the senior leadership team isalways there to invest in the projects.
So the teams get to show these projectsin a very specific way, and I'll, I'll
(07:41):
walk you a little bit through that.
So I'm, I'm happy to reveal thosesecrets because they should be
accessible to everybody, right?
I'll link to all those resourcesthat are available on the Strategyzer
website as well, but Alex is gonnabring us through a few slides.
For those just listening to us, thisis probably gonna be more difficult
to grasp than a usual episode.
But Alex said he'd do his bestto describe this for you and let
(08:04):
you know what's on the screen.
Over to you, my man
I'll use words to describe the visualsso it's easier when you see the
visuals, but, you know, let's alsomake the slides accessible, right?
'Cause w- my goal is reallyto get this stuff to spread.
So, you know, a couple years ago, weworked with a consortium of businesses.
There was, Bosch, there was,Cargill, there was Nestlé.
(08:26):
We came together to ask, "How canwe actually score growth projects
to know which ones to invest in?"So that was the initial goal,
like, how can we create metrics?
Because if you can't measureit, well, you can't manage it.
It's, it's very simple.
So sometimes I'm a bit, you know,surprised how in the innovation and
growth world, we don't measure thatmuch, and we, you know, dole out
(08:48):
money for, you know, things thatpeople didn't show you the metrics.
And when I say metrics, it'snot an upfront business case.
I'll show you what I'm talking about.
I'm talking about measuring the evidencethat the business case could work.
So how should you do this?
So just quickly, fundamentals.
I'll go very quick.
When you start with an opportunity,you can come up with a business
(09:10):
case, but you know what?
It's a fantasy.
So what you really need to dois search for the right Business
Model and Value Propositions.
That's what we need to prove, okay?
So we can actually measure how closeare we to success, and then we kn-
when we're close, we start to scale.
So it's this whole thing, right?
We go from an idea opportunityto the real business.
Now, there are two big tasks there.
(09:30):
One, companies are really goodat designing the business logic.
So with these tools that you mightknow, like Business Model Canvas, Value
Proposition Canvas- Companies makebusiness cases, but here's the problem.
They invest in a businesscase that is a pure fantasy.
What they should do is admit, "Wedo not know if that's gonna work,
(09:50):
so we actually need to test andvalidate," you know, again and again
and again, and we kinda create thisdiscipline that is evidence-based.
So we design, we test, we design, wetest, and that's a gradual process.
Okay?
So that's the process.
So what do we need to test,and what do we need to measure?
(10:11):
So first thing, pretty straightforward.
Well, let's test if thosecustomer needs actually exist.
So sounds trivial, but instead ofgoing to talk to customers or run other
experiments, we're gonna focus, youknow, three weeks on a business case.
That's analysis paralysis.
So we tend to overthinkand under-experiment.
So what you wanna do is you wannathink for maybe a, a half a day, and
(10:36):
then you go and talk to customers.
Do they actually have those needs?
The second thing you immediatelywanna do is willingness to pay.
Do they have a budget?
Have they purchasedthings like that before?
So you're not gonna ask, "Whatwould you pay?" But you start
to investigate, will they pay?
And you can do that either with interviewsor more sophisticated experiments.
(10:57):
Then you start to look at the benefits.
Now you look at the solution, andall the way up to here, you don't,
you don't need to build anything.
So people say, "Yeah, we buildMVPs," minimal viable product.
Well, the problem is engineers loveto build, so they build too fast.
The first thing you wanna do,in particular in the age of AI,
is first test and validate theneeds and the willingness to pay.
(11:21):
Because we can build so fast, we tendto build first, and then we're gonna
build the, the wrong thing for 100 times.
So it's better to startactually with the needs.
Sounds trivial, not done.
Right?
Common sense, not common practice.
Then we go to, um, go to market, and thenwe start to really look at feasibility.
So it's a process.
So you put this together.
We test desirability.
(11:42):
We show the evidence.
That's what we can measure.
We can measure the evidencethat there is desirability.
We can measure the evidencethat there's feasibility.
That's the easiest one 'causeall the engineers are gonna get
excited about feasibility, so thisone we don't need to worry about.
Companies do this well.
But then viability.
We need to measure the evidence thatcustomers will pay, and sometimes
(12:04):
companies tell me, "Yeah, Alex,we actually measure viability."
"What do you do?" "We do spreadsheets."Spreadsheets are a fantasy made explicit.
They're not a metric.
What you can do is measure theevidence that supports the spreadsheet.
So you can say, "Hey, thisis the customer segment.
We talked to 10.
We talked to 1,000,"or, "We surveyed 1,000.
(12:26):
You know, like 50% actually alreadyspent on this type of solution."
That's what you callmeasuring kinda the evidence.
Okay.
So now I showed you the principle.
Let's look at the metrics.
So when we worked with this consortiumof companies, because we wanted to
make it applied, we said, "Well,how could we measure and what do
we measure so that we can applyit from B2C to B2B to government?"
(12:50):
We said, "Well, what we canmeasure is evidence." First rule
is business plans and high-levelmarket research is not evidence.
It's a hint that there's a market there,but just because some big consulting
firm or your internal analysis saidthere's a big market there, doesn't
mean they're gonna buy from you.
It doesn't mean they have theneed you're gonna address.
(13:12):
So that's not evidence yet.
So what is evidence?
Hey, we talked to, let's say,a couple of hundred, and we get
feedback from them, or we run…I'll show you some other experiments.
That's first light evidence.
We give that a score of one, and thenwe can have higher scores if we actually
go further, and they may be pre-purchaseor other experiments where it's
(13:32):
really proof that it's the real world.
Okay, so we score theevidence from one to five.
So let's go through this.
The first two levels is what people say.
So if I do an interview, soI'll make this concrete, okay?
So if I go and talk to people, but Idon't really have the solution yet,
I just do an interview, it's great.
(13:52):
It's a good start.
It's low level.
It's level one.
People, you know, in B2B, theycall this voice of customer.
You have market research firms.
That's great.
That's level one.
But what you then wanna do is, what ifyou showed them a data sheet, a storyboard
that made the solution concrete?
Now they react to a real thing.
That's already level two, butit's still just what they say.
(14:14):
"Oh, I love that solution." "Okay,great." So, so they just say, and then
you might ask, "Would you buy this?""Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah." But they say
that, doesn't mean they're gonna do it.
So what you wanna do now is gofurther than just interviews, which
most companies stop there, and theywill invest a million, a hundred
million sometimes based on interviews.
Not good enough.
So then you say, "Well, could wedo a stronger experiment, slightly
(14:39):
stronger, where there's a bit moreskin in the game beyond saying?" So the
typical kinda thing is a landing page.
You put up a landing page with thestoryboard of the solution, and you get
people to sign up maybe for a sales call.
Well, you know what?
That's already more than themjust saying because they came to
you, they signed up for the salescall or for an email or whatever.
(15:01):
There's a small call to action.
That's stronger evidence thansaying, but it's still very weak.
Oh, what could we do?
Could we do something stronger?
Well, if we're in B2B, what if…
Let me get out of the way What if wegot them to sign a letter of intent?
What if we got the CEO of the potentialcustomer to join a co-creation workshop
(15:22):
where he flies over, the CEO fliesover, and we actually work together?
That's a stronger commitment.
Will they buy?
Not sure, but the fact thatthe CEO of a client shows up
is already a bigger commitment.
Oh, could we do something that's a five?
A whole series of experiments that,you know, either it can be a down
payment, it can be a real payment, itcould be some things where you just
(15:46):
go and, you know, watch them in theirplant, how they're actually working.
But the point is that we havelevels of evidence, okay?
So we know we need to gobeyond the interviews.
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
If you just stick to this, peoplewill say, "Oh, they're gonna try to
test the whole idea." But remember, Ishowed you, there are pieces to test.
(16:07):
You test the needs, you test willingnessto pay, you test the solution.
So what you really wanna do isbreak this down and have evidence
for the different aspects.
So evidence here for desirability.
Do I have evidence one, two,three, four, five for desirability?
(16:28):
Then we go to feasibility.
Do I have evidence levelone, two, three, four, five?
And same for viability.
So it's almost that we createa scorecard for each idea.
Now, to make it concrete, when a teampresents, and I talk, talked to you
about the Honeywell Growth Symposium,each team is not just going to present
(16:49):
the idea, they're gonna present theirscorecard of evidence, and it's the
scorecard of evidence that's gonnagive the leadership confidence.
So the idea per se, you can'tjudge if it's good or bad.
You can only judge, do we haveevidence that shows it's an
idea that is worth investing in?
(17:11):
And at, you know, you do this gradually.
So at the beginning, youmight have a zero everywhere.
That's okay Last, you know, the,the, the thing I show sometimes to
make it concrete, if you compareLEGO Friends to LEGO Movies, when
LEGO started to invest in LEGOMovies, all of it was actually zero.
(17:32):
They don't-- didn't know anything.
They didn't know how to make a movie.
They didn't know if the brand would work.
So they start from scratch.
When you take LEGO, uh, Friends, whichwere play box for girls, feasibility,
they had level five from the start.
They didn't need to run experimentsbecause they had the supply chain,
so were already starting at a five.
So you can see, you can alreadystart to compare ideas, which one
(17:54):
is riskier, which one is less risky.
But the point here is, is that we don'tstick to abstract stuff or our opinions,
we stick to more objective evidence.
So that is the theory or the technicalpart where we get very geeky around
these things because we know thatwe need to get to the metrics.
(18:15):
It's not a feeling.
Innovation is actually a process,growth project, and then we start
to build playbooks around it.
So this is a little bit of a veryconcrete content that we kinda give
away, we put them out there on slides,is the playbooks that we then use to
try to get people to the next level toactually doing this in an organization.
(18:35):
Man, I, I have PTSD now.
So it reminded me of my first career,which was in a media company where
I was head of transformation, ordigital transformation, and I was
constantly coming up with ideas,and the CFO would always kill them
by asking me to do a business plan.
And of course, I'd make itup, finger in the air, no idea
(18:56):
even how to do any of this.
And back then, I told you, that'swhen I discovered your work
on the Business Model Canvas.
I tried that, but this is Business ModelCanvas evolved and on steroids in a way.
But I just wanted it to go, okay,so so you're in any company.
Now, I know it might feeldifferent if you're in a services
(19:17):
company or a business co- a, aproduct, physical product company.
you're somebody in la- sector 7G and youhave an idea, what usually happens is
you try and get somebody with authorityto listen to you, or you might be lucky
or a bit more evolved where you mighthave one of those spark boxes where
you can come up and suggest an idea.
(19:38):
But usually they don't go anywhere.
So take us through somebodythere, somebody starting there.
'Cause y- you, youworked with these people.
You've helped these people.
You've actually helped people getall the way through the gates, but
also decide to actually just killthe project in the first place
Yeah.
So there's a bit of a, a,a tricky one there, right?
(19:58):
Because if you're in, what, what yousaid, , sector G7 wherever you are
that's where, HomerSimpson's, office was Sector
Okay.
Okay, got it.
But so the problem is w- you're actuallystarting from a difficult point because
if the company doesn't already understand,you evaluate and invest differently in
(20:20):
growth projects for a future that wedon't know compared to execution projects.
If the leaders don't know, you're alreadya little bit on a lost kinda track, right?
Because they're gonnathink in the exploit world.
So the first tactic I'd say is try toget them to understand that in an explore
(20:41):
world, we don't know if it's gonna work.
We have to be honest.
We do not know.
And then you show them, you know, thebest thing we can do is not a spreadsheet,
because a spreadsheet is a fantasy.
What I did is I startedto collect evidence.
So here's this process where we getmore and more evidence, and based
on the evidence, we should invest.
So you do need to get them intoa frame that how is working in
(21:05):
explore different from exploit?
Because what you need to understand--I do this with leaders all the time,
but it's the same if you're notthe leader making the decisions.
You need to realize in ninetypercent of the companies,
everybody's in an exploit mindset.
So if you don't take them out of theexploit mindset, they're gonna evaluate
(21:25):
everything with that lens, right?
They have the exploit glasses on, sothey're gonna want a business case.
They're going to want, youknow, the spreadsheet, you know,
for the next hundred years.
So what you wanna do is say, "Look,this is not about a business case.
I have one.
I made this, and it looks great.
But what's more important is I'm nowon track to find the evidence that
(21:48):
this business case could work." So youneed to bring them out of the exploit
mindset to show how exploration works.
That's the tough part.
So sometimes if you're in that little box,you can't get leaders to think like that.
But some actually naturally are inclinedto think like that, but nobody's
ever told them to think like that.
I know a ton of CEOs.
(22:09):
Like, I get to work witha ton of leadership teams.
I just start with,"Here's how explore works.
Here's how exploit works." And thenthey immediately realize, "That's why
none of our projects work, becausewe try to pick the right idea.
We had a great business case and,you know, then we poured, you know,
ten million or a hundred millionon the project." That doesn't work.
That works in the exploit world.
(22:31):
So that's the starting point.
That's the unfortunate part whenyou're at the bottom of the pyramid
I love the line that your mentorand friend of the show, Steve
Blank, has, "Exploitation paysyour salary, exploration pays your
pension." I absolutely love that.
It's at the start of
Lead and Disrupt, Tushman and O'Reilly's
book.
But that, that, that is a huge thing.
(22:53):
The last thing before we go on to e-evolve the idea a little bit further
is the, the, the lessons there.
So you talked about earlier on the,the move from books to playbooks.
One of the biggest and saddest things,I think, particularly in the age of AI,
is that we didn't read enough anyway.
We didn't evolve our lenses anyway toadd new lenses when the world changes,
(23:16):
so we're stuck with the lenses we have.
The business schools are teaching models.
Now, it's getting better.
I know, for example, your work, forexample, is taught in Trinity College,
where, business school, where I am,Now, it's getting better, but there's
still a lot of leaders in companieswho have been taught, if at all,
for the way of exploitation, and theworld has changed dramatically, and
(23:40):
the metrics they use to measure thatare so, so different than the metrics
needed for exploration or new ideas.
Maybe just a word on that, becausethat, for example, is a huge thing.
So you talked about lenses there, butthe lenses plus the metrics, of course
many ideas don't make it through thegates because they're measured so badly
(24:02):
Yes.
But so, so couple of things there.
The biggest challenge is indeedwhat you say is that established
companies are trimmed to execute.
And you know what?
That's actually a goodthing because they have to.
And if you're a publicly listedcompany, well, your first thing
is you need to really fight forthe survival of that company, so
you can never neglect execution.
(24:24):
So that's why when people say,"Oh, everybody needs to be an
innovator," I say, "Absolutely not.
You need to run the company." And,and that is a big task, right?
It's like the execution pays the salaries.
So what we need to have now is aneducation for leaders that shows
them they need a dual mindset.
They need to actuallythink, explore, and exploit.
(24:46):
The 19th century, you know, CEO, if I maygo all the way back, that was an exploit
CEO because better processes to run thecompany was the differentiator, right?
Today, the real differentiator isthe ability to constantly transform.
So if you look at the companies thatare at the top of the pyramid today, the
best performing companies, it's thosethat constantly reinvent themselves.
(25:10):
So they're world-class atrunning the business, and they're
world-class at reinventing.
So, you know, the usualsuspect is an Amazon.
Um, but now if the AI… Ifyou look at the AI companies,
which ones are surviving?
Those that can reinventthemselves faster than the others.
So that is a key, and it's not fullytaught yet But the worst thing is that
(25:31):
today we have, you know, heads of strategyand growth or heads of innovation that
have never done it before and thathave not gone through that education.
So sometimes CEOs or leadershipteams put people in place who
they're good with technology.
Well, guess what?
That does not equip youwith being a growth leader.
(25:52):
Growth is something that has processesand ways of doing, and the good
news is we now know how to do it.
So A, let's educate ourselves onhow it's being done, and let's
peop-p- put people in place who'vedone it once or twice, right?
So I still see major corporations,I will not name names, but they
(26:13):
put people in place who don't know.
And then they, you know, they call usand they say, "Alex, can you tell us?"
So we tell them, and then instead of, youknow, working with us so we can help them,
they go and do it themselves, and thenthey realize, "Oh, shoot, didn't work,"
and then they come back to us because,you know, we've done this 100 times.
We're not smarter.
We've just done it so many times thatwe're able to formulate how to do it
(26:36):
from the leadership level, that's whatwe call governance, all the way down to
the team level, which is the process.
Process is the easiest part.
The bastion that we now need to winover is the leadership, and that
means we need to get the boardsto hire already the right CEOs
because some CEOs, they don't know.
Once they know, they will do it.
But some CEOs are very stuck in, youknow, an execution mindset, and it's gonna
(27:01):
be very hard to turn them into what Ilike to call the entrepreneurial leader.
And you don't have to be a Jeff Bezosto be an entrepreneurial leader.
Bracken Darrell of Logitech wasa very entrepreneurial leader
without having been an entrepreneur.
He's been a corporate person forever,but he has that entrepreneurial
CEO mindset and has a dual mindset.
(27:21):
Exploit and explore atthe same time in harmony
I remember Gary Hamel used to say this,that, you know, in, in the way the world
is today, the business environment,you need the entrepreneurial leader.
Ideally, if it was somebody who actuallydid be an entrepreneur in the past,
but failing that, learning new things,learning new tools, learning new lenses.
(27:44):
Just a word on the head of innovationwho doesn't have the training.
I see this all the time.
I was that person, and actually,it's led to this brilliant v- journey
that I've been on to learn, becausewhen I was head of innovation for
the national broadcaster here inIreland, I did a lot of good things,
but they were all low-level things.
They were all… You know what?
It didn't really matterif they happened or not.
(28:06):
They were kind of innovation theater.
But I actually thought they were good,but then as I've learned more and more,
and I realize so much more content is outthere, I realized how little I knew, and
actually, it's why I do the show and whyI try and democratize this knowledge and
share it with the world, much like you do.
But it's to help almost the inner child,young Aidan, and go, "Here, reach out
(28:32):
and help people like me in the past."Because actually, they don't know what to
do, and they weren't taught what to do,and often you're put into that position
'cause your personality is right, you'reentrepreneurial, you have great ideas.
None of that is innovation.
It's highly, highly disciplined,and that's the biggest lesson I had.
And when I work with organizationsmyself, I'm telling them, "That's
(28:53):
the type of person you wanna tr- youwant in the role." It's almost like
the shift to data-based marketing.
You want a marketer that, yeah, hasgreat ideas and knows good brand and
knows good from bad, but actuallycan measure the life out of things
because actually that's the discipline
Yep.
And that's, again, the ideasare the easy part, right?
(29:13):
How to make that work is wh- whywe came up with playbooks also,
because the other thing is thatnobody has time for training.
Everybody's under huge pressure.
You know, big corporations, smallcorporations, they have to deliver.
There is very little time to learn.
So what if you could package thingsin a way that learning is a byproduct?
(29:34):
Because, you know, some peopleare passionate about learning per
se, but at the end of the day,when you have a job, learning is
just, you know, a means to an end.
So what if you can get to those skills?
That got us really passionate aboutplaybooks and, you know, one playbook
was explicitly on how do I knowif I should invest in a project
or if I should kill a project?
Like what, how, how risky is that still?
(29:57):
Those are things that are technical thatyou can easily make the playbook for
okay, man.
Well, we're gonna takepeople out of your misery.
Young Aidan, not that young, 20years ago Aidan, I'm gonna reach back
and go, "Here you go, man. Here's aplaybook. So Alex is gonna teach you
and hopefully help many other heads ofinnovation that listen to the show."
Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonnashow you a quick playbook.
(30:18):
Let me just switch here on myscreen, see if I can make it happen.
So we developed, a playbook librarywhere you have a ton of playbooks
because all of these are thingsyou need to know as, you know, head
of growth and strategy, et cetera.
So it's a library that you get access to.
(30:38):
Now, the playbook that we start tolook at, I, I just prepared this.
I made a project here for the innovationshow, and we just look at a playbook.
So playbook is basically a step-by-stepapproach that tells me a little bit, you
know, what to do, just like I did now,but then you immediately do it, right?
So say, do, say, do, say, do all the time.
(31:00):
So here I have one on howmarket-ready is your project.
So that's an assessment I can go through.
So first one here is, okay,navigating risk and uncertainty.
This is a video that, you know,first you watch and you get a little
bit of the stuff I just told you.
So you do need to learn a bit, but thepoint is, you don't learn for too long.
(31:22):
You immediately go and apply.
So what I mean with that isapply… Well, first, what if
we had a little theory thing?
So in this case, I clicked onthe second step, and the second
step brings us to an exercise.
But then we wanna go as fastas possible to our own project.
So here, just so we understand, let'stake these Amazon projects and put them
(31:43):
on a scale from explore to exploit.
Is this a new idea?
We have no clue if it's gonnawork, or is this managing
the existing business, right?
So pretty straightforward, youknow, start to offer Amazon Web
Services, launch the Amazon Kindle,open new distribution warehouses.
You can already see innovationis everywhere, but this
is much closer to exploit.
(32:04):
It's gonna be much easier toopen a new warehouse than to
start Amazon Web Services.
So guess what?
Amazon did not say, "Hey, give me abusiness case and I'm gonna invest in
the business case." They said, "Okay,the business case could be interesting.
Let's try it out." So theystarted to experiment, right?
So now if I go back and I showyou just exactly what I told you
(32:27):
theoretically, we can do it practically.
So I showed you levels of evidence.
Okay, so let me scroll down here somewherefurther down after I map my idea.
I have a step, step six herethat's called assess and score
the customer evidence that I have.
So I click on this step, andit immediately asks me to score
(32:50):
the evidence for my customer.
So let's say here I put up a stickynote, you know, I'm selling to
innovation, uh, uh, leaders, okay?
That's my first customer segment.
Now, I need to show the evidencethat I have, level one, what people
(33:12):
say, level two, three, four, five,that shows the needs that they have.
So, oh, you know what?
I actually, after the show with Aidan, Italked to a hun- let's say a 10, talked
to 10 innovation leaders, 10 interviewees,okay, um, said they have this problem.
(33:36):
Or let me make it more realisticand say five out of 10.
So I start to collectthe evidence that I have.
So right now, I'm just collecting theevidence, showing the evidence that
I have, that I understand my firstcustomer segment, innovation leaders.
And if I cannot show that evidence,I haven't done my homework yet, so I
(33:59):
shouldn't even start to think about thesolution because, you know, I need this.
So as a project doer, I need to collectthe evidence on customers first.
As a leader, I need to ask the team,"Hey, you're starting to work on
the solution. Do you have evidencethat you understand the problem the
customer needs?" So you go back andpush them back to show me the evidence.
(34:21):
So the key word here is show me theevidence on a scoring level from what
people say, reactions to artifacts.
Oh, I just made a mistake, right?
Because I said That I talked to f- 10people, five said they had this problem.
Did I actually show them somethingvery concrete, an artifact
(34:43):
that they could react to?
No, no, no.
So the leader just asked me, right?
Well, you know what, then it's actuallylevel one evidence because I didn't
show them a concrete situation.
Oh, when you were in this context, did youknow in which projects to invest or not?
So I just caught myself givingmyself a level two score when it
was actually a level one, right?
So you can start to have an objectiveconversation based on these levels.
(35:08):
So you move away the conversationaround evidence away from, "I think
this is a great idea," to, "Well,what's your evidence and what
score does that evidence have?"
So now the whole thing isless about leader's opinion
versus the team's opinion.
It's the team's evidence for the customerversus does the leader believe you
(35:33):
that that evidence is strong enough?
And now, of course, you'll always haveleaders that will say, "Well, I don't
really care what your evidence is," butthen you just have a bad leader, right?
The best leaders will start to havean evidence-based conversation.
So this was just scoring,around the, assessment of the
e- evidence for customers.
(35:53):
So then you do the same for the solution,you do the same for willingness to pay.
But we just walk you through kindagoing through collecting that
evidence and giving it a score.
So we make it ultra practical from a verytechnical thing away from educating you,
from getting you to do it on the spot.
(36:13):
Because this is, again,it's not rocket science.
We're not doing surgery.
We're scoring an idea.
So this is what our idea of playbooks isgetting people to do it, to work on their
project, not fictional stuff, on the spot.
So at the end, you have a scoreof where your project is today.
So that's just anillustration of a playbook
(36:34):
Absolutely love it, man.
I love it.
I, I was thinking about how, , we hadTimo Vuori and Quy Huy on the show
talking about Nokia's reinvention and howNokia moved into the networks business.
And what they said, essentially, wasthe whole company, firstly, they had
psychological safety, where it was okayto call out a bad idea or a good idea.
But more than that, they moved towardsa data-based approach to things.
(36:57):
And I always think of that brilliantline, one of my favorite lines ever,
Upton Sinclair, "It's difficult to geta man to understand something when their
salary depends on not understandingit." This takes that out of it.
I mean, this makes it data-based.
And, you the big thing is, I oftenthink about this, you're, you're
in a room, ideas are presented.
(37:18):
Maybe it's a brainstorming session.
S- the leader makes it very, very clearwhich ideas they prefer, and to go
against that and to be the person whogo, goes, "Yeah, yeah, sorry. Sorry,
boss. I, you know, I just think it'sa terrible idea," they're gonna keep
receipts on that, and they remember you.
And they're… You know, I've seenthis happen where in the, in the
(37:39):
hallway afterwards, getting coffee, theleader's like, "Yeah, Aidan was very
negative in that meeting, wasn't he?"
Here's, here, here's the thing thatgets really interesting, right?
Because those are real aspectsthat we're dealing with.
But, you know, let's take a sessionlike this where one leader might
say, "Well, we have the evidence thatcustomers care." Well, you know what
(38:01):
I say, and it's a bit harder for aninternal person, is to say, "Okay.
Well, tell me what that evidence is.""Well, we just know." Okay, so what
I'm gonna capture here is Mark said inthe meeting on this date that we know.
And then it's, you know,it's on the line, right?
So just bec- he said we know.
W- so it's okay, it's actually, it's okayto proceed without evidence, but it needs
(38:25):
to be explicit because I'm not dogmatic.
If you wanna do projects withzero evidence, be my guest.
If you have the moneyto waste, that's okay.
And sometimes you need to go fast,so you're gonna take a risk, right?
But it needs to be explicit.
Are we investing based on evidence orare we investing based on faith, right?
So, so when you get leaders to have to puttheir name on it, we just know, I believe
(38:51):
it's gonna work in an evidence-basedworld, it's gonna get very tricky, and
they usually backtrack very, very quickly
Fantastic.
And I led with the idea of the cat,Alex, Oscar the Cat jumping up on beds.
If companies wanna reach out to you andStrategyzer to come and jump on their
projects and let them know if they'vegot a hope or not, is the best place
(39:13):
for them to find you and the playbooks?
Everything's available on the website.
Just go , to Strategyzer.com.
Can Google my name also,you'll end up with Strategyzer.
We put a lot of stuff out there.
So typically, we make thetheory, the concepts accessible
because we want it to spread.
For those of, you know, who don't wannakinda figure out on their own how to
(39:34):
apply it, they just go and have a lookat the playbooks or get to talk to us.
So we're really in that.
We're passionate about gettingpeople to work the right way
Author of The Invincible Company,Testing Business Ideas, High Impact
Tools For Teams, Value PropositionDesign, and The Business Model Canvas.
And there's a business book for kidsthat Alex especially wrote for his
(39:56):
own kids, which I also have a copy of,which I'm, I haven't pulled it out yet.
They're not quite there yet,Alex, but they certainly will be.
They'll s- be sick of me.
They'll be going through allthese canvases to validate ideas.
But always a pleasure to have youon the show, and we'll be back.
Just let's give a littlepreview of what we'll be back
next week to talk about, Alex
I'd really love to talkabout value propositions.
(40:18):
Big theme and not a lot of companiesget their value propositions right
Author of Value Proposition Design,our next episode, Alex Osterwalder.
Thank you for joining us
Just to let you know, you can wina copy of one of Alex books just by
signing up to the Kyndryl Institute,K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L.com/institute.
(40:38):
Just send us a screenshot, let us knowthat you did sign up, and you will
be in with a chance to win a copy.
With a unique blend of AI-poweredconsulting built on unmatched managed
service capability, Kyndryl helps leadersharness the power of technology for
smarter decisions, faster innovation,and a lasting competitive edge.
You can find out more aboutKyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute
(40:59):
at K-Y-N-D-R-Y-L, kyndryl.com
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