#402 How to make innovation a reality - an interview with Matt Sturgess
How can innovation become a reality in your organisation? Matt Sturgess is a former CEO, a former MD and shares his insights, his knowledge and his experiences in this interview with Niels Brabandt.
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More on this topic in this week's podcast: Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the podcast transcript, read below.
Is excellent leadership important to you?
Let's have a chat: NB@NB-Networks.com
Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
Website: www.NB-Networks.biz
Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Innovation. Usually, some of you might now think, oh god. Please no. Not another change thing that's going to disrupt our business as they say. Nothing really happens. We have a lot of work, and after all, it's all the same afterwards. That's how it often goes.
However, innovation can be a lot better, and I am very proud and happy that we have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, Matt Sturges.
Matt Sturgess
Hello. Good to good to see you. It's great to speak to you again.
Niels Brabandt
Thank you very much for taking the time to be on the podcast as we get straight into the topic. Many people speak about innovation. Can you give us your background on what makes you unique, an expert on the matter? What is your business background? What is your background in life that we know a bit more about you? Why you can speak about innovation?
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Sure. So so I started life as an engineer. So I've done lots of development innovation work. So I, designed the first surround sound speakers for televisions for Sony, Panasonic
Niels Brabandt
Oh, so when I sit at my Dolby system or in the movies, it's you have part in this. Yeah. Absolutely. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
Matt Sturgess
It was a it's a it's a fascinating area because there's a certain amount of science, and there's a certain amount where how you hear things is very interpretive. So it's a lovely mix of the two. Mhmm. So, so, yeah, so that was my sort of starting point. Then I ended up, project managing, innovation teams because I was annoyed we were letting customers down and the businesses in. Mhmm. And then as my career progressed, I got into sales, but I ended up being in a sales role and also managing an r and d team and a development team.
So we developed, new technology to automate cooking with ceramic cooktops so you could fry an egg automatically and things like that. So it was very innovative of its time.
Niels Brabandt
Absolutely. So why do you think it is that often when people talk about innovation, we have this approach where and I just give you one example. You might have heard that case as an engineer. So some guy usually with a business background, an MBA like me or anything, shows up and says, we sold this to the client, and then you say it's technically not possible. And then someone from the business department says it has to work. It's already sold. So please take it from here, and then you somehow have to work your way through.
So often the innovation is not early enough. It is pushed by the client. What is the reason why many businesses hesitate to be on the earlier frontier of innovation?
Matt Sturgess
I think some of some of it is sort of a fear factor. They're not quite sure how to make it happen. A lot of businesses talk about innovation, say innovation's our thing. That's what we're gonna do, but haven't actually even begun to think about the culture, the objectives, how they sort of set it up. So I would I would call that accidental innovation where the salesperson has promised something to, to the customer and then come back and said, can can you do this? They're sort of scratching their heads, and I'm not sure. I'm not sure.
But it's an interesting point, though, because some innovation is created assuming somebody wants what you're about to create. Whereas the best thing is is when you know somebody wants it.
Niels Brabandt
And and then here we get to the point. Let's say you're an engineer in my team, and I am some sort of MD or whatever position I have. Yep. So I will ask you, Matt, you're my engineer. When we go on the innovation frontier a bit further to the front, can you guarantee me that we're going to make a profit out of what you developed there? And let's face it. You can't guarantee that.
So how do you deal with that situation when you have a leader that says, I give you the money, but only when you guarantee me a return?
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. I think for that, it's really getting to to go and see a potential customer and really understand what they truly want, what problems do they want solved because a lot of businesses assume they know what customers want want to solve. And then doing a realistic assessment, I think, yeah, I I could do that. I've got a rough idea of of how much that's gonna cost. I think the other thing is for me, true in there's two types of innovation for me. There's what I call steady state innovation, which is just sort of moving things along a bit, nudging them along, and then you've got true disruptive innovation. So disruptive innovation, the definition for me is, I didn't know I needed it, but now I've got it.
I can't live without it.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm.
Matt Sturgess
And that's the most tricky one. Because if you went to ask a customer, would you like this disruptive innovation?
They say, no. I'm I'm fine with what I've got. I I don't need that. But if I then developed it and took it to them, I went, actually, this is brilliant. This is wonderful. I never thought I would ever need something like this. So so you've got two very distinct ways of doing it.
Steady state, you can base it on something you know, whereas truly disruptive innovation, which is far riskier in terms of how long it's gonna take to get your return, is is is a is a much trickier one.
Niels Brabandt
Excellent. I mean, I know that you wrote your MBA at the University of Warwick on when I researched that correctly, making product innovation a successful and sustainable reality.
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Niels Brabandt
From that point of view, because we all know that the the the Warwick MBA is probably, I think, amongst the top 10 in the world. So from your point of view, if if now people are listening and say, well, we are sitting here thinking of how to find the right approach. We tested this. We tested that. It all didn't work. What from your, not only personal experience, but also the scientific background you have, what is key to make exactly this product innovation successful and sustainable in reality?
Matt Sturgess
Okay. So so probably the two most important things that sort of related is is culture and who's running your innovation team.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm.
Matt Sturgess
Because if you think about a lot of businesses, they're wrapped in things like ISO 9,001, 14 thousand and one. So it's very structural. We must do this, follow the process, follow the rules, do this. Innovation needs to be far more flexible. You need to be able to make mistakes. One of the best quotes I ever heard was, mistakes are the portals of discovery by James Joyce. Nice one.
Which sums it up, I think. Unless so if you've if you need that culture where you can play, make mistakes, people get actually rewarded for learning from mistakes rather than a a very restrictive culture of, no.
It's ISO 9,001. You can't do this.
The process says that. Mhmm. But that culture and then you need somebody that's running that team that's quite entrepreneurial, but you need to give them space to do that. So if if if you've got an MD that that particularly likes structure and and discipline, they've got a better comfortable letting go and letting that person sort of run run that team. Mhmm. So I
Niels Brabandt
can tell you from my own experience. When I started working in the nineties, '1 of my first employers after uni was a UK company, and I was on the frontier of implementing ISO 9,001. So that that just struck a chord with me. I've I had exactly that experience. Everything suddenly revolved to this is the process, and we cannot do anything else than what the process tells us.
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. And that's that's sort of very, very restrictive, and that's, innovation is just you you just gonna starve innovation of the oxygen it needs to to do that that type of environment.
Niels Brabandt
So when you now have a leader who needs that kind of mindset to be allowed to let go, these these leaders need to have a a reasonable amount of resilience because they cannot expect results within four weeks' time and probably get questions from others about the spending after four weeks' time. I saw that you wrote a book, which is called nuclear power resilience. So how can people get that resilience that they need in these situations? Because we all know managers, MDs love to talk about how resilient they are and how much space they leave and how often they let go. And when you then do surveys amongst their teams, you get a very different point of view compared to what the MD said before.
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. No. That was an interesting question. I mean, there's a lot of, well meaning resilience training out there, but it sort of assumes that you're in a in a rational mindset when when you need resilience. So what what I mean by that is, most of what happens to us is 90 to 95% of what happens to us is is habit based, which is habits that are embedded in our unconscious mind. So when when life happens, your brain looks at the situation and says, ah, I've seen this before.
I know what we do. We do this. And it could be a number of options. It could be panic. It could be hide. It could be get stressed. But it looks at the at that sort of framework in in our mind, in our unconscious mind, and it's very fast, and that part of our brain hijacks our thinking.
So traditional some of the traditional resilience training, assumes you're using your rational pragmatic mind, the problem solving part, to say, no. I'm gonna reframe this. It's not as bad as I think, which to be blunt is pretty pointless because your un your your rational mind has hijacked you. It's not in control, your your your rational mind. So a lot of what I do, I I use a framework I call ACE. So a is for awareness. So I explain to people what's happening in the mind, how it works.
C is choice, so choosing a different response that you want to have when when you when you're under stressful situations, and e is embedding it. So using how the mind works to embed it. So that becomes your new normal response. So you don't react as badly as you you you may have done in the past. So that's the key to it. So I cover some of that in my book and also a particular technique that I shared with a friend during COVID that suffered a childhood trauma and, spent sixty five years training himself in every technique known. Nothing helped.
And and this very simple technique I shared with him, which is fun to do, takes a couple of minutes each day, changed his life. Can you
Niels Brabandt
tell us how that works?
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Sure. In very simplistic terms, what happened with my friend is I I drew two lines in the snow when I went for a walk with with him for an hour to explain this. And I said, imagine these lines are railway lines, but also think of them as neural pathways in your mind. And the first line, I said to him, is is the neural pathway that's your trauma. And nearly all the techniques that he'd been taught and been through basically got him to relive it one way or another and reexamine it. It just made it stronger.
I mean, it's Yeah.
Niels Brabandt
It's re retraumatization, which is irreversible according to psychological science. Yeah.
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you if you take the emotional side of it, it's it's, you know, it's an electro, chemical, pathway that at its heart. So I said to him, we're gonna create a new branch off of this. So if you imagine sort of a railway line with an old fashioned lever that you pull, we're gonna go down a different one, which is based on unconditional love. And we all need love, and we all need to be part of something. So regardless of your upbringing and your experiences, I told him a very simple way that you can embed that in your mind in a and the young the irrational part of your mind behaves the same way to real or imagined events.
Hence, when you're watching a film and you might get emotional, someone's being chased and your heart's racing, you're thinking it's a film. Why why am I doing this? That's because that part of the brain responds the same way as whether it's real or imagined. So you can use that to create a new neural pathway, which is fun and enjoyable. And gradually, the the old one is doesn't become your default, path if you like.
Niels Brabandt
Mhmm. I just usually, I would have one question, which I think I now figured out because I saw on your LinkedIn that you call yourself the mind locksmith. And, probably, these techniques you offer here is the reason for that, or how how how did you come to the term of the how did you find the term mind mind locksmith? Because I haven't heard that term ever, and I'm in business for more than twenty years.
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Now well, so so as I said, I started life as an engineer, so I'm deeply curious. And that curiosity turned to how the mind works. I'm thinking it's the most powerful bit of technology we've got, and nobody's given us a a user guide. Mhmm. So that's what a lot of my workshops, training, and and coaching sort of revolves around. So I wanted a name that tried to explain the idea of a mind locksmith.
So in the same way you might get a locksmith, helps unlock a locked door for you, get into something to recover something, and upgrade it. That's I thought that's quite a good idea.
I have to be honest. I went through lots of ideas for names that were already taken, but I was quite when I found that one, I thought, no. That that describes what I'm doing. So I was quite pleased when I found that one.
Niels Brabandt
Yeah. It's excellent for sure. If if now people are listening to this and say, well, I think I should get in touch with Matt. I want more of his content. I want more of his ideas. What kind of ways are available where people can get in contact with you or get more more out of you, more from your content?
Matt Sturgess
Yeah. Sure. There's there's a couple of ways. I've got a a website, which is simply mindlocksmith.com. The other route is to find me on LinkedIn, Matt two t's sturges, s t u r g e, double s. And if if there's not many other Matt Sturgesses, but if if the mind locksmith thing comes up, then you you will see me. And on there, on the main profile, there's a little blue link.
I've got a free weekly newsletter called Saturday Solace, so I share all sorts of insights about how the mind works. But, yeah, people can find me there, contact me, interact with my post. Yeah, I love speaking and and doing workshops and things like that. And, yeah, it's it's it's fun when you get that what I call that moment when you explain something to someone. You think, wow. That's just really changed how how I feel and how I think now.
Niels Brabandt
Perfect. I think these are the perfect final words. So get in touch with Matt. He offered you all the ways to do so. I can tell you that we just recently spoke together at a conference in, Bristol in The UK, and that's where we met first. And I can tell you, he's a brilliant person, brilliant trainer, brilliant coach, and I think he can really offer you quite something. And just to share of that, you just heard, and I think it's always a good idea to get more.
At the end of this podcast, there's only one thing left for me to say. Matt, thank you very much for your time.
Matt Sturgess
A pleasure. Thank you very much as well. Thank you.