Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Communication executives face special challenges when it comes to driving innovation and change within an organization. This practical, hands-on lecture highlights the sometimes surprising principles for driving impactful change via communication, using real-world examples from Wedell-Wedellsborg’s own work with companies all over the world. Topics and examples covered in the session include:

• Get employee buy-in. Two communication teams in two different Fortune 100 companies had to get employee buy-in for a new project. One team failed completely; the other team was so successful they got featured in Business Week, Fast Company and Harvard Business Review. See what the successful team did differently—and how you can use the same principles in your own business.
• Deal with senior management. Communication teams need top-level support. See how a team at Samsung UK got their bosses in Korea to support their projects despite strong cultural and geographical barriers, eventually generating 700m dollars in profit contribution to Samsung.
• Use crowdsourcing right. Open innovation and customer involvement are big trends in innovation—but how do you use those methods effectively? Learn some surprising lessons from Starbucks, and understand how to use the power of the crowd without getting inundated by bad ideas.
• Create real value. Communication isn’t just about packaging messages: it can be used to create direct value for the business. The research division of DSM, a Dutch company, had been struggling with a problem for two years when their communication team decided to get involved. Launching a highly creative, cost-free communication campaign, the communications team managed to solve the problem and bring a lucrative new product to market.
• Overcome ‘innovation fatigue.’ The leaders of a small sales and marketing company had to drive innovation internally—but the company had already been through three previous innovation initiatives, all of which had failed. Learn how the leadership team approached the challenge and ended up winning the Best Place to Work award in their country.

The keynote shares the core framework of the book Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life (Harvard Business Review Press, March 2013). It centers on the challenge of leading innovation, i.e. what it takes to make other people innovate in a corporate context. It is aimed at an audience of ‘regular’ leaders and managers—that is, managers who are not in a specialized R&D department, but who have to drive innovation as one of several activities, using the people they already have, and facing the challenge that innovation is often a second priority compared to the urgency of the day-to-day business.

The keynote is very practical in nature and will give the audience five tangible take-aways that they can implement immediately after the seminar. The core of the keynote is built around several inspiring real- world examples, taken from both well-known innovations and from his own corporate engagements, serving to make the take-aways both tangible and memorable.

The key take-aways are:

• What the role of the leader is when it comes to driving everyday innovation
• How to set good goals for innovation (i.e. providing direction and focus for your people, and making sure they work on problems that matter to the business)
• How to identify new opportunity spaces and make your people look beyond the obvious ideas
• How to innovate when you don’t have extra budgets or resources for it
• How to avoid some common pitfalls of corporate innovation initiatives

The standard session lasts 45 to 60 minutes; a Q&A or a workshop element can easily be added to it. The keynote can also be delivered in a version suited for non-management audiences (e.g. employees or non- professional audiences).

The workshop builds on Thomas’ book Innovation as Usual (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013) and will teach participants a powerful new problem-solving tool, reframing the problem, which they can use in almost all aspects of their work and their life.

The workshop focuses on the challenge of diagnosing a given problem—such as, ‘what is preventing us from making progress‘ or perhaps a problem faced by their customers—and then, crucially, challenging and reframing people’s initial perception of that problem.

The importance of reframing becomes clear when you look at how people tend to approach problem-solving. By nature, managers are very action-oriented, and tend to apply brute force in the shape of trial and-error. That is often a good approach. But the tendency to ‘jump into action’ also creates a danger that people keep trying new solutions without understanding whether they understand the problem correctly—or if they are even targeting the right problem in the first place. The trial-and-error approach benefits tremendously from being combined with reframing; a little bit of analysis can save managers and innovators a great deal of wasted effort. But it is critical to introduce the idea of reframing as early as possible, before people start falling in love with a particular type of solution.

The workshop is highly interactive and the timing is flexible: It can be conducted in anything from a concentrated 60-minute version to a 3 hour immersive version. It includes a teamwork element where people apply reframing on the challenges they are currently facing in their business, letting them use the workshop to create immediate real-life benefits.

The workshop does not require any special room setup and can be run with any size of audience, including very large ones.