Why Couldn’t Dave Hoffmann Get His Bananas?

In 2014, Scott and Andy spoke to Dave Hoffmann about innovation at McDonald’s.⁷ At the time, Hoffmann led the fast food giant’s operations in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East, and Africa.⁸ That footprint covered close to 10,000 stores that produced $20 billion in annual revenues. Like many of the company’s top leaders, Hoffmann had been with McDonald’s for decades.

In 1993, a local franchise owner in Melbourne developed a concept called McCafé, which offered high-quality espresso-based beverages, fruit shakes, and bakery items at prices sharply lower than coffee chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee (which was acquired by The Coca-Cola Company in 2018). The concept spread throughout Australia and now is embedded within McDonald’s stores globally. By all accounts, the concept has been an amazing success. Yet something bothered Hoffman. “I keep saying I want bananas in the stores,” he said. “And they never show up.”

You may think, “Bananas? Who cares about bananas?” But all of us, at some point, push for our own versions of bananas, and get stifled—and understanding why we can’t get sell-in is important.

Imagine the following scenario. Hoffmann makes his request at a meeting of top leaders. The meeting notes dutifully summarize his proposal. The proclamation winds its way through the organization to land on the desk of a midlevel manager responsible for menu and operations at McCafé. Imagine this manager has already gone through the annual budgeting process, at which time new drink flavors and cakes looked more attractive than bananas. He now considers squeezing bananas in, but then he revisits the goals he agreed to at the beginning of the year. A key one was to reduce food wastage by 6 percent. Bananas are famously perishable, so adding them to the menu would threaten his ability to hit that metric. And after eighteen months on the job, he’s this close to getting a coveted promotion. He also knows from experience that any off-budget request has to go through a review committee of midlevel managers who have a similar set of incentives. And as for Hoffmann, by now he has already gone back (appropriately!) to focusing on how to deal with the latest supply-chain or public-relations issue that has cropped up. Time gets away until, a few months later, he asks, “Hey, whatever happened to those bananas?”

In this story (and this is an imagined story, we have no idea if any of the specific discussions detailed above actually took place), it isn’t bureaucracy or excessive risk aversion that squashes Hoffmann’s bananas; it is simply the underlying systems that determine how resources get allocated. The core corporate machinery does the intended job of optimizing the current business model, and bananas and similar ideas end up a necessary casualty.

Why Does Culture Eat Strategy for Breakfast?

Let’s raise the stakes.

Imagine a deep-pocketed company that spots an opportunity to create a powerful growth business. A powerful chief executive officer, fully backed by the board of directors, declares the opportunity to be strategic. Resources are allocated aggressively to pursue the opportunity. But despite the stated strategic focus and resource allocation, the company ultimately loses the opportunity to an upstart that seems to lack all of the natural advantages enjoyed by the incumbent.

That’s essentially what happened in the early 2000s when Microsoft was working on a solution that was eerily similar to a powerful business model at Google called AdWords. AdWords, the secret to Google’s success over the past two decades, allows companies to “buy” keywords that tie advertisements to specific search terms. Companies pay only if someone actually clicks on an advertisement. As described in a brilliant 2009 Wall Street Journal article by Robert A. Guth, “Microsoft Bid to Beat Google Builds on a History of Misses,” no individual decision doomed Microsoft’s efforts. Instead, a series of subtle decisions led to Microsoft’s miss. For example, Microsoft wanted to test search-based advertising on its MSN portal. But the portal’s business leaders worried that the advertisements would draw users away from the banner advertisements that served as a lucrative source of revenue, so they made the search results hard for users to find. Disappointing test results were at least one factor that led Microsoft to deprioritize the opportunity.

Whether the innovation is big or small, the internal enemy is the same and results not from malice but, ironically, from success. Successful organizations become successful by repeatedly solving a problem. They grow by solving that problem more effectively and efficiently. They then develop habits related to how they solve that problem, and the rationale for the habits disappears into unstated assumptions (“That’s just the way we do things around here.”) Habits are reinforced by standard operating procedures, performance management systems, and operating metrics. In a stable world, engrained habits reinforced by systems and structures serve as a source of strength.

But in a changing world, with advancing technologies and lines between industries blurred, a blind adherence to these habits can be harmful, as institutionalized inertia inhibits necessary change. This is the fundamental paradox and the fundamental challenge facing leaders looking to create a culture of innovation: the systems that enable success in today’s model reinforce behaviors inconsistent with discovering tomorrow’s model. As one executive quipped, “We are organized to deliver predictable, reliable results. And that’s exactly the problem.”

The shadow strategy is the reason culture eats strategy for breakfast. After all, as noted by scholars from a field known as the “resource-based view,” strategy isn’t what you say you do—it is what you actually do. In the 2005 book From Resource Allocation to Strategy, Harvard Business School professor Joseph Bower and longtime Innosight adviser Clark Gilbert noted, “The strategy of a company is more than the statement of strategy as presented in company documents or written plans. It is the actual aggregation of commitments and their relationship to the realized strategy of the firm.”

In simple terms, your strategy is:

• What marketing markets
• What engineering engineers
• What the sales team sells
• What production produces
• What finance funds
• How HR measures performance

All of these things are optimized to make today better and to improve or guarantee the bottom line. And all of them stand in the way of making tomorrow different.

A few years ago, Innosight surveyed close to one thousand executives. Only 12 percent of respondents said they had a growth strategy with at least a five-year-plus time horizon. More often, executives reported that “we are too busy executing” (36 percent) or “we have no process for creating one” (25 percent). These companies absolutely have a long-term strategy: to keep doing exactly what they are currently doing. The shadow strategy quietly tugs and nudges a company down a path of perpetuation, even if circumstances demand something drastically different.

In summary, organizations do exactly what they are designed to do—they execute a known and proven model. Imagine a leader breaks through the individual shackles described in Happy Harry’s story. She dreams of becoming an innovation superhero who delivers all of the benefits of innovation to her organization. She has to come to grips with the reality that her biggest enemy is her own organization. The leader has to fight against institutional shackles—an intertwined strategy, operating metrics, processes, performance incentives, and decision criteria, all optimized to help the organization do what it is currently doing, only better, faster, or cheaper—not to help it do something materially different.

In Seeing Around Corners, Columbia University professor Rita McGrath shows that we have no one to blame for this problem but ourselves. McGrath describes a memorable experience running a workshop for a large multinational. She asks the group to list innovation blockers in their organizations. They provide the usual litany of responses, such as “Management wants near-term success,” “Lack of customer focus,” “Fear of failure,” “Fear of cannibalizing our successful business,” and “No career incentive to work on innovation/growth projects.”

Here’s what McGrath has to say about their responses:

“What,” I asked them, “does every single one of these barriers to innovation have in common?” After a few halting remarks, the penny dropped. Everyone is an internally imposed constraint. They are all there to protect and defend the orderly operation of the existing business and to keep it from being disrupted. More precisely, they are there to stop the kind of disruption that innovations can represent. And yet, if we collectively and consciously decide that these constraints can be addressed, we can move them out of the way. After all, God did not come down from heaven and declare, “There shalt be silos!”

As acolytes of process improvement guru W. Edwards Deming have noted, every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets. Breaking this institutionalized inertia requires fighting against the shadow strategy.

The shadow strategy can be defeated, however; seemingly immovable organizations can become agile and innovative.⁹ The case study that follows returns to Harry’s home in Singapore to see one organization that did just that.

Chapter Summary

• Human beings enter the world naturally curious and creative. All of us once were “Happy Harry.”
• However, school and work constrain those natural tendencies, leading innovation muscles to wither.
• Organizations are designed to do what they are currently doing better, faster, or cheaper. Individuals who break free of self-imposed constraints must therefore wrestle against the shadow strategy, which institutionalizes inertia through reinforcing systems, structures, strategy, norms, and more.

1. 1. We mentioned one of our favorite reviewers, Karl Ronn, in the introduction. Karl is a former Procter & Gamble executive who is now involved in the startup ecosystem in San Francisco. After reading this sentence, he wrote: “I tell people San Francisco has three industries. Tourism, innovation, and, the largest of all, innovation tourism. See our cathedrals. Go home inspired. And do nothing different.” Innoganda!

2. 2. The word cloud also showed how hard the word bureaucracy is to spell in real time, as participants also submitted the words “beauracrwcy,” “burocracy,” and “beauracracy” (so close!).

3. 3. Harry’s mother, Joanne, insisted that Scott noted that Harry does, like any kid, have his whiny moments!

4. 4. Harrylandia, you’ll be happy to know, is replete with pigs, watermelon, and volcanoes. Who knew!

5. 5. Happy Harry was not yet five when the incident in question occurred. You can argue he was even happier then!

6. 6. The basic idea is that if you fix the small stuff, like broken windows and subway fare evasion, you change norms and expectations, and stop the big stuff from ever happening.

7. 7. Andy is coauthor Andy Parker. We said we wouldn’t remind you of this shocking first-name use in text again. But there you go—we did.

8. 8. Hoffmann joined Dunkin’ Brands in 2016 and became its CEO in 2018.

9. 9. The “immovable organization” is a Paul phrase. Run a thought experiment in which you consider how you would consciously create an organization that would never change. How much does it overlap with your organization?

Companion Case Study

From Damn Bloody Slow to Best Bank in the World

Paul remembers vividly his first day at DBS in 2009: when he asked his taxi driver to take him to DBS, the driver said, “Ah, DBS—Damn Bloody Slow,” referring to the notorious long queues that plagued its ATMs. That same year, when preparing to move to Singapore, Scott asked around for advice about which bank he should use there. No one said DBS. In fact, customer satisfaction scores ranked DBS fifth in Singapore, trailing locally based companies UOB and OCBC and global giants HSBC and Citi.

Now fast-forward a few years to 2016, when DBS was named the world’s best digital bank by Euromoney, who noted, “It is demonstrably the case that digital innovation pervades every part of DBS.” And by 2019, DBS became the first bank to simultaneously hold the titles Bank of the Year (The Banker), Best Bank in the World (Global Finance), and World’s Best Bank (Euromoney).

How did that happen? A large portion of the answer is a concerted, cohesive effort to create a culture of innovation. These efforts have now paid dividends in many ways. Among them, customer satisfaction scores have gone from being industry-lagging to industry-leading, innovative efforts to redesign services have saved 250 million customer hours, and a digital-only offering in India and Indonesia has enabled new bank accounts to be created in minutes without a visit to a branch.

DBS’s success story began in 2009, when Piyush Gupta took over as CEO. Gupta coupled substantial industry experience, gained from his long history at Citibank, with a dose of entrepreneurialism, learned from his helming of a (failed) startup called Go4i.com in the early 2000s. He became CEO at an interesting moment in the financial services industry—a time when many global banks were dealing with the aftereffects of the 2007–2008 global financial crisis. While many Asian banks emerged relatively unscathed, it was clear that more change was coming soon driven by the rapid emergence of nontraditional competitors such as Alibaba, Tencent, and Amazon.com and technologies such as digitization, cryptocurrency, roboadvisers, and peer-to-peer finance platforms. Gupta and his team concluded that DBS had to transform.

Acting Like a 28,000-Person Startup

A key change for DBS was reframing its competition. No longer could it compare itself to other banks based in Singapore, like OCBC or UOB, or to big regional banks like ANZ. It also couldn’t compare itself to global behemoths like JP Morgan Chase or HSBC—or even to small but nimble global banks like BBVA and ING. Rather, the pace of technological change meant it had to look less like a bank that biased toward regulatory compliance and more like a technology company that biased toward entrepreneurialism and innovation. As such, it decided to begin comparing itself to Google, Amazon, Netflix, Apple, LinkedIn (subsequently acquired by Microsoft), and Facebook. It didn’t pick those companies haphazardly. If you put DBS between Netflix and Apple, it forms the acronym GANDALF, the long-bearded wizard from J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series. That, along with functioning like a “28,000-person startup,” became evocative metaphors for DBS’s future destination and presented clear contrasts from its state at the beginning of its transformation.

This change in orientation drove two fundamental shifts within DBS. The first shift related to technology. DBS made the strategic decision to insource technology operations to give it more control over its digital transformation. In 2009, almost all of its IT operations were outsourced. But by the end of 2017, DBS controlled 85 percent of its own IT operations. It had also moved two-thirds of its applications to the cloud to provide greater flexibility.

The second shift, which relates to the main focus of this book, was to encourage specific behaviors. This was the truly critical shift, because technology can’t change itself; transformation happens only if technologists and businesspeople change what they do. So after some trial-and-error experimentation, DBS defined five desired behaviors of a 28,000-person startup (which, incidentally, overlap the five behaviors defined in chapter 1):

• Agile.  In order to adapt and move faster, DBS needed to go full-bore to embed agile principles so it could get fast feedback on ideas.
• Be a learning organization.  As a legacy company aspiring to be a digital company, DBS had a learning mountain to climb. Its technology people needed to learn fundamentally different paradigms around the cloud and automation, its businesspeople needed to become tech savvy, and its leadership needed to learn new decision-making approaches and how to unlock the company’s curiosity.
• Customer-obsessed.  No one wakes up in the morning and says, “Hey, today’s a great day to do some banking—let’s all go to the bank.” Banking tasks are typically part of a broader customer need or “job to be done.” So DBS had to learn to go deep in understanding its customers’ lives.
• Data-driven.  DBS had to accelerate its use of data analytics and embrace artificial intelligence. That fed into a desired shift from making decisions “by HIPPO” (the highest paid person’s opinion) to making decisions with data.
• Experiment and take risks.  Conducting experiments is the best way to quickly get data to determine whether new ideas will address customer needs. Otherwise, it is too easy to fall back on the past practice of asking managers to put their reputations on the line by developing hefty business cases to make them successful.

The following stories describe these behaviors in action, showing how DBS innovated to enter new markets, save customers’ time, and make families safer.

Breaking into New Markets

Historically, DBS’s stronghold has, naturally, been Singapore, where it is the clear market leader. During the 1980s and 1990s it became a regional bank by expanding into other regional markets such as Indonesia. In 2013 it began setting its sights on what historically seemed an aspirational market: India. DBS already had a small presence in the market, with fewer than 20,000 customers. How could it dramatically scale that number? The market’s vast size and complexity meant DBS had to approach it in a fundamentally different way. Rather than a vast infrastructure of physical locations, it considered a digital-first offering that could allow it to scale up reasonably quickly without a big investment. It created a special-purpose team to design the offering. The team set a goal to create a mobile-only offering that would allow a customer to open an account, without going to a branch, in ninety seconds. That required thinking creatively about how to partner with local organizations like Café Coffee Day, a leading local coffee shop chain. It piloted the idea in 2015 and formally launched in 2017. Within two years it had attracted 2 million customers. Of course, that is still a relatively small number in a country with more than a billion people, but the innovative offering built a strong foothold in India and became the base of DBS’s expansion into other markets. It also helped build DBS’s digital fluencies. In 2017 it launched the world’s largest banking application protocol interface (API), through which partners can invisibly integrate DBS’s capabilities into their systems. By late 2018 it had demonstrated that digital customers are at least twice as profitable as traditional customers, setting the stage for further growth and expansion.

Shortening Queues, Saving Millions of Hours

During its transformation journey, DBS constantly raised its ambitions. Before setting the bar at “best bank it the world,” it aspired to become a leading Asian bank. How could it do that? Make banking joyful. How can banking be joyful? By disappearing from people’s lives. That meant making DBS the world’s first invisible bank while still providing high-quality service. So it set a new metric, called the customer hour, which measured the aggregate time customers spent waiting for the bank to complete tasks. It designed and executed 250 process-improvement events to remove operational waste from the system. Those events ended up saving more than 250 million customer hours, rocketing DBS from the bottom to the top of the customer satisfaction scores.

Today, DBS has the busiest ATM network in the world. How did it shorten its legendary ATM queues?¹ It combined careful customer observation with advanced analytics to identify opportunities for improvement. Some of those changes were invisible to consumers. For example, predictive analytics helped anticipate when machines would run out of cash and thereby optimize replenishment routes. Predictive analytics also helped anticipate mechanical failure. One surprising factor behind failure? Proximity to “wet markets” that sell fresh meat and fish. It turns out that ATMs and fish scales don’t go well together. Other changes focused on the customer experience. For example, many customers would wait for their receipt to print, but it turned out they didn’t actually want a receipt—they simply wanted to know their balance. So DBS added a feature that allowed customers to see their balance on the screen. It also had to think about when and how to show that balance. As it turned out, a significant number of customers, primarily males, were forgetting their cards in the machines. Close observation suggested that displaying the balance and the “Please take your card” message overwhelmed some customers. So, DBS separated the balance message from the “take your card” message, experimented with different time intervals between the message and the card’s release, and added an audible alarm indicating that the consumer should take their card. DBS also made it easy for mobile users to quickly see their balances so that they wouldn’t need to stand in line to use an ATM.

Another process improvement related to how DBS handled lost credit cards. Historically, when a customer reported a lost credit card, it would take DBS five days to return it. It set a goal of decreasing that time to a single day. Not only would the quicker turnaround time increase customer satisfaction, DBS reasoned, but a customer who doesn’t have a credit card isn’t using it. After delivering against its one-day goal, DBS phoned a customer and said, “Madam, how did you like getting your credit card back in a day?” The response, Paul believes, changed history. “It was great, thank you very much,” she said. “But where is my debit card? I didn’t just lose my credit card. I lost my handbag and all my cards in the shopping mall.” This highlighted that, while innovating processes with an internal view has its benefit, an outside-in view often highlights broader opportunities to innovate. Focused research helped change the script used by call center representatives when customers reported lost cards. Rather than ask authentication questions with the implication that the customer was a criminal, representatives would express empathy and provide other useful information. Customer satisfaction scores went through the roof.

Developing SmartBuddy

As DBS progressed with its transformation, it experimented with different tools, methods, and vocabulary to drive process improvement, customer experience, and innovation. For example, in response to an explosion of incoherent vernacular that confused its employees, DBS borrowed a model from the UK Design Council called double diamond, or 4D. The 4D model refers to four phases: Discover (identify a problem to solve), Define (detail the specifics of the problem), Develop (prototype and iterate solutions), and Deliver (finalize and launch the idea).² At a 2016 leadership offsite, DBS spent a full day training leaders on the concept. While historically, leaders had crafted solutions based on experience or gut feel, this training taught them to “wallow in the problem,” in order to uncover emotional, social, and functional jobs to be done, and then to experiment with different solutions.

A collaboration with Singapore’s Ministry of Education to eliminate the need for cash transactions in public schools demonstrates this “wallow in the problem” methodology in action. DBS developed a prototype of a wristband that would allow cashless transactions and tied it to an app that allowed parents to provide allowances and set savings goals for their children. The solution, called SmartBuddy, also allowed children to transfer money into their own savings accounts. As DBS wallowed in the problem further, it discovered a related problem: parents were reporting concern about the safety of their children traveling to and from school. Based on this insight, DBS added a functionality to the app that would allow children to tap their wristbands on a reader in the school bus, which would then notify parents. SmartBuddy was subsequently launched across more than thirty schools in Singapore.

Enabling Innovation

An innovative digital-only banking offering, shorter ATM lines, and a cashless solution that also helped parents feel safe show innovation in action at DBS. Or, in simple terms, they show “the what.” The next two examples return to the beginning of the story to address “the how.”

BRINGING MOJO TO MEETINGS3

In 2016, DBS’s top leaders gathered in Singapore to talk about how the bank was progressing. All agreed that though it had made headway, much work remained. A major blocker they identified was dysfunctional meetings that entrenched organizational inertia and hindered innovation. Most meetings at DBS could be charitably described as inefficient. They would often start and run late, eating up time that leadership could otherwise have spent on innovation. Sometimes decisions were made, and sometimes they were not. People would dutifully arrive without a clear sense of why they were there. Some participants were active, but many sat in defensive silence. And it is this last point that was most salient. Meetings, DBS’s top leaders concluded, were suppressing diverse voices and reinforcing the status quo.

To fix those bad habits, DBS introduced a program called MOJO. It was informed by research at Google that showed that having an equal share of voice and psychological safety was critical to high-performing, highly innovative project teams. MOJO promotes efficient, effective, open, and collaborative meetings. MO refers to the meeting owner who is responsible for ensuring that the meeting has a clear agenda, that it starts and ends on time, and that all attendees are given an equal say. The JO—or joyful observer—is assigned to help the meeting run crisply and to encourage broad participation. The JO, for example, has the authority to call a “phone Jenga,” which requires all attendees to put their phones in pile on the table. Perhaps most important, at the meeting’s end, the JO holds the MO accountable, providing frank feedback about how things went and how the MO can improve. Even when the JO is a junior employee, he or she is explicitly authorized to be direct with the MO. The presence of an observer and the knowledge that feedback is coming at the end of the meeting nudges the MO to be mindful of meeting behavior.

This approach, supported by physical reminders in meeting rooms (small cards, wall art, and fun paper cubes that can be tossed in the room) and a range of measurement and tracking tools, has had a powerful impact. Meetings at DBS no longer run late, which has saved an estimated 500,000 employee hours as of 2019. Meeting effectiveness, as gauged by ongoing employee surveys, has doubled, and the percentage of employees who feel they have an equal share of the voice in meetings has jumped from 40 percent to 90 percent. Improved efficiency and effectiveness doesn’t mean meetings have become dull, however. Living up to their moniker, the JOs have even been known to give their feedback in verse. And legends have spread: at one meeting, the observer bravely told a senior executive who had lost his cool that the blowup had shut down all discussion. The executive welcomed the feedback, promising to do better next time. It’s a story that still circulates, reinforcing the behavioral change DBS had hoped to drive with MOJO.

THE INNOVATION TEAM THAT DOESN’T INNOVATE

It would be natural to assume that a centralized innovation team has driven the range of innovation stories at DBS. And it has, but perhaps in an unexpected way. In CEO Gupta’s early days, he put in place a strategy to differentiate DBS based on its position in, and knowledge of, Asia. Underpinning the strategy were five pillars: Asian service, Asian connectivity, Asian relationships, Asian insights, and Asian innovation. Of the five, innovation proved the most challenging to get moving. There were a couple of false starts. The first iteration was to assemble some senior internal talent and ask them to develop ideas in a workshop. In parallel, DBS formed an advisory board of innovation experts to oversee the efforts. However, the workshop approach yielded unsatisfactory outcomes, and the innovation board members’ expertise was too narrow and deep to help shape the innovation strategy effectively.

So DBS tested another approach. A new innovation head was hired to set up a small team that worked on potentially groundbreaking projects. However, the new team had difficulty selling its ideas to the rest of the company. This is a common challenge: organizations bring in people with innovation experience at other companies, isolate them, and expect them to work magic. But the magic often doesn’t materialize. In DBS’s case, the would-be magicians struggled to navigate through DBS’s core organization, so they couldn’t integrate DBS’s core assets and capabilities into their ideas. Smart integration is critically important in a regulated industry like banking, where offerings need to comply with appropriate regulations and be slotted into complex systems.

By this time, the Asian service pillar was enjoying success by adopting a very inclusive approach. Everyone in the company was encouraged to participate, and, as a result, enthusiasm for improvement was spreading across the company. So DBS decided that the innovation portfolio should align with the customer experience program—which was led by Paul.

Paul gave the innovation team one rule: under no circumstance should it innovate. Why? Because the innovation team should be made up of evangelists, agitators, coaches, and guides that teach the whole company to innovate.

Many DBS employees, and especially leaders, believed that innovation was the special reserve of creative types—that average bankers could not be expected to innovate. To counter that perspective, the DBS team held programs to teach employees the processes involved in innovation. The first focus of these programs was to help leaders understand what it felt like to work at startup speed. The innovation team partnered with the HR learning team to create a series of weeklong events, which included three days of training on digital concepts. This week of events was then followed by a forty-eight-hour “hackathon,” where executives were teamed with real startups to work on real business problems. The executives created working prototypes that they pitched to the CEO on the final afternoon.

The innovation team that doesn’t innovate has made significant strides in its mission of raising the organization’s overall innovation fluency and capabilities, helping DBS achieve its strategic objective of becoming a 28,000-person startup that is legitimately positioned to put the D in GANDALF.

Coping with a Crisis

Finally, DBS’s innovation capability helped its response to COVID-19, and COVID-19, perhaps a bit surprisingly, helped to strengthen DBS’s innovation capability.

Following the 2003–2004 SARS epidemic, Singapore required that all of its companies develop business continuity plans. In early February 2020, the government moved its internal monitoring system to “orange,” which required companies to limit the number of employees in offices at any given time; in April it executed a “circuit breaker” that mandated all but essential employees to work from home. DBS quickly moved to execute a bankwide effort to make the process as smooth and painless as possible.

Good innovators seek to empathetically understand their customers. In this case, the operations team quickly observed new challenges, such as the lack of “sense-based memory” that tied particular meeting rooms to particular meetings and the need to replace water cooler chat as an informal source of information. The team also noticed surprising concerns from employees, such as people being reluctant to turn on their cameras because they were embarrassed about their homes or feeling like managers asking them to turn on their cameras signaled mistrust versus a desire to make a more human connection.

A specific effort called “Project Lemonade” sought to rapidly develop tools and approaches to help combat these problems and enable virtual connection and collaboration. The project covered both “hard” issues, such as testing various technological platforms, and soft issues, such as defining simple rules for videoconference etiquette and determining how to use the chat function to augment key points and answer simple questions that could otherwise derail a discussion.

All of this helped to accelerate key ongoing behavior shifts. Agile practices such as daily team huddles became standard practices quickly. Senior leaders personally experiencing the pain of inadequate digital technologies helped to accelerate investments in critical upgrades. More widespread use of feedback tools helped DBS to be even more data driven in its decision making. Interestingly, early data showed improvement in meeting behavior, with higher degrees of collaboration and fewer emotional outbursts.

While at the time of the writing of this book significant uncertainty remains about the lasting impact of COVID-19, DBS’s strengthening innovation capabilities position it well to be able to continue to rapidly adapt to, and indeed get in front of, key shifts.

Did MOJO catch your attention? It certainly caught ours.⁴ It serves as a powerful, practical example of how to break the shadow strategy and encourage collaboration, a key ingredient to successful innovation. The next chapter provides the science behind MOJO’s success and details a new tool for the would-be culture-changer: a behavior enabler, artifact, and nudge. Yes, it’s finally time to dive deep into BEANs.

1. 1. The long queues weren’t entirely DBS’s fault. Singaporeans like cash. A typical ATM has about 5,000 transactions a month. In Singapore, the average is ten thousand a month. The ATM with the highest frequency in the world resides in Singapore (Paul knows the location but is sworn to secrecy).

2. 2. To plant a small seed, this model nicely maps the four phases of the innovation journey described in part II of the book.

3. 3. You can’t footnote a picture, but you’ll notice a small illustration tied to this section. Every time a BEAN (behavior enabler, artifact, and nudge) is described in depth, Paul has doodled an image connected to it. You’ll see forty-one more of these in the pages ahead (without captions, as that seems to defeat the point), and can find all of the details for the BEANs at www.eatsleepinnovate.com.

4. 4. Well, it caught the attention of Andy, Scott, and Natalie. Paul, of course, helped to create MOJO. And has lots of mojo.