CHAPTER 7

Create an Incubation Alliance

A successful imaginer has the imagination of a five-year-old with the wisdom of a grandparent.

—WALT DISNEY

My grandmother was an incubator. Near her backyard, she had a chicken house divided into a row of cubbies much like the ones you had in grade school. Each cubby had a floor of pine straw and a raw light bulb on top. It was where her chickens laid their eggs. I lived nearby, and when I visited my grandparents, my job was to empty the nest of eggs she would use for cooking. The hens did not seem to mind since they had plenty more on the way. However, when the goal was baby chickens instead of eggs, the light was turned on. And the hens were not at all amused at my territorial invasion.

My grandmother sang a lot to the chickens perched on their eggs. Her small garden was right beside the chicken house and she sang as she weeded or picked vegetables. I thought the process was magical when chicks (or “biddies” as we called them) pecked their way out of the eggshell. I remember wondering if it might have been my grandmother’s singing that enticed them to leave the safety of their shell. Or was it the glow or heat of the raw light bulb positioned above them in their cubby? An incubation alliance feels to its participants like my grandmother’s chicken house must have felt to her hens.

Generate a Rapport Retreat

An incubation alliance is an environment laced with conditions and dispositions that favor the birth of ideas. My grandmother’s chicken yard was surrounded by a high chicken-wire fence designed to keep the hens in and the foxes out. It was physically safe. But a rapport retreat is less about physical conditions (colorful pictures, great music, or comfy seats) and more about the security of positive dispositions, affirming attitudes, and optimistic moods.

Why rapport? “Rapport” comes from an antique French word that means “harmony renewed.” It is the expression we use to mean “establishing a safe connection.” Most people approaching a potentially anxious encounter will raise their antennae high in search of clues about the road ahead: Will this situation embarrass me? Will this person take advantage of me? Will I be effective in this encounter? When I fail, will I be perceived as a failure?

What about the world inside your customer’s imagination? It does not likely come streaming out just on its own. Unless your customer is a rare person, he or she does not go through the business day with a wild imagination set on full speed ahead. It comes out as needed, if at all. And it comes out by invitation through your interpersonal conduct, or it is attracted out, riding on the vehicle of an important cause or accompanied by its cousin, discovery. The secret you are about to explore is all about the anatomy, attributes, and applications of that cousin.

In the first secret we reviewed how to send an irresistible invitation to your customer’s imagination through your curiosity manifested as eccentric listening, witnessing your customer, and unbiased inquiry. In the second secret we explored how to create a profound attraction through grounding, exhibited as a compelling focus, with helpful guardrails and full accountability for success. We will now begin our examination of another secret to attract your customer’s imagination: discovery (read: learning). And it begins like most relationships, with establishing rapport.

The Arbor Company is a successful chain of senior living communities. Each community has an “Engagement” staff whose job is to involve residents in designing activities they will find enjoyable and that promote their overall health. Arbor created a contest among all their communities to enhance the Engagement programs in a uniquely innovative way. One successful program was called “Love it or Leave Us.” The staff was challenged to assess what’s happening in their communities during high-frequency new prospect tour times and to generate ideas for activities to be used during those times to help create prospect rapport by making their community feel more energized.

The program has had multiple beneficiaries: the residents, who have more activity opportunities; the staff, who have an enhanced involvement with residents (their customers); and the prospects, who see a more active environment and therefore may be more inclined to choose the Arbor community as being the right fit for them and thus “love it” rather than “leave us.”

How do you create a rapport that connects? Use welcoming tones, bring a gift, create the excitement and anticipation of a birthday party, take time to get really acquainted—longer than you normally might. Create a spirit of openness and positive regard. Start with a fun topic. Add whimsy to the ambiance. Make your customer the center of attention. Talk about the future as opportunity, not challenge. Do something quirky to alter the status quo of an otherwise serious meeting in search of a serious solution. These are actions to add to the attraction; what are actions to avoid?

Stop Thinking It’s Picture Day

Perfection is the enemy of excellence. Now don’t get me wrong. There are clearly areas where perfection should be the minimum standard. If my surgeon is doing surgery on what’s inside my skull or the pilot is landing the plane in which I am a passenger, I want absolutely zero defects—total perfection. No hospital would get away with a quality goal of a 99.9 percent accuracy rate on the number of dropped babies!

Discovery is not like hunting for Easter eggs with a colorful basket of fake straw;

discovery is like Indiana Jones’s Ark of the Covenant hunting … with snakes!

There are risks.

The challenge with the pursuit of perfection (with a hat tip to our brain surgeon, pilot, and baby-dropping exceptions) is it can slow momentum or stop progress. While “good enough for government work” might signal an acquiescence to mediocrity, the standard my son Bilijack uses—“Hey, it’s not picture day”—telegraphs that we do our very best and move on, not worrying about reaching perfection but enjoying the substance of excellence. To quote Norman Vincent Peale, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you end up among the stars.”

Why is a picture-day mentality a problem? The application of imagination in an innovation setting needs a rough and tumble, sawdust-on-the-floor type of environment, not a sterilized, error-avoiding operating room. A push for perfection can lasso experimentation and pull it to the ground of inspection and close-up evaluation. It can stymie a make-itup-as-we-go freedom that allows “tentative” to feel at home and “speculative” to be safe.

The CEO of a senior living company announced to her leadership group they would be holding a retreat at a rustic venue instead of the “big conference room,” as they called it. “Wear jeans,” she told the group. “Not your nice jeans you wear to an outdoor party, I mean the worn-out pair you wear to paint. Tomorrow, we will be wallowing in wild ideas and we need to focus on imagination, not on formality.” It was her way of saying, “This is not picture day.”

Help your customer lighten up, let go, kick back, and save perfection for a rare picture day. Eliminate emotional barriers. Build an out-of-the-box activity into your meeting plan, and early. Meet in fun places, not a formal meeting room. Turn mistakes into fun learnings to celebrate rather than criticize. One company gives a “green wiener” award to the person who makes the biggest mistake (while doing their best) that results in valuable learning for all. Assume that orientation with your customer. Confucius said: “Better a diamond with a flaw than a pebble without.”

Imagination is more attractive when dressed in work clothes. For your customers, it means an environment of “we can be a bit wacky,” “let’s have fun,” and “this will lead to something novel.” It is a setting where judgment waits in the next room until summoned. However, such refereeing of the relationship is in your hands as the provider. Stay vigilant for any sights, sounds, and scenarios that signal judgment and criticism have escaped their confinement to infiltrate your relationship.

Enroll Together in Daredevil Learning

Let’s have fun with a simulated example. You are the owner of a large printing company. Your reputation is built on high-quality printing, lightning fast responsiveness, and a willingness to pull out all the stops to meet your customers’ needs. Customers bring or email you what they need printed, a proof is prepared for their review, it is printed on approval, and a local courier is used to deliver the finished goods. One of your most prominent customers is a very large resort community. Their head of operations wants even faster turn time on print jobs without sacrificing quality. She has ideas and schedules a meeting with you to discuss her need. Here are a few daredevil principles to guide your discussion.

Find expert input that can enable you and your customer to learn together. Not just best practices, new practices you can observe or hear about.

Schedule your meeting at your customer’s location to gain a deeper understanding of the context of his or her need.

Start your meeting by brainstorming all the ways the key variable (in this case, speed) can be interpreted (e.g., agility instead of pace).

Identify ways this key variable is operationalized in other contexts (e.g., electronically, drones, embedded devices, and so forth).

Look at your customer’s need from new angles (e.g., if your product could speak, what would it suggest?).

Create Unmistakable Acceptance

Co-creation partnerships are girded by complete acceptance. Accepting means encouraging your customer to be courageous enough to take the risks needed to unfreeze old habits and embrace new practices. It is the trumpeting of support, despite unstable first attempts and timid trials. It means helping your customer feel like a full owner, not a tenant or junior partner.

Ownership also matters when you are in search of product improvements. For example, how could you improve on a product as simple and pedestrian as a baby bottle? Playtex, Evenflo, and Similac have all tweaked the hundred-year-old design with better nipples, easier handles, and ways to minimize uncomfortable air intake. But Jason Tebeau took the baby bottle in a completely different direction.

It all started when Jason’s mom was babysitting. Driving with a child in the car seat in the passenger seat, she got frustrated having to stop the car to reposition the baby bottle and stop the child from crying. Jason learned other parents had the same frustration with baby bottles—they were operationally parent dependent. He created a hands-free bottle that left the baby independent during feeding time. But what he created is not the story; how he created it is a tutorial in ways to get inside your customer’s imagination.

Assembling a group of fifty babies with parents in tow, Tebeau and the parents observed babies interacting with bottles in various stages of the design process as assorted product challenges were solved—how to work with the physics of liquid moving up a tube, how to capitalize on babies’ tendencies to put everything in their mouth and treat every object as a toy, how to use a valve to retain liquid in the pacifier-style nipple so babies would not lose interest if they stopped sucking and the liquid fell back into the bottle. At each phase, he interviewed and brainstormed with parents and listened to them in focus groups talking to each other about what they had observed. They were treated as baby experts; he was simply a bottle designer.

The result of their collaboration was the popular Pacifeeder, one of several products from Tebeau’s company Savi Baby. Sold at retail outlets like Target and Amazon, the bottle has been so well liked many babies prefer it over the traditional “lie in mommy’s lap” variety. The customers—the babies and their parents—were intimately involved throughout. Tebeau even used parents to help him determine the appropriate price and conceive ideas for promoting his creative product, knowing retailers might see it as “just another baby bottle.”¹ Notice the complete acceptance and obvious trust Tebeau placed in his customers. It is this attractive approval that makes customers want to share their imagination and claim the pride of co-creation.

The opportunity to co-create is a gift you give your customer as a way to summon their imagination. Orators start with a joke, salespeople start with chitchat rather than features and benefits, and you bring a bottle of wine to a dinner party. All these gifts signify that beginnings can be difficult. When the welcome mat of imagination is an opportunity to discover together, it attracts the customer’s imagination to come out and add to the mix.

Create an Incubation Alliance: The Partnering Crib Notes

Turn everything into a learning challenge. So, why is the sky blue? Put on your hobby hat and consider new learning opportunities you and your customers could share. “I have never played _________; I understand you have not either. I would enjoy learning it with you.” Watch a relevant TED talk together. Level the learning field by ensuring every effort is egalitarian without a hint of a schoolmarm-to-student gap. Turn your innovation gatherings into games or treasure hunts. Put learning points on coffee mugs, instructional information on bathroom walls. Write a blog together. Bring in visitors to introduce new angles regarding your customer challenge. If your challenge were a meal, what would it be like? Let’s get a chef to prepare it. “Incubate” comes from the word “brood” meaning “to nurse.” Nurse innovation by supporting the emotional environment in which it grows.

The late Hallmark Cards artist Gordon MacKenzie in his best-selling book Orbiting the Giant Hairball tells the story about his time volunteering as an artist-in-residence in the Kansas City–area elementary schools. When he entered a first-grade class, he would ask, “How many artists do we have here?” and all the children would raise their hands. The same question asked of third graders yielded only about half the number of raised hands. And when MacKenzie asked the sixth graders his question, only one or two “closet” artists would timidly raise their hands. What happened to youthful eagerness?² The goal of an incubation alliance is getting “all hands in the air.”

There’s a good reason Google puts ping-pong tables in their headquarters. If you want to encourage insights, you’ve got to also encourage people to relax.

—JOHN KOUNIOS, cognitive neuroscientist at Drexel University