Strategy Meets Reality Podcast

Rethinking Innovation: Paul Frobisher on Strategy, Thinking better, and Organising for Uncertainty

• Season 1 • Episode 14

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Innovation isn’t a brainstorm. It’s a way of thinking, organising, and acting in uncertainty.

In this episode of Strategy Meets Reality, Mike Jones sits down with Paul Frobisher—engineer, strategist, and founder of Strategic Innovation—to explore how organisations often misdiagnose the innovation challenge. From solving the wrong problems to collapsing under performance pressure, Paul breaks down the real reasons innovation fails—and what leaders can do instead.

They explore the value of TRIZ and IDEF0, the emotional cost of failed innovation, and how to build innovation systems that work over time—not just on slides. With insight from automotive and energy disruption, this is a sharp look at how to think better, decide better, and act with intent.

🔍 In this episode:

  • Why most innovation fails before it starts
  • How to solve the right problem—not just move fast
  • Using TRIZ, IDEF0 and models to design innovation processes
  • The emotional and political side of innovation
  • Hydrogen, EVs, and the long game of disruption
  • Why innovation isn’t about creativity—it’s about clarity

🎧 Keywords: Innovation, TRIZ, IDEF0, uncertainty, strategy, engineering, EV disruption, hydrogen, decision-making, organisational design

📘 Learn more about Paul’s work: https://strategic-innovation.co.uk/

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💬 Connect with host Mike Jones → https://www.linkedin.com/in/mike-h-jones/

Paul Frobisher (00:00)
So you can say when that clock speed starts speeding up you haven't got time to be working on the wrong problems.

I think probably one of the learnings is always spend a lot of time thinking about and defining what your problem is before jumping into solution mode. As I say, solutions and ideas are one of the biggest enemies of innovation.

Mike Jones (00:18)
Yeah, yeah.

Cool, welcome back to Strategy Meets Reality podcast. Today I'm joined by Paul Frobisher, who is an expert in innovation, and that's what we're really gonna explore today. So Paul, thank you for joining me. And if you don't mind just giving a brief background about yourself and a bit of context, what you've been up to lately.

Paul Frobisher (01:14)
Right, yeah, so my background is that originally I'm an engineer. I've spent quite a long time in the automotive industry, the first third. ended up mainly as a sort program manager putting complicated or complex chassis mounting and engine mounting systems into production, which is no mean challenge sometimes.

And during that time I came across a technique for innovation and creativity called TRIZ. I was asked to look at that because I was way too creative to be a program manager apparently according to the bosses. And so yeah, that set me on a completely different track looking back and having learned TRIZ I was

Mike Jones (01:44)
Ha ha.

Paul Frobisher (01:53)
taught that by a called Daryl Mann, Professor Daryl Mann. we basically looked at implementing it in the company I was in using Bathurst University to do an action research type and fill research. So the idea was that we would see whether TRIZ was any good, right? So measure the system, implement TRIZ.

Mike Jones (02:06)
Hmm.

Paul Frobisher (02:14)
measure it afterwards to see if the innovation had improved. what I didn't realise was that there was not really a definition of innovation, for one, a really good definition, so I didn't even know what I was measuring. And there wasn't, of course, if you don't know what is, how do you measure it? So there was very woolly definitions about how do you measure innovation.

And so I just thought, well, I'll just spend a few weeks defining and measure, working out how to define and measure innovation and I'm still doing it. So, yeah, so that took me then into all sorts of areas because I ended up doing consultancy with Darrell. I've been all over the world doing systematic innovation is what you would call the TRIZ method. It's a systematic approach to innovation. My company is called Strategic Innovation because we now do it.

Mike Jones (02:39)
the next episode.

Paul Frobisher (02:57)
strategically. So from working with governments in the Middle East, looking at entire economic sectors to startups and everything in between basically. So using this approach to innovation and creativity, but using it in a strategic way. perhaps one thing to say was, is just to say if you want to, we'll dig into a little bit of what

Mike Jones (02:59)
Ha ha.

Paul Frobisher (03:19)
is because it's important and I think it's useful for people to understand even just some of very basic principles. We'll sort dig into that but we're using that consistently over a period of time, all these different types of settings and we're kind of realizing that innovation and strategy are kind of the same thing in very interesting ways.

And our latest thing that we're doing is we're developing, we don't even know what it's called really, or what it is. It's kind of alliance and movement called Think Better World. And it's targeted primarily at the food system, because we think the food system is probably the most complex system that we do as humanity. It's also the one that trips.

Mike Jones (03:42)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (04:01)
civilizations up every time if you look back in history. So we love food, we love the food system and we want to help and we call it Think Better World because we want to get this better world but we need to think better to get there so it's Think Better for a Better World. So I think that's in a reasonable nutshell of where I'm from and where I'm at.

Mike Jones (04:07)
I did.

Yeah.

Yeah. A lot of good stuff there. But you brought out a really interesting point because you know, you go into organizations and they say, we need to be more innovative. And it becomes one of these Throw around words, bit like agility.

So I would say to be more innovative. then when you start to pull back and go, what do you mean by innovation? Like how, how, how much more innovative do you need to be? met by stunned silence. So it'd be great to have you on that. So I wanted to, to go on to see actually where's the link with innovation strategy. how do you manage innovation in deep uncertainty that

Paul Frobisher (04:43)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (04:53)
a lot of organizations are facing now.

Paul Frobisher (04:54)
Well, I can start with like the definition of innovation ⁓ and then, you know, I've got some slides we can go through. But when I started looking at that question, the inference always is something about creativity and about being out of the box. So in the company I was in, was like, you you're very out of the box thinker. And yeah, so this idea that it's creative, bit weird, bit wacky.

Mike Jones (04:58)
Yeah, that'll be good.

That's my way of putting it.

Paul Frobisher (05:18)
And you say well, that's a really good innovation, you know, that's a really good innovation you look on Dragon's Den You know, that's a great idea. That's a really good innovation and then they pan it, you know Yeah, and I think you know Dragon's Den is a good is a good Litmus test almost of what innovation is because if you look at the dictionary definition, it's it's

Mike Jones (05:27)
I hate that,

Paul Frobisher (05:37)
even in the dictionary there's different definitions so it's like the commercial implementation of a new idea is one way of defining it or it might be quite like this one it's to make changes to something existing by introducing something new

Mike Jones (05:53)
That's just.

Paul Frobisher (05:53)
Which means,

so whichever way you really look into a proper definition of innovation, it's separate to the creativity and the invention.

Mike Jones (06:02)
Well, that's where people tend to get confused because they think that, you know, we will have loads of ideas and that's, that's innovation, but it's quite clearly with those, it's, the implementation that, that, that matters.

Paul Frobisher (06:12)
Yes,

yeah. actually, one of the things that I've learned over the years is one of the most disruptive things about innovation is ideas.

Mike Jones (06:21)
Okay, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (06:22)
Right, which is contradictory in itself because obviously

ideas are almost like the lifeblood of innovation. But that happens in so many ways. So people have a great idea and they think it's a great idea. They become attached to that idea. And so what we tend to call ideas in that setting would be hunches. Right, because a hunch, somehow you can let go of a hunch. If you...

Mike Jones (06:40)
right, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (06:45)
attach yourself too closely in your ego. Talking to the bosses here, the bosses know everything, the experts know everything. It's my idea that I possess the ownership of.

Mike Jones (06:49)
Mm.

Yeah,

that's, you when you think about strategy and innovation, we say the same strategy that your ability as a person or a leader or whatever in this space is that you can deconstruct your mental model. You're willing to destroy your idea. I look for things to destroy it rather than what we tend to find in that sense is that they're so wedded to it. They're only looking for things to confirm their belief that that's the best idea that

Paul Frobisher (07:14)
Good.

Mike Jones (07:24)
you know, man's ever heard of.

Paul Frobisher (07:25)
Yeah, absolutely. but the question is who's judging whether it's good or not at the end of the day. I think customers will like this. Or the marketing department goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is a great idea cause X, Y, Z. And you think, well, is it? we'll show how to look at the system. So what I came up with really was

Mike Jones (07:31)
And.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, great.

Paul Frobisher (07:47)
innovation really is invention and commercialization or application so it's invention and the ability to put it so my world was putting things into production and the other thing that you kind of realize is that you've got these projects these project plans and having gone around the

the kind of the new going through facelifts and various new vehicle programs, But what you find is that in the automotive industry, things get aligned up with this, the machine that makes the machine.

Mike Jones (08:13)
yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (08:22)
that Elon Musk sort of talked about. So everybody knows where they are in that process, but what happens is there's some uncertainty that comes in. this is where I first thought about the uncertainty factor, if you like, because we used to put engine mounts and chassis mounts in that used castings, aluminium castings. And the car companies were using them more and more because of the recyclability and also

So we were using more more castings and these castings were an absolute pain because you get lots of inclusions and porosity and you could maybe think you could say well this is a 12 week program to get the casting tools made, approved.

when you used to supply to Honda and something went wrong, you'd have a thing called a trouble report.

which I thought was really nice. So instead of like a corrective action request or something like that, was a trouble report. And then what they made you do at the beginning of a new program, they made you on an A3 sheet. They had like an A3 sheet with all these different portions in it. And they wanted you to go through similar projects in the past and look at the old trouble reports. And we thought, you know what, that is such a good idea. And only Honda would do that. And then we thought, well, then we started doing like, can we do our

Mike Jones (09:04)
No, right.

yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (09:29)
like management by idiom. So one of the management by idiom things was if you've got a component that's coming through that you've got designed and it's got a casting in it, times the lead time by pi.

Mike Jones (09:40)
Okay.

Paul Frobisher (09:40)
for that part and that's what it will take. Cause we started to look and actually if you look at uncertainty and you kind of work out how long something's going to take in uncertain projects times it by pie and that's about what it takes. So it was just a bit of a joke, but it almost works. You try it. So there's some things that just, you know, it's going to work, you know, it's totally reliable and there's other things that don't. Understanding the difference is incredibly important. Even just in program management.

Mike Jones (09:51)
What?

Paul Frobisher (10:04)
so then you get this idea of that you're in this ecosystem and the ecosystem is going in different trends and you're following that trend. And that goes back to the post stuff and the couplings that you have. So you feel as though you're part of that machine, you're part of the machine that makes the machine.

Mike Jones (10:14)
and

Paul Frobisher (10:18)
And then we're thinking, even a long time ago, when I was in uni, we used to debate about EVs then, because we used to have the petrolheads like me and my mate, And look how good electric motors are, DC electric motors. They're just amazing how much power and torque you can get in such a small thing. Yeah, okay, that's fine. Yeah, but what about the batteries? And we were talking about that in the 90s.

Mike Jones (10:28)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (10:40)
And so there was a lot, there's a real, there's this sort of idea all the way through that EVs were going to be potentially sometimes coming but would never come. It's always in the future and then they did. And of course if you're making engine mounts, doesn't matter how good you were making engine mounts and that's innovation, that's disruptive innovation. And that's where the uncertainty is. So how do you know

Mike Jones (10:51)
Yeah, yeah.

Yes.

Paul Frobisher (11:03)
whether something is disruptive or not.

Mike Jones (11:05)
And this is where it links to strategy because, where people get confused. think with strategy where they see the orthodoxy is we come together. We, we, um, what's our winning aspiration. And we then create things where, what we're trying to challenge is no strategy is a term with looking at patterns of relationships of what's driving the innovation of the, the external environment.

Paul Frobisher (11:30)
Mm.

Mike Jones (11:30)
and where

is the opportunities or threats in there that we can do. you know, it's trying to identify those so you can bring those innovations into your organization and adapt over time, rather than being shaped by the innovations or the changes that happen in the external environment. You're always trying to look for those opportunities to shape rather than being shaped. And I think this is where, you know, the two are tightly coupled because in part of being strategic,

you are doing some form of change in your in organization.

Paul Frobisher (11:59)
Yes,

which by its definition is innovation. Strategy is sort of done through innovation. that's right. I've been struggling What is the difference between innovation and strategy? And they are different and they're called different. They're done by different people, if you like. But I think when you really, in the journey I've been on, really looking at just

Mike Jones (12:03)
Yeah, yeah.

Mmm.

Paul Frobisher (12:21)
fundamentally looking into what strategy is. It is a whole company thing. It isn't something that the boffins do with the T-Fell heads and things like that. Some organizations are very tech heavy. And in fact, certainly in an industrial setting, the purchasing decisions at the end of the day that drive the money.

are made on technical merit so if you're in the, I don't know, grinding machine for biscuits or something, know, there's ways of doing it and if you're somehow now half the decibels of the production then you've got a competitive advantage so you know that if you solve that problem then you've got a market.

Mike Jones (13:04)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (13:04)
But in some, so those are very technically dominated, so you have like technical sales people in those sorts of organisations. In other organisations like FMCG, the marketeers get involved in doing the innovation.

Mike Jones (13:15)
We've

got to watch what you say about Marketers I've already upset him already.

Paul Frobisher (13:19)
Oh, okay, all right. Well, that's okay. I mean, they're all right. I like them really.

One of the things they do though, the things with innovation and marketing, I think it's an interesting one because quite often what we've seen over the years is the marketers have a dream. They have, oh, we just need to be able to do this. And the technical people just sat there with their head in their hands going, how on earth could you even think that that was a good idea? Because can't you just see that there's no way we can make that?

Mike Jones (13:42)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (13:47)
There's no way in her, you know, and we're, but we're going, yeah, but you could, could you make that?

Mike Jones (13:51)
Yeah.

I think that's the, where earlier you were talking about, you you are, you are the engine mount people in an ecosystem. You do your part really well. That helps the, the car perform even better. But to the, to the layman, wouldn't, they wouldn't recognize that. But that's the same in with this, with, marketing, technical people, the operations, the strategy, the innovation teams, they're all that.

Paul Frobisher (14:09)
Yeah, yeah.

Mike Jones (14:18)
They're all part of the ecosystem is keeping the organization viable. How do we get that connection? And, when we think about innovation strategy, it's in that definition we talked about, which is about the implementation. It's, you know, you've got, you've got the part of, of strategy, which is looking for those relationships and opportunities. And then it's the innovation to be able to go, well, how, how can we balance this in an organization?

Paul Frobisher (14:22)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (14:43)
and develop and implement it whilst not disrupting or swamping our operations as it currently is.

Paul Frobisher (14:49)
Yeah, yeah, and that's building on that one as well is that what you're what I was taking there was like these different layers. You've got short term and long term. So a lot of companies and some of the language around innovations about horizons. So you're looking at immediate or you're looking at five, 20 years. So think the longest we've done really on a proper project was 35, 40 years into the future. And that's

Mike Jones (14:58)
Mm.

Mmm.

Paul Frobisher (15:17)
really interesting to do that kind of project. Really interesting.

Mike Jones (15:20)
It

gets tough. We're doing, I think the longest scenario plan I've was probably about 35, 40 years. And it starts to get tough as soon as you start getting beyond sort of the 10 year point, then it really does seem to open up and you've got to really look at the evidence that you're seeing in the weak signal.

Paul Frobisher (15:38)
Yeah, and I think at that kind 10 year, 10 to 20 year horizon, you kind of, it's almost more certain than the next week, I find. Yeah. I mean, I can show you the, in the slides, I've got a few, a couple of examples of going back to automotive again, is that, so the slides I've got, I'm just conscious that quite a few people perhaps aren't going to be using, going to be listening in rather than looking at the screen.

Mike Jones (15:47)
Mmm, yeah.

Yeah, we

can explain them and then if it's peak they're interested. Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (16:05)
Yeah, I'll put them on. I'll talk about

it now and then then I'll perhaps leave the slides a bit later. But yeah, so when we when I saw I and presented it in 2019, which of course is before just before Covid the World Systematic Innovation Conference and it was in Liverpool and

Mike Jones (16:24)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (16:30)
I thought what do I need to write a paper about it and this what I call this box model which was based on this thing called IDAF-0 which was a military methodology that was used to understand the systems of the military supply chain back in the 1980s when they were doing the Star Wars program.

Mike Jones (16:49)
All right. I didn't realize it was from the military. I use it a lot in my use viable systems model. I never knew it was from the military and I'm really conscious that a lot of things I use are from the military and it's not intentional. yeah. Yeah. I just want to tell my clients, I'm like, not bringing this stuff because I'm ex-military. It's just the way it is.

Paul Frobisher (16:53)
Yeah.

Yeah, there's a lot of strategy that comes from military.

So

I've just spoiled it for you because now you know it's from the military, it's another one. Yeah, can't use that anymore. So in 2009, so when I was writing the paper in late 2018, early 2019, doing the thinking for it, then it was July 19. And it was, at that point really, the only EVs on the road were Leafs and Teslas.

Mike Jones (17:14)
I know, you're a mask and everything now. Anyway, sorry.

Paul Frobisher (17:34)
And those BMW ones. Being close to the automotive industry I knew that Jaguar were doing the I-PACE and that had just come out and in fact there was a photo of it on the pavement outside the thing. It was the first one I'd actually got up close to. And it was this sort of idea. So were EVs going to happen or not? And at the time...

Mike Jones (17:34)
yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (17:58)
Tesla were really struggling, think their finances were in a really bad state Musk was going through his production hell and everything in the Model 3 although a great idea was in many ways was an absolute bag of spanners really in terms of its build quality so that was a very interesting one would EVs take off or not? There was nothing from Volkswagen on the road at the time

Mike Jones (18:12)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (18:21)
We know now there's a bunch of them but what I was using is this methodology to say, so we've got this uncertainty, this uncertain situation, where are EVs going to go? What does this, what I call this box model, what does it tell us about, can we use it as a of a forecasting tool to understand where we are? And yeah, it turns out it of worked okay.

Mike Jones (18:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (18:42)
I'm not saying again that this is something that I would do, I would recommend as like the only tool that you would use, but it's a very useful tool in terms of you can draw in, you can see the whole thing on one page, that's one of the things with strategy and with innovation is that everything's connecting to everything else.

The easy innovation is the one where it's not. So if you've got a simple thing, so some of the stuff that we were doing, again back to the automotive industry with a chassis mounting system or something and you say, what are we going to innovate here? Well, we know that customers want them snap fit or something like that. okay, well our innovation is how do we make it snap fit? And all it does is it involves your

plastic supply chain, your tooling guys, the process people so we're going to turn it from metal to plastic, some bonding agent stuff, some process development, but it's all in your control and if you do it outside of a vehicle program it doesn't matter if it fails.

Mike Jones (19:37)
Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, true, because it's not impacting the world.

Paul Frobisher (19:43)
Right. So you're just

disconnecting it and you could almost be anywhere in the world. You're best off doing it in the factory so you're testing everything with maybe even the people that going to run it in a cell overnight for some prototypes so that the people that are going to be running it in production are familiar with it, all that kind of stuff.

shall we just dig into the...

Mike Jones (20:02)
Yeah, yeah, let's dig in.

Paul Frobisher (20:04)
So ⁓ this is just replaying back to 2019. So again, going back to the innovation measurement question. So this is expanding, going further out than what we've discussed so far. So good old Steve Jobs, he said, I want to put a ding in the universe. And I thought that was stuck with me because two reasons. One is that it's

Mike Jones (20:23)
Mm.

Paul Frobisher (20:28)
It's something about what innovation is. He was, as a person, not quite so much now, I think other people have taken his title, but everybody in innovation circles would talk about Steve Jobs. So that was one reason why, but the other one is you could say, well, innovation, how good your innovation is about how big is your ding? So, yeah. So literally,

Mike Jones (20:40)
We are.

Yeah, it did.

Paul Frobisher (20:52)
the ding that you're putting in the universe

Apple has great power, lots of leading innovative companies that lead the market properly, or even are very fast followers in the way that they work. They have a lot of power and they make the market follow them, the herd. And then the other thing that you could probably say is that

Mike Jones (21:08)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (21:12)
A ding that was an impact is also like an imprint. You're leaving an imprint or a footprint. So this idea of the innovation footprint and this idea that an organization sort of goes through time taking steps. So you can go from one step of technology to the next step and each step takes it, creates a footprint. so the next thing you're thinking about is, and again in the context of

of Steve Jobs is this idea of legacy. So a really good innovative company is leaving a legacy and it's like the company has a life. if a company leads a legacy, it has a life and this is an idea of the organism. So we're not just a set of processes that's going on. As an organization, it has an idea of life to it.

Mike Jones (21:52)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (22:05)
or it should do and certainly leaders should be thinking of it like that. And if it's something that's got life, then you can love or you can hate it. And of course, as we know, when we lose somebody close to us, we always say that grief is the penalty or the price that we pay for love. And ⁓ Steve Jobs was highly missed obviously as a person, but you can imagine there was something about Apple itself lost something there and there was a grief.

for what Apple might turn into. Obviously they've done quite well. Quite well, doesn't underestimate, but he put the foundations in for what Apple have done and they could lose it all in two years' time, who knows. yeah, then Woolworths, for instance, when they failed, was people absolutely grieving in the streets over their penny chews.

Mike Jones (22:37)
Yeah.

Yeah, looking likely at the moment, so...

Yeah,

yeah, there's still, you still see it now there's memes and stuff or, you hear, you see things on social media about 80s life

Paul Frobisher (23:08)
It is. It's something, it's emotional, it's intangible. That's an important fact. That's an important thing to hold onto here, As well.

Mike Jones (23:15)
Mm.

Paul Frobisher (23:16)
So if we just look at how we do Innovation generally so this is the double diamonds this Fugle one, which is similar ⁓ and design thinking what what they come up with really is Let's think up some loads of ideas choose the best one Refine it and then do it That's really

Mike Jones (23:35)
Yes.

Paul Frobisher (23:37)
what I call the program manager approach to innovation and it is not wrong. ⁓ I'm not saying that those models are wrong in any way. This one, Tim Besant did this one, was quite nice because it's about learning. So it starts with search. So other words, look for things, select the best one, implement it, acquire, execute launch estate. And this is a little bit about

⁓ starting to get into open innovation and so on. And then the learning thing. So this idea of this cycle of learning, I thought that was quite interesting. So these are like what you call sequential models and there's many of them. And then for strategy, there's the VSM and Bible system models, Stafford Beer and all that. And ⁓ for innovation that I was looking at those thinking, yeah, sounds...

Mike Jones (24:09)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (24:28)
There's something here, but there's nothing I can use right now. And this one at the top right is part of ⁓ the TRiZ systematic innovation world. So that's saying that any system has those things. And we do actually use that for categorizing or looking where to look in your system where you need to, where to innovate. So do you innovate in your production system, your route to market or the thing itself, the more ideal products or service and everybody has a tendency.

Mike Jones (24:52)
Yeah. So is TRIZ

a more internal innovation rather than, cause I will see innovation as two things you've got, um, internal is in how do we deliver value better, um, you know, than we do currently. And I think that's a bit like your, um, definition earlier around, you know, a new idea to improve on what already exists. Um, and then another part of innovation is external.

Paul Frobisher (25:16)
Hmm.

Mike Jones (25:19)
innovation that we're looking for changes that could provide opportunity for innovation that you will bring into the organisation.

Paul Frobisher (25:27)
Yeah, think both. what Trizz is, all Trizz is really, as it's fundamental, it says, looking mainly at the patent database, can you make your particular problem like a standard type problem? Can you standardize your problem? Reformulate your problem into a standard type problem.

Mike Jones (25:30)
Yeah, OK.

Paul Frobisher (25:56)
Then you can find a standard preselected we found for you options for the solutions and then can you then interpret that standard solution into your setting as your solution. So in other words just going straight from problem to solution you go through this kind of this little separate process and it works really well but a lot of it is about psychological inertia trying to understand what is the real problem.

And I think probably one of the learnings is always spend a lot of time thinking about and defining what your problem is before jumping into solution mode. As I say, solutions and ideas are one of the biggest enemies of innovation. Because what you do is you get attached to that idea like we saying before and you solve the wrong problem. And we can say, doesn't matter how good your idea is, if you're solving the wrong problem, it's rubbish.

Mike Jones (26:33)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. See that many times.

Paul Frobisher (26:50)
Yeah.

So this is a little dive into the world of IDEF 0. joy. So this is the idea that any process is a verb and any process has inputs, outputs, mechanisms and controls. So inputs are defined as something that is consumed or transformed by the process. So an ingredient. A mechanism is a means of doing something which could be a machine.

Mike Jones (26:58)
Yeah. ⁓

Paul Frobisher (27:19)
it can also be a method and then the output is the result of the process and the controls are the things which determine what good output is or isn't so they're like that's the judge of what is good so if it was a you know yeah I think get that and then what they say is that that every process is decomposed into sub processes and those in turn are

Mike Jones (27:37)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (27:48)
then into sub-processes and the arrows have to, so the arrows here also decompose at the lower level so one of those input arrows, so on the right hand side here you've got those different, these different things here

So if you, yeah, so you can see that, you know, this, this output arrow here has to still has to have an output arrow and the output arrow here then cascades up to that. So, okay. So I'd use that in the past at this sort of level going down to it. And it became very, very complex and very sort of, well, you can look there. That's supposed to be simple. And it, even that is a bit for today's.

market people glaze over at this but the thing is that it's the real this what's actually going on so i just said like could we do this to innovation innovate is a verb so let's do it and came up with this one so this is not what came up at the time that's what i've ended up with which is that on the input side you have knowledge and ip you have natural resources energy and investment

So at the top level of innovation, that's what you've got. At the bottom for the means and mechanisms, you've got people, the who, infrastructure, the what, and the tools and methods, the how. So that's people within an infrastructure using tools and methods to create the output, which is the new knowledge. So you've got like a old knowledge into new knowledge. The added value, which

Usually it will be pounds, shillings and pence but it necessarily added value. So actually I didn't have the impact at Aero originally because I thought well added value was something about that. Anyway then we ended up with impacts and then the tangible and intangible. So when we talked about the life and the love and the intangible stuff that's there. But it's also the positive and negative. So it's like a four box model there isn't it? One of those. Where you've got the tangible intangible and you've got the

Mike Jones (29:45)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (29:49)
positive and negative and that all there then is judged by the voices, the voice of the customer, the technology and the business and that's where that goes. So then if you start to go down one point, that make sense to you? Yeah. So the next thing I thought, well, let's go down a level and

Mike Jones (30:07)
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (30:13)
came up with this which was basically the normal way of doing innovation would be you plan, develop and launch and that would be the sequential type models that we looked at in Double Diamond and so on and then you just basically pass that and that goes back into the operation of the business the operation of the business is then passed over to the use through customers so what we have just done is shown that operation of the business so the manufacturing or the

whatever the day-to-day business of the customer of the organization is, comes within innovation and so does use. So your customers are part of your innovation process as well. Which means your supply base, the infrastructure that you're in, and that's very important.

Mike Jones (30:58)
Yeah. And that's, that's often forgotten because you, I've seen it before they come up with a good idea. They, they pushed this change through and it's almost like, Oh, uh, how does this actually work? So I've seen recent ones where they wanted to move from, um, to, electric technology. So they've got all the tools and stuff for it. But then when they, when the, the people at the frontline went to go use it, there was no way of actually being able to charge or maintain.

Paul Frobisher (31:16)
Mmm.

Yeah, that's such a good example actually. Yeah, that's such a good example. So what it means, ⁓ well, if you go back to here, what you're saying there is that you've created ⁓ a new idea and potentially even the people. we've looked at this before where when we're looking at those longer term innovations or innovation projects, quite often you're using

Mike Jones (31:27)
the Yeah, they've got that process.

Paul Frobisher (31:52)
a new technology like laser so if you're cutting, know, if you're manufacturer of cutting equipment and laser becomes the thing that you need to be using, you've got nobody, no idea of using lasers, you your people issues, your infrastructure and your tools and methods, they're all highly affected and people forget that. It's really easy to forget that because you're down in one of these sort of these develop, this develop box. If that develop box just basically is

Mike Jones (31:55)
Okay.

Yes.

Paul Frobisher (32:18)
You're given a plan from the strategic plan. You've got to develop this. So you do that. You develop it. You work out how to launch it. Maybe the launch people are different to the develop people because the develop people, they've sort of organized the business so that basically these are three different lots of people. And you've got handovers and you've got not only just handovers, but you've got battle lines and...

Mike Jones (32:39)
Yeah, it's so amazing.

Paul Frobisher (32:42)
As a program manager, you've got to be like a very, very good negotiator to persuade a very, very busy and stressed operations manager that they need to give you their machine for like half an hour or overnight or something to do some prototyping. So yeah, there's a lot of that goes on and the people issues and understanding how you organize this, but whatever happens, doesn't matter how you're organized.

Mike Jones (32:46)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (33:06)
These processes are the sub-processes of innovation. That is the lesson from this. You can't get away from it. So if you just think about the money. So the money is coming in here from outside. If you do, you might not need that. The other money is coming from use from your customers. So you're getting commercial money back into the input. You're also getting feedback into the voice of the customer, if you like. Of course, then you've got this decision to make.

Mike Jones (33:10)
Yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna be fucking...

Paul Frobisher (33:34)
with the output of the operation, so you can got your factory or whatever it is, you've got money which can go out to your shareholders or retain profit, whatever, and you can also then put a proportion of it into your planning, developing and launching of new stuff. So you've got budgets which then do that and that's kind of like how that works. So that makes sense. The biggest decision that you're making strategically is that, how much do you...

Mike Jones (33:55)
Wow. ⁓

Paul Frobisher (34:00)
How much do take out? How much do put in? How much do need? And what's the return on that?

Mike Jones (34:02)
Yeah, I'm just saying

that's probably something the water companies should have looked at. Yeah, Mr. Link, we've solved the problem of UK water companies. They put all the value went outwards and none of them went back into plan developing.

Paul Frobisher (34:08)
I think so.

Exactly and that

what they have what they have done is they have forgotten about the impact So here's unit. This is a good this perfect right so natural resources energy water Is cut is going into your so they are using water in their system it is us and there is industrial and you know home users that are using the water and giving the money back, but the impact on

Mike Jones (34:29)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (34:45)
tangible and intangible and think what they're probably working on all the tangible outputs and not realizing what the intangible outputs are. So they see, okay they may be thinking well okay if it rains really hard this year we're going to end up with I don't know how many millions fines and how many billions would it cost to redo all the sewage systems so we'll just take the hit. But what they forgot was that the intangible results of that

drip drip drip of intangible negativity to the horse industry is starting to cause them a pretty big problem.

Mike Jones (35:16)
Yeah.

Yes.

Paul Frobisher (35:22)
So that's their footprint and it's not just you, it's your supply base. So if you think about the operation of your business, are the people that are doing this. So here's the really messy slide.

Mike Jones (35:35)
Yes, you can tell the complexity starts to ⁓ increase quite quickly.

Paul Frobisher (35:43)
Yeah, so you start to look at the people, know, look at who's got, you know, just follow that, that people thing. And so you've got the different people that are involved, but an important part is that if operation is your supply chain and people like that are involved in the operation. your supply chain people should be involved in your planning, developing and launching as well. Shouldn't they? That would be obvious, but is very not. Anyway, so we move on quickly for that. So the other, this is a Trizzi sort of, ⁓

Mike Jones (36:02)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (36:10)
or we call the innovation landscape thing so as things people know the S curve and you have this what we call the black curve and the red curve so the black curve is let's look at it in terms of a system so we've got a system here that's with our engine mounts or you know our system that we're within with the system which is down to engines with petrol engines and whatnot ice and then we've got the EV curve over here with a separate system

And this the jump in between is is the uncertainty is the big uncertainty with innovation. And we're going through that with so many things at the moment in and what you were hoping to do. What you hope to do as a car company with the EV revolution is that you are going to be the one that takes the stuff out of your current system. So the added value and the

the knowledge and everything, we put that into our new system and we take the market. The problem is that normally the operation of those two things is so different that the way that it really happens is that somebody comes with some risk capital from outside and it becomes somebody else that does it. So these big innovations generally are not done from inside the industry. And there's all these other

Mike Jones (37:08)
and

Paul Frobisher (37:29)
successful systems that have been created which are creating the risk capital.

Mike Jones (37:33)
Yeah, that's a bit like, sorry, there's a bit like Scania. Scania done that. I forgot what innovation they were doing, but they essentially created a separate organisation to build this new thing. And then when it actually worked, they just moved it over to that.

Paul Frobisher (37:49)
Yeah,

that's a very sensible thing. So it's having this skunkworks idea that you have to be hold two things at once. You have to be part of the system, but you have to be separate to it in order to do that kind of big step jump. I think for me, the automotive industry, it's very difficult for automotive industry. Here we've got the I-PACE. So I think it was one of the first times I saw one on the road, up close anyway.

Mike Jones (38:15)
It probably thought you were ticket attending because I can see two double yellow lines there. ⁓

Paul Frobisher (38:16)
and

Yeah, yeah.

But it was just really weird that I was just going into that building to talk about EVs and then just happened to be an EV there. it's a site, you know? And this is what we call the innovation landscape. So this is a pattern that we found fits pretty well every client or every industry. There's this black curve, which is the predominant

Mike Jones (38:32)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (38:45)
way of delivering the function. So we have this thing on the left called ideality which is a tris term so this is how ideal is something which is the good stuff divided by the bad stuff basically so it's and that goes through these S curve things now. I would also say now that that is fit so how does that technology fit the market and it starts off fitting not so well and then it gets better and better as you get better and

The blue ones are what you would call attempts to disrupt the black curve and they come and they go. They're the jokes. They're Sinclair C5s, the milk floats and so on. ⁓ And there's been many, many, of those. mean, when we do this for real on a real project, you can probably have two or 300 of those little blue curves.

Mike Jones (39:23)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (39:33)
And they can sometimes find their niche and go for a long time or they can just come and go like the C5 for instance But interestingly, know cars started with EVs Then the ICE came along with the Model T and then we end up with beautiful BMW chariots Autobahn chariots and and they are amazing pieces of kit and then of course the EV

Mike Jones (39:39)
Yeah.

Okay.

Paul Frobisher (40:00)
thing comes on. is the question that we're having with Tesla. Are they going to take the market? Are EVs going to take the market or not? And this is where, at this level, strategy and technology and innovation, I can't see what the difference is. Because when you define innovation the way that we've just defined it, it's the whole company, it's the whole damn thing that you're changing.

Mike Jones (40:17)
Yeah, do. Do.

Paul Frobisher (40:26)
So how can that not be anything other than strategy?

Mike Jones (40:29)
It

has to be, it has to be joined because in the end you're looking to achieve fit into the external environment. And to do this, you either have, you either got capability you already have and you're just redirecting in different way, or there's new capability that you don't have that then needs to go through change. Like you said, there to change your organization. It's all in one of the same thing, but I think people just.

bring it out and that's where you get real confused in the organisations because people go, yeah, we've got an innovation strategy, we've got this strategy, we've got that strategy and really thinking there is a strategy and they're all a part of it.

Paul Frobisher (41:08)
Yeah.

And so that means that everybody has to work together. So those three, I call them the three tribes at the top, the three voices, so the consumer, technology and business are really, you have to get that right. These very strategic levels, when it's disruptive innovation, you can't just have the marketing or the technology or the MBA type people deciding what's happening. You have to have teamwork. Otherwise,

You will fail.

Mike Jones (41:37)
Yeah,

we had ⁓ a previous episode to this is we had ⁓ Julia Heltz on and she was talking about open ⁓ strategy, which is exactly what you're just talking about there is how do we how do we get the perspectives and get people involved and the edges of organization. And that means bringing bringing organization involved, which I think is actually what you're trying to say there.

Paul Frobisher (41:44)
Mm.

Yep.

Absolutely,

yeah. So it means that the people that are over at bottom there, it's everybody and it's not just your organization, it's your supply base and your customers as well. So it's literally everybody. So I'm just sort conscious of time, but I just wanted to show you how then you can start to use this as a bit of a benchmarking tool or a...

Mike Jones (42:11)
Yes, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (42:22)
let's use this to look around if we are going to investigate every one of those arrows around the box then we will have evaluated things from every direction that we need to and like I say this has been like almost 20 believe me almost 20 years that this was started and obviously it developed a bit over those years but I've never found a situation where this does not fit so it's a really good way of understanding it from all the things so ⁓

Mike Jones (42:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (42:49)
So if we look at this is a tris fundamental, okay, so it's the idea of contradictions. So in terms of solving problems, a type of problem is like a strength to weight problem. So it's what's called contradiction where you have two elements that are fighting each other. So journey distance versus charge time is important for customers. Range versus price for an EV is important. And also it has to be cool.

And think that's one of the things that Tesla did is that in the early days is they put loads of YouTube clips of people putting the grandmas into a Model S and accelerating from 0 to 60 in about three seconds and get looking at the fire sun. That was cool. They certainly were like milk folks. And then for technology, battery capacity versus weight, battery capacity versus type, but it's all about the battery. Right? So you start to realize those are things that really matter. The business side of it, you've got

Mike Jones (43:27)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (43:42)
two things, legislation and like the banning of ICE vehicles by 2040, that's what was obviously brought it forward at that point since then. But then there's the collaborations, what's going on with competition and cooperation and so on in that range. So that's kind of allowing you to say, well, where are we in terms of, we solving, are those problems soluble?

Mike Jones (43:52)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (44:09)
And actually when you come down to it at the end of the day it becomes a technical thing and you can say well actually really although they're not solved in 2019 those are orange they're not red and they're not green but they're kind of orange that's what that's why he puts it so it could be disruptible. The available knowledge you can look into the patent database and you can see that people are looking at EVs and batteries and that seems to be that they're working on

right contradiction. So in terms of EVs, the EV level, the patents were dropping off but the patents were rising up on batteries and probably has continued to do so. So what it's telling you is that the industry seems to be working, I suppose obviously on the right things, so you that's in green.

And then you can start to say, natural energy and resources, there was a lot talking about cobalt at the time. And you'd say that was a red flag. You need to get around. You need to solve the problem of cobalt and getting sufficient lithium in order to solve that problem. So we put that down as a red. There was a lot of money going in, which was a green. And there was very, very good people down there. So Elon and what was he called?

He just died recently, but was over 100 when that photo was taken Anyway, erm Yeah, so the people, the right people working on it Probably the infrastructure not good enough as a red and then the tools and methods seem to be something in those areas which means that when you start to look at how Norway are working and they were going up the ass curve at that point now they're kind of like 90 odd percent new cars or EVs and

There was a big question at the time. People were saying EVs are going to be cheaper than ICE vehicles by 2025, somebody from Mercedes. And then somebody else was saying there's at least 20 years for diesel and 30 years of petrol because EVs are not going to make it. It's going to be very difficult. So there was a real debate about whether EVs were actually a viable proposition. But what we were showing was that there was not that many problems.

that needed to be solved in order for that to be a jump that would happen because you've got the legislative drivers, you've got customers that can find them cool and that's the most important thing because if they're not cool, the whole thing doesn't work. So if you can make them cool and interesting, then it's fine. Okay, that's still a bit of a challenge. But that's what you can do. You can use this approach to kind of saying, well, where are we? And you can start to use it to track.

Mike Jones (46:21)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (46:42)
patents or what you're doing, what competitors are doing and you're looking at the whole ecosystem and that's innovation and it's strategy as well.

Mike Jones (46:48)
Yes,

that's great to think about that systems approach rather than just getting focused on the idea of being blinded by everything. ⁓

Paul Frobisher (47:00)
Yeah, because

when you're looking at that, you're not looking, you're not just, you know, haven't even on that, I haven't even got a car on there. You know, it's about the system. It's about the companies. It's about the consumers, the consumers impression and what is affecting, what is affecting consumers. You know, so really at the end of the day, as somebody who has driven EVs for a while and also been a petrol head as well.

Mike Jones (47:06)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (47:26)
Journey distance versus charge time is really important. So, how long are you having to charge for? And what you're finding now, I I would never have thought so quickly that you could get up to, just be able to go up the road and charge at 300 kilowatts and the 600 kilowatt ones, that's a massive amount of energy and they have to cool. They have to have cooling of the cables and stuff. Bonkers. ⁓ But you could go faster and the battery technologies are...

Mike Jones (47:29)
this.

Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (47:54)
There's obviously many more of those technical contradictions there. This is a ⁓ cleaner way of looking at it that's more appropriate. If you take something like the Beyond Burger, instance, and these meat alternatives, can imagine how you would use this process to just get a gist of is this actually going to work or not? Because all the investors, the

Mike Jones (48:06)
Mmm.

Paul Frobisher (48:22)
Everybody was thinking, yeah, Beyond Burger, that's all we're going to be eating. ⁓ free, plant-based, it's all coming in. And did it do it? They were betting on C, Beyond Burger, billions of investment, and it's not worked.

Mike Jones (48:41)
No. ⁓

Paul Frobisher (48:42)
And

what I would say is that you could just go around to diagnose that problem. You could just go around those arrows and just take a view of what is it, where is it, where's the problem. And it will come back down to probably two things. One is the customer and whether they think it's cool or not. Something about it that would have been known about that's been ignored.

Mike Jones (49:03)
Yeah. And I think that's a great way of looking at it you look at your box model, because looking over those whole areas from the controls, inputs, outputs, means and mechanisms, it gives you a more holistic way of looking at the problem rather than just getting trapped into thinking, well, it must be, I'd say, must be not marketing it right. And they're just going to put more money into marketing when there's no need to look at the people or the customers in thinking.

Well, ⁓ I'd say, you know, if someone was going to offer me a burger, ⁓ I know which one I'm going to take and it's probably not going to be beyond burger. Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (49:44)
And the thing is that it's quite often to do with what we call the say do gap. So they'll go out and do their market research and eight out of 10 cats said their owners preferred it kind of thing. But yeah, they would say that and you go, you focus groups and everything. the reality is, so that's another thing that we actually do. So we use this model when we're doing scouting projects so that we're...

Mike Jones (49:55)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (50:07)
We're kind of knowing where we're looking. So we like to look at all the aspects of this so that when we go back to a client, we can say, this is really where the landscape is in this ecosystem.

Mike Jones (50:16)
Yeah, but

it'd be interesting when you look at last sort of points, like when we look at EVs and now hydrogen, and as you can match those again, so I'm wondering if like, is hydrogen gonna be considered the blue disruption that will go away, but, or is it a lasting disruption that actually it was EVs that were the blue one?

Paul Frobisher (50:41)
Yeah, now, I mean this is an interesting one, because if you go back to, yeah, is it a blue one or go back to this, right, and you say, well, is there another S curve which is coming back, which is like an even better red curve, which is hydrogen, right? I'm wondering whether effectively what this becomes is two separate curves, two separate markets, because I think my

gut feel at the moment and until you've really gone into it you don't really know.

I'd have to look at the contradictions and what it means. I was quite interested, I was watching a YouTube clip of JCB and I've been watching that, know a few people that work there and obviously the Hydrogen project, they've done really well with the Hydrogen project and if you think about the box model there

There's two important things. One is the infrastructure side. So they have recognized that part of their hydrogen model has to be that they have to produce and transport the hydrogen to the job site. If you didn't have that, it wouldn't work. And they've of cottoned onto that. The thing is that the technology side of it, the stuff, the, so they've got the same contradictions. Okay, we've got battery performance versus safety, for instance there, but you've got the same kind of,

contradiction so you've got hydrogen storage versus safety. On a construction site that's hard I would think to, I mean all these are solvable problems but it's something that could be an issue. it's that for a job you have not got the time to set down and sit down and take something out of 24 hour production and charge it up. You can't do that.

Mike Jones (52:23)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (52:25)
Right,

so either you could have an EV that's replaceable batteries or something, which is hard, or you go to hydrogen or some other fuel. Because fuel has the fundamental advantage over batteries of power to weight of the fuel. They lose massively on the efficiency. So what, about 25, 30 % of your fuel

energy gets used to useful energy and it's like 93 % or something for an EV or even higher so the efficiency sort of gap is different so I think for me it's what are the use cases which are completely unaffected or basically unreachable by EVs and how does hydrogen meet those?

Mike Jones (53:20)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (53:21)
and then the fight then will be that's the niche that you need because if you don't have the niche so going back to the box model at this point if you haven't got the operation and use and the money from your niche you either need a massive amount of investment until it works which is massive massive risk or you've got to prove that it works and that's really what Tesla does is they found a niche

Mike Jones (53:45)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (53:49)
they did it, they perfected it and then they've scaled it. They didn't want it, you know.

Mike Jones (53:53)
Yeah. When you look at, you know, strategy,

you ask that student question around what, what, what is your organization capable of now versus what it can be capable of in the future? ⁓ and because I think people forget that along with innovation and strategy, cause we've kind of figured out they're quite coupled close together is that your organization is an input to, to strategy as much as strategy is an input to your organization.

Paul Frobisher (54:05)
Yeah.

Mike Jones (54:19)
and it's same innovation. It's like, you we could do that and no doubt just looking at that, you can start seeing by using your box model, how you could look at the different problems and start to understand disruption.

Paul Frobisher (54:19)
Absolutely.

Yeah, and I think that's where we get to sort of the deep uncertainty part.

So you can say when that clock speed starts speeding up you haven't got time to be working on the wrong problems.

So you can say when that clock speed starts speeding up you haven't got time to be working on the wrong problems.

And this is where it goes back to the military strategy as well where the consequences of making a decision you have to make a fast decision, you've got to make the right one and you've got to make it on good information.

Mike Jones (54:52)
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.

Yes.

Paul Frobisher (55:06)
One of the things, back to our sort Think Better World idea is in order to make a better world, to make good decisions at the system level, at the food system level, you need to understand what's going on. So let's use AI to go and listen to society. And this is our big idea, is that literally listening to all the conversations in the UK that we can, ethically, about food and food systems. And what can we glean from that?

Mike Jones (55:17)
and

Paul Frobisher (55:28)
and it's those emotional things which are moving very fast and then those company so imagine like you know when you know talking about these couplings right so the system that you have has all these couplings where you've got suppliers and everybody sort of loosely cooperating with each other in a system and it's a bit like it's a bit like ringa ringa roses when you're in the playground and

Mike Jones (55:48)
Yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (55:51)
The boys get invited by the girls to go and play or something and then what would happen then is that the girls will all play nicely and then the boys would want to speed up and speed up and speed up until at some point it just degenerates into a rugby match or something and you can't hold anymore and it just all disintegrates. And it's like that, it's like what happens is in these times of rapid change is that the couplings that you've had, those grips that you have between different entities within the system

Mike Jones (56:03)
Yeah.

Paul Frobisher (56:17)
pulled and pulled and pulled apart until it goes and the whole system falls down. And I think that's what's likely to be happening with AI in a lot of what would have been very typically very stable, very boring businesses, especially in sort of banking, finance, insurance, all these things. And we've been predicting this for 15 years about now. Now we know when we were doing 20 year forecasting, 15 years forecasting 15 years ago, we're saying,

Mike Jones (56:41)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (56:43)
Well, you know, at some point in the mid twenties, it looks like AI is really going to be very disruptive. What would happen? What should we be doing about that? So, and it's going to have very, very, very, very unpredictable consequences. Even with all these sorts of ways of modeling and thinking about it, it's very difficult to understand what the consequential cascade is going to be.

Mike Jones (56:48)
Yes, I did.

Paul Frobisher (57:03)
But I come back to the capability side, is if your company is capable of working in uncertainty and making sure that you understand those key contradictions that you're working on, then you've got a chance. And so you need to use methodologies that allow you to see what the key, what are you all about as a company, what are the threats that are coming in, and how do you adapt and make good decisions and be lucky.

Mike Jones (57:14)
Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and what needs to adapt as well, because, you know, we said that innovation strategy involves the whole organization that does, but not all the organization is adapting at the same time. And I think that's crucial that, you know, if your approach and, you know, we do with patterns and good strategy is realizing that there are maneuvers that need to happen and these maneuvers will happen, sequentially. They all have to happen at the same time. They can happen sequentially.

And there's some bits of your organization that are, are just static. They, they won't change fundamentally some, some bits, well, but not every, every little bit of it. And it's thinking around having that look to go, well, what actually needs to change? What doesn't, what sequences it needs to happen.

Paul Frobisher (58:11)
And I think what happens in these sort of times again of disruption, the maneuvers that you're having to do, I think this is where POS really works so well with this because the box-mall kind of diagnoses where things are and where the journey needs to go, which then with the POS stuff allows you to say, where are all the actors in here? And also...

box model that might be acted in there that we've identified that perhaps you wouldn't think about being part of the POS and that helps you to work out what's the journey, how do you maneuver through that uncertainty. So I think yeah there's a really good really good sort of tie up with those approaches.

Mike Jones (58:40)
yeah

Yeah. Well, being absolutely fascinating. We, you know, we've explored a lot and I didn't even think when I asked you to talk about innovation that we'd sort of go this way, but that's why I love the nature of these conversations because we keep them loose and we see where it takes us. I think it took us some really fascinating places, but what would you like to leave our listeners to think about from this episode?

Paul Frobisher (59:01)
Yeah.

I think it's just that

Innovation is.

think it's going back to the innovation is almost one of the most important aspects of a company's life. Going back to that life thing.

Mike Jones (59:23)
Mm, yeah.

Paul Frobisher (59:25)
The way that you navigate through a business is navigating through Life if you like it's think about as it being a person I think and I going back to that life and love and thing is that actually doing it right? treating treating your people As if you're in charge of a company, you know that the people are part of your lifeblood and

you need to think about how people are going to navigate through these times of uncertainty and of course there's the whole thing about there's back redundancies and all those sorts of things going on about how are going to navigate through that and maintain the legacy that's what i think keep thinking on this thing about legacy is that you have to be you have to be proud if you like about what you're going to be doing as a company and

That to me like is almost like the very top level thing because it's about the personality and the kind of way that you're navigating and then everything falls below that. So are you a fast follower? Are you a leader in the are you part of the herd later on? Play your part but play it in a really positive way that that you can be proud of and then everything else sorts of fits into that and the innovation is so close to being strategy. I don't know how to

Mike Jones (1:00:35)
Mm.

Paul Frobisher (1:00:46)
I still don't know how to define how you distinct, how do you define this distinction between innovation and strategy? So I'd ask people to say, well, if there's a discussion about that, that would be really interesting. But I think the intangible world is massively important.

Mike Jones (1:00:49)
Yeah.

Yeah,

Yeah. It was almost like, remember back in the day with blue Peter and they say your answers on the back of a postcard, ⁓ and send them in. So maybe we should do that. If, the listeners here when they want to comment on the show, maybe they could put their ideas about the definitions of, what, what is the difference between strategy and, innovation? Cause we've, we've kind of identified on the show that they are very tightly coupled. and I think you've given a, a

Paul Frobisher (1:01:10)
Yeah

Mike Jones (1:01:30)
great understanding to our listeners around, you know, what is innovation and how we can start moving beyond this surface level idea of just creativity and what it means to be really truly innovative organization in deep, deep uncertainty. So, you know, if you've liked the show, please share to your network, like and subscribe. And I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you very much, Paul, for being a guest. It's been absolutely fabulous. Cheers.

Paul Frobisher (1:01:57)
Thanks mate.

Mike Jones (1:01:58)
Take care everyone.

Paul Frobisher (1:01:59)
Cheers, thanks.