(Photo: Zach Warren/ALM) (Photo: Zach Warren/ALM)

 

If you're at ILTACON, chances are you think change and innovation are important. But Lisa Bodell, author and CEO of business consultancy futurethink, had one key question for attendees of the opening keynote at ILTACON 2018: Why is it so hard to do, and why aren't we doing a better job of it?

Ultimately, Bodell said, “What we say we do and what we do are two different things.”

At the “Winning Innovators Embrace Change—Do You?” keynote on Monday morning at ILTACON, Bodell explored a number of examples of how companies have crossed the innovation chasm to think about business problems and partnerships in a new way.

Among examples was her work with pharmaceutical companies. “Sometimes, it's tough getting those groups to innovate, because the risks are so high,” she said. “The idea is to get beyond the pill, and one of the things we talk about is, 'What can we do?'”

Getting beyond the pill means focusing not on new products but on new ways of keeping people on their medicine regimen to ensure they stay healthy. “Where do people spend a lot of their time in the morning?” she asked. “Their cars.” But what if there was a way to inject a medicine into a car, possibly through contact in a steering wheel, to make sure people take their medicine on a daily basis?

Seems crazy, right? “People say, 'Haha, that is never going to happen,' until it does,” Bodell said. “One day, you'll have a BMW, brought to you by Pfizer.”

This is how companies can practice what Bodell calls “proactive obsolescence.” Car companies, for instance, are looking at a future with self-driving cars, likely in a standardized fleet. They need to predict what will ultimately “kill the company,” then adjust to provide new value in a way that nobody—neither customers nor competitors—are currently predicting.

“The people are going to succeed aren't going to tell me who their firm or their company are,” she added. “They're thinking about who they're becoming. They have their antenna up.”

For the legal market, this message is particularly applicable for strategic planning. Bodell said that when looking to innovate, there needs to be a space for change to be made, but most organizations focus on the positive and trying to promote what's working well. Less often are those who ask tough questions about what's not working: How can you go back and kill the company? What's not working? What should we divest? What will our competitors eat our lunch on?

“It's not about getting more done on your to-do list. It's about what's on your to-do list in the first place,” she added.

And these goals should not be for yourself, she explained. Bodell often gives teams a diagnostic that rates how much they influence change in their organization, on a scale from one to eight. The average when asking people about their whole team is three or four; when replacing the word “we” in each question with “I,” the average goes up to five or six.

And in the end, that's not the goal—change can only occur when an entire team is on the same page about what change means and what actually matters to change within an organization: “The goal is not to get yourself to eight. It's to get your team to eight.”

To that end, she gave some final practical tips to remember when trying to affect that team change:

  • Ask killer questions. “In the future, asking the right questions will become more valuable than finding answers.”
  • Kill a stupid rule. “We assume things are the way they are—that rule is in place for a reason. Why? Sometimes, rules have outlived their purpose.”
  • Empower decision-making. “People say their biggest pain point isn't knowing what to do, but feeling like they can't make decisions.”
  • Be chief simplifier. “We think multitasking is the way to go … [and] we all elevate everything to the same level of urgency,” she said. Instead, think about what actually is meaningful work, and what should be eliminated for meaningful change.

This year's ILTACON boasted the largest attendance ever, according to the organization's board of directors—more than 1,800 registrants and more than 4,000 total attendees. The conference is taking place in National Harbor, Maryland, outside Washington, D.C., and runs through Aug. 23. Legaltech News will have more coverage from the event throughout the week.