I’ve written before about the false promise of Innovation Theatre— getting caught up in activities that look like innovation, but don’t really add value.

I have said that the antithesis of and antidote to Innovation Theatre is to define innovation as implementing new ideas that create value. This does create a bit of a paradox though– if we only work on new ideas that we can implement, and we only implement ideas that are sure to create value, how innovative are we really?

As Oren Harari said “The electric light did not come from the continuous improvement of candles.”

If we are going to do more than a few minor feature tweaks or product extensions— the fintech equivalent of adding a fifth blade to our “innovative” QuadBlade razor that we launched last year— we are clearly going to have to break some new ground. Breaking new ground means trying some things that might not work, and in fact, some of those things might never even see the light of day with real customers.

How do we reconcile these seemingly opposed ideas?

What we need is an empirical approach to value creation.

One that lets us try new things and break new ground, but doesn’t let us get mired in the unproductive muck. Something that allows us to test new ideas and cut our losses quickly with those that things that are not panning out, and double down quickly on those that look promising.

Welcome to FIRE™

FIRE™ stands for Fast, Iterative, Responsive Experiments.

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  Fast – because we want to shorten the gap between idea and results

  
  
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  Iterative – because we want a process of continuous improvement

  
  
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  Responsive – because data, not internal opinions, should drive our iteration

  
  
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  Experiments – because we want the process structured to maximize learning

  
  

We think of FIRE™ as an “innovation operating system” for teams. Once you install it in your organization, you can use it to create value quickly from everything from small incremental feature improvements to more disruptive or transformative approaches to new products, new markets, and new business models.

Modern Agile Business Methods

Manufacturers have Lean production methods and Six Sigma programs to improve quality and reduce costs. Software developers have Agile and Scrum programs to reduce waste and improve client responsiveness. Startups use Lean Startup and programs like Startup Weekend to build and test ideas quickly. Google Ventures uses their own Sprint process to vet concepts quickly for the companies in which they invest. Design Thinking has revolutionized everything from app design to consumer goods to industrial products.

These are all proven processes and methodologies that offer dramatic improvements in effectiveness and efficiency within their appropriate context (and you can click through the links above to learn more about each one if you are not familiar), but none of them alone are a perfect fit for financial services companies trying to innovate in a highly regulated environment.

The FIRE™ process is an empirical approach to value creation that combines the best parts of all of those modern agile business methods into an effective and repeatable process that is custom tailored to work in the highly regulated environment of financial services. Best of all, it gets results fast.

We will dig in to the FIRE™ process a little deeper in future posts on the FinTech Forge blog with some examples, but contact us if you have any questions so far, or if you want to see how it can help you create value quickly in your own teams.

The financial services industry has a long and important tradition of executive education. Up and coming managers are sent off to graduate banking programs to learn industry best practices developed over prior decades, and in some cases, centuries. These programs are well prepared to teach the evolving art and science of asset and liability management, credit underwriting, portfolio management, and general leadership and management principles.

However, many programs have not always been so well suited to prepare their students for the revolutionary changes that have been impacting financial services in profound and dramatic ways. I created the world’s first graduate banking school class on fintech and innovation to help address this gap. I first taught the class in 2015 at the Pacific Coast Banking School, held at the University of Washington, where it has become one of the program’s most poplar classes. I have also taught portions of it at many industry seminars and workshops before and since. This year I am looking forward to also joining the esteemed faculties of the Graduate School of Banking at Colorado and the Graduate School of Banking at Wisconsin to help prepare our future leaders.

These are some of the key lessons for students who not only want to master the best practices of the past, but to also learn how to establish the next practices to shape the future of banking.

1) Think Beyond Traditional Competitors

The nature of competition in financial services has changed more in the past 10 years than in the prior 100. It is no longer sufficient to measure your performance relative to your peer group of similar sized and similarly structured financial institutions. Regional and national competitors once relegated as secondary competitors by local knowledge and community ties have bridged those gaps with the rise of broadband, mobility, and apps. The dynamics of competition have been further stretched to include fintech competitors from across the country and around the world, providing new alternatives to every traditional product and service. Leaders must have a much broader view of competition and competitiveness to achieve success in this changing environment.

2) ‘Plan Your Work and Work Your Plan’ Doesn’t Work Anymore

The logical and pragmatic credo of ‘plan your work and work your plan’ resonates with the analytical and risk-averse nature of bankers, and in more predictable times with more homogeneous competitors it generally worked. Today’s leaders can no longer afford to spend several quarters perfecting and vetting plans internally before learning how they actually perform in the market. The answers lie outside the building, and leaders must learn how to adopt and lead a more agile ‘test and learn’ approach to replace opinions with facts more quickly. Just as important, they also have to learn the skills to be able to adjust their course accordingly as the data requires.

3) The Effective Allocation of Limited Resources

Financial capital, human capital, and managerial time and attention are the primary resources leaders have at their disposal to create positive outcomes. Like all resources, these too are limited, and they most be used wisely, and not just for short-term results. Despite their precious rarity and the uncertainty of investing in the unknown, some portion of these limited resources must be allocated toward creating strategic options for the future. As tempting as it is to wait and see, to hold out for some undefined future date where the horizon must surely come into clearer focus, the reality is that the risk only increases the longer you wait to take action. The best way to predict the future is to create it.

4) Collaborating with Internal and External Partners

The financial institutions that are winning today and that are most likely to win in the future look a lot more like technology companies than ever before. Data scientists, programmers, designers, and engineers are among the fasted growing job titles, and leaders need to be know how to manage their skills and their work toward the outcomes that tomorrow’s customers demand. Increasingly, this means leading effective collaboration across internal business units, and even more challenging, with external vendors and partners. This isn’t about the mindless pursuit of cool technology and shiny objects, it’s about leveraging modern tools to find new ways to create value.

5) Leading Change

An organization’s natural state is to maintain the status quo, and human nature prefers routine and familiarity over change and uncertainty. Today’s leaders need adaptive and situational leadership skills to map a course through uncharted territory, and keep the team focused on the goal, even when it might not be so clear from the onset. To focus more on deeply understanding the needs of the customers and orienting the products and services around them rather than just selling what you have.

Like leaders, innovators are made, not born. Tools and frameworks can be taught and practiced, and everyone should have a role in improving existing products and processes beyond simply executing business as usual. This is even more important for leaders, and most organizations cannot afford a full team dedicated to nothing but innovating new solutions.

New technologies such as distributed ledger technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are still in the early stages. We don’t know exactly how it will all play out just yet, but we must help our leaders embrace and lead change to explore the possibilities and manage the risks.

None of these lessons will sound new to anyone who has read or heard me before, but they are still pretty unique for the traditional banking school curriculum. Hopefully they will become less rare as leaders bring these skills back to their job and use them to help develop future leaders inside their organizations.

Our future depends on it. 

Bill Gates has said “Success is a lousy teacher. It seduces smart people into thinking they can’t lose”. The sweet afterglow of success has a way of redefining as brilliant decisions all of the ways you got lucky, and glossing over a lot of little things that never were quite right along the way. It can also blind you to a shifting landscape and emerging threats and opportunities. The skills, strategies, and activities that got you to this point may not be the same ones that that can take you to the next level.

Blockbuster has become an easy punchline for those looking to describe the very public failures of a fallen giant, but the company was a giant. They were tremendously successful for nearly two decades, becoming the largest video rental store chain in the world, at one point controlling nearly a third of the home rental video market.

It’s hard to imagine from today’s digital perspective the pain points that consumers endured for a couple of hours of video entertainment, but it was a sorry state of affairs before Blockbuster came along. (Check out this time capsule of a guide for new video store entrepreneurs at the time.)

In 1985 Blockbuster founder David Cook pioneered the use of a customer database to better match supply and demand to the demographics of his stores, and the use of barcodes to manage a huge inventory of 10,000 movies per store, versus a few hundred in the average local store.

Suddenly customers had a much better chance of finding that new hit movie in stock, and the second and third choice options were now considerably better too. If you were in the mood for something different, you could browse rows and rows of movies, and now video games too, or get recommendations from a large and well trained staff. Gone were the pesky upfront membership fees.

Within a couple of years, Cook had sold the fast growing company to successful entrepreneur Wayne Huizenga, and it was soon opening a new store every 24 hours. The home video market was growing rapidly as the cost of VCRs came down, and the growth accelerated as videotapes gave way to DVDs. Over the next decade the company would continue to expand rapidly, eventually growing to 8,000 stores at its peak. The local video stores closed or were bought by regional chains, most of which were eventually acquired by Blockbuster.

Your strategy works until it doesn’t

The apocryphal story of the beginning of the end for Blockbuster takes place in 1997 when a California software engineer returned a rented copy of Apollo 13 back late and had to pay $40 in late fees. That engineer was Reed Hastings, and he started Netflix in August of that year.

Imagine what the first Blockbuster board meeting must have been like when they first heard of this new so-called “competitor”.

“They what? Mail you a DVD, then when you mail it back, they send you the next one on your list?  I couldn’t imagine any of our customers wanting that. We have a store in every neighborhood, filled with thousands of movies with friendly and knowledgable staff. What’s next on the agenda?”

At the time, nobody was better at the business of renting out movies through physical stores than Blockbuster, and the company was busy leveraging its superior operating leverage to acquire just about all of its major competitors. The company was unquestionably successful at executing the industry’s dominant business model, but success was a poor teacher for helping them see the potential vulnerabilities of that business model, how the landscape was beginning to change, and how new competitors with new business models might challenge the status quo.

It was expensive to build and maintain all of those brick and mortar locations and to stock and staff them. Netflix had no physical locations to build and maintain and stock and staff, and they were able to create convenience advantages of their own. Renters no longer had to endure the weather and traffic to visit a store to find something to watch, they now could build their own queue of entertainment choices in the comfort of their own homes.

Netflix maintained one inventory that could serve the whole country. This larger market also meant they could profitably stock more rare, unique, and special interest programming, creating what Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson would later call “the long tail”. This advantage was further expanded as Netflix was able to reinvest its profits into developing their digital streaming service that would completely change the game and eventually come to dominate home entertainment.

In other words, Netflix didn’t beat Blockbuster at their own game, they changed the game.

Your business model works until it doesn’t, and your success in the past is a poor teacher for what it will take to be successful in the future, particularly in this era of rapid and dynamic change. Delivering this quarter’s results today is important, but don’t forget to set aside a little time to work on how you’re going to deliver even better results a few quarters from now.

Postscript: In 2000, Hastings offered to sell Netflix to Blockbuster for $50 million. Blockbuster declined the offer.

Managers have this bad habit of looking for a silver bullet. That magical holy grail that will make all of their problems go away quickly, and preferably painlessly. Those expensive consultants. That fancy new CRM system. This flashy acquisition. That confusing and demoralizing internal reorganization. Not the last one, this one.

Many have this same unrealistic expectation about innovation.

“We launched this innovation team last quarter, why haven’t we seen results yet?”

Not long ago we met with one of our clients to discuss the test and learn approach, and to encourage that they run many small experiments to maximize the learning and increase the probability and speed of success. We used an analogy that it was like planting a lot of seeds at once, since not all of them would bloom into something big and beautiful. The client, the COO of a midsize U.S. financial institution, replied that he understood, but warned that we had better make damn sure that the very first experiment was successful.

Innovation is Like Weight Loss

In some ways innovation is like weight loss. The process is simple; move more and eat less. So why are so many people overweight? Because achieving lasting results takes consistent application of the process over time.

We are now 7 weeks into 2017, and most well-intentioned new year’s resolutions have been overpowered by old habits. The gym is noticeably less crowded and Frappucino sales are booming again. Those first few pounds shed have returned, and the alarm clocks have been rolled back to less ambitious hours.

Likewise, with the innovation process. Managers get excited to chart a new course and to boost their flagging performance by implementing new ideas. The first few come out pretty easily because they were the proverbial low hanging fruit; quick wins to show success and build confidence. But they probably didn’t show up in the financial results because they were small improvements. More than likely, they really didn’t create any competitive advantage at all, they probably just helped close your lagging gap a little bit.

Throwing in the Towel

This is the time when the short-sighted silver bullet seekers want to pull the plug.

“This wasn’t the right program, we got bad advice, involved the wrong people, tackled the wrong opportunities, the timing was bad.” 

Any or all of that is possible of course. But the more likely explanation is that you hit your first plateau, and you need to power through it. Consistent application of the process is what drives results.

Your competitors that are sticking to their program are starting to create their own competitive advantages. Partly through the accumulation of a lot of small wins, and partly by getting better at successive experiments because they’re learning more quickly what works and what doesn’t. Tighter iteration loops.

As you go back to the drawing board and try something else, they’re really starting to benefit because some of the bigger bets that took longer to figure out are starting to pay off. Now they are in position to make even bigger improvements and the gap between them and you is about to get a lot bigger

You’re really going to need a silver bullet to catch up now.

Six Sigma is a quality improvement program that gets its name from the concept of 99.9997% quality. In statistics, each sigma represents the statistical measure of 1 standard deviation from the mean in a range of outcomes in a normal distribution. Six sigma translates into no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities.

It is often related to (and sometimes conflated with) the concept of “Lean”, which was coined to describe Toyota’s manufacturing practices during the late 1980s, when their level of consistent quality was noticeably superior to much of what was coming out of Detroit at the time. Lean focuses on improving efficiencies by reducing waste through standardization and elimination of non-value-added efforts. Six Sigma, developed by Motorola and widely popularized by GE and others, focuses on improving quality by reducing process variation and using detailed measurement and statistical analysis. The two are often used in tandem in Lean Six Sigma programs.

Striving for this kind of consistent quality can save lives in healthcare procedures and plant safety. It is what we have come to expect today from our personal electronic devices and even from lower priced automobiles, and this is the kind of uptime we expect from computer and communications networks.

In financial services, it’s what we strive for in our transaction processing, statement production, compliance programs, and reliability of our ATMs and core systems.

What’s not to like?

Quality, consistency, efficiency, defect reduction, what’s not to like?

Lean and Six Sigma programs work well when there are identical operations and repeatable processes in large volumes, particularly when those operations can generate a lot of accurately measured data. When administered properly, they also focus on creating real value by improving quality, cost and customer satisfaction.

But what happens when you perfectly execute the wrong priorities?

Kodak was arguably the best manufacturer of celluloid film in the world (although Fuji Film might argue that one). Nokia was the world’s leading maker of mobile phones, with 48.7% market share in 2007. Sony’s Walkman was the leader in portable music for a decade. The quality of their operations was admirable, and not what turned out to be the achilles heel for those companies.

New technologies and new business models regularly disrupt the status quo. Blockbuster beat all comers in the business of operating video rental stores. They executed the standard business model of their industry better than anyone else. Netflix didn’t beat them at their own game, they changed the game.

Blockbuster is an especially good example for financial services. For most of the industry’s history, success has been about executing the same business model better than largely similar competitors. The winners of the consolidation wars over the past three decades have been those who executed with the efficiency that created operating leverage.

“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all” – Peter Drucker

Efficiency and positive operating leverage are important ways to win the standard game in financial services, but they aren’t necessarily enough to counteract the new technologies and new business models that are changing the game now and in coming years. Nor will simply blindly going all-in on the latest in fintech hype. How can we balance operational excellence and efficiency with flexibility and innovation?

The power of One Sigma

One of the drivers of the dot com boom and bust of late 1990s was the notion of ‘build it and they will come’. Billions of dollars of equity was invested in new technologies that were promising, yet unproven in the marketplace. Valuations got unreasonably optimistic, money flowed too freely, and millions of dollars of advertising was spent hawking products that not enough people wanted.

Eventually reality set in, valuations came back to earth, and the weakest value propositions died off. New wisdom prevailed from Geoffrey Moore, Steve Blank, and others, including Eric Ries who offered a better formula for testing ideas before making big bets. This process of Build, Measure, and Learn is a twist on “lean” methodologies that Ries detailed in his bestselling book The Lean Startup. But this ‘nail it then scale it’ approach is not just for startups.

In financial services we tend to think that if we can just get all of our smartest people in a conference room, perhaps supplemented with the best consulting minds we can rent from the outside, we can perfectly plan out all of our strategies and “roadmaps” down to the last detail. Then, all we need to do is execute them perfectly. Plan your work and work your plan. Simple, right?

But the marketplace has a way of making us look stupid when we make think we can plan for every contingency up front. Market conditions change, customer preferences evolve, and the competitive landscape shifts, so our plans have to be flexible and responsive to these changing conditions.

One Sigma in a normal distribution covers more than two-thirds (68.27% to be exact) of the outcomes. That’s not nearly good enough for heart surgery or network reliability, but it’s a pretty good indication that you’re on to something worth testing further.

The answers are outside the building, not inside the boardroom. The sooner we can test our ideas, the sooner we’ll know whether we should increase our bets or iterate to something better. That’s stacking the odds in your favor in the strategic planning process.

By all means keep those Lean and Six Sigma programs going where they’re working, but navigating these uncharted waters in our rapidly changing industry takes a new approach. It’s time to embrace the power of One Sigma.

Innovation is all about value creation.

Or at least it should be.

It’s easy to get caught up in the front end of the process. Brainstorming new ideas, drawing on whiteboards, and moving different colored sticky notes around the wall is fun. But all of that should be a means to an end. That end should be about creating value; whether it’s improving the customer experience, taking the cost out of a process, or creating a new feature or a completely new product category.

Most of the work I do is centered in financial services, which is not exactly known as an industry that excitedly embraces change. I spend a lot of time trying to convince leaders that they need to innovate, and that maintaining the status quo is a slow train to irrelevancy (and that the train is heading down a steep grade and picking up speed).

Over the past ten years (most of) the industry has gotten the message, helped more than a little bit by the perceived threats and opportunities of FinTech. A recent PWC survey showed that 83% of bankers said that at least part of their current business is at risk of being lost to standalone FinTech companies.

In 2013 I said that the innovation maturity of the financial services industry is best represented by a power curve, with a very small group of Leaders, followed by a small but growing group of Learners, and a long tail of Laggards. As we enter 2017 all three groups are still represented, but there has been some fattening in the middle as more and more Laggards have entered the status of Learners.

Learners get that just doing the same old same old is a sinking proposition within a rising tide, even if they’re not sure exactly what to do or how to get started. Naturally, they are often inspired by the cool and interesting things that the Leaders are doing.

Tempering Inspiration with Reality

This inspiration should be tempered with a strong chaser of reality. Some of the flashier things are simply what I like to call “Innovation Theatre”. Sometimes that’s intentional, part branding exercise to position the company as a thought leader in the minds of its customers (and/or competitors). Other times it’s unintended, a result of losing track of the whole purpose of innovation.

Shiny new objects can be compelling, especially to those people whose job description contains the word “innovation”. Don’t get me wrong, innovation labs that look like Silicon Valley startups, hackathons, and teams of bearded hipsters in hoodies leading design workshops are a few of my favorite things. But they too are just means to an end. (The great Steve Blank has his own deep thoughts on this. Read this if you’re thinking of standing up an innovation outpost. )

Innovation Is Implementing New Ideas That Create Value

If you ask a group of people in a room their definitions (which we have done on many occasions), you often get back nearly as many definitions as there are people in the room. Some people cite examples of innovative companies or products, other mention technology, most people say something about “new ideas”.

So let’s level-set right here, our working definition for innovation at the highest level is this: Innovation is Implementing New Ideas That Create Value. We agree about the “new ideas” part, but everyone has new ideas. In order to count as innovation in our book, they have to be implemented, and they need to create value.

If you don’t implement the new ideas, or if they don’t create value, why did you waste organizational time and resources on them?

That value can be defined in a lot of different ways- new products or services, reduced costs, better customer experiences, extending the life of mature products, etc. – so organizations (and managers) will have differing views on value creation. More on that in future posts.

The Real Work of Innovation

With that as a working definition of innovation in the broadest sense, most innovation work— at least that which is truly about value creation, not just branding—  is usually much more bland and quotidian than the flashy activities of Innovation Theatre. “Blue Collar innovation” is how one innovation leader of a top 10 U.S. Bank recently described it to us. With one eye firmly fixed on a few key questions:

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  What value are we creating for whom?

  
  
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  What job does our customer need us to do here?

  
  
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  How do we know when we get there?

  
  

Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma will turn 20 years old this year. The lessons of how new technologies disrupt mature industries are still being played out today in financial services, media, transportation, and just about any other industry you can name.

In his new book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice, he focuses on making innovation a reliable engine for growth, and it is centered on the Theory of Jobs to Be Done— “What exactly did you hire this product to do?”

Christensen points out that a primary reason why some new innovations don’t reach wide market adoption is because the new offering does not do a better job than the existing thing that the customer “hired” to get a specific job done (let alone overcoming the cost and pain of making a change).

Knowing that you are being disrupted and committing to doing something about it is an important first step. Focusing on the Jobs to be Done ensures that you’re solving the right problems for the right people in the right way at the right time.

That is value creation.

Anything less is just Innovation Theatre. 

This week at Money20/20 in Las Vegas I spent some time behind the scenes at Capital One to see how they are using technology, innovation, and design to create a better banking experience.

I sat down with Scott Zimmer, Capital One’s Global Head of Design, to focus on how design is taking on a growing role in banking. He describes himself as a “Disney-bred creative, someone who’s driven to create”. Not exactly a common bio quote for most bankers, but one that may grow more familiar as design takes an increasingly important role in the industry.

“There’s a pretty compelling story in banking, and the things we do for people matter to people on a human level,” says Zimmer, “and in the design community, that’s what designers were born to do.”

Listen to the interview here:

Design is about a lot more than making things look pretty. It’s about making things work better. Technology has been a democratizing force across so many industries, and banking is no exception. Customers have more choices than ever, and those choices now include products, services and experiences that are often far superior than the you’ll-take-what-we-make era that prevailed for so long.

I have heard a lot of bankers proclaim their desire to make their branches more like Apple stores, but for too many of them that desire begins and ends with the clean visual aesthetic. The effectiveness of the design of the Apple store that makes it so successful goes far deeper than that. Zimmer agrees, “Steve (Jobs) was famous for saying ‘design is really how something works’, and what’s interesting about the Apple store in all its starkness, is they simplified it, to make it work better.”

The business case for beautiful products and compelling customer experiences is a tough one for most boards and executives to get their hands around. I know this firsthand from my work helping some of them with their strategic planning, as they fret about making big bets that might not payoff. A good design process involves a ‘test and learn’ approach that is well known to any fintech entrepreneurs following lean startup principles. It’s an approach that banks should be using in more of their business decisions.

As Zimmer puts it: “We try to avoid failing at scale”

Las Vegas is an appropriate setting for using a poker analogy to describe the advantages of this approach (blackjack works too). Rather than pushing all of their chips to the center of the table and declaring “all in” as the first cards are dealt, the savvy player makes small bets and only increases them until the cards are in their favor.

“It’s the thing that has transitioned product development dramatically”, says Zimmer, “in days past you might have made two, three big bets a year, and now, any team that’s working in this collaborative, iterative fashion can be making sixty, seventy bets at one time, but with minimal investment.”

Zimmer and his team have brought this iterative test and learn approach inside the organization too. They’ve built user labs to test ideas with customers much earlier, and this gives them better insights into what’s working and what’s not much sooner. He contrasts that approach with the typical big meeting going over a PowerPoint presentation that someone has worked on internally for weeks. That approach can cause teams to be defensive about their hard work instead of working through the options more collaboratively with more early contact with customers.

The future of design is evolving beyond spaces, products and services. Zimmer also talked about the challenge of designing for voice with the Capital One skill for Amazon Echo, with a team focused on conversation design “obsessing around the humanity that has to come through in an interaction and what the word choices are”. That work is continuing with the release of an update to the skill called “How Much Did I Spend?” that was built with a natural language query, “as though you are talking with your money”.

Zimmer sees parallels between financial health and physical health, and he thinks software and good design can help us to set goals and achieve them. “The ability to leverage software’s capability to do that is this new era that’s upon us of creating new products and services. I think design plays a huge role, and there’s a bright future ahead.”

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Thanks to Capital One for sponsoring these posts and podcasts and for providing access to their team, but all of the opinions expressed are still mine, all mine. For more information about Capital One, visit www.CapitalOne.com

Make way for the And-I’s.

And-I’s are my name for a new phenomenon I’ve noticed in financial services job titles. “And-I” stands for the words “and innovation” tacked on to the end of existing job titles. Your “Head of Digital Banking” is now “Head of Digital Banking and Innovation“.

Boom. You’re now in the innovation game. No one can accuse you of anything otherwise. It’s right there on the business card. The only thing we love more than acronyms in this business is that kind of git er done, check-the-box process efficiency.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that every bank needs a full time Chief Innovation Officer (and no one needs the trousered acronym CHINO that comes with it, but I guess we have to differentiate from our Chief Information Officers and Chief Investment Officers somehow). It’s great to recognize the need to innovate and to give someone the responsibility for making it happen. It’s just that simply tacking it on without a means of support usually does not have much of an impact.

The 3 most common types of And-I’s:

Head of Digital Banking and Innovation

The head of digital banking (who was called the head of online banking just a few years ago) has already been put in charge of digitizing an analog business model, so adding innovation to their job title seems natural.

• PRO: The service delivery model of financial services has been on the front lines of the disruption wars, so an effective head of digital banking probably has a pretty good handle on understanding how customers’ needs and preferences are changing.
• CON: Often times, the head of digital banking’s domain is limited to consumer retail banking, and usually just the front end of customer interactions, at that. Opportunities may be missed to create better outcomes in other business lines, drive efficiencies from back office processes, or build a sustainable culture of innovation.

Head of Technology and Innovation

The only thing worse than the incorrect and incomplete conflation that ‘innovation = technology’ is its even more misguided cousin, ‘technology = innovation’, even though the two do often co-exist as a matter of necessity.

• PRO: A senior technologist who understands how to make things work inside the complex machinery of a bank is definitely a great person to have thinking about implementing better ways of doing things.
• CON: Senior technology leaders are under a lot of (understandable) pressure to keep all of the systems running smoothly and reliably, and to continually seek out and destroy any potential security threats. It’s hard to ask that person to spend a lot of time building and testing new concepts with regularity.

Executive Vice President of X and Innovation

If a board and/or CEO have decided that innovation is indeed an act of leadership, they may want to vest a member of the senior leadership team with newly minted innovation powers.

• PRO: Any innovation efforts without a serious commitment from senior leadership is doomed to fail. Having someone with the ear of the CEO and board and a direct say in the budgeting process is a good thing.
• CON: Even if the appointed senior officer isn’t the type who needs their granddaughter to help them figure out all of those apps on their new iPhone, all of that experience of the grizzled veterans can actually work against them in the innovation process. The pursuit of perfecting best practices can get in the way of discovering the next practices.

The Case for And-I’s

• Hiring people with a full time focus on innovation is an expense that most banks cannot afford. The cost of a full-time, senior level Chief Innovation Officer, plus a team of supporting researchers, designers, and technologists can easily be a million dollar a year investment (or more). Plus hoodies. You can’t forget hoodies.
• Infusing an imperative to innovate into everyone’s psyche and their job description is a hallmark of the most innovative companies in the world. It shouldn’t be reserved for an anointed few.
• Far-flung R&D labs and skunkworks activities disconnected from the core business and its practitioners can be a rabbit hole of unproductive navel-gazing.

How to Make it Work

1. Use all of these people as a team, plus a few others (just none of these people), to help you build out your innovation team. But put someone in charge. Even if it’s part time, someone has to be the leader of your innovation efforts.
2. Establish innovation goals. What are the business goals you are trying to achieve? (See: 5 New Years Resolutions for Bank Innovators.)
3. Create a separate innovation governance and funding structure. Innovation projects can’t be managed like typical BAU (business as usual) projects.
4. Have the appropriate time horizons. Your typical ROI models, J-curves and break-even analysis don’t always work well when you’re experimenting with something new. (See: 5 Ways to Kill Your Innovation Initiative)
5. Don’t go it alone. Get some help setting up and running your innovation program, and don’t build everything in-house. Nimble fintech companies can build and release a whole new app in the time it can take for you to assemble the committee members required to sign off its release.

Support your local And-I’s. They need all the help they can get.

As a few fintech companies like Lending Club, Betterment, and others have run into some rough patches lately, it has been interesting to note some of the reactions, especially amongst bankers (that’s just shorthand, I’m looking at you too, credit union leaders).

Some have taken this news as indication that fintech was just a bubble after all, and it is finally popping.

I  think a more pragmatic view is that fintech (and “innovation” in general) has simply moved down from the dizzying heights of the hype curve. That’s a good thing. It’s the natural progression of maturing technologies and sectors. It means that fintech is moving from wild, pie-in-the-sky fantasizing to actual application with customers. Real companies are learning real lessons in the marketplace.

Some will make it and some will not, but technology– financial, and otherwise– will continue to be an increasingly important part of our financial lives. As fintech companies navigate the hype curve, bankers seem to be navigating their own grief cycle about fintech and the need to innovate:

The Bankers Fintech Grief Cycle

The first stage is Denial. It is hard to comprehend that the things that have brought us so much success are beginning to be less effective. Denial is a powerful reality-distorting mechanism that can persist for a very long time (and it has). We’ve been doing it this way for years. We’re at the top of our peer group. Financial services are different than just selling books or videos. The industry is too big, too established, too well regulated, too politically protected, too important to the economy, too whatever, to be disrupted. We’re in financial services, and we have technology like a core processing system, some ATMs and a website– we already are a fintech company! 

The second stage is Anger. Frustration sets in when reality begins to bevoke harder to deny: This is unfair competition! When are the regulators going to take a look at these companies and smack them back to the real world? I could do more if only I was allowed! 

The third stage is Bargaining. Compromise seems like an easier path than change, and we become willing to make trade-offs now that we should’ve made earlier: I know we’re going to have to do something different someday for those millennial (never mind that the oldest of this demographic group are already in their mid-30’s), but we can just stay the course until I retire. Maybe if we just clean up our website a little and update our mobile app (or just come out with one), we’ll be OK. What if we just add the word “innovation” to a couple of our people’s job titles?

The fourth stage is Depression. As the new reality persists in the face of all of the other coping mechanisms, despair sets in. Why bother? The industry just isn’t the same anymore. Maybe it’s just time to sell.

The final stage is Acceptance. The inevitable is finally accepted, and for some, even embraced. You know, beyond the threats, there are actually quite a few opportunities in all of this. Some of these companies have some pretty good ideas, maybe we should work with them instead of fighting against them. This could actually be good for us!

Fintech is the new normal, and the bankers who move from Denial to Acceptance faster and step up their own innovation efforts will reap the benefits in this new era of digital disruption.

It’s midyear already.

Halftime.

Two quarters down and two to go for 2016. For many financial institutions, it’s also the start of the 2017 strategic planning season. That time when boards and senior leadership teams sit down to hash out next year’s budget; working together to set aside silo politics and internecine battles to focus on what’s best for the customers, and the overall enterprise as a result.

Haha– just kidding!

It’s that time when business line leaders are calculating what they need to spend quickly so they don’t lose it in next year’s budget. It’s that time when executives start currying favor and jockeying for position by letting their bosses know how much more worthy their business unit is for additional funding compared to their peers.

As silly as it sounds, it’s all pretty rational behavior, really.

Much of the strategic planning process, especially the budgeting aspects of it, are pretty much a zero-sum game. All of the bottom-up funding requests sent out to frontline leaders from the top of the organization (with varying degrees of sincerity) invariably tally up to far more in expenses and far less in current revenues than what the C-suite has already telegraphed to investors. The resulting negotiations, horse trading, and unsatisfying compromises usually end up with limited resources being spread across the organization like a thin layer of peanut butter. Starving no one, but providing the necessary energy to few.

Lessons from Las Vegas?

Unlike many Wall Street investment bankers and traders, most commercial bank and credit union leaders are inherently risk averse. Las Vegas would seem to provide few practical lessons for the latter group, despite the risk of not taking risk, as I have pointed out before.

But if you’re really serious about reaching a new level of performance, this should really be the time for doubling down on a small number of bets that show promise for outsized returns. That also means taking a few bets off the table if the odds don’t look so good.

Spreading your money around the roulette table seems like a way to hedge your risk, but thanks to the house edge, your expected loss over the long run is a minimum of 5.26%, the same as betting it all on black. Or red.

Moving from House Edge to Player Edge

The only people in Las Vegas who can make money over the long run (besides the house) are blackjack players, but not just any blackjack players– just those who:

• Know the odds of every possible bet,
• Understand when the odds have shifted in their favor, and
• Vary their bets accordingly.

Learning the odds of every possible bet in blackjack is time consuming, but not incredibly difficult. Casinos sell wallet-sized basic strategy cards in their gift shops. But millions of gamblers will ignore them and bet on ‘hunches’, ‘streaks’, and ‘strategies’ more grounded in wishful thinking than in the mathematics of probabilities and statistics.

Understanding when the odds have shifted requires the ability to count cards, a practice made famous in Ben Mezrich’s 2003 book “Bringing Down the House: The Inside Story of Six M.I.T. Students Who Took Vegas for Millions” (later made into the 2008 movie “21”, starring Kevin Spacey).

Counting cards is a way of carefully tracking what happened in the past in order to better predict what might happen in the future. (Predictive analytics, anyone?) This is only true when dealing from a finite number of decks, and not true for a spin of the roulette wheel or the rolling of a pair of dice, where any one outcome is independent of all others. Card counting is not illegal, but it is against the rules of every casino in the world, because it reveals when the house edge has temporarily become the player’s edge.

All of this information can be leveraged to bet more when the odds are in the player’s favor. If most of the cards that have been dealt so far have been smaller values, then there is a greater likelihood that more of the cards to be dealt next will have higher values. This tends to favor the player over the long run (partially because it tends to cause the house to bust more often), so the player should increase their bets.

These factors will almost never combine to create a sure bet, with a win locked in 100%. As in business and in life, blackjack still has a significant amount of randomness involved. All of those tens left in the deck that you hope will allow you to draw to 21 and the dealer to bust her 12, can just as easily do the opposite.

Still, utilizing all of these strategies together can help create more winning sessions, and that’s a good thing.

Turning the Tables in the Boardroom

How can you take the lesson from the blackjack table to the conference table? How can you stack the odds in your favor this strategic planning season?

1. Know the odds of your existing bets. Are there any slow-growing products or business lines where you know deep down that you are unlikely to grow any faster? Especially if they are not strategically important or do not represent a significant share of ongoing profits?
2. Understand where the odds have shifted. Are there emerging businesses, products, or services that you’re not investing in today that you should be? Are there outside partners you should be working with to capitalize on new opportunities? Have changes to the competitive landscape exposed new weaknesses you should be shoring up?
3. Be brave in making your bets. One of your most important jobs as a leader is the allocation of resources. Don’t be fooled by history, legacy, and sunk costs– where is the best place to invest the next dollar? Where should you take bets off the table so you have more to put where the odds are better?

The odds can always move against you in the short run, but taking this approach can help position you to have more wins, and to win more over the long run.

May the odds forever be in your favor.