Episode 2: Innovation and Change Management

In today's fast-paced and constantly evolving business landscape, innovation and change management is essential for staying competitive and achieving long-term success. 

But how do you recognize true innovation? Why do so many innovation efforts fail? What can organizations do culturally to support innovation? In this month’s episode, we’ll answer these questions and more. 

Join us as we dive into the world of change management with Mark Edmondson, President and CEO of Inflo.

Transcript

Matt Sutorius  0:11  
Welcome to Making change, the CPA podcast that has nothing to do with accounting and everything to do with innovation. I'm your host, Matt Sutorius, and today we're speaking with Mark Edmondson, President and CEO at Inflo on innovation and change management.

Mark, tell us a little bit about Inflo and your role at the company.

Mark Edmondson  0:40  
So Inflo is an audit technology solution. And we work with accounting CPA firms to deliver a more modern and digital audit supported by tools and technologies, which really focus on the efficiency and the quality of the work, but also the value that clients get from those services. I'm the CEO and main founder of the business, we founded the business seven years ago, on the back of my own career in one of the large big four accounting firms involved in their technology, their innovation efforts across both the UK, the US, and what became a global capacity. And that was really the genesis of what became Inflo founding a business that could help the broader accounting profession really trying to tackle this digital transformation agenda.

Matt Sutorius  1:34  
Do you feel like you've seen a lot of progress over the past seven years? I mean, we talk frequently and innovation in this industry is difficult. What are you seeing?

Mark Edmondson  1:44  
Yes and no Matt, I think I've seen progress. And I think that a lot of the change that we've experienced in the last three or so years in the way that the workforce works, the flexibility that's been required from professional service businesses, in particular, has really derived that need to innovate into adopts technology, I think that a lot more can be done, than is done naturally happens some of the time. And I think that's, that's often because of that really entrenched established way of working in certain areas of professional services. I think that extends more broadly as well. But I think there's a lot more that can be done. And there's a lot of that potentially starting to really become more tangible. Whereas, you know, maybe two, three years ago, it was more hypothesized around where the progression would go, we often heard the future of audit the future accounting Well, I think a lot of that is now more tangible for for accounting firms. And naturally, as they start to innovate, I think that also starts to help their clients start to innovate, because they can kind of see firsthand the benefits and the experience that they're receiving. From a more technology and data driven approach.

Matt Sutorius  3:04  
We tend to get hung up on what the word innovation means. How would you define it?

Mark Edmondson  3:10  
It's a tricky one, because I think innovation is one that involves some level of personal perspective on something that you might think is innovative, isn't necessarily what I would think of as being innovative. And therefore, that personal interpretation of the word can sometimes be a little bit of an inhibiting factor on actually making progress. A lot of the time, what I'm really focused on here is, how are we trying to change? I say, trying to change because sometimes it doesn't work. Sometimes we are unsuccessful. And we need to embrace that some of the time. But for me, innovation is trying to change trying to improve what we've done before. And so it's when we looked back, and we're doing something now, are we doing it the same as we did 12 months ago or two years ago? Are we trying to really push the envelope here and try and think of a smarter way of doing this? Do it quicker, add more value, do it to a higher standard, like these are the kinds of things that I would I would personally view as innovative model.

Matt Sutorius  4:15  
When you think about the companies you've worked with that are really innovative, either in your your past career or in flow, what characteristics do they share? What do they have in common?

Mark Edmondson  4:25  
I think there's there's a few things. First, I would say real alignment in their decision making process. And so what I see being done poorly, is what I would call indecision by committee. If we all agree that we don't agree, then it's okay for us to not do anything. And I think what we really see working well, is strong and decisive decision making. I think other businesses are really good at listening to their stuff and involving them in the process. So a lot of the time, we can take a top down approach to innovation. We've had a great idea over here at headquarters, and we're going to now push that down across everyone. Well, actually, how can we fertilize the broader business and get those great ideas coming up from the bottom, and then that ownership changes quite a lot in terms of the change management and the adoption. We see businesses that are focused on the end client, for a CPA firm like yourselves, what does the client actually want? But maybe it's the consumer where it's the other business that we're trying to sell to? What is it that adds value for the for them? Why would they want us to be innovative? Why would they want to benefit from this? What do they get from this thing, that's a really important piece, because a lot of innovation and transformation is around actually moving multiple stakeholders rather than just yourselves. And that can be really important. And a couple of other pieces, I think, that are really important. Recognizing the importance of data in any level of transformation is really key. If you can have the best all singing, finance dashboard or operational system, if the data underneath it isn't good quality, if it isn't effectively moved from one system to another, you're going to almost fail at the first hurdle because the user adoption won't be there, or you'll have spent so much time trying to get to that you'll have lost the impact that it would be able to achieve. And some of that then really boils down to workflow and accountability. So in anything that you're looking at, we always have a rule in our business and with the people we work with, you know, if if something an area and innovation, a task doesn't have one and only one person accountable, then nobody is accountable. And having that real crystal clear division and allocation of innovative ideas of changes that you're trying to implement is really important.

Matt Sutorius  7:05  
Right. what can organizations who wants to be innovative, and that's virtually every company organization I've ever worked with? Has that as one of their goals in some way? What culturally can an organization do to support a culture of innovation where people feel like they can bring forward ideas where innovative things tend to work and result in real change? How do organizations make that happen?

Mark Edmondson  7:30  
Firstly, it's around tone from the top and setting that clear expectation that the business doesn't just implement ideas that come out of the CEOs head, that it's a more collaborative community that you're trying to build in your organization. You might say, Well, how do you do that? Well, partly, that's in you know, your all hands meetings, your quarterly meetings, your strategic leadership of the business, but then it's around training to really emphasize small examples of that, and really showcase them. So you know, if you can take something that a junior staff member has done, and really shine a light on that, and say, That's exactly what we want, let's recognize that person with some rewards for doing that, etc, you know, classic Amazon vouchers or this kind of stuff, right, and just champion that as being that's what I want to see. That's where you start to then open up more participation from the broader group. Now, what you need to be very careful about is dismissing ideas that have been developed, or that have been brought to you, you know, you always need to have a very open, consider everything, give everything its due course, you know, never shutting something down. It used to be the classic open door policy. But now it's evolved a little bit to more just having channels where people can share those ideas in a way that they feel safe, and can be really difficult. Because often as a leader, you'll kind of know two or three steps down the line, what is or isn't going to work. Sometimes you need to be willing to let it go down one or two steps of that journey. So I was that person can see why as well. So there's a lot of different things to my experience, but openness, turning from the top, and really trying to recognize when when staff have good ideas, is a really good start for 10. Anyway, it's probably a whole podcast we could do on some on some of those topics.

Matt Sutorius  9:23  
I see some risk in that I agree with you. But the I always wonder if you ask staff for ideas and what they want to see the organization to, then they're gonna give them to you, and then you're gonna have to do something about it. So what do you what do you do to make sure they feel like they're heard, even if a lot of the ideas aren't going to come to fruition?

Mark Edmondson  9:44  
I do some strategic workshops with with some of our customers and with the leadership group and it's, it's really insightful trying to unpick how they engage with their staff to be able to get that finger on the pulse understanding of what their view is on things. What I've seen work quite well has been around the format and the forum of that map. So things like workshops can quite work quite well, because it gives almost the group the ability to share, but also to refine those ideas before they're coming to you. So you almost get that level of qualification from the group. So maybe the most junior person has actually had a conversation in that audience with managers and more experienced people who can actually say, actually, you know, let's, let's try and prioritize this work on these things. Let's refine that before we're taking it to the leadership team in terms of ideas. That's a very different format to running like a questionnaire across the business. That's what are all the problems that we've got, and how can we improve things. So I think it's around trying to make sure that to to your point earlier on around cottony of transparency and communication, but understanding that you're going to listen to all of their ideas, maybe maybe setting that expectation from the get go and that that you're not going to be able to do everything that they share with you, you're going to have to be quite selective, etc. But I think that the bigger picture piece here is, I don't view it as a junior team member has three ideas and a need to see three ideas come to fruition. What I think we need to be able to foster is, I would like you to share ideas with us. And we will use those ideas to start doing something, it might not be exactly what you've said. But it is going to be something I think the worst thing you can do is start to try and ask those questions. And then the staff see, 12 months later, nothing has happened, right? That's when you start to really lose them. I think it's more important to show almost the funnel, if you like to show yes, we need lots of ideas. But even that idea that was totally irrelevant to what we actually did. That's part of the process is almost creating all the ideas. So as then we can put them into the funnel, and we can move forward some, you know, 234 ideas that we think are the best ones, which this process is helped to create.

Matt Sutorius  12:17  
Why do you think it is that when we think of examples of innovative companies or organizations, at least for me that one, the ones that come to mind are companies like Apple and Tesla, that have a real cult of personality around one person at the top? When it's clear that innovation, in a lot of ways comes from the staff and new hires and new people with new experience yet culturally, we seem to really praise the Elon Musk's and the Tim Cook's and that kind of leader in organizations.

Mark Edmondson  12:51  
So I think it's more of a pop culture type thing, because, you know, it's very difficult to credit, you know, one of the senior Apple engineers who created something cool who nobody's ever heard of, versus crediting apple and therefore going well, who's the figurehead of Apple? Let's make them the super hero of this movie. In essence, that's kind of you know, some organizations really push that. So, you know, Elon Musk is the prototypical, you know, everything's about Elon type agenda, right? But don't for one minute tell me that every great idea in Tesla, and SpaceX, and now Twitter is going to be coming from Elon, it is and there's a huge team of people here that ultimately should be taking a lot more credit, but they don't because they aren't the figurehead of the company. And so I think it's partly that the journalist coverage and the external media wants a person to assign a lot of this to as the superhero of the movie. In reality, the vast majority of ideas do not come from one single person and news organizations. Right? That makes sense.

Matt Sutorius  13:58  
Are there things that people who aren't naturally prone to thinking innovatively can do to nurture more innovative thinking in themselves?

Mark Edmondson  14:07  
I think so. I think that it comes back to the earlier question around perception of what innovation is. And I think if you brand innovation as being the very upper echelon of I need to create the next iPhone, then there's going to be very few people who feel up to that challenge. I think if you can really deconstruct what you mean by innovation in the sense of the very lower end of that scale. So I would like us to do things better than we did last time we did this task. I think that most people can be engaged with that capability. Can I you know, three months later, having done three months more work, experience, whatever. Have I learned something at a time? I'd hope so. Can I apply that to what I did three months ago, in the cold light of day at hopes so. So I think, for me, the thing that really engages people more in innovation, if they feel inferior to the task is by really being clear what we're trying to mean by innovation, and what kind of ideas we're looking forward to be able to help support the broader innovation agenda, Mark. So that's maybe how I would try and engage with people who maybe feel a little nervous about their role in innovation.

Matt Sutorius  15:30  
And then more generally, do you have any advice for organizations who've attempted innovative efforts before and find themselves snared up, you know, analysis, paralysis in the process, and the group can't get anything done any any advice for how to move the meter and get things started?

Mark Edmondson  15:48  
We used to have a very strong mantra at PWC, when I was trying to move things quickly in a very large organization. And the mantra was very much, there's no worse decision than indecision, we can pretty much always unwind something if it goes wrong, or pivots on it. But if we sit and think about it for too long, then the move momentum and the movement might have gone now, there is a time and a place to take longer and analyze further what decision we're trying to make. But a lot of the time making the decision and moving on is probably better than standing still for too long. The other real nugget of wisdom that I picked up over over my years is more of a way to approach innovation and transformation as a four step process. And whenever you're looking at something, the first area that you should focus on is elimination. Other things that you're doing that you could remove completely, and there would be absolutely no impact. And on the face of it, you might think well, that sounds a bit silly. It's surprising when you look at any process or any piece of work, how much stuff is done purely because that's always how it's been done. And when you look at it and go, What would happen if we didn't do that particular activity, nothing. Let's stop doing it. And that's the easiest innovation you can make anywhere, anytime, just stop doing something that you are doing, and you don't need to the second step of the process was around simplification. A lot of the time you might be doing something, but doing it in lots of different ways, or it's overly complicated. And, you know, we're using 20 words to describe something that could be described in four, or we've got far more steps in this process than we really need to. So look at how to simplify the process. Third area was standardization. So when you've got to a process that you've taken out the stuff that you don't need to do, and you've simplified the steps involved in it, look at standardizing that. So as they're consistent, you don't have that variability. You don't have the volatility that might be in that. Because when you get to a standardized process that's simpler and taken out the steps, you don't need to that's then primed for automation. All too often, when we look at innovation, we jump to the automation step, and go how can we automate this process? And you go well, we can't really because the process is completely different, overly complicated, and it involves too many steps. So actually thinking about it in those four progressions of how to get to automation, rather than thinking about how to apply automation to something was somewhat kind of groundbreaking in our in our methodology that we used to use around process transformation. And I think it's a really simple way to think about things as you kind of unpick a particular process, a way that you are operating as a finance function or the operations of a business. Think about those four steps and think about, well, what improvements could I make in those four boxes. I think that that gives you a much clearer methodology to work through. And that certainly would be my recommendation to anyone thinking about this and how to kind of demystify innovation. That's a really good area of methodology to apply.

Matt Sutorius  19:08  
So elimination, simplification, standardization, and then automation in that order. And don't skip any steps and go to the more interesting sexier one at the end, because it's not going to work as well.

Mark Edmondson  19:20  
It's very difficult to automate 1000 different ways of doing the same process. It's a heck of a lot easier for you to try and do it when it's all the same process.

Matt Sutorius  19:29  
Well, Mark, I've really enjoyed watching what you and Inflo have been doing over the past few years and interested in fascinated in what the company is going to be like a couple years from now. And this has been a pleasure talking with you on the podcast. Thanks for coming on today. Thanks very much. And that's our show. Thanks again to mark for speaking with us and to you for listening in. Join us next month as we discussed the future of talent acquisition with Marcy Glenn, CEO and chief talent strategist at Another Source.