TheThreePercent

If the kind of innovator we are looking for at TheThreePercent is rare – about three percent of any large population at any given time – then the kind of people those innovators need to support them is equally rare.

ThreePercenters need to be able to tap the insights, resources and capabilities of a wide array of people, from marketing experts to financial wizzes. When you have a new venture that intends to disrupt how people organize themselves, you need access to a deep and wide toolbox of knowhow. In particular, you need functional experts who are comfortable in a discussion about changing the status quo.

One of the most important sources of insight an innovator needs – particularly in Europe or America – is the legal team. Access to a sharp, experienced lawyer can be one of the most important assets a new venture can have, especially new ventures inside existing companies.

If you find a lawyer at your company or among your circle of friends who can have the following conversation, hold onto them for dear life…they are as rare as opals:

ThreePercenter: “Hey lawyer dude, I’m thinking about turning this part of the company upside down. What do you think?”

Lawyer: “Cool. Well, you’re going to run into a problem with this law, but if I understand your intentions correctly, you could approach it this other way and get the same result.”

Particularly in a corporate environment, finding a lawyer like this who won’t run screaming to pull the emergency alarm is like finding….yeah, like finding a good lawyer.

The problem is that a typical lawyer has been drilled on two things: 1) reacting aggressively to threats; 2) practicing the art of the adversarial process. This is a cultural mismatch. You need a safe place to explore how to change the rules. But choose the wrong lawyer, and it’s like trying to pet the Doberman in charge of attacking anyone that ventures into the yard – there will be blood.

This can be a real problem for CEOs and other executives trying to build an innovative culture. The traditional legal team – just by doing what it is paid to do – tends to send the innovators underground. This especially happens in highly-regulated industries or in companies which have attracted a high degree of public scrutiny due to size or past practices. This is a conundrum. There is no question that most big companies need legal watch dogs. But if exploring new ventures must be done underground to avoid aggressive confrontation too soon in the process, then most initiatives are going to miss valuable insight and can stumble into a heap of legal trouble when they launch.

But this is exactly what many “vice presidents of innovation” do at large companies. Rather than find and embrace legal thinkers who can have a positive, proactive, problem-solving conversation about rule-changing, they tend to shelter their innovators. Their favorite phrase: “You have to stay below the radar until we’ve shown results.”

This then causes a downward spiral, as the lawyers now have to clean up the legal mess caused by the ill-informed new venture which has launched without any prior awareness of the legal issues. The mess will be used as proof that more watch dogs are needed, turning the CEO’s dream of an innovative culture into a police state.

However, telling lawyers to lighten-up sends mixed messages. Most of the time you want them on high-alert.

One way to approach this is to encourage the “but the but” habit we use with scientific teams. Scientists, like lawyers, have been well trained to use the word “but”: “But that theory doesn’t hold up.” “But your approach breaks the laws of physics.” Trying to tell a scientist to employ “no killer phrases” when discussing a new venture is like asking someone to not use their tongue while talking. So instead, we say, “Use But whenever you like, but for every But, you must supply a second But: ‘But that won’t work, BUT it would if….’”

We have had somewhat more success with this simple rule in our innovation programs. It doesn’t solve the whole problem, BUT it’s a start.