TSLP Season 4- The Think-Make Gap

🎙️ New Episode Alert: The Think-Make Gap with JL Heather
Great ideas are everywhere but breakthroughs happen when leaders turn ideas into action.

In this episode of the Transformation Station Leadership Podcast, I sit down with JL Heather to discuss The Think-Make Gap — the space between strategy, creativity, and actual execution. 

This conversation is packed with practical insight for leaders, entrepreneurs, and teams who are ready to stop hesitating and start building.

Learn more about JL:
Website: https://centered.work
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jlheather/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BreakthroughInnovation

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Until next time, stand tall, step bold, and own your transformation.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

Great ideas are everywhere, but real breakthroughs are rare. The difference is not creativity, it's execution. And the gap between thinking and making is where most progress stalls and also where leadership is tested. Come on, let's go ahead and get this conversation started. Nope. We live it, we lead it, and we ignite it in others. I'm your host, Adrian Benson, and today we're diving into a powerful concept that separates vision from results. That's right. We're talking about bridging the think-make gap to deliver breakthroughs. I'm super excited because today I have JL Heather with me. He's a leader who understands that innovation is not just about ideas, it's about turning these ideas into meaningful, measurable outcomes. Let me tell you just a little bit about JL. JL Heather is the co-founder and managing partner of Centered and co-author of two books on organizational transformation, The Agile Code and Breakthrough Innovation. Over 20, over the past 20 years, JL has been in the trenches helping organizations transform how they lead, collaborate, and innovate. I am so excited that today we have the opportunity to welcome JL. Welcome to Transformation Station Leadership Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Thank you very much. I'm excited to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

Oh, we're super excited to have you today. And you know, one of the reasons we're excited to have you is because this is a conversation that leaders really need to stop and have one with themselves and also in community with their teams. We're talking about the think-make gap. And as I was prepping for this episode, I was thinking to myself, you know, JL, many of us as leaders, we over time learn how to excel at strategy. We learn how to excel at casting a vision, but many of us struggle to translate the vision, to translate the ideas into something that's consistent and tangible. So I want to start off by asking you this question from your experience. What do you mean by the think-make gap? And also tell us why do so many leaders and organizations struggle to turn good ideas into real breakthroughs?

SPEAKER_01 2:54

Yeah, I mean, you'll hear a lot of things. I think there's a lot of attention on this topic around what is stopping an idea from going and being executed and breathing life into that idea. For most organizations, they're gonna look at it and they're gonna see all these things from a structural perspective, all these things from an operational perspective that get in the way. But I think those are more symptoms than root causes. I think a big part of what you're seeing more often than not is most organizations have what I would call a can't culture, where whether it's through structural issues, whether it's through language issues, the default answer becomes can't. And it's something that evolves from a very prudent state of mind. Like we have to protect ourselves, we have to be careful, we we have to avoid risk. But the what it boils down to is we can't cancel this initiative to fully fund this initiative. Let's just partially fund both. We can't do this because of that. And that mindset of kind of gets in the way of accountability and it gets in the way of a leader's ability to even make decisions. And I think that's what really stops something from going from the idea phase to the execution phase.

SPEAKER_00 4:09

Here at Transformation Station, we love and not love, but we enjoy giving our listeners and viewers an opportunity to pause and reflect. And to all of our audience right now, you know, JL just talked to us about that can't perception, that can't culture. Do you struggle in your community, in with your teams, in your work environment with a can't? So, JL, you know, I want to ask you this. What is the most common misconception that businesses have about innovation? And how do you address it?

SPEAKER_01 4:44

I think everyone thinks innovation is about ideas. That's a really easy thing to think, right? Because the innovation, it feels like the idea is what drives it. But that's not, in my opinion, the thing that matters. The thing that matters is what do they do with the ideas? Most organizations that I've worked with have more ideas than they they can handle. They they have ideas from their employees, they have ideas from their customers, they're all over the place. So the real bottleneck is someone taking ownership of the trade-offs. Right. Uh, if we if we want to do this, we can't do this. I think if you look back at like Kodak and a few others, Kodak's probably the one that comes to mind right now when digital photography was coming out. Kodak had every opportunity to be the leader in that space as someone who led the the whole industry in terms of digital photography, but they didn't. They were unwilling to make the trade-off of short-term profit with their existing business model to become the leader in what became a new industry. And I think so. I think that's probably one of the more dramatic examples. But I think when you go back, if you're a leader and you're going back and looking at how you operate within your organization, maybe one good thing to look how many yeses does someone need to get an idea to move forward? And how many no's does it take to kill that idea? But I'm only going to bet it takes a lot more yeses than no's. Yes. And that's one of those signs of a can't culture.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Take us deeper. This is good. This is good. Tell us a little bit more.

SPEAKER_01 6:20

So I think most organizations, like I mentioned before, especially so AI right now is exploding. Everyone has X number of AI initiatives, usually in the double digits. And boards are looking for those types of initiatives, and they want organizations to be leveraging these things for efficiency, all the productivity, all that sort of stuff. So most organizations will fund a dozen AI initiatives a quarter of the way, half of the way of what they would need to truly be successful and transformative. For any one of those to get canceled, they have to really acknowledge that there was a trade-off. Someone has to own that decision, and that's hard. That's coming from the top down. From the bottom up, when someone has a really great idea and they want to gain funding that they would have to take from somewhere else, they typically have to go through an approval process that's going to require a multi-tiered approach that gets yeses, multiple yeses at every tier. Right. One no any anywhere along that process, and that initiative is dead.

unknown 7:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 7:28

So you're top down, a whole bunch of initiatives are being spun up right now, primarily due to AI, because that's what a board the board expects. From bottom up, where some of your best ideas come from, because those are the people who are talking to your customers every day. Those ideas are being smothered because no one's willing to accept the trade-off of saying no to something else to say yes to that. So that whole idea that no one's taking accountability, no one's taking ownership, that's a really big sign of that can't culture because no everyone is saying we can't do this because we already have that. We can't cancel this because we need to do that. So that view is coming in pretty heavily. And it's it's again, it's not a uh malicious intent kind of thing. It's a very prudent structural organizational behavior. We're we're taught from a very young age, even in school, that avoid risk, right? Even avoid accountability. It's not uncommon for you to hear a kid go, oh, I'm I can't do math. I'm just not good at math. Right? Like, oh, sure you can. Yes, you can. But the idea is you're not actually counteracting the can't there. No, you're learning. You're just reinforcing it, you're making it worse a lot of times. But I think a lot of organizations need to do as part of this is get really specific about the trade-offs they're making and understand when we say can't, is that an actual constraint? Or is it just a trade-off we haven't made yet, a decision we haven't made? And you'll see that at the organizational level, the project level, individual one-on-one action. So, how many leaders for all your listeners have had a one-on-one with one of their people where you know there's something you really need to talk about, but for some reason it just never seems to come up? Like that is can't culture and action on a small scale. You're avoiding that conversation because you're trying to protect that relationship, you're trying to avoid risk, you're you're not making the trade-off as a leader, you probably should be making.

SPEAKER_00 9:23

This is good stuff right here. Um, audience JL is giving us a masterclass. I need you to go ahead and make sure that you are taking notes right now, seriously, so that we can continue to grow. So, JL, why do you emphasize influence over authority in leadership? And how does this change outcomes?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

Yeah, I mean, when you think about authority, there's so one, there's a few types of authority to think about, and we're talking about a very specific one. We're talking primarily about positional authority, okay, not necessarily like expert authority and things like that. Like when you're an expert and you have authority there, people are listening to you because you know what you're talking about in that space. Right. So the the primary authority that we're we're taking issue with when we talk about authority over uh influence is positional, where you have someone who is CEO, director, manager, whatever it is. And the other part that we need to specify here is that we're talking about instances where we need problem solvers, we need people to do thought work, not necessarily the physical work. Because one thing happens when you take positional authority, you take accountability, you take ownership, and you're telling that person what to do. And when you think about most of the problems we're trying to solve in today's professional world, that's not what we want. We want people to go out and solve problems for us. We want people to take ownership and move the ball forward on their own. But the moment we take that positional authority, we're taking that autonomy away. Who's been through the standard psychology classes in college, maybe even high school, probably has heard of Stanley Milgram's experiment where he had people, uh, he had two people go in, right? And they one was gonna be the learner, one was gonna be the teacher. They drew straws, and whoever drew the long straw was the teacher. And the the learner would go in the other room, they'd get hooked up to stuff or whatever, they couldn't see each other, they just talked through an intercom. And the teacher had this device in front of them that had like different voltages across the front of it. And the goal was every time that learner got a question wrong, they would shock them.

SPEAKER_00 11:30

Mercy.

SPEAKER_01 11:31

And every time it would go up, and like at first it was just like, oh, that didn't feel good. Then later there was like a little squeak of pain. Later, they actually like yelled or whatever. Before long, they were like, Please stop, you know. And there was about two-thirds of the way up, there was this breaking point where people would look at the guy running the experiment, and he would look at them and say, Please continue. So he was the authority figure, he had the positional authority, and people would. Now, I've talked about this story in conferences with hundreds of people at this point, and I all have them all raise their hand and say, Who would stop before here, here, and here? Right. And almost all of them say, We're gonna stop like in the first third. In the study, I'm remembering everyone went two-thirds of the way, so people were yelling in pain, screaming in pain, and a significant portion, I can't remember the exact percentage right now, went all the way to the like, I think on the device it was actually an XXX, right? And it was because of that authority figure, they were no longer making decisions for themselves because they were no longer accountable for those actions. That person was, they had turned off that autonomous person in their head and started taking direction from this person. So when you invoke positional authority, that's what you're doing. You're having someone flip the switch in their head and going, you know what, I'm no longer gonna think for myself, which is the opposite of what you want. I'm just gonna do what they tell me to do. And they did this experiment to talk about basically Nazi Germany, why were people doing the things they were doing and like the internment camps, all that sort of stuff. And a lot of it came down to positional authority. So if you are in a leadership position and you want people to just do what you say, lean on that positional authority. If you want people to solve problems for you and create value for you without your direction, so maybe you can take a vacation, that's really where you need to start tapping into that influence.

SPEAKER_00 13:26

I love this right here. You know, when you were talking, I was um I was thinking about this best practice, and uh the best practice says for leaders, focus on building trust through consistent communication, listening, and aligning teams around purpose rather than position. And, you know, as you were talking, you know, I know that you were your messaging was getting out to all of us as leaders is to remind us, you know, when we are leading and we are building our teams and we're creating this type of culture that you're describing with influence, then we don't have to tell people that we're the leader. You know, I had a mentor one time who said one of the ways you know that you're really leading is you don't have to be there for your team to function and to function well, right? Because you've mentored them, you've coached them, you've trained them. Now step away and let them do without having to be that authority figure. You were gonna say something?

SPEAKER_01 14:25

Well, I I just agree. I I always like to refer to a quote by Simon Sinek, which I am now gonna butcher, I'm sure, uh, where he says something along the lines of it's not a leader's job to have all the ideas. The leader's job is to create the environment in which great ideas can happen. And I think that's kind of what you're saying is if you're a truly good, influential leader, you're creating the environment where the great ideas can be born and grown and thrive and come to fruition. Uh, so many leaders have this big fear that if they aren't the ones doing it, yes, then it's gonna go wrong or they won't get the credit for or any number of things, and it's really hard to let go of. And those are the leaders that burn out because they never take a vacation.

SPEAKER_00 15:11

Yes, yeah. You know, I've seen over the years, like many times, JL, it's it's when something goes wrong that the team actually learns and figures out how to not let that happen again. But if you're always jumping in and you're rescuing as a leader or you're you know telling people what to do, the team never gets the chance. You know, you mentioned that earlier about ownership, they never get ownership for the project, for the company, they never really get to espouse the values themselves, they're just routinely, you know, going through. So that brings me to this question when organizations feel stuck, what's usually holding them back from innovation? And how how can we break free?

SPEAKER_01 15:52

I I think there's a lot of things that get in the way. When I think about it from a camp culture perspective, I think there's five things that you really have to think about. Um is the political, who loses power, whose toes are gonna get stepped on. So if you're you're a leader in an organization, if you find yourself thinking a lot about the political side, uh that gets in the way a ton. There's financial, you know, are we gonna hit our numbers this quarter? Can we afford to do that? Can we leverage more or not? There's strategic. What is the priority? Like, how are we prioritizing? How do we make decisions on where the money goes and where it doesn't? So that's the difference between funding everything at a quarter or funding three, four things fully. And then there is capability. So have we actually invested in making sure the skill sets we need to do this thing actually exist? And then there's structural. How are we incentivizing people within the organization? Most organizations incentivize safety, and I don't mean that from the psychological safety perspective, which is the way safety is referenced a lot right now. I mean that from a am I am I safe to keep my job if I do this? Am I going to get in trouble if I do this? I think it was if anyone's seen uh oh shoot, what's the movie? It came out a long time ago, Office Space, I think it was. The guy, the main character talks about there is like, I'm incentivized to do just enough not to get fired. Right? A lot of times that's what you see is people are in this situation where what's incentivized in the structural capability and all of it is to do just enough not to lose your job, not actually being challenged to rise to your potential.

SPEAKER_00 17:45

Here's a principle that I was thinking of, which says influence builds commitment where authority only creates compliance. That goes in alignment with exactly what you just said. Leaders listening and watching right now, JL and I are inviting you. Hey, stop, take some notes right here. And as a matter of fact, go ahead and tell us in the comment section what's resonating with you. What have you seen on your journey through leadership? What have you experienced yourself? We want to know, and know that we will definitely highlight you as we move forward. So, JL, I want to ask you this question. In your experience, okay, what's the difference between innovation that's genuinely transformative and innovation that's simply incremental?

SPEAKER_01 18:30

So I think from a product perspective, and maybe this is a little bit of a hot take, from a product perspective, I don't think there's a big difference between iterative or incremental rather innovation and transformative innovation. I think transformation that is truly or innovation that's truly transformative, that happens on the organizational side. So to start on the product side first, like when you think about the the iPhone, the iPhone is just an uh incremental improvement from the iPod. Like you can show a direct line from the iPod to the iPhone. And Steve Jobs, I believe, even talked about how there was no new technology in the iPhone. It was just the combination of existing technology in a really user-friendly way that made it successful. And most of the time in the product space, that's what it is, right? It is iterative incremental improvement on products that eventually lead to something people go, oh wow, that's kind of new. So I don't see a huge difference in the product space. And maybe that maybe there are going to be people that disagree with me. Matter of fact, I hope there are because I'd love to talk about it more. But from a cultural perspective, from an organizational perspective, the problem is if you are incrementally and iteratively improving from a bad place, there is no incremental improvement that leads you to the right place for the most part, at least not in the time that you need to actually survive the pace of change in today's world. So I think in the organizational space, that's where innovation has to be transformative, where it has to be big and where you have to look at the way your organization is working now, create the vision of where you need to be. And it's different for every organization, right? There is there are no silver bullets. That's one of the things I hate most when I'm working in the lean and agile space. So much of it is marketed as a silver bullet, just do this and it'll work. That doesn't exist. So that's where you need your most innovation is how do you make the jump from here as an organization to here? And it's not simple. What you see most organizations do is kind of what I fall into what I call the cargo cult trap. So if you've never heard of a cargo cult, this is what it is. In World War II in the Pacific, they there was the island hopping campaign where Air Force and Navy would go to an island in the Pacific to set up an airstrip for logistical support, all that sort of stuff. On that island were indigenous people that had been kind of cut off from the rest of the world. So all they saw was someone walk onto this island, create a flat strip of land, and wave these two glowing sticks around, and then a plane landed with food on it, with devices they've never seen before, like just magic. End of World War II, Air Force Navy is gone. You would still see sometimes a person walk out onto that airstrip with two sticks painted orange at the end and wave them around trying to summon a plane. Most organizations are that person. They're standing on the airstrip waving two painted sticks around, hoping an airplane will land, not understanding that there was a whole industry and everything behind it that led it there. If they look at what these other organizations did and don't understand their journey and the principles they base that system on, and they chose tools to support, so principles tools, they don't see any of that. They just see the tools and they try and use the tools and they hope they get the same results. And I had a mentor very early on in my career that liked to say hope is not a plan. And I agree. If you cool out and just hope it's gonna work, it's probably not. So that's where I like to say you gotta start from the very beginning, you have to envision the end, and you have to have really strong, innovative, empowered people that help you make the jump.

SPEAKER_00 22:14

Mercy. I keep hearing a word called clarity as you're talking, right? We know that you know clarity helps us as leaders to create momentum, right? Confusion brings uh stagnation. I love the illustration that you gave there. That was really powerful. So I know that there are leaders that are listening and watching uh this conversation, and they're like, got it, JL. You know what? Think got like this is really good, but hmm, there's that but so for the leader that's listening today, JL, um, that has a powerful idea, but they themselves feel stuck in analysis or hesitation, what is one step that we as leaders can take this week to begin turning ideas into action?

SPEAKER_01 23:03

So if you really are stuck, you you have the ideas, you know they're powerful, and you can't turn them into action, I would start by interrogating your own language. So we talked about can't culture. You know, start looking at how you're thinking, how you're talking, how the conversation goes in your meetings, and start looking at where is can't showing up. And then ask yourself, is that really a can't? Or is it a haven't or a won't? Because very often when we say can't, it's not, it's a decision we've implicitly made without ever considering fully. And if you can look at those and say, no, no, no, that's a haven't or a won't, you now have the opportunity to change the dialogue a little bit. And you can start asking, you know, hey, if that constraint that we're talking about didn't exist, would we be able to move? That helps you know is it load-bearing? You could say, who owns the decision not to do this? That creates accountability. You can have all these diagnostic questions that you can start asking, but you have to catch that can't first and you have to act on it. So even if you can't act on it, like just start catching them, start documenting them a little bit and start thinking through the fact like how could I ask a better question? And I think more often than not, those better questions are what get you unstuck. That's what leads you to the structural changes, that's what leads you to the political changes that are needed to change to move because you can't force those things. Even if you're the CEO, you can't force those things. You have boards, you have other C level executives that you're dealing with, you have to start pulling out the influence card to get those changes to happen. And that requires those powerful questions. And more often than not, if you target those at the can't, that's gonna shake things loose and allow things to move.

SPEAKER_00 24:52

My goodness gracious, this has been such a powerful conversation here. And I know that our leaders want to engage, they want to hear more, tap into the resources. What's a good way for our audience to be able to engage with you, tap into your resources?

SPEAKER_01 25:10

So there's always the website. So centered.work uh.com, as you can imagine, is taken on stuff like that. But centered.work, we like it because we like to talk about human-centered work. We like to talk about design first, design thinking work. So centered.work is where we sit. Outside of that, I love having conversations on LinkedIn. We put a lot of our content out on LinkedIn and we'd love to see more engagement there as well. So either one of those places are a great way to get a hold of us. Anyone who wants to ping me directly on LinkedIn, I'd love to hear from you. We do a lot of free consultations for like the first half hour, hour kind of thing, just to get to know people. And if you're interested, we'd love to talk.

SPEAKER_00 25:47

That is fantastic. All right, well, there you have it, Transformation Station. We're gonna invite you. You see the link here on the screen is also in the description box. I want to invite you to go ahead and tap on that link, reach out to JL, find the resources, go ahead and get that call so that you can grow, right? Also, I'm going to invite you to contact JL and let him know that you've seen, you've heard this episode. Share with him what has resonated with you and keep on because we know the community that learns together grows together. JL, it's been a pleasure to have you here with us on Transformation Station today. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_01 26:25

Oh, thank you. It was my pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 26:28

Absolutely. Well, listen, Transformation Station, this conversation today reminded us that ideas only create impact when they're acted upon. JL challenged us today. He challenged us to close the gap between intention and execution so that innovation becomes a reality, not just a discussion. And if this episode inspired you, I'm going to invite you right now to share it with a leader, a team, an organization that you know is ready to move from thinking to making. So until next time, keep taking action, keep building momentum, and keep on continuing your transformational leadership journey.