Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Are people in your organization solving the right problems – or do they too often jump mindlessly into solution mode? Here’s how to fix it.

Based on “What’s Your Problem?” (HBR Press 2020), the keynote teaches participants a powerful new tool, reframing the problem, which they can use in almost all aspects of their work.

The importance of reframing becomes clear when you look at how people tend to approach problem-solving. By nature, people are often action-oriented and tend to rely on trial-and-error.

That is often a good approach. But the tendency to ‘jump into action’ also creates a danger that people keep trying new solutions without understanding whether they understand the problem correctly – or if they are even targeting the right problem in the first place. The trial-and- error approach benefits tremendously from being combined with reframing; a little bit of analysis can save people a great deal of wasted
effort.

The keynote can be extended to include a teamwork element where people apply reframing on the challenges they are currently facing in their business – a very powerful way to make sure your event has real impact.

How do you make innovation happen as part of a day job in an organization? Hands-on advice the audience can implement right away.

The keynote shares the core framework of ‘Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life’.

It is aimed at an audience of ‘regular’ business people – that is, people who are not in a specialized R&D department, but who have to drive innovation as one of several activities, using the resources they already have, and facing the challenge that innovation is often a second priority compared to the urgency of the day-to-day business.

Drawing on real-world cases from Thomas’s research, the keynote is very practical in nature and will give the audience a number of tangible take-aways that they can implement immediately after the talk.

Key take-aways include:
• Focus on ideas that matter to the business
• Look beyond technology when searching for growth opportunities
• Use quick, super-low-cost experiments before you ‘pilot’ anything
• Effectively build support for your ideas within the organization
• And more