To catalyze innovation, companies have invested billions in internal venture capital, incubators, accelerators, and field trips to Silicon Valley. Yet according to a McKinsey survey, 94% of executives are dissatisfied with their firms’ innovation performance. Across industries, one survey after another has found the same thing: Businesses just aren’t getting the impact they want, despite all their spending. Why? We believe that it’s because they’ve failed to address a huge underlying obstacle: the day-to-day routines and rituals that stifle innovation.

Fortunately, it’s possible to “hack” this problem. Drawing on the behavioral-change literature and on our experiences working with dozens of global companies, including DBS, Southeast Asia’s biggest bank, we’ve devised a practical way to break bad habits that squelch innovation and to develop new ones that inspire it.

Like most hacks, our approach isn’t expensive, though it does take time and energy. It involves setting up interventions we call BEANs, shorthand for behavior enablers, artifacts, and nudges. Behavior enablers are tools or processes that make it easier for people to do something different. Artifacts—things you can see and touch—support the new behavior. And nudges, a tactic drawn from behavioral science, promote change through indirect suggestion and reinforcement. Though the acronym may sound a bit glib, we’ve found that it’s simple and memorable in a way that’s useful for organizations trying to develop better habits.

In this article we’ll describe a variety of BEANs that firms have used to unleash innovation, the characteristics that make them effective, and how your organization can develop and implement its own BEANs. But first we’ll briefly examine the behaviors that drive innovation and the barriers that thwart it.

Innovation Behaviors and Blockers

To us, innovation doesn’t mean mere inventiveness. In our work we define it as “something different that creates value.” It isn’t just the purview of engineers and scientists, nor is it limited to new-product development. Processes can be innovated. Marketing approaches can too. Something different can be a big breakthrough, but it can also be an everyday improvement that makes the complicated a bit simpler or the expensive more affordable.

In our work and research, we’ve found that the most innovative organizations exhibit five key behaviors: They always assume there’s a better way to do things. They focus on deeply understanding customers’ stated and unstated needs and desires. They collaborate across and beyond the organization, actively cross-pollinating. They recognize that success requires experimentation, rapid iteration, and frequent failure. Last, they empower people to take considered risks, voice dissenting opinions, and seek needed resources. John Chervinsky

None of those behaviors is surprising. It’s just puzzling that they aren’t more common. After all, as children, most of us were creative, curious, collaborative, and risk taking. But once we went to school and, later, to work, those behaviors got quashed. Students and employees are taught there’s a right way to do things. That raising questions and expressing dissent, even benignly, is risky. As people learn those rules, the innovation muscles that were toned in their youth atrophy. That may explain why kindergarten graduates generally outperform new MBAs on “the marshmallow challenge,” a timed competition to use spaghetti, tape, and string to build the tallest structure that will support a marshmallow on top.

Ask executives what stands in the way of innovation, and they’ll point to real barriers, such as a lack of time (few executives or organizations have slack capacity to spend on new thinking); the perception that doing things differently produces no benefits, just costs (and possibly punishment); a lack of innovation skills; and a lack of infrastructure for bringing ideas to fruition. But one of the biggest impediments is organizational inertia. As an executive once said to us, businesses are “organized to deliver predictable, reliable results—and that’s exactly the problem.” A major paradox managers face is that the systems that enable success with today’s model reinforce behaviors that are inconsistent with discovering tomorrow’s model.

If you don’t address inertia, efforts to eliminate other blockers won’t work. Give people more time in an environment stifled by inertia, and they’ll simply have more time to do things the old way; give them new skills, and those will go to waste if they don’t fit with existing routines. Fortunately, you can combat both inertia and other blockers with BEANs. Now let’s look at an initiative that did just that.

Breaking Down Innovation Barriers at DBS

When Piyush Gupta took over as CEO of DBS, in 2009, he began a multipronged effort to transform it from a stodgy, regulated bank into an agile technology company—or, as he put it, “a 27,000-person start-up.” Once mocked locally as “Damn Bloody Slow” (for its notoriously long lines), DBS is now considered a global digital leader in financial services, and in 2019 it became the first bank to simultaneously hold the titles “Bank of the Year” (The Banker), “Best Bank in the World” (Global Finance), and “World’s Best Bank” (Euromoney).

But back in 2016, DBS was still on its journey. When its top leaders gathered in Singapore to talk about how the bank was progressing, all agreed that though it had made headway, much work remained. In their discussion they identified dysfunctional meetings as a major blocker that entrenched organizational inertia and hindered innovation. Most meetings at DBS could charitably be described as inefficient. They would often start and run late, eating up time that leaders could otherwise have spent on innovation. Sometimes decisions were made, and sometimes they were not. People would dutifully arrive at meetings without a clear sense of why they were there. Some participants were active, but many sat in defensive silence. It’s this last point that’s most salient. Meetings, leadership concluded, were suppressing diverse voices and reinforcing the status quo.

To change that, DBS introduced a BEAN it called MOJO. It was informed by research at Google that showed that equal share of voice and psychological safety were critical to high-performing, highly innovative project teams. MOJO promotes efficient, effective, open, and collaborative meetings. The MO is the meeting owner, who’s responsible for ensuring that the meeting has a clear agenda, that it starts and ends on time, and that all attendees are given an equal say. The JO—or joyful observer—is assigned to help the meeting run crisply and to encourage broad participation. The JO, for example, has the authority to call a “phone jenga” that requires all attendees to put their phones in a pile on the table. Perhaps most important, at the meeting’s end, the JO holds the MO accountable, providing frank feedback about how things went and how the MO can improve. Even when the JO is junior, he or she is explicitly authorized to be direct with the MO. The presence of an observer and the knowledge that feedback is coming nudge the MO to be mindful of meeting behavior.

This approach, supported by physical reminders in meeting rooms (small cards, wall art, and fun paper cubes that can be tossed around) and a range of measurement and tracking tools, has had a powerful impact. Meetings at DBS no longer run late, saving an estimated 500,000 employee hours to date. Meeting effectiveness, as gauged by ongoing employee surveys, has doubled, and the percentage of employees who say they have an equal share of voice in meetings has jumped from 40% to 90%. Improved efficiency and effectiveness doesn’t mean meetings have become dull, however. Living up to their moniker (which reinforces a broader effort at DBS to “make banking joyful”), JOs have even been known to give their feedback in verse. And legends have spread. At one meeting the observer bravely told a senior executive who had lost his cool that the blowup had shut down all discussion. The executive welcomed the feedback, promising to do better next time. It’s a story that still circulates, reinforcing the behavioral change DBS hoped to drive with MOJO.