Serious Business, Silly Games: Why Play is the Secret Weapon of Leaders

“A lot of the ideas are existing and being able to get permission and the space to be able to work on ideas that maybe might have been someone else’s baby at some point, but being able to sort of take them on and nurture them”

“Sometimes I like to refer to our team as the Lazarus team because they’re sort of raising projects from the dead, but sometimes ideas are just not quite their time yet…being able to sort of resurrect that project, think about it slightly differently, and being able to communicate that internally is quite challenging when there’s that rich history behind some of the sort of initiatives that are important but perhaps haven’t been executed right in the past.”
Shane Burford

Shane Burford, an intrapreneurial leader who’s made some serious moves in his career out of establishing new growth businesses within existing organisations. Shane shares his journey of driving innovation within some of Australia’s largest companies. Shane reveals how he’s transformed old, forgotten ideas into successful ventures by using a build-measure-learn approach, focusing on understanding customer needs, and securing executive support. He discusses the challenges of balancing new initiatives with ongoing business demands and emphasises the importance of communication, collaboration, and design thinking in making innovation happen. Plus, Shane shares his insights on how AI will shape the future of creating personalised products.

Don’t miss this episode where Shane Burford lays out the blueprint for embedding innovation practices that deliver long-term value. Tune in now to learn how you can bring these strategies into your own organisation and elevate your game to the next level!

In this episode you’ll hear about

• What is Shane Burford’s background and expertise in corporate innovation and entrepreneurship?
• What are some of the hardest challenges faced in establishing new businesses within large organisations?
• What strategies are effective in resurrecting and repurposing old ideas within a company?
• How does the “build-measure-learn” approach influence innovation in a corporate setting?
• What are the challenges in working with core teams on innovation projects in established organisations?
• What role does data play in justifying the investment of time and resources in a new innovation initiative?
• How do you measure the success of a new product or service, especially when aiming for mass-market adoption?
• What happens when an innovation idea doesn’t work out as expected, and what lessons can be learned from such failures?
• What is the attitude towards failure in innovation teams, and how can it be used as a learning experience?
• How to balance strategic thinking versus action-oriented approaches in your innovation processes?
• How does top-down support from leadership impact the ability to drive innovation?
• How to manage the risk of political sensitivities when developing new ideas?
• How to manage the process of killing ideas when they don’t meet customer needs or organisational goals?

Key links

Shane Burford LinkedIn
CAR Group
National Australia Bank
Telstra
Toyota

About our guest

Shane is an entrepreneurial leader focussed on establishing new growth businesses within existing organisations. He is focussed on embedding innovation practices in organisations so that they can discover and incubate higher risk and longer term opportunities.

Shane has worked in innovation at NAB, Telstra, Toyota and is currently building new businesses within CAR Group where he is Head of Design. With a background in product and design Shane is passionate about establishing new businesses that better solve customer needs whilst also delivering long term commercial and strategic value.

About our host

Our host, Chris Hudson, is a Teacher, Experience Designer and Founder of business transformation coaching and consultancy Company Road.

Company Road was founded by Chris Hudson, who saw over-niching and specialisation within corporates as a significant barrier to change.

Chris considers himself incredibly fortunate to have worked with some of the world’s most ambitious and successful companies, including Google, Mercedes-Benz, Accenture (Fjord) and Dulux, to name a small few. He continues to teach with University of Melbourne in Innovation, and Academy Xi in CX, Product Management, Design Thinking and Service Design and mentors many business leaders internationally.

Transcript

Chris Hudson: 0:07
Hey there and welcome back to the company road podcast where we explore what it takes to change a company and how intrapreneurs like you, the listeners can create positive change in the work that you’re doing. I’m Chris Hudson, your host, and today we’re going to be diving deeper into the world of intrapreneurship and corporate innovation. So I’m really excited to introduce on. Our next guest, Shane Burford, an intrapreneurial leader who has made some serious moves in his career out of establishing new growth businesses within existing organisations. And Shane’s expertise lies in embedding innovation practices that enable companies to discover and incubate higher risk, longer term opportunities in one way or another. And Shane’s got an impressive track record, spearheaded innovation initiatives at some of Australia’s largest companies, including NAB, so NAB, Telstra, and Toyota. And currently he’s putting his skills to work as the head of design at Car Group, where he’s building new businesses and ventures to take to market from the ground up. And Shane’s got a background in product and design and has fuelled his passion for establishing new ventures that not only better solve customer needs, but also deliver longer term commercial and strategic value to those businesses as well. And he’s got a unique perspective on driving change within established organisations, uh, that makes him the perfect guest for this show. So today we’re going to jump into exploring some of the challenges and opportunities of fostering innovation within corporate structures, and we’ll learn from Shane’s wealth of experience in turning entrepreneurial ideas into successful business ventures. So Shane, I’ve got to say your work sounds incredibly exciting. Welcome to the company road podcast.

Shane Burford: 1:32
Thank you, great to be here. Great.

Chris Hudson: 1:33
Shane, I know when we last spoke, you were about to board a plane to Europe for a massive trip and welcome back from that. Hope you had an amazing time.

Shane Burford: 1:40
Yeah, it was a great trip. Nice, uh, nice weather to escape the Melbourne winter.

Chris Hudson: 1:45
Can you, can you tell me again how many countries you were doing and how many, in how many days?

Shane Burford: 1:50
Six weeks, 12 countries. It was a lot. It was a, it was a big trip. Got, got to see a lot of great sites, so wouldn’t change it.

Chris Hudson: 1:57
I’ve got to say, I really do admire how Aussies like go over and do Europe, you know, in that kind of way, it’s as many countries, as few days as possible, and then you just get round, it’s, it’s amazing. It sounds like an epic trip. Shane, let’s, let’s jump into some of your work. So you worked on innovation in various large organisations. What are some of the hardest things, the biggest challenges that you’ve faced in trying to establish some of these new businesses? You know, what are some of the common themes that you see coming up when it comes to innovation?

Shane Burford: 2:21
Yeah, I think innovation in a established organisation is always really hard because you’ve got sort of incumbent products and incumbent teams, and often there’s not new ideas, often, certainly a car group, a lot of the ideas that we’re working on and incubating in the innovation team here, ideas that have been circulating around the organisation for a while. But the challenge is that A lot of the sort of core team members, the people who don’t work in the innovation team, haven’t really had the space or the bandwidth to be able to explore those newer opportunity areas. And so that sort of meant that they’ve been shelved, which is a little bit sad. For us, it’s about sort of almost resurrecting some of those projects and trying to approach them in a different way. That car group, we’re really interested in our innovation space in taking a Build, measure, learn approach, sort of like the lean startup approach where we try and launch something as quickly as possible, you know, potentially to one customer which enables us to learn as fast as possible, which is very different to the rest of the company because the rest of the company has existing sort of products that they’re working on. So being able to, you know, launch in a day is really not something that’s possible for them. And so, so I guess some of the challenges are around just sort of that internal sort of. Working with the core teams, a lot of the ideas are existing and being able to get permission and the space to be able to work on ideas that maybe might have been someone else’s baby at some point, but being able to sort of take them on and nurture them. Yeah,

Chris Hudson: 3:50
yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s interesting because what you point out, I think it seems obvious, but there’s a lot of insight and a lot of rich data around in most organisations. And the fact that some of the ideas are being dusted off and almost repurposed or revisited. You know, it’s good to know that that data is there for people and that inspiration can be there for people to draw upon, but it’s unexpected because often innovation is associated with the thing that has to be new and shiny. And, you know, people are expecting it to be this kind of big tada. It’s good to know that people can just work with what they’ve got in a sense.

Shane Burford: 4:21
Yeah, but sometimes ideas are just not quite their time yet. So, an example at Car Group is we, like, three, five years ago or so, we did a payments product where we enabled buyers and sellers to pay one another through our platform. Amazing because it enabled, you know, each party to be verified so they trust each other more and, you know, you don’t have to pay large sums of money in increments to a seller that you don’t really know. But it was before it’s time because the Just the technology wasn’t there. And so payments would take two days, they’d get lost in transit. And so we’re sort of resurrecting that project, our innovation team at the moment with a slightly different spin, because we’ve got new technology there. You know, we’ve got the new payments platform in Australia that enables us to do transactions instantly. Being able to sort of resurrect that project, think about it slightly differently and being able to communicate that internally is quite challenging when there’s like, yeah, that rich history behind sort of initiatives that Perhaps haven’t been executed right in the past.

Chris Hudson: 5:18
Yeah. Interesting one. I mean, that one is definitely, you know, if you think about the days where people had to turn up to buy a new car or a used car, you know, with envelope of cash, basically, that would have been a, that would have been a massive, massive improvement to that whole process.

Shane Burford: 5:35
That’s ridiculously, like people still do that, or they do something worse. They reach their transaction limits. So they pay 10, 000 today, 10, 000 the next day to like a complete stranger.

Chris Hudson: 5:45
What could possibly go wrong, eh? I mean, they always talk about the car being the second most important or the second most major purchase that you make in your life after your home and just. Weird to think that people are going around with these envelopes of cash, but in that case, I mean, for that story, how did you, obviously you knew that that was a problem to be solved, but how did you go about bringing that problem to the focus of the business and getting it through as an initiative that you felt the team would need to solve for and fix in some way?

Shane Burford: 6:14
Yeah, well, fortunately for us, it was an existing known pain point that the business had. Decided was important to solve. Just not sure how, when I say the business, I mean, our leadership team specifically, they saw that as sort of like a strategic unlock to being able to be more present in the customer journey. So that was good, but I guess with the broader team, we needed to sort of Work with them from the start to firstly learn from their experience so that we didn’t repeat mistakes at the past. Money laundering was one risk that certainly existed back in the previous incarnation, but also delays in the technology and the technology of speaking, having our sort of sub call centre sort of being inundated with calls was another. And so really trying to learn from that wisdom, I think that gave us credibility to be able to solve the problem. Working with the same. Just to design the solution to co design so that it’s not us telling them what the solution is, but rather it’s us coming to a combined for a consensus together and then using data, you know, trying to launch as quickly as possible to get data to support for our hypotheses. With payments, we, we launched a landing page. As the first thing, there’s a fake door test to measure how many people were actually interested in a solution like this and, and measure willingness to pay as well. It’s a free solution. We want to understand willingness to pay. That data that we were able to get, you know, sheer volume of people going through that landing page and being able to pay. And being interested enough to, to leave their email address was really a compelling story for us to, to get the broader business on board.

Chris Hudson: 7:51
Yeah, that’s really good. I mean, I think, you know, looking at what you’ve got on business casing from the point of view of understanding the problem and, and putting those facts in front of your leadership or your board can get the wheels moving sort of fast forwarding on, on that train of thought. Do you think there’s also the expectation of the leadership level that you’re having to prove what it could achieve if it was solved? So from an ROI point of view, you’re getting a lot of those kinds of conversations coming up as well.

Shane Burford: 8:15
Absolutely. We have an investments team internally, which makes small early stage investments in organisations and, and also. And so we’ve taken a lot of learnings from them in terms of how we communicate internally potential value. And so we use sort of like a startup type approach for communicating value. So starting with the, you know, the total addressable market, and then trying to figure out what we might be able to take and using those experiments as sort of like, Waste collect data on what the potential serviceable obtainable market is for us. So yeah, we, we absolutely had a lot of conversations really early on around the value and it was kind of quite fun actually to be able to sort of ideate all the different value streams that could come from an idea. Not just the direct one, which is, you know, charging a 10 fee, being able to sort of explore, Oh, well, if we had this piece of data, how does that benefit, you know, this business or this external company? Or if, you know, the banks all of a sudden don’t get 400, 000 calls about the transaction limits, how does that impact them? How can we, How can we create value for them? So it was a really exciting process. And I think by the time we got to pitching the solution, we had a really robust, multi faceted approach to creating value that enabled us to, you know, cause there’s inherent risk in launching a new solution. So we don’t want to sort of like commit to a hundred thousand transactions in the first place. You know, a year and then it’s 10 and we don’t actually generate any value. So by having that sort of multifaceted approach to thinking about the benefits and being able to proactively communicate that, I hope that enables us to, to being held in good stead as, you know, We learn through the launch of the product, but yeah, it’s, it’s super fascinating. Like the leadership team are really engaged in exploring those opportunities here at car group and the benefits. So yeah, it’s a really fun conversation to have.

Chris Hudson: 10:13
So I think there’s different steps, isn’t it? Obviously you’ve, you’ve got the kind of initial stage of. You know, forming up a bit of an opportunity. And then, you know, from the point of justifying that it’s going to be worth investing people’s time and effort, then, then you’re pulling together these dimensions of value in terms of what it might offer to the business, as well as to your customers and your packaging that. And then beyond that, I said, beyond launch into the product life cycle a little bit. What are you finding people are looking back at as being like the most important dimensions of value based on what you were just describing? Like, what are they looking to then see in terms of whether it’s a success or not?

Shane Burford: 10:45
Fetch the idea. I mean, at PowerGroove, it’s quite easy, really, to think about value because we’re a marketplace. We have a very well known flywheel. Get all the customers using our service by creating a great experience that then encourages all the dealers and private sellers to use the service to reach those customers and create a great seller experience. So it’s pretty logical. And so what the key success metric for us is around volume. So getting to mass market now, most of our products we think about is as mass market products, and I think there’s a place for us to think about sort of more niche products in the future. But at this point, all we’re really looking at is volume, and that sort of serves the sort of lean startup approach quite well. Because it enables us to collect as much data as possible to make the most informed decisions as we sort of go through the process of.

Chris Hudson: 11:37
Yeah. Okay. So if it breaks the threshold of mass market, what are you defining that as? Is it 1, 000, 10, 000 secret? In a normal year, we would have about 400, 000 private sellers that would list their car on car sales at about half a million over the last year. It’s been a bigger year than normal for us. And so we want to get as many of those customers as possible using the service. Obviously it’s a funnel. So, so, you know, we’ve got to onboard the seller and onboard the buyer. So naturally there’ll be, there’ll be drop off within that, but we think that there’s a huge opportunity that you’re trying to get them all.

Chris Hudson: 12:10
I mean, the other flip side of that question is good ideas. You, you take things to market and for whatever reason, things don’t work out. So have you got a story around that or, you know, something around where, you know, with the best intent, things were. We’re kind of all laid out and then just didn’t work.

Shane Burford: 12:25
Oh, it’s a good one. I mean, I think there’s a lot of stories of failure, but I think the hardest ones are ones that you really love and that maybe you’ve flogged the dead horse a little bit too long. When I was at Telstra, one of the projects that I worked on was trackers. So essentially an AirTag, but this is like 10 years ago, so it was before it’s time. It was a Bluetooth based, but also wifi. And there was a possibility to use a network technology as well, which enabled us to sort of use the cell phone towers to triangulate devices. We did a great job of doing the design. Testing and desirability was there for sure, but when it got to market, it just wasn’t successful. Not many people bought it, you know, I don’t think it would, it was an idea that was perhaps a little bit premature. I think there could have been sort of opportunities to see potential risks to that project much earlier, um, in the piece, uh, specifically, you know, like a blue chip. Tracker relies on a strong listening network. So yeah, Apple can go because I’ve got hundreds of millions or if not a billion devices that can listen. Telstra had the 24 7 app, but at the time privacy settings around the phone were changing. So that sort of capability to be able to listen was changing as well. If we’d looked perhaps a little bit forward at the, at the time when we were investigating that, we might’ve figured out that construct for that product being successful might be undermined in the future. And, You know, may not have gone to market. I don’t know, but it was kind of cool to see your own product in the store. Oh, yeah, those things are obviously getting quite popular now, right? Yeah, people are tracking people, kids. Yeah,

Chris Hudson: 14:03
I was talking to a parent the other day. They made an incision into their kid’s blazer for school and they basically put a tracker in and then sewn it back up. So because it’s a valuable piece of clothing. They didn’t want that getting lost. So they’re putting trackers into that.

Shane Burford: 14:21
So this is hilarious, because when we did the research 10 years ago, we asked people in a survey, what do you lose most frequently? But then also, what are you most afraid to lose? You know, because there’s a different, you know, you might lose your keys, but they’re not particularly valuable. Keys are probably valuable, but you might lose something that is immaterial to you. And like, the responses were children, bikes was another one. Wallet and phone, I think. It’s interesting that people, you know, because phones can track themselves these days, but people still wanted to be able to track them. We used that. We created some CVPs to take to customers. And when we said the sort of tracking your children on, it didn’t land very well because it seemed a bit stalker-ish, maybe had some privacy concerns. So we iterated the product as a result. But yeah, it’s interesting that, that, you know, people are still quite afraid of losing their children while at the same time afraid of the privacy and safety risks that come along with that as well.

Chris Hudson: 15:21
Yeah. I mean, 10 years ago, maybe not every eight year old had a mobile phone, you know?

Shane Burford: 15:26
Ah, yeah, that’s true. It might’ve been different, but yeah, everyone’s got that. Obviously you can do find my phone and other things now, but it’s, yeah, it’s a different world out there. Safety aware. I want to ask you, because you’re talking a little bit about, you know, that experiment and obviously it went to market, it didn’t work. You know, what characterises your attitude towards failure and towards, you know, learning from that in some way, you know? Either at a personal level or within the teams that you work at, usually, how does, how does that get approached?

Shane Burford: 15:50
My approach, I’ve got a little saying for this. Anything worth doing is worth doing wrong because you’re never right at the start. So often we throw a throw around the word failure and it’s sort of a bit defeatist, but just learning, committing to doing something that you might not get right. That’s what I’m really. Sort of trying to encourage the teams and it’s hard because when you work in a corporate environment, it’s far easier to take the safe bet, but a safe bets, you know, like a optimising platform performance, you know, that’s something that is a very safe path that our payments team could work on right now and get the platform working twice as fast. is far harder for them to think about, you know, how they connect, you know, the payments product to an ownership journey and unlock, you know, 10 new businesses out of, in the sort of car ownership space. But if they do think about that, the reward would be far higher for the organisation. So anything worth doing.

Chris Hudson: 16:48

And maybe tying to the previous chat we were having around ROI and business case, how do you frame up sort of higher risk version of, of that proposition where you think it’s higher risk, but it could be higher rewards and dressing that in some way when, when you’re putting the data to them?

Shane Burford: 17:02

Absolutely. We were really fortunate at CAR Group. To have a really close relationship with our sort of investment committee, which includes several members of the C suite. And right at the start, we said, if we’re not failing 50 percent of the ideas that we are pitching to you, then we’re not going far enough. So we’ve sort of got this, I guess, failure target, which is kind of nice. You know, when we’re presenting numbers, the numbers look a little too. Certainly saying it’s 4, 127, 000 worth of revenue. You know, obviously it’s not going to. So we try to now give ranges. Which helps us to could be 1 to 10 million or somewhere in the middle. I don’t know. Yeah. Trying to sort of talk about ROI in less certain terms, but sort of communicate the parameters for what good looks like those Northstar metrics and, you know, our approach to pivot, persevere and perish through that. So when we talk about sort of the future phases of the work, we’re talking about This is our next three biggest hypotheses, and depending on how we go with those will depend on the potential business upside that goes along with a product like this. And at some point, you’re going to be asked to make the decision, do we kill this or not, based on, you know, what we learned through the process. So we’re really trying to make like learning the currency.

Chris Hudson: 18:26
So you’re up front with that. You say there are still some unknowns and obviously you’re saying, you know, it’s, it’s in your remit and within your control and power, obviously to shut it down once we present you with the information and make the decision. So it’s like a deferred decision rather than an upfront one in a way, which is cool.

Shane Burford: 18:43
Yeah, yeah. But investment, how to learn, which is, I guess, is the ask at that point.

Chris Hudson: 18:49
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And is it investment is that always clean cut as in there’s an innovation budget and that’s what we’re going to spend or are you often having to go sort of cap in hand to different budget holders and ask for, ask for different pots of money to be released? The latter.

Shane Burford: 19:02
Yeah, everything is um, everything is new money. Oh, sorry, not new money. That’s the wrong term. I don’t know what the right term is.

Chris Hudson: 19:09
Pre allocated money.

Shane Burford: 19:11
Yeah, it’s, it’s, well, it’s not pre allocated.

Chris Hudson: 19:13
As in pre allocated to something else.

Shane Burford: 19:15
Yeah, that’s it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Shane Burford: 19:19
We don’t have a set budget that we can just draw down on, which is really quite nice. And we set that up intentionally because for our existing teams, like the payments team that I was talking about earlier, they have to go every year for budget or every six months to say, this is what we committed to in terms of our learning outcomes. This is what we delivered. And this is what the next phase looks like. Do you still support this initiative?

Chris Hudson: 19:46
Yeah. And from a roadmapping point of view, do you find that shorter term initiatives and quick wins kind of get you confidence and then build out into bigger things? Or have you got longer, you know, a mixture of those and longer term initiatives? I mean, how does it, you know, what sort of formula there do you find is working well?

Shane Burford: 20:02
We spent a lot of energy thinking about what we wanted the long term to be, and we set broad themes for our innovation. I think that was really valuable at the start because it enabled us to sort of have some focus without being too constrained to the things that you would expect, you know, for an auto company. You know, you would expect that we would be looking at streamlining the purchasing experience. You’d probably also expect that we’d be considering EVs. Things like that. So there’s six of them. And so that enabled us to sort of have, I guess, perspective of the ballparks that we wanted to play. But then the initiatives that we look at within those, we often think really big around what we want by ideas from now to look like. But then what’s the first step and how can we learn today? Ideally, Oh, yesterday from, so that we can sort of prove or disprove whether that’s a good path, you know, so with payments, like, like we wanted to have a completely integrated purchasing experience, that’s the goal so that no one has to leave our platform to purchase a car privately, obviously dealers. Do that all themselves now. So that’s, you know, their domain, but for us, you know, our focus is on the private experience and the first step was landing page payment. Is that acceptable or is that is that valuable? So, yeah, we’re trying to be, but then. Sort of taper it back into what small, tiny experiments could be. And we do assumption mapping to figure out what those experiments should be. So where are our biggest sort of unknowns and how can we answer them?

Chris Hudson: 21:39
Yeah, I really like that. I mean, I think it’s, it’s incredibly sensible because this sort of the wave of innovation and, and the way in which it. It’s perceived in terms of its success is incredibly important, obviously. And if you’ve got quick wins on the board, then you can obviously always have some, some sort of story to report. If you’re in the kitchen or if you’re here or there in a meeting, you can just talk about the things you’re up to and you know, what you might say for it.

Shane Burford: 22:01
And also as an incumbent business that has lots of customers, you know, it actually enables us to make money from day one. Sometimes in some of the initiatives that we’re working on, which is kind of nice because we have existing relationships with. the dealers and with the car brands, and obviously with all of our customers that use our platform. So it’s actually, it’s a really nice story when we can get to sort of revenue positive on day one.

Chris Hudson: 22:25
So in terms of enabling that from a cultural point of view or from an operational point of view, you’re going to need to have people ready to go. And from the ops or, you know, delivery or production side, you know, Lined up to be able to turn around some of these experiments. How, how have you gone about setting that sort of thing up to, to make it as responsive as you need it to be? To get the short term results and to, to track those?

Shane Burford: 22:45
Yeah, it’s a really good point. So we spent a lot of energy at the start sort of setting up those tools. So some of them were already existing in the organisation. Like we use Optimisely for AB testing, which enables us to like turn something on, you know, overnight. We invested in our legal team to have. dedicated capacity to enable us to figure out the legal constraint and managing partners, which is definitely the least interesting part. But so, yeah, we invested in capacity there. And then, you know, other tools like, you know, our landing page platform that enables us to just build out ideas same day and be able to launch something. At Car Group, we’re really lucky in that, you know, we have a culture of experimentation. So it’s not just, you know, my team that’s, Focused on rapid experimentation, the sort of core buyer team experimenting with different label copy and different placements of, of content on the page all the time. And so we have some of those tools that we can draw on and, and be able to go pretty fast there, which is kind of nice. And everyone’s pretty open.

Chris Hudson: 23:45
No, that’s good. That’s good. And supportive, which obviously helps. So I, I get the feeling as well that, you know, I have a few coffees with people that work within innovation. Within the futures area. And they always talk to me about these things and they’re kind of thinking, okay, well, innovation from what I gather, innovation sort of falls in and out of favour sometimes, you know, it’s like you’re in political leadership and you know, suddenly innovation’s in for two years and then it’s out because it’s been over invested in and then cuts are made. And then all of a sudden all the good work is then gone. You have to come back to it in another two years when people. Come back in and there’s confidence or cashflow in the business to pay for it. I mean, those are the ups and downs, but is that what you’re seeing as well? Like it’s always that kind of justification and it could be pulled at any point.

Shane Burford: 24:26
It’s really interesting because Car Group a growth stock. So we have, I guess, a market position that’s built around, you know, delivering value for our core business, but also always having an eye to the future. So I think it’s sort of baked into the DNA of the organisation to some extent, but that innovation is something that we’re always striving. But that being said, you know, I was at NAB when the NAB labs got discontinued. I think what I would say in terms of what we’re doing at Car Group is we’re actually not talking. It’s not at all the focus of our communications. Our team is trying to build a vision of the future. The big opportunities on the horizon are, but we’re proving it through doing, and that’s what’s really valued internally. So I’ve been in plenty of meetings where like I present, you know, a research report and all I get is eye rolls like, Oh, we already knew that. Sometimes when you present a strategy, it’s like, yeah, that was great. We’ve been talking about like 20 years, like, and we haven’t been able to execute what’s different today. We’re trying to avoid those conversations. By not talking about innovation and not talking about, you know, what we intend to do, but actually just.

Chris Hudson: 25:30
Yeah, it’s impactful because I was going to ask you about embedding innovation practices in organisations after this last question. And actually that resistance to change you can get around. Obviously, if you’re coming at. At the problem, or, you know, you’re talking in terms of problems and solutions and what you’ve taken to market, what you’ve found out. And it’s a more action orientated conversation than the one that sort of starts with, Oh, this is what we found out. And these were the key insights. And you know, what are we going to do about it? And that’s taken you six months to do it. You know, I mean, the strategy and the research, it feels like a big conversation and people will interpret that in different ways as well. You know, some people are very action orientated. Some people want to go more deep into understanding it more and it just creates this sort of. Environment of not knowing, you know, whether it’s based on a solution and an outcome from a meeting where you’re presenting this information or whether it’s just going to be okay, that we’ve still got some questions we need to answer before we can go into anything else. And that I know it’s, if it’s a conservative, like it just feels like there’s a lot of, yeah, a lot of, a lot of pressure on those teams if they are working in that way to come up with answers and to prove value all the time. And they think they’re doing it, but it may be not framed in exactly the way that you’re describing.

Shane Burford: 26:36
Understanding the language of the organisation. And speaking that language and there are plenty, I mean, there’s plenty of organisations that strategic thinking is the language of the organisation. One of the organisations that I was at previously was really focused on delivering a vision that they would never actually, but they were always focused on talking about what might be as opposed to what, what is today. And that was really valuable for them. So to be able to get an innovation initiative up there, it’s about how it feeds into that sort of, That probably would never be that is important to the organisation, but a car group, super action orientated. And I think the general thing that I try and. Do with our internal conversations. And our team is, you know, just having a really strong empathy for what the needs are of all the different stakeholders. So we do at the start of any initiative we do, as I guess you would in a lot of different initiatives, but we do stakeholder interviews to try and understand, you know, what’s important to them, what do they see as risk. So that enables us to have the vocabulary just to like, speak about how we’re solving their problems, as opposed to presenting our. Spend angled solution that you know, might not actually beat the mark in their eyes.

Chris Hudson: 27:47
Yeah, I mean, taking their voice into those conversations, almost having it in mind. You know, it’s like you’re saying you’re a researcher. Having that in mind when you are, when you’re trying to navigate what’s, what should be going ahead and what shouldn’t is incredibly valuable I find. I think if you are removed from that, you are being told what other people think of the initiatives, but indirectly, I think that’s always harder.

Shane Burford: 28:07
Yeah. Just recently, we’re about to pitch a new solution next week, and in the last meeting we had with our C suite, the question was, how do we get, you know, the value that you’re describing instead of a year from now, even like a month from now? And so having that top of mind as we go through the process so that we can answer that. But they feel heard and also we’re speaking in their language, which I mentioned really action orientated. It’s exactly that.

Chris Hudson: 28:33
Yeah. And I think, you know, just to stretch on from that point in, particularly in the larger organisations, if you’re thinking about, you know, a bank or any, any of the big ones. It’s good to have allies within your team that can be having their ears to the ground and having these conversations and then, and you get this sort of sense of, you know, shared information, shared insight and shared, shared business context, really, that you can’t be, you know, as one person, you can’t be everywhere in every meeting all the time, obviously. So, I mean, do you think it’s possible to navigate that as an individual? Or do you think there are other things that. That you need to consider for making that sort of, it’s just like a ground swell, but shared understanding of what’s going on, a real like direct appreciation for the work that you’re doing. I mean, how, how do you set that up in a way that works? Do you think?

Shane Burford: 29:18
Yeah. So at Car Group, we do every time we talk to our key stakeholders, we do update our little Slack groups and we have a fortnightly meeting where we just talk about what is the general sentiment around some of the ideas and you know, where we’re being pushed to explore different things that, that maybe weren’t on our radar previously. So we’ve got sort of some of those, I guess, communication channels in, in play, but I think, you know, like. A lot of organisations, we struggle with documentation and, you know, creating that sort of that shared understanding of the organisational context, I guess, and strategic context. We also, we just had our results announcement yesterday. So, and payments is part of that, which is one of our project. We got a slide. So we try and encourage the sort of team in the innovation team to be dialling into it. Meetings like that, because that gives them the context of what’s important. That gives the questions that the CEO gets asked from investors so that we can start to be on the front foot and help to answer those questions.

Chris Hudson: 30:19
Yeah, that’s good. Yeah, I think obviously if it’s focused around the numbers and there’s a cadence for that being reported, then people can understand that quite easily and get behind it as well. I think the commercial transparency in a way is. As important as strategic or design transparency and all the things that are going on feels like it’s hard to stay across a lot of time. Yeah. Just in terms of sometimes there’s conversation around this business as usual work, and then there’s that other stuff, the new, the new stuff that is sort of a bit further out, but you know, there’s more important stuff to do in the short term and we’re too busy. Cause we’re doing that. Have you found that to be. You know, a conversation that comes up quite a lot, and you’re always having to kind of battle against what other people believe to be another priority.

Shane Burford: 31:00
Definitely. I mean, I think that that is the toughest problem with an intrapreneurship sort of team in so much as, at least for our team, half dependent on the rest of the business to make your new innovation concept successful. Because, you know, you’re sort of using the existing platform and brand. If nothing else, brand position of, of the incumbent company to just sort of catapult your idea forward, but there’s always new initiatives and sort of team are working on. And that’s certainly no truer than right now in carsales.com.au where we’re sort of going through a process of re platforming and you know, there’s a lot of pressure to get that out to the core teams, which. You know, it makes it more difficult for us to get involved, you get prioritised for delivery. I think what has helped us a lot is bringing the core teams along from the very first conversation of a new idea, right through to the implementation, because that helped us or has helped us to understand the constraints of business and what easy looks like versus hard so that we can start to figure out like, Okay, well, this core concept, you know, let’s say payments, well, cause it’s one that we’ve launched. We want to have the ability for people to be able to find it on site. If we, do it this way, it’ll take, you know, three months of effort. If we do it this way, it’ll take two days worth of effort. And so by having that understanding and being able to prioritise things that are, you know, relatively easy for the core team enables us to get to market without, you know, unduly impacting their roadmap. I think the other thing is, you know, we’ve been really fortunate, uh, in that we have Cultivated the support about C suite and that’s enabled us to, you know, work on initiatives that have that sort of top down support. That won’t always be the case. If that is always the case, then we’re not pushing our initiatives hard enough. Our C suite should hate. A whole bunch of the ideas, especially ones that, you know, disrupt ourselves.

Chris Hudson: 33:00
You’ve got a KPI around that, right? You must hate at least 50%.

Shane Burford: 33:05
Yeah, yeah, exactly. By cultivating that sort of leadership port has helped us to get a little bit of top down support as well for, for bringing ideas to market.

Chris Hudson: 33:16
Yeah. Yeah. No. Interesting. I mean, interesting that you’re kind of putting the scenarios forward for, you know, a two month, two year or two day version. And I think involving people in those conversations is always incredibly valuable from the point that if they can see the merit in doing it quickly and getting it out of the way, then that might help your cause. If you’re trying to free up, you know, some developer time or whatever it is. But yeah, that, that can work really well. Yeah. I wanted to ask about. Maybe design thinking a little bit because, you know, human centred design, design thinking, you know, the voice, the customer, you know, the, the role that that’s playing within some of your conversations and how powerful you find that to be. Obviously there are design thinking practitioners that kind of follow the process of that to the book will only kind of, you know, output something and recommendations, you know, sounds like you’re kind of more in the lean camp, but I just wanted to, yeah, see, see how that was going, you know, Some, some stakeholders really respond well to the fact that we’re designing, you know, in a human sense of design way around the customers. And, and that’s always part of the conversation. Some businesses are obviously more, more interested in, you know, the, the commercial or the, you know, the, the growth or the sales or whatever it is. There’s a different kind of set of hats and it did a set different set of interests, but yeah, how are you, how are you finding the kind of customer led conversation at the minute and what are some of the things that are coming up?

Shane Burford: 34:31
Yeah, really. Great. Really interesting point. I hadn’t really reflected on this, but we use design thinking and we also use lean startup, but at different stages in the, in the process, you know, so like I said before, we got sort of like these, these core themes that we, that we work toward as an organisation and we’re constantly sort of, I guess, scanning the market for new trends and new data that helps us to, um, uncover. New opportunities. Well, once we’ve got an opportunity, we actually go through the design thinking process doing, you know, research on that sort of broad opportunity space that, you know, in payments is, um, is, you know, how might we streamline the, the, the private selling. Um, purchasing experience and we do research to understand what the customer pain points are and the opportunities are. We design solutions. We test them with users, sort of generally a lo fi way. We also use quant to back that up. So a lot of our ideas are so early that if we relied on a small sample of qualitative interviews, we might accidentally do something that is actually not valuable. At the mass market level, I guess. And then we iterate the solutions and that’s what turns into the pitch that we take to our stakeholders. But the outcome of that is then once we’ve got something that we know is desirable, how do we break it up into chunks that we can deliver? And how do we deliver in a way that we’re constantly learning? So I guess, like, lean startup, yeah. It’s sort of like the end of the design picking process for us.

Chris Hudson: 36:05
How do you engage the other teams? I mean, this is also this question around, you know, is it a closed process with only a few people doing it? Do we involve everyone because everyone loves it and they want to get involved? You know, do you have a sort of sizing conversation all the time?

Shane Burford: 36:19
Oh, extremely painful. And we haven’t got this right yet. One of our first initiatives is payments. We, we involved everyone from day one. In fact, we even involved the board. They were really interested in it. And that was really good to, I guess, rally support behind something that’s quite difficult as an organisation, you know, certainly from the perspective of our organisational risk and the partnerships that we need to engage with, you know, it makes it quite complicated. With other initiatives, we’ve decided to be a little bit more closed and sort of work in a sort of skunk works type operation because we know But there might be some political sensitivities around those ideas. And if we, um, if we exposed the rosebud, this is my analogy, a terrible analogy, we exposed the rosebud, you know, on day one. It would get killed. So there’s a need to sort of like, you know, go through the design process, design thinking process in sort of a little bit of a vacuum so that we can nurture the idea enough, be able to present something that’s more palatable. I think, you know, that’s just general, generally the case with all Meet intrapreneurship because there’s often a history behind an idea. If you’re working on an idea that someone like one of our ideas that we’re working on now, I won’t say what it is, but it’s something that we’ve done previously and spent a couple of years doing and failed very badly at. And. We’re redoing it because we believe the, I believe, uh, execution was the failure behind that project. If we had gone to, uh, on day one to the sort of broader organisation, Hey, we’re going to do this, then it’s highly improbable that we would actually be working on that today.

Chris Hudson: 38:14
Yeah. Yeah. Because it’s associated with the execution that ran last time.

Shane Burford: 38:18
But also. People who worked on the last version, you know, are still here and you know, they still wear those scars.

Chris Hudson: 38:26
Yeah. Well, I mean that, that’s a tricky one. And then you’re having to represent or reframe its value in some way and, and look past that without, yep. I don’t know. I, I mean, you can, obviously there’s gonna be a link made between this and the last thing. Unless you can disguise it in such a way that it doesn’t sound like the same thing at all, but obviously that’s a consideration. We talk about the learnings from the last time and we talk about what’s different in the, you know, market or our organisation today that enables us to think differently. And then we, we present that whatever the solution is that we’re working on. So I, I would hope that anyone who sees our new solution would be able to, just see how. And maybe their pain has been addressed in some meaningful way.

Chris Hudson: 39:13
Well, I don’t think you’ve got to be optimistic or you have to be an optimist in this role anyway, I think. You got this scaffolding, I always think of it as scaffolding. Like you, you can basically, you can, you can talk about it at that executional level, which is sort of right at the top. Or you can just strip it right back to what it is people will agree on in some capacity. So, you know, was the strategy right? Was the insight, you know, kind of the right area of focus? Was the data coming in, like right at the bottom? Was the data coming in kind of the. The part that we can all, you can, you can usually find some alignment through that at some layer and strip it back to that and then agree on that. And they’ll say, Oh, we’re going to build up again from here and then go from there. So hopefully you can find that.

Shane Burford: 39:53
And also, you know, I think there’s power in saying we’re also happy to kill it if, you know, we don’t get it right again. And these are our lead indicators to help us figure out whether we’ve got it right, you know, we’re just going along for the ride.

Chris Hudson: 40:09
Yeah. Have you always been okay with that? Like from a, from a killing the idea point of view, have you always been okay with that? Or is it, is it something that you’ve kind of grown, grown to accept?

Shane Burford: 40:19
Um, uh, well, I don’t know. Maybe it’s more rhetoric at the moment. I still don’t know if I’m okay with that. Yeah, fair enough. You know, what’s really powerful is like user testing is so powerful, right? Cause you think you got the most amazing idea and then like the customer, like, that’s, you know, a waste of time is that sort of, at least for me, it’s, it’s clarifying in enabling you to really rally behind your own idea or sort of like, let it, let it die. It’s sad death.

Chris Hudson: 40:50
It’s a hard one to get over the line sometimes. And then you end up with what, four people or six people or something that you talk to and, and people are kind of. You know, resting a lot on that, um, in terms of being able to make a decision. So I think, yeah, being able to justify that the testing needs to be done in at least one round or preferably more is kind of hard sometimes. Do you find that?

Shane Burford: 41:12
Yeah, it’s really interesting. We, we do have a culture of doing user testing on everything sometimes too much. It’s relatively straightforward at car group. Also at NAB, luckily as well, and at Telstra as well, it’s the research stage that’s perhaps a little harder to get across the line, like just to explore a problem space, so you just mix the two. We do research at the start of like an interview and then, then we’ll go into some concepts so that we get some user testing out.

Chris Hudson: 41:43
So in terms of who you align to, to, to make sure that, you know, you’re working on interesting things and you’re able to, you know, build your, now, maybe, maybe in a previous part of your career, I’m not sure, but, but it’s just in terms of navigating that, that organisational space and building your reputation. What have you found works well?

Shane Burford: 42:01
Certainly for the car group, and I guess the Telstra and NAB as well in their innovation spaces, being really clear about the customer problems that are important to solve is useful, and also having a solid understanding of the company’s strategy that enables you to solve it. Just logically attach yourself to initiatives that are going to be winning initiatives. Um, at Car Group, our vision is to make buying and selling a great experience. And one of the strategic pillars is creating a streamlined purchasing experience. So any sort of Payments obviously just tax on nicely to that, but so would a whole bunch of other opportunity spaces. What wouldn’t tack on very nicely to that is creating a new ad placements. So using the strategy and sort of the customer needs in our organisation, really quite powerful to try and figure out where the sort of the winning forces are in terms of finding the right people. It’s really hard. It’s hard to, To find people, uh, are working on the right issues, but also have the right level of political will to help, I guess, you and your career. I would just advocate, you know, early on in my career, focused on trying to be friends and learn from as many people in the organisation as possible, you know, from people. Marketing, legal, product, design, research. I worked in the retail stores initially, so the retail stores team as well, sales team. Um, trying to understand, you know, what’s important to them and, and get a really broad understanding of the organisation. You know, a lot of the people that, you know, I worked with weren’t necessarily going to help me to, to get to the more interesting initiatives by having good relationships with lots of them. It enabled me to sort of navigate, I guess, my way to what I eventually ended up in, which is the design practice at Telstra, which, Enabled me to sort of have the career that I have today. And also like, I find a lot of people sometimes just stay this length on the market. It’s on mid standard marketing. I started as a product manager, then I took a look as a comment, as a business analyst, and then I did research for a while. And then I ended up in design thinking like having, I guess, that curiosity be around other practices just enables you to have more effective conversations. Cause you know, when you talk to a product manager about changing something, can that Platform, you can have some empathy for, you know, what their sort of priorities are and what they look for in their role versus someone in design thinking, maybe more customer focus develop or curating, you know, strong relationships that are cross disciplinary to help you to, you know, eventually find the right people to, to get it. Involved in interesting work is important.

Chris Hudson: 44:50
It does involve so many teams now in the work that you do. If you are in one of those teams and, and you’re thinking, you know, could I get more involved and it’s something that I’m really interested in, then the opportunity in a way is much greater now that, you know, design thinking and some of the practices that exist around it allow for that cross functional team environment to be brought together. And that just means that, you know, if you do love it, then you, you could be the future design leader, the future innovation leader, right? Absolutely.

Shane Burford: 45:14
Absolutely. Yeah, it’s certainly a car group where we’re very committed to nurturing people who are early in their career, but also career switches. We support the digital jobs program in Victoria, which enables us to bring on people who are looking to change careers from something to, you know, digital. And so there’s heaps of opportunity out there. And, and yeah, car group is one of those places that loves to support that. Love it.

Chris Hudson: 45:41
Nice plug. So. So final question, looking ahead, I mean, if you’re thinking about trends and technologies and, you know, things that would have the biggest impact on, I guess, intrapreneurs careers out there in the coming years, yeah, anything spring to mind there?

Shane Burford: 45:57
Well, you know, the other day I was brainstorming with ChatGPT and I was surprised at how effective it was. Yeah, because, like, previously you’d just ask a question, right? And it gives you an answer, but now you can sort of, like, have a, you know, a conversation, like, Oh, no, I don’t think that’s right. What else can we do? And, you know, it starts to sort of become quite a useful tool for expanding your thinking. So, ultimately, that replaces me right at some point. So, I guess that’s the trend. Yeah. So, maybe less so AI. Less as a tool to replace our workforce and just more as a tool for creating more personalised and valuable products. I think that’s going to be the next big frontier for Car Group and I guess most organisations, specifically the training of probably proprietary models. That we can use our vast data that we already have access to to create really valuable results rather than sort of the general results that often you get from, you know, large language models. So, yeah, we’ve got heaps of initiatives right now. In train that are exploring how to to use AI for our business purposes. But yeah, that’s the big one. Getting across the basics of that for me has been really valuable just to sort of understand how it works and then be able to sort of spot opportunities. Maybe other people haven’t thought of yet just because, yeah, it’s still such an emergent, emergent space. Yeah, at HBR has a great book actually, which is just AI for managers or something like that. And it’s really great just to enable, was great for me to enable me to get speed on how that could really shape the future of our business.

Chris Hudson: 47:45
Yeah. Awesome. That’s really cool. And yeah, I mean, any other places that you get inspiration from more generally than that, not, not necessarily AI, but any other kind of go to resources or anything that you think would be useful for the, for the listeners?

Shane Burford: 47:57
At CAR Group, we do a lot of. Longitudinal research studies, how the buyer journey is changing over time and stuff like that. That’s really fascinating in our industry context. So yeah, I guess similar types of tools or resources like that can be really valuable to explore new opportunities. I know we’re looking at payments, you know, just looking at what McKinsey and, you know, Deloitte and Deloitte. All the big consulting firms are talking about when they think of those topics and the trends coming up has been really valuable to help us shape and future proof our ideas moving forward. And also, you know, uncover new ones which is kind of cool. So yeah, that’s probably my go to. That’s cool. Probably quite industry focused.

Chris Hudson: 48:37
Yeah. Cool. All right. And yeah, just finally, I mean, how, how are you feeling about the future? Are you feeling positive? What are you, what are you thinking about it?

Shane Burford: 48:44
Yeah. Extremely positive. You know, we’re in a really difficult economic time, right at the moment. And I signed at least, you know, in economic downturn. R in R& D of the research side is the first thing to get cut. So I think a lot of organisations are pessimistic, but, you know, taking a historical lens on that, the organisations that invest through economic downturn are the ones that come out strong. A lot of organisations, you know, looking at that and trying to, you know, reduce their, their overall expense on, on R& D. Car group is, is one that’s sort of investing in the future through the economic downturn. I guess at a, at a company level, that’s quite heartwarming, but also I think people who invest in their career now. Uh, going to hold themselves in good stead for the future because two or three years from now with you know, all the you know Shedding that’s happening. There’ll be just a deficit of you know, strategic meetings So those that do it now will be holding good. So very optimistic and super super optimistic about uh,

Chris Hudson: 49:47
Good, good. That’s great. Great for us all to hear. I think there’s definitely some doubts out there and, uh, yeah, I mean, you, you’ve obviously, I really appreciate the chat today. I want to say thank you to you for coming along and, um, and for being so open and candid about, you know, the things that you’ve experienced and car sales and, you know, car group, obviously. Yeah, I just feel like from somebody who’s obviously worked through that change to create, you know, valuable outputs, you know, within each of the organisations that you’ve worked in, it’s, it’s okay to have some of that change without it feeling kind of uncertain and a little bit worrying. So I think, you know, you’ve, you’ve brought a positivity and an optimism to the conversation around innovation and what’s, you know, what can be done and what people can, can get involved in as well. So really appreciate your time today. Thanks so much, Shane.

Shane Burford: 50:33
Thanks for having me. It’s been great. Thank you.

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