Tendayi Viki joins Brian to unpack the difference between doing innovation and delivering value, with practical takeaways for product folks, innovation teams, and anyone who wants to stop spinning their wheels.

Overview

Innovation theater. Experimentation theater. Value that never quite materializes. In this episode, Brian Milner sits down with Tendayi Viki—author, strategist, and partner at Strategyzer—to talk about why so many organizations look like they’re innovating… but aren’t.

Together, they dig into what real innovation looks like (and how to measure it), how to escape the trap of cool ideas with no customer value, and why experiments only matter if they lead to decisions. You’ll also learn how to spot the difference between a small bet and a large leap, and what it actually means to “be a pirate in the navy.”

References and resources mentioned in the show:

Tendayi Viki

Tendayi’s Books

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This episode’s presenters are:

Brian Milner is a Certified Scrum Trainer®, Certified Scrum Professional®, Certified ScrumMaster®, and Certified Scrum Product Owner®, and host of the Agile Mentors Podcast training at Mountain Goat Software. He's passionate about making a difference in people's day-to-day work, influenced by his own experience of transitioning to Scrum and seeing improvements in work/life balance, honesty, respect, and the quality of work.

Tendayi Viki is a globally recognized innovation strategist, author, and partner at Strategyzer, where he helps large organizations build real value—not just innovation theater. With a PhD in Psychology and a client list that spans Unilever to The British Museum, Tendayi brings deep insight into the human side of transformation, backed by frameworks that actually work.

Auto-generated Transcript:

Brian Milner (00:00 )

Welcome in Agile Mentors. We're back for another episode of the Agile Mentors podcast. I'm here as always, Brian Milner. And today I'm very, very excited. I have Mr. Tendayi Vicki with us. Tendayi, welcome in.

Tendayi Viki (00:13 )

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brian Milner (00:15 )

Very, very excited to have him here. Just to give you some background, if you're not familiar with his work, very prolific and very deep thinker here. He's a partner at a company called Strategizer, where he helps large companies innovate like startups. He's a regular contributor on Forbes, so you may have read some of his articles on Forbes. He's the author of three books, The Corporate Startup, Pirates in the Navy and the Lean Product Lifecycle. Pirates in the Navy is his latest one. Pirates in the Navy, correct me if I'm wrong, it's kind of about how to infiltrate via innovative presence in a large corporation. Is that correct?

Tendayi Viki (00:55 )

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, how to be a pirate in the Navy.

Brian Milner (00:58 )

I love it. I love the title. ⁓ But his books are really practical. They're on building innovation ecosystems that actually work. He's advised some big companies like Unilever, Amex, and Lutanza. He's been named to Thinker's 50 radar list for his influence and innovation and strategy. But his passion is really helping teams avoid

Tendayi Viki (00:59 )

that.

Brian Milner (01:22 )

what do you terms as innovation theater and focus on creating real sustainable value. So I thought maybe that's a good place to just start to kick off a conversation and say, Tendayi, talk to us about innovation theater. What does that look like to you? How would you define that? What does that mean?

Tendayi Viki (01:41 )

Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a term that's kind of simultaneously coined by Rita McGrath. Steve Blank has used it a few times, and so has Alex Osterwalder. And it's really about... So the thing about the startup world is that the startup world is kind of a coolness factor. So everybody wants to be cool. And then the toolbox that startups use in that cool design thinking, deep school vibe of like sticky notes and... design and prototyping and all that. So everybody wants to do all of those things. I've even watched teams actually engage in agile rituals. Like they do the daily stand up, they do the demo day, they do the retro, right? But when you really look at the, when you dive deep into the focus, it doesn't seem to be a lot of value creation. So you're like, you're doing a... a retrospective as an agile team and you're not talking about what you learned from customers. You didn't do that during that week's sprint. yeah, you can do all the rituals, but if you don't understand the reason the rituals exist, then it's easy for you to kind of just spin and not create any value. And that's innovation theory.

Brian Milner (02:42 )

Yeah. Yeah. man, I am with you a million percent on that and completely agree. These structures are there to help kind of be a pathway to that, but not the end result. If you don't understand, just like you said, if you don't understand the reason behind it, the why, then yeah, you could go through all the motions. And I completely get that term, It's kind of theater. It looks like it's actually happening, but it's not really happening. The culture underneath it is not really there. ⁓ So that brings the million dollar question then, right? If these structures like we do, like standups and everything else, aren't going to automatically generate that kind of innovation and it's more of a culture thing,

Tendayi Viki (03:28 )

Exactly. Mm-hmm.

Brian Milner (03:44 )

How do you then build a culture that is placing innovation as a priority?

Tendayi Viki (03:53 )

So yeah, so just to answer your question, think one of the things that's really interesting about the way to create value is you have to authentically care about value creation first. You really have to understand this notion that innovation is this combination of really, really cool ideas, right? Together with a deep understanding of customers and their needs, and then a deep understanding of how to... use a business model that works to deliver that value to customers so you can get value back. Once you complete the entirety of that cycle, we say you're a successful innovator. If you complete the ideas or tech portion of that cycle, you're just an inventor or the ideas guy or whatever people call themselves, right? And so I find that companies excessively focus on ideas too much. And so too much focus on ideation and not enough focus on putting ideas on a journey towards value creation and actually value realization for the organization. So if you're going to build a culture for innovation, you have to understand what you're building it for. You to go, all right, we have to deliberately design our workflows and the way we interact with each other to discover what customers we need. Then we have to design the workflows to bring those customer needs into life through products. Then we have to test whether those products are really delivering that value. And then we have to figure out a way to scale that value and give value back to the moment of vision. you go, okay, that's the job. Now let's design the process, the culture, the toolbox, the artifacts, the rituals that allow us to actually do that. And I think that kind of understanding is probably more fundamental than anything else.

Brian Milner (05:32 )

Yeah, absolutely agree. It's the structure for discovery, right? I mean, it's not the discovery. It's the structure that led you to the discovery that has to be repeatable that then can generate future discoveries. It's not how you found the island in the middle of the ocean. Or it's not the island you found in the middle of the ocean. It's how you found it. ⁓ that would lead you to find another one you know. ⁓

Tendayi Viki (05:55 )

Exactly. And that's the fundamental question is, can you find another island? Because again, innovation teams stumble a lot on good ideas. And so you can bumble into something good and then fail to do it again because you don't have a repeatable process.

Brian Milner (06:01 )

Yeah. Yeah. So let's dive into that a little bit. mean, whether you're a startup or whether you're a bigger organization and you're working on a product in a bigger organization, I know that you can often feel like you're kind of, I was talking to someone this week about this, you kind of feel like you're drowning in a sea of opportunity. There's all these things that we could do and it's sometimes hard to find, well, which ones do we really

Tendayi Viki (06:32 )

Mmm.

Brian Milner (06:42 )

double down on which ones we invest in and really pour our time and energy and efforts into. So how do you talk about that in your book? How do you find the things that are worth really investing in?

Tendayi Viki (