Max Havey: Hello, and welcome to another edition of Security Visionaries, a podcast all about the world of cyber, data, and tech infrastructure, bringing together experts from around the world and across domains. I'm your host, Max Havey, Senior Content Specialist here at Netskope, and today we're talking about the world of remote work and innovation with our guest, Rebecca Hinds, the Head of the Work Innovation Lab at Asana. Rebecca, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today.
Rebecca Hinds: Thanks so much, Max. I'm really looking forward to the conversation, and it's great to be here.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And joining us as well, a friend of the show, we have Yihua Liao, the head of Netskope AI Labs. Yihua, thank you for joining us today.
Yihua Liao: Thank you, Max. I'm glad to be back on this show again.
Max Havey: Absolutely. We're glad to have you back. So let's jump right in here. In the world of remote work and innovation, there's a lot floating around. You know, Rebecca, to start things off here, what are some key tactics to consider to make innovation a part of everyday work? What are some tactics that you would offer to folks out there in the ether?
Rebecca Hinds: It's a great question and a difficult one, especially in our day of age right now when there's so much overload associated with work. We're trying to do more with less and innovation is so difficult, primarily because it's hard to create intentional space for it. And so I think that's the most important aspect of driving innovation is being intentional about how do you create that space for innovation. Innovation requires creativity, it requires blue sky thinking, and it requires the mental capacity for those aspects as well. As an example, right now on my team, we're currently doing a two week, what we call Winnovation Week, that's intentionally devoted to fostering innovation, canceling as many meetings as possible, taking as much off of our plate so that we can focus on that creativity that we know is a core driver of innovation. So I think that's step one. Step two is we know from the research, there's a lot of evidence to support the fact that innovation requires embracing failure and having the psychological safety to be creative, make mistakes. And I think that type of culture where you're de-stigmatizing failure. We know that your most creative idea is actually most likely to come after your 20th idea or 25th idea.
Rebecca Hinds: And often we, again, don't create the space for it. And we don't create the culture where it's okay to fail 20 times before you come up with the best creative idea that's going to fuel innovation. So I think creating a culture where you're celebrating well intentional, thoughtful failure is key. And then I think third is I see the most innovative teams today wearing multiple hats. And I think the more that business leaders can start to hire generalists in their organization, especially when we think about AI, the importance of having subject matter expertise. On my team, we've been really intentional about hiring world-class researchers, but also hiring people who can communicate the research, who can design, who can code, and having full stack people in your organization fosters innovation because it encourages connecting dots across disciplines. It also enables you to be a little bit more independent in terms of less reliance on other groups, other departments, resourcing, and be able to innovate in a space that's a little bit siloed, which we also know that silos are a key part of driving innovation. Cross-functionality is important and having that collaboration across your organization is essential, but you also need some level of independence to be able to execute in that safe, enclosed space.
Max Havey: Definitely. The idea of having those dedicated spaces and being very intentional, as you said at the beginning of your answer there, having all of that around helps better drive and better encourage that culture of innovation there.
Rebecca Hinds: Absolutely.
Max Havey: Totally. And Yihua, I know Rebecca covered a lot in her answer. Anything else from your perspective, any other tactics that you would offer for making innovation a part of everyday work?
Yihua Liao: Yeah, Rebecca definitely had a lot of great points. Just to add some of the tactics that we have used at Netskope AI Labs. So we are a team of AI researchers as well, focusing on trying to use some of the latest AI machine learning technology to make our security platform better. Innovation is really important for our team. Some of the things that we tried include just to foster this open communication and collaboration culture. So within our team, we have weekly team meetings and also monthly deep dive meetings where people can really share what's on their mind and what they have learned from their projects.
Yihua Liao: And also what are some of the latest trends that we see? In the industry. And that has been one of the platforms people feel like they're really encouraged to share their own ideas and try to learn from each other. And then another thing that has worked really well for us is that we try to bring in folks from other teams as well, people with this cross-functional collaboration. We think it's also very important because most of the folks on my team, they have very deep AI expertise. But then when we solve security problems, we also need domain knowledge. We need the domain experts. So we try to have very close collaboration with folks who know, for example, malware very, very well and know phishing really, really well. We try to collaborate with them and pick their brain and then see how we can use machine learning to solve those problems. So those are just some of the things that we try to do on a regular basis in order to foster this innovative culture within my team.
Max Havey: Definitely. It's the same sort of cross-functional thinking and working cross-functionally while also working independently and finding a way to bring those things together so that you can do this in the best possible way and get the best possible outcome.
Rebecca Hinds: We've done some research on the nature of those cross-functional interactions. And what we see is that the most important cross-functional relationship for innovation is the relationship between engineering and marketing. And I think that's something that's a little bit counterintuitive. It makes sense because you need great development. You need to have a great team that's going to bring it to market effectively. But often it's not in the mindset of leaders to, if they're an engineering team, to bring in marketers earlier on or vice versa. And I think that's something that is is absolutely critical as we think about being intentional about innovation, intentionally bringing together those groups that maybe don't sit next to each other, maybe don't talk to each other that often, creating that space for it.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And thinking about innovation broadly here, you know, how do you sort of measure innovation within your team? I know it's kind of an abstract concept to try and measure, but like, is there a specific metric that you're looking for? I know you are managing a team of AI researchers, like how do you specifically measure innovation within your team?
Yihua Liao: So for us, it's relatively easy, I would say. We typically look at how many machine learning models or AI models that we deploy into production, because ultimately we want to create the real impact of making our products better by leveraging some of the latest AI machine learning technology. So that's one. Second metric we typically use is how many patents we have applied or have been granted. And so far, for the past few years, four or five years, we've had almost 30 AI ML-related patents here at Netskope. So we're very, very proud of our progress. Each year we're trying to do more. So those are the successes, right? But we all know, as Rebecca mentioned, we want to embrace failure. We want to learn from failure. So evidently, some of our projects may not get good results may not get deployed into production and we may not get a patent granted as well. So we also track how many times have we tried, how many new projects we've explored. And I think that's also a very important metric as well. We do want to encourage our team members to explore, to experiment.
Max Havey: Definitely. That sort of iteration is what kind of begets some of these greater successes. You don't follow down some of those roads if you aren't kind of failing first and realizing what stuff doesn't work there. I think that's just as important as seeing what sort of like, you know, what paths have gone through, which have been successful. And that's kind of an interesting measure to think about is not only the successes, but those failures. And Rebecca, from your view, what are some of those sort of key metrics or key ways to measure innovation that you're using over on your team?
Rebecca Hinds: And we've thought a lot about this, and we've actually done extensive research to look at the drivers of innovation. Often innovation is a little bit of a lagging indicator. And so we've tried to distill what differentiates the most innovative companies from less innovative companies, looking across thousands of different companies. And what we found is consistently there are four drivers of innovation. So the first is cohesion. So we've talked about this a little bit, how well employees are working together, how cohesively they're working together. We know that innovation is a team sport and that's important. The second is velocity. So we know that a big part of innovation is speed of execution. So velocity is about how quickly do ideas and work and decisions flow through your organization. The third is what we call resilience. So this is how stable or how robust is your organization when individuals move teams, move departments, or leave the organization entirely. We know that as great talent leaves, part of innovation can leave with them.
Rebecca Hinds: So how stable is your organization to maintain those ideas, maintain that innovation potential? And then the final one, which we spoke about earlier as well, is capacity. So how much bandwidth do your employees have to do their most important work? Do they have the creative space to do so? And so we've distilled this into what we call the work innovation score. And we're able to score companies based on their collaboration patterns to understand whether those patterns, whether that collaboration is setting the team up and the organization up to be innovative at work today. And I think another flavor of this is often when we think about innovation, we focus very much on products and services. And what we know, especially now in our constantly changing world of work, where a lot of our business practices are decades old and are in need of innovation. It's also critical to think not just about product and service innovation, but also what we and others call process innovation and how are we innovating our business processes, our workflows. That needs to be a core part of our sort of definition of innovation.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And I really appreciate you saying kind of the top of your four drivers. Innovation is a team sport. Our theme on the previous season of Security Visionaries was, in fact, security as a team sport. So there are a number of different sports and leagues that all kind of require collaboration. And love to see that innovation is another one of those as well.
Rebecca Hinds: I'm a former athlete, so I always use that model of how can we create great teams at work that model great athletic teams, and innovation, security are two top of mind aspects of work that very much should model, I think, great athletic teams.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And to go off a little side street here, Rebecca, something that you've talked about a lot before in Thought Leadership and elsewhere out online, is the idea of the need for digital literacy. Can you sort of explain what digital literacy is and how can leaders create a culture of digital literacy?
Rebecca Hinds: It's essential right now, I think, especially with all the rapid advancements in technology, AI in particular, but also collaboration technology. Digital literacy is a little bit of a catch all term to not only refer to how we use a technology and the features and functionality of that technology, but also how we're embedding it into our day to day work. And there's a long line of academic research to show that the one truth about technology is it never unfolds as we intend in terms of how it's adopted and how it's implemented in organizations. And so When we think about digital literacy, that's often where technology fails. We can have a great technology, we can have a great new shiny AI tool. And if we're not thinking about how it fits into our day to day work, how it integrates with other tools, how we should use it, it's going to fail. And so digital literacy is essentially about not just the features and functionality of the technology. But how do we think about that intersection with human dynamics and with our day to day work? And I think when we think about collaboration tools, there's been this mindset of more is better, especially as we saw the pandemic unfold, businesses hyper invested in collaboration tools.
Rebecca Hinds: Slack, Asana, Zoom, all these different collaboration tools. And very few businesses took a step back, at least initially, and said, how do these pieces fit together and how do we create a robust tech stack where they're synergistic and not competing for our workers intention? And I often use the example of asynchronous versus synchronous technology, which is a little bit of a buzzword, buzz phrase right now. Technology, contrary to popular belief, is not inherently asynchronous or synchronous in most cases. How we use it is. And so a tool like email can be used either asynchronously or synchronously, depending on how we respond to the email. And so as a leader, it's important to not just educate your workforce on what the technology can do, but how it should be used.
Max Havey: And if you're not articulating those rules of the road, when should Slack be used versus Asana, when should Google Drive be used versus Dropbox, and have that clarity within your organization. That's where the technology breaks down, and that's why digital literacy is so important. And I think we're seeing a new level of it with AI, where we're seeing all these different gaps. One of the consistent findings across our research is executives right now in organizations have a vastly different perception and conception of AI compared to individual contributors. Digital literacy is also about figuring out how do you bring individual contributors, your entire organization along your AI journey so that you're incorporating the technology into their day to day work in a way that it is empowering them for success, not competing for their attention or evoking fear and resistance.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And that gets back to sort of the idea that we've talked about with iteration. There's iteration, setting expectations and setting best practices to make sure that these innovations you're creating actually have an impact, that they actually fit what people want to be doing with them. It's great to have pie in the sky ideas. It's great to hope that this is going to be the silver bullet panacea that we're all hoping for. But it kind of takes having that groundwork set first before it can really even get off the ground.
Rebecca Hinds: Those foundations are so important and first impressions matter and they matter with technology too because it's so interdependent. And the more you can set your employees up for success from the get go, have those resources, have the learning and development alongside the technology, that's where we see the greatest benefits for sure.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And to shift gears here slightly, I'd love to talk to y'all about some of the projects that you've worked on that you've seen success through innovation on. And just to start off Yihua, I know that you helped drive a hackathon at Netskope late last year, and that was done remotely throughout the many offices around the globe for Netskope. Could you tell us a little bit about what you learned from that and how that's impacted the way that you think about innovation?
Yihua Liao: Sure. So we've actually organized our annual engineering hackathon for the past three years now, this has become a tradition for our engineering teams. We have close to a 1000 engineers all over the world. And every day they're working on the engineering roadmap, things on our engineering roadmap. And we really wanted to create an opportunity for all the engineers to take a step back and then reflect on their daily tasks. And are there any things, maybe annoying little things that they wish could be better, or some other things that have been on roadmap, but they never had a chance to really work on them and to maybe build a prototype. So we thought, hey, maybe hackathon would be a good opportunity for us to do all of those things, to really encourage everyone on the team to bring new ideas to the table and build prototypes and see what we can learn from them. So for the past three years, we've been pretty successful in organizing the engineering hackathons.
Yihua Liao: People from different offices can collaborate. Some engineers, they try to work with customer support and other functions and then try to solve some of the problems that they are seeing through very close collaboration from people in different offices, different functional groups. And each year, we've had about around 50, 60 projects submitted for the hackathon organizing committee to review. And then we encourage all the people, not just engineers, maybe other organizations as well, to review the projects. And we even encourage all the employees to vote on those hackathon projects. This was a way for people...
Yihua Liao: For the employees to try to learn what people have done in their hackathon projects. So, and then end of the hackathon, we ask our engineering executives to help us to be on the panel, to review the projects and then help us select the best hackathon projects and based on the potential impact of those projects based on what kind of problems they're trying to solve. For example, are they trying to solve customer pain points or we're trying to improve our platform quality, things like that. To, Rebecca's point, I think it's really important we create opportunity, create space for our employees to try different ideas and some of them will be successful and most actually a lot more projects will turn out to be not so successful. And that's okay, right. As long as we try to learn from those experiences. So yeah, I think hackathon is a great idea and many different companies have done this. We're trying to do this at Netskope as well and I'm pretty sure we'll try to keep this as a tradition and we'll have a lot more hackathons going forward as well.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And Rebecca, from your end, what are some innovation projects that you've either been at the helm of or helped collaborate on in recent memory that you'd like to share as well?
Rebecca Hinds: And I love this conversation because I think it really highlights the importance of open innovation and whether you're doing a hackathon or other initiatives, having some sort of an intake process where folks from across your company can submit ideas. That's where we see the biggest innovations happen. When the idea doesn't necessarily come from our team, it comes from some other part of the business where they're facing a real problem and it grounds it in that problem, a real problem. We know that a big part of innovation is being useful, the combination of novelty and usefulness. And I think the more you can encourage submissions, intake processes around what we can potentially innovate on, that's where we see the greatest outcome. So several of our research projects have started that way. We did very early on in the work innovation lab journey, we did what we called a meeting doomsday and that emerged out of a submission from a small team who was facing overwhelm associated with their meetings.
Rebecca Hinds: They were in too many meetings and the leader came to us and said, "What if we thought of a way to solve meeting overload on my team?" And so what we did is we initiated this meeting doomsday. We essentially had the team cancel all their meetings for a period of 48 hours, completely wipe the slate clean and then re their calendar from the ground up. And that's an example of something where it led to significant time savings, 11 hours per person per month of time savings by rethinking their calendar. We've done something similar with technology. We partnered with Amazon Web Services on a study that we called the collaboration cleanse that was again, born out of this recognition that companies today are overloaded with too many technologies. And so we designed an intervention similar to the meeting doomsday. What happens when you start to subtract some of your tools? How do you then work differently? How do you lean into more cross-functional collaboration platforms, more integrations? And so I think when I think back to the most innovative projects our team has been part of or led, they've all happened through these recognitions of real pains in organizations and having a mechanism to collect those pains and then act on them.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And it, it's coming back to the idea of finding that specific pain point and stripping back everything to see what is the thing that we need to solve here. And then building an innovation sort of bespoke to see how can we navigate around this and find the best possible way that's going to work for everyone here.
Rebecca Hinds: And I'm a big, big proponent of small wins too and pilots and I think you can learn a lot from doing something innovating on a small scale before scaling up. And I think we see that consistently as well.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And another just kind of side street that I wanted to ask about here, Rebecca, could you maybe dig into a little bit as to why innovation is so difficult to cultivate when it comes to working with teams that are becoming increasingly remote? You noted that in an earlier answer and I was kind of curious if you could maybe expand on that a little bit.
Rebecca Hinds: It's a great question and I think definitely remote teams can be highly innovative just as much as in-person teams. I think it comes back to that intentionality. And what we do see in the research and our research as well as other research is that what tends to break down quite quickly in remote and distributed organizations are those cross-functional relationships. In general, we can do a reasonable good job at maintaining in team collaboration, but those cross-functional relationships tend to break down really quickly. Again, not always the case, it is about how intentional we are, but in general we do see that with the shift to remote and distributed work. And the nature of that is those cross-functional collaboration patterns as we've touched on, are critical for innovation. And so innovation suffers and as you think about distributed work environments and remote work fostering intentionally, those relationships becomes even more important. Sometimes we refer to this idea of creative collisions and how those proverbial water cooler moments where you're bumping into a sales engineer or a marketing folk in the office tend to spark new ideas, spark innovation potential. You need to be intentional about creating those in a remote environment. And if you're not, innovation is going to suffer for sure.
Max Havey: Absolutely. The sort of thing like building in like a monthly brainstorm or like having, having deep dives as I know Yihua sort of talked about with his team, where you have people that are bringing up like a thing like, hey, this is a thing that I'm working on. What do you all think of this? Is there something that kind of sparks your brain about this? I know I've been a part of many sort of brainstorms in a similar way and that's often where some of our best ideas come from. Just like an offhanded like, oh, that would be funny, I wonder how we could make that happen.
Rebecca Hinds: And I think the example Yihua touched on around the remote hackathon where that's not necessarily intuitive that if we're doing a hackathon it can be remote. I think that's a very healthy generative process for innovation and those are the types of interventions and initiatives we need to foster and make space for to drive innovation in more distributed work environment.
Yihua Liao: Yeah, so I can give an example. So right now half of my team is remote, so I'm based in San Francisco Bay area, but we have team members in Southern California, also in India, and we're now thinking of hiring more people in Taiwan as well. So I assume it's going to be very, very common managing global teams. So how do you run effective brainstorm sessions when you have team members across the globe? That definitely is one of the challenges I think we face when people work remotely, but I think you just have to be intentional. You create this culture to encourage people to share their ideas freely and solicit feedback and hopefully every once in a while you can bring people together, if not every week, maybe once a quarter or once every six months or so. And I do think that kind of in-person interaction is important and hopefully you can create that kind of opportunity for people to come together and build a stronger relationship.
Rebecca Hinds: I think that's a brilliant point and what we see in the research too is that in-person interaction is quite durable. It lasts, it can last for months after the in-person interaction. And so even if you only can make space for it once a year, once a quarter, once every six months, it does tend to have a bigger lasting effect than maybe we might think at the onset.
Max Havey: I love sort of where that's coming from, the idea of creating spaces for these creative collisions even in a remote world. And as we sort of come to the end of our conversation here, 'cause I can see our producer kind of giving me the sign here that we're coming up to the end here. If you each had to offer one piece of advice to folks out there that are looking to better encourage these sort of creative collisions when working with a remote team and better encouraging that remote innovation, what would you offer? Yihua, let's start with you. If you had one piece of advice, what would that be?
Yihua Liao: One piece of advice. I have lots of better piece of advice, so if you just ask me to pick one, but I would say it's something that I learned recently. It's the probably the most interesting one off the top of my, which is you may want to have a brainstorm session with ChatGPT, I've seen some research saying that, hey, if you ask the right questions, provide the right context and these generative AI models, they can actually provide a lot of creative ideas and I've done it myself, I think can be very, very helpful as long as you provide the right context and ask the right questions. And you may want to brainstorm with ChatGPT next time.
Max Havey: Absolutely.
Rebecca Hinds: I love that. And there's a lot of evidence as well to show that the way we brainstorm, especially in person is broken and it's not the most effective way to do it. Actually brainstorming tends to be more effective when we start in a more independent capacity. And so I love the idea of starting with an AI partner and then coming together potentially in person or in a remote setting together to brainstorm. I think what I would add as well is we think a lot about measuring collaboration. Collaboration is something that is so difficult to see. It's so hard to understand how much we're collaborating, whether we're doing it well or not. And I think there's real value in starting to measure collaboration, understand how your workers are bridging silos. We use a lot of technology exhaust data using Asana data to understand which teams are working well together, which are not. How can we start to be more intentional again about measuring collaboration and not just using our gut to think about is sales working well with marketing using data to understand what is the strength of that collaboration? How has it changed over time as people move locations, as they move to more distributed settings, how does that change collaboration and starting to be more data-driven about a practice collaboration that we know consumes most of our time in workplaces today, yet we don't often take the time to actively measure it.
Max Havey: Absolutely. I love both of these, you know, whether that is finding a way to collaborate with, with generative AI and ChatGPT or to better use data to back up the cross-functional decisions and cross-functional projects that you're working on and to better quantitatively measure those things. Both those are fantastic places to start with better driving innovation. As that sort of brings us to the end of the episode here, Rebecca, so much for coming on here. This was such an enlightening conversation and I've learned so much about innovation that I cannot wait to take back to some of my teammates as we start on some of our next projects. So thank you both.
Yihua Liao: Thank you.
Rebecca Hinds: Thank you.
Yihua Liao: Thank you. Thank you Max. Thank you Rebecca. It's been fun.
Rebecca Hinds: It's been a great conversation. Thanks so much.
Max Havey: Absolutely. And you've been listening to the Security Visionaries podcast. I've been your host, Max Havey, and if you've enjoyed this episode, share it with a friend and subscribe to Security Visionaries on your favorite podcast platform. There you can listen to our back catalog of episodes and keep an eye out for new ones, dropping every other week, hosted either by me or my co-host, the wonderful Emily Wearmouth. And with that, we'll catch you on the next episode.
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