Most teams try to get colleagues to care about innovation by running events like lunch-and-learns and booth days, since they are the easiest way to get people in a room.
They work well enough to look successful: rooms fill up, feedback forms come back with five stars, and the whole thing feels like progress. Chris Murumets, Chief Innovation Officer at RGA Americas, experienced this firsthand: events were well attended and well reviewed, yet they rarely led to meaningful changes in how people worked afterward.
As he puts it, "participation doesn't equal caring."
Two things his team tried instead got people caring: the first is a dinner that gets a small group to care about one problem before they ever sit down. It's called a Jeffersonian dinner, after Thomas Jefferson, who used the format when he was working through big policy changes - and Chris's team runs its own version of it.
The second is a hard question his team puts to the whole company at once, reaching far more people than a dinner table ever could. Both approaches are simple enough for any innovation leader to adapt and use.
The Jeffersonian dinner
1. Seat about eight people who differ from each other
Invite about eight people from different functions, levels, and offices, since a group that already agrees with itself won't produce much. Jefferson's own tables mixed people like a scientist, a teacher, and a mathematician. One group Chris leaves out at this stage is skeptics. When you're trying to think differently, he says, a "black hat" doesn't help. Skeptics come in once the idea matures, when their opinion is worth having.
2. Send one question ahead
Send one question ahead of time so everyone arrives with an answer in mind. Choose a question the business needs answered, and check two things first: whether answering it would move the business, and which part of the business it would move. It's the same test Chris's team applies to every idea that comes to them. Drop any question that fails the first check, and ask people to describe the problem before they suggest solutions.
3. Open with why each person cares
Open the evening by having each person say why they personally care about the problem, and keep job titles out of the introductions. Chris's own answer starts with where he grew up in Ontario, and answers like that get personal quickly. Once everyone has spoken, the group knows why each person is at the table, and the rest of the evening goes towards working on the one question.
4. Compare the themes across dinners
If you run the dinner in more than one office, write down the themes from each one and compare the notes afterward. RGA did this in several parts of the world, and in every conversation people's reasons for caring led back to a community they belong to or depend on. From those repeated answers, RGA concluded that building communities around the organization gets more colleagues to care about the work. Your own dinners may turn up a different theme. A theme that repeats across offices will show what your colleagues have in common.
One hard question for the whole company
A dinner only reaches eight people at a time. For something that reaches everyone, Chris's team picks one structural question and puts it to the whole company. The questions are chosen for what the dinners kept surfacing: they have a community feel to them.
It starts with making the business personal. RGA is a life and health reinsurer, and its purpose is financial protection accessible to all. In the U.S. alone, RGA reinsures roughly 20 million people. "They're rows on spreadsheets," Chris says, "but at the end of every one of those rows is a human being." The question then becomes how RGA gets the next 10 million people access to what it does.
Two questions they've used, for example:
Why is GoFundMe the largest payer of funeral costs in North America, in an industry that spends billions of dollars? Behind it are adult children crowdsourcing a parent's funeral, not raising enough, and going further into debt.
Why does the average 55-year-old in the U.S. or Canada have only about $75,000 saved for retirement, and how do you retire in 10 years on that?
The goal here is to make the problem feel personal enough that people start thinking about it themselves. Chris's team asks colleagues to look at their own families and ask how to make sure it doesn't happen to them.
Chris first tried talking to the organization in a more KPI-driven way, and "it was a flop." Once colleagues are asking what they would change, innovation starts becoming something they engage with.
For senior innovation leaders, there's one, simple takeaway: use the format that fits the number of people you need to reach. A Jeffersonian dinner can get a small group into a deep dice discussion, while a single company-wide question can involve people across the organization.
Both give a simple way to move colleagues from just "talking about innovation" to working on real business problems, collectively.
