QUICK SUMMARY
Erin Faulk from The Garage Group and Sarah Stabelfeldt from Schreiber Foods shared their five-year journey of transforming Schreiber Foods into a culture of innovation through five key enablers: creating a dynamic shared vision, using the snowball analogy to embrace non-linear change, demonstrating vulnerability, leveraging sprints for business challenges, and building post-sprint momentum. Their approach treated the adoption curve as a segmentation strategy, meeting different groups where they were and tailoring communication to their specific needs while maintaining focus on the ultimate goal of building a resilient culture committed to possibility and experimentation. The transformation resulted in 48 business challenges tackled, 349 cross-functional partners engaged, 134 activated solutions, and a 97% sprint repeat rate, demonstrating how systemic change can drive both cultural transformation and business results.
KEY QUOTES
- “The only real way to break this pattern is to drive systemic change in service of organizational resilience.”
- “When I shared that vision, my context mattered, and who I was facing in this adoption curve mattered because what they needed to hear in order to jump on was different.”
- “What excites me most about our cultural transformation is when I walk into a sprint open house and see partners from all over the world with a sparkle in their eye and passion in their voices.”
FULL SESSION SUMMARY
Introduction to the Dark Cave Analogy
Erin Faulk from The Garage Group opened the session by introducing the analogy of a “dark cave” to represent transition points for businesses. These caves represent challenging, uncertain periods that organizations must navigate. While it’s comfortable to remain outside, true progress requires entering these caves. However, organizations often expect teams to enter these caves and accelerate quickly, which can lead to initial enthusiasm followed by fatigue, overwhelm, and eventually complacency and fear. The presenters positioned systemic change as the solution to break this pattern and build organizational resilience.
The Schreiber Foods Journey
Stabelfeldt shared her background and introduced Schreiber Foods, an $8 billion global dairy company that primarily serves global retailers, food service chains, and brands rather than selling under its own name. She outlined Schreiber’s innovation journey through three eras: beginning with a technological invention that provided market differentiation, followed by global and category expansion, and then shifting to cost and process improvement. When Sarah joined five years ago, the CEO challenged her to transform the organization and “deliver the vibe” – creating a genuine culture of innovation.
Defining the Culture of Innovation
The team defined this culture of innovation as having three main components:
- Resilience during change
- Commitment to possibility
- Continuous experimentation
All of these elements serve both growth and positive impact. When Sarah started, there was only a small group of passionate innovators at the beginning of the adoption curve. The transformation strategy focused on two key elements: people (especially important as Schreiber employees are also shareholders) and process (using a customer-first innovation approach with actionable tools).
Five Key Enablers for Transformation
1. Creating a Dynamic Shared Vision
Sarah explained how she initially shared her vision broadly across the company but found it resonated differently with different groups. This led to treating the adoption curve as a segmentation strategy, approaching each segment with empathy to understand their reality, concerns about risk-taking, and barriers to change. The team would pause after bringing each new group on board to refresh their strategy before approaching the next segment, making the vision dynamic while maintaining the North Star.
2. The Snowball Analogy and Context
Erin introduced the snowball analogy to illustrate how transformation isn’t linear. Like building a snowman, you start with a tightly packed ball but must allow it to take on a life of its own, following the contours of the ground. This translated into five principles:
- Remain laser-focused on what you’re solving for and why
- Seek to understand your audience
- Recognize you’ll get lost along the way
- Put stakes in the ground throughout the process
- Harness the power of language to embrace possibility
3. Demonstrating Vulnerability by Showing Work
Innovation often feels like a black box in large organizations, with innovators tending to perfect ideas before sharing them. The Schreiber approach embraced vulnerability by sharing less perfect versions earlier. They showcased an example of their Innovation Council meetings where executives actively participate in building ideas with team members using frameworks like the Business Model Canvas, creating stakeholder buy-in throughout the process.
4. Leveraging Sprints for Business Challenges
Every sprint at Schreiber is championed by an executive, ensuring focus on the most important business challenges. These sprints have addressed diverse challenges across functions including HR, finance, operations, and supply chain. All sprints follow the same overall process: building empathy for stakeholders, identifying and prioritizing problems, exploring solutions, refining those solutions, and building business cases. The company implemented “open houses” where any employee could learn about the business challenges and ideas being developed.
5. Building Post-Sprint Momentum
To maintain momentum after sprints, Schreiber implemented an innovation champions program with 24 partners from across the company. These champions transfer mindsets, tools, and processes from sprints into everyday work, helping ideas reach implementation. This program also serves as career development for the champions themselves, creating a win-win situation.
Results and Impact
The transformation has created an innovation ecosystem at Schreiber that includes core innovation, adjacent innovation, digital transformation, startup partnerships, and a venture capital arm. The core innovation portion has tackled 48 business challenges with 349 cross-functional partners, resulting in 134 activated or completed solutions. Most impressively, they’ve achieved a 97% sprint repeat rate, showing strong employee engagement. The CEO noted that what excited him most was seeing partners from around the world sharing ideas with “sparkle in their eye and passion in their voices.”
Closing Thoughts
Erin closed by acknowledging that behavior change takes time and resilience but can start with a spark. She highlighted Sarah’s commitment as a fierce internal change agent who makes a daily commitment to move forward despite setbacks. The presenters challenged attendees to commit to one change they would make after leaving the session.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- Meet people where they are: Treat the adoption curve as a segmentation strategy, tailoring your approach to different groups based on their readiness for change while maintaining focus on your ultimate goal.
- Embrace non-linear transformation: Like rolling a snowball, transformation follows an unpredictable path. Stay focused on the problem you’re solving while allowing flexibility in how you get there.
- Build infrastructure for sustained momentum: Create systems (like innovation champions) that transfer the energy and methods from focused innovation activities into everyday work to prevent ideas from stalling after initial enthusiasm.
Delivery on Event Focus:
Aligning Innovation with Business Strategy
This session directly addresses the focus of aligning innovation with business strategy by demonstrating how Schreiber Foods integrated innovation processes into core business challenges. By ensuring every sprint was championed by an executive and aligned with strategic priorities, they created direct connections between innovation activities and business needs. The approach of building cross-functional teams to tackle specific business challenges ensured that innovation efforts directly contributed to organizational goals rather than existing in isolation.
Delivery on Event Theme:
Harvesting Innovation and Sowing the Seeds of Future Growth
The session embodies the theme of “harvesting innovation and sowing seeds of future growth” through its comprehensive approach to cultural transformation. Schreiber harvested innovation by implementing processes that turned ideas into 134 activated solutions with measurable business impact. Simultaneously, they sowed seeds for future growth by building innovation capabilities across the organization through their champions program and by creating a culture where experimentation and possibility thinking became embedded in everyday operations.
Action Steps for Innovation Experts and Corporate Changemakers
- Map your organization’s adoption curve: Identify where different groups and individuals fall on the innovation adoption curve and develop tailored approaches for each segment.
- Implement executive-championed sprints: Select high-priority business challenges and pair them with executive sponsors to ensure focus and resources for innovation efforts.
- Create an innovation champions network: Identify and develop individuals across functions who can help maintain momentum after formal innovation activities and embed new ways of working into everyday operations.
- Build vulnerability into your process: Create structured opportunities to share work-in-progress with stakeholders to build buy-in and improve ideas through early feedback.
- Make a daily commitment to change: Successful change agents recommit daily to moving forward despite setbacks, focusing on small wins that build toward larger transformation.