How Site Visits Speed Innovative Changes
Team visits to companies that have successfully developed innovative processes can help organizations accelerate and ease their own innovation processes.
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To compete and survive, companies need to adopt innovative ways of working, but new options seem to be emerging more frequently than ever before. Fortunately, not all innovative practices need to be invented anew. Many — such as lean management, digitization, and agile approaches — have already been conceptualized and employed by other companies or institutions.
A leadership team is expected to drive the transition to new innovation practices and overcome obstacles — one of which may be “not invented here” syndrome.1 Another common hurdle is misalignment in leadership team members’ conviction in the value of a specific innovation, often due to their varying levels of knowledge about it. While the CEO may be quite familiar with a particular approach and perhaps may even have seen it in practice, other members may have only heard buzzwords and have a surface-level understanding. Having different levels of information can result in misalignment and potentially even in resistance to change.
The social proof of witnessing an innovation working successfully in another organization validates its feasibility and benefits.
Key Concepts of ‘Go and See Together’
As managing director of the German subsidiary of SC Johnson (SCJ), I became convinced that Go and See Together (GST) was an ideal method to build quick and enduring alignment within the leadership team and significantly raise the probability of a successful innovation adoption. In one exemplary case, we needed to find and implement a superior sales forecasting and operating system for our subsidiary because our mix of overstocks and out-of-stocks had become intolerable. Our earnings and cash flow had taken a hit as a consequence, and our relationships with trade customers had become strained.
To address this, I took my six-person leadership team to visit another European SCJ affiliate that was already using an innovative sales forecasting and operating system. I had learned about the effectiveness of this system and was confident that it could be our solution as well. Every member of my team quickly agreed once they saw it in use. We were able to implement it quickly and successfully across our organization with great business results. The key was that the whole management team went to the source and saw the innovative system in action. This is the essence of GST.
In any change process, creating a guiding coalition is a critical early step.2 But GST goes beyond establishing such a team — it stresses the need for all members of the leadership team to observe the innovation in practice. Let’s look at the benefits of each component.
- Go: Visiting another company that has successfully implemented an innovative way of working offers a chance to observe real-life problem-solving and outcomes, facilitating deeper learning.3 Major changes can trigger fear of an innovation in many organizations, but that concern usually fades if people are able to observe the source of their fear in action. This principle of going to the source is very similar to Toyota’s genchi genbutsu and gemba walk, which are key pillars of its successful culture.4
- See: The social proof of witnessing an innovation working successfully in another organization validates its feasibility and benefits.5 Seeing a solution succeed firsthand can reduce resistance to change. As the saying goes, “Seeing is believing.”
- Together: The shared experience of the full leadership team fosters a common understanding.6 Cohesion and trust develop as team members engage in a shared activity, such as a joint visit. Commitment and a sense of ownership grow as all team members feel involved in the learning process and perceive the new way of working as their own idea rather than one that’s being imposed on them.
GST Success Stories
One of the most impressive success stories of GST comes from the auto industry. Early in the 1990s, Porsche, the German car manufacturer, was in a deep crisis.7 Its sales had slid from 50,000 cars in the boom year of 1986 to only 14,000 cars by 1992. New models that were in the pipeline took five years to be brought to fruition due to Porsche’s antiquated sequential product development system.
When Wendelin Wiedeking was named CEO in 1991, it was immediately obvious to him that Porsche’s fundamental problem was cost. The time, effort, inventories, tools, and space needed by the best Japanese companies to produce a similar car were just a fraction of Porsche’s.8 Wiedeking asked all of the leaders who directly reported to him to read The Machine That Changed the World, a book that describes the Toyota Production System (TPS), a lean manufacturing methodology that has become the driver of Toyota’s enduring success.9 As Wiedeking coordinated a visit to some Japanese car manufacturers, he was shocked that they were willing to show him and his team everything about their lean production systems. And indeed, on the ground in Japan, the auto companies proved to be extremely open in disclosing their lean management methods. (Later, Porsche even worked with Toyota consultants on restructuring processes at its German plant.)
Wiedeking arranged a total of four trips to Japan in a short time span. The first visit included only his direct reports, but on subsequent trips, he also invited shop-floor workers and members of the works council to join him and his executive team.10 This tremendously increased alignment and buy-in among all employees for the new lean management methods. Wiedeking was thus able to turn Porsche around and put it on a successful path for some decades.
The health care industry has also used GST successfully. After hearing about lean manufacturing’s avoidance of waste and, in particular, about the TPS from a seat neighbor on a flight in 2001, J. Michael Rona, president of Virginia Mason Medical Center (VMMC) in Seattle, was intrigued.11 It took little effort to stoke CEO and chairman Gary Kaplan’s interest in this new, lean way of working. The organization’s competitiveness had been suffering, so Kaplan had already been rallying his organization around a new mission to become the quality leader in health care.
In any change process, creating a guiding coalition is a critical early step.
In June 2002, Kaplan took the entire top row of the VMMC organizational chart, some 30 people, to visit Toyota’s headquarters for a 13-day immersion in TPS practices.12 The trip helped Kaplan align the leadership team around the need to change VMMC’s practices and triggered a reorganization. VMCC successfully introduced its own lean management system, the Virginia Mason Production System, following the principles of the TPS.
After the first trip to Japan, Kaplan took employees, from senior executives to physicians and nurses, on nine additional trips in order to immerse them in lean manufacturing. After one of his surgeons initially refused to accompany him to Japan, Kaplan had a very clear message: “All department chairs and VPs must go if they want to become executives with us.”13 The teams also visited other Japanese companies, including Hitachi, and conferred with Shingijutsu, a leading international consultancy, about the TPS.
Over the years, VMMC became very successful in significantly reducing patient wait times, decreasing staff walking distances, increasing productivity, and shrinking space requirements and capital expenditures.14 Later, other U.S. hospitals, such as the Mayo Clinic, adopted lean management approaches when implementing new care-delivery models.15
European companies’ trips to Silicon Valley — typically to visit Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Salesforce, or PayPal — are widely known within the tech industry. One of the many companies to visit the tech hub was Otto Group, today a leading German e-commerce company. Early in the 2000s, then-CEO Rainer Hillebrand wanted all leadership team members — 18 board members and directors — to accompany him to California for a digital learning visit.16 He had a hard time convincing one of his directors, who wanted to remain in Hamburg, and proposed that he join the traveling team via video call.
After the trip that the director eventually did join, he told Hillebrand that it was the best thing that could have happened to him. “Now I finally understand what you’re talking about and what’s so different in [Silicon] Valley,” he said.17 The leadership team’s joint visit to Silicon Valley was the starting point of a very successful transformation of Otto Group. Nowadays, more than 70% of its revenue comes from the digitized mail-ordering business.
Procter & Gamble, too, has been making generous use of the GST approach in order to reengineer its innovation processes. In July 2016, P&G’s then-CEO, David Taylor, and his leadership team visited Silicon Valley to align around lean innovation, which involves constantly experimenting, using minimum viable products, and learning from each experiment.18 Later, in 2019, a P&G marketing leadership team went to Silicon Valley to draw inspiration from agile startups, and, as a result, the company decided to reskill its brand managers to operate like entrepreneurs.
Inviting employees to join executives on site visits can tremendously increase buy-in for new lean management methods.
These efforts to improve P&G’s innovation capabilities were actually preceded by those of an earlier CEO, A.G. Lafley, who had introduced a design thinking initiative in the early 2000s. Together with Claudia Kotchka, whom he had appointed P&G’s first head of design, in 2003, Lafley took his entire global leadership team of 35 to the design and innovation consultancy IDEO in San Francisco to expose them to the experience of design thinking.20 Some of the visiting managers who initially were critical of the new method became fervent supporters once they participated in the workshops.
Following this visit, Kotchka took her design team to Mattel to understand its Project Platypus initiative, which was designed to fuel innovation by means of a cross-disciplinary, fully dedicated team and to map a new way to create toys that would be infused with design thinking.21 Building on this eye-opening visit, the P&G team developed a similar concept called Clay Street.22 To provide Clay Street team members with new, immersive experiences that would help them see, think, and solve problems differently, they were located in a building about a mile from P&G’s head office in Cincinnati.23 Clay Street played an integral part in P&G’s extremely successful period under Lafley’s leadership, during which the company’s innovation success rate doubled, from 25% to 50%.24
Making GST Work for You
These guidelines can help optimize the impact and success of your team’s GST visits and prevent such efforts from being derailed.
- Pre-visit preparation: Ensure that all team members understand the purpose and importance of the visit. They should all define specific objectives and draft the questions to be asked together. To maximize the effectiveness of the visit, the team may need to read or review relevant materials in advance.
- Post-observation debrief: Collect all team members’ observations and compile a list of key joint insights immediately after the visit. This step is important to preventing, as much as possible, unspoken assumptions and misperceptions by some team members, which may calcify if not discussed and possibly challenged.
- Pre-return action plan: Align on next steps and deadlines, and assign responsibilities for implementation. The potential challenges of implementation should also be discussed and reflected in the plan. It is important to take this step before the leadership team disperses after the visit.
- Post-return briefing: Brief all pertinent employees on the findings of the visit in order to ensure their buy-in, and assign tasks to the appropriate people.
- Continuous monitoring: Track progress against milestones and goals to maintain momentum, and adjust implementation strategies as needed.
The greater the change or fear of change, the higher the likelihood of resistance to change — and the less experience an organization has with change, the more GST is indicated as an intervention. Because employees will be able to observe any fissures in the leadership team’s alignment, executive insistence on all team members’ participation in GST initiatives is an absolute necessity. The cost of traveling to the source with a complete leadership team easily pays off, in most cases, due to increased alignment, a higher probability of successful change, time savings resulting from less resistance to innovation, and, of course, a much faster and more successful innovation implementation.
References (24)
1. R.-C. Wentz, “Beating ‘Not Invented Here’ Syndrome,” MIT Sloan Management Review 66, no. 1 (fall 2024): 12-13.
2. J.P. Kotter, “Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail,” Harvard Business Review 73, no. 2 (March-April 1995): 59-67.
3. D. Kolb, “Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development,” 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2014); and S. McLeod, “Kolb’s Learning Styles and Experiential Learning Cycle,” Simply Psychology, March 19, 2025, www.simplypsychology.org.
4. J.K. Liker and M. Hoseus, “Toyota Culture: The Heart and Soul of the Toyota Way” (McGraw-Hill, 2008); or J. Liker, “Lessons From Toyota: How to Do a Gemba Walk and Why You Need To,” Medium, June 7, 2018, https://medium.com.
5. R.B. Cialdini, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” rev. ed. (Harper Business, 2006).
6. A. Bandura, “Social Learning Theory” (Prentice Hall, 1977); and S. McLeod, “Albert Bandura’s Social Learning Theory,” Simply Psychology, March 18, 2025, www.simplypsychology.org.
7. J.P. Womack and D.T. Jones, “Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation,” rev. ed. (Free Press, 2003).
8. Ibid.
9. J.P. Womack, D.T. Jones, and D. Roos, “The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production” (Rawson Associates, 1990).
10. A works council (“Betriebsrat” in German) is an internal body of elected employees that represents all employees within a company to improve working conditions and address workplace issues. A trade union, on the other hand, is an external organization that represents workers’ interests more broadly, often on an industry or national level. The members of a works council may or may not be affiliated with a (trade) union.
11. D.O. Weber, “Toyota-Style Management Drives Virginia Mason,” Physician Executive 32, no. 1 (January-February 2006): 12-17; and R.M.J. Bohmer and E.M. Ferlins, “Virginia Mason Medical Center,” Harvard Business School case no. 9-606-044 (Harvard Business School Publishing, October 2008).
12. Ibid.
13. “Interview With Dr. Gary Kaplan, Virginia Mason Medical Center,” Shingijutsu USA, accessed Aug. 12, 2025, www.shingijutsuusa.com.
14. Bohmer and Ferlins, “Virginia Mason Medical Center.”
15. Weber, “Toyota-Style Management,” 12-17.
16. R. Hillebrand, T. Müller, and T. Schumacher, “Wir sind mehr als eine Lernwiese für den Konzern,” OrganisationsEntwicklung 1 (2018): 4-30; and N. Kreimeier, “‘Wir irren uns empor,’” Capital, March 19, 2015, www.capital.de.
17. Hillebrand, Müller, and Schumacher, “Wir sind mehr als eine Lernwiese,” 4-30.
18. E. Truelove, L.A. Hill, and E. Tedards, “Kathy Fish at Procter & Gamble: Navigating Industry Disruption by Disrupting From Within,” Harvard Business School case no. 9-421-012 (Harvard Business School Publishing, July 2020).
19. “P&G’s Marketers Learn From Silicon Valley,” WARC, Oct. 7, 2019, www.warc.com.
20. H. Yu, “Beyond the Beautiful: How Design Thinking Shaped P&G’s Strategy,” PDF file (International Institute for Management Development, 2016), https://imd.widen.net.
21. S. D’Amico, “What I Learned Leading P&G’s Innovation Lab,” Hello Creativity (blog), Oct. 12, 2020, www.hellocreativity.com.
22. A.G. Lafley and R. Charan, “The Game-Changer: How You Can Drive Revenue and Profit Growth With Innovation” (Crown Business, 2008).
23. D’Amico, “What I Learned.”
24. Lafley and Charan, “The Game-Changer.”
