In an unassuming conference room located on the first floor of Taco Bell’s expansive Irvine, California, headquarters, an energized group of about 50 people gather to brainstorm their ideas on how to solve some of the chain’s biggest challenges.
There are no tables in sight – an intentional omission to break down inadvertent conversational barriers. The group is diverse, including 13 participants from Taco Bell’s nascent global system. On this particular day, they’re breaking the ice by trying to come up with solutions to each other’s personal challenges. One participant from London tells his counterpart, for example, that he and his partner can’t decide if they want to live in the city any longer or move to where there is more space.
From there, the group is tasked with ideating how to sell products like invisible wallpaper or shoes for centipedes. If it sounds ridiculous, that’s the point. The goal is to get participants comfortable with each other and, ideally, remove judgement. These employees are here to learn the design thinking process, a methodology created in the 1950s to help come up with innovation solutions to complex issues using five stages: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, and test. Essentially, participants learn how to think in a completely different way than what they’re used to.
After the icebreaker session, they’re tasked with using their new skills to ideate solutions to Taco Bell’s challenges, throwing hundreds of ideas into the mix and organizing them into bullet points on 11-by-17-inch sheets of paper that are then whittled down by a group of six or seven company stakeholders. Taco Bell then puts a pilot in place to ensure an idea’s feasibility. In this case, the “creative brief” – or challenge – is how to raise the brand’s awareness in international markets as it ramps up that part of the business.
This is what it’s like to be a part of Taco Bell’s Internal Incubator program, first conceived in early 2020, just prior to the pandemic. It is the brainchild of former CEO Mark King, who believed the brand would thrive if it embraced “restless creativity,” and the way to do that was to pull as many ideas from as many people within the organization as possible, but to do so in a process-supported organized fashion.
The first incubator session was held in 2021 when Taco Bell’s leaders were trying to figure out how to maintain company culture in a newly hybrid world. The program has continued under current CEO Sean Tresvant. The latest cohort marked the first time international employees have participated, a nod to the company’s new charge under Tresvant, and a bridge between the two leaders, according to Scott Mezvinsky, president of North America and international.
“Mark was about restless creativity. Sean is [about] how to make the brand truly global and not just a U.S. business, but also an international business and to bring them together more tightly. Bringing the internal incubator global is part of it,” he said. “We’re committed to making Taco Bell International the next growth engine for [parent company] Yum Brands and part of that is knowing that all the ideas don’t have to come from the same people. It’s one thing to say we’re global, but we’re in Irvine. We’re bringing in people from all over the world to solicit ideas and help us have a more global mindset.”
Taco Bell’s director of corporate communications and employee engagement Natasha Gaffoglio has been involved in the incubator program since it began. She said the underlying goal is to “shatter peoples’ common ideas” that they’re not creative. That’s where the design thinking process comes into play. It’s a unique approach for a restaurant company, but Gaffoglio said it has been highly effective in not only bringing new solutions to the table, but also creating more employee engagement and development opportunities.
“Our industry is so multifaceted that you just never know what the next challenge is going to be, and you can only prepare for so much,” Gaffoglio said. “To have a program with hundreds of employees helping to solve it is a huge benefit. And, at the end of the day, employees end up trained in this process and even if their idea never came to life, they now have these tools to think differently and they can teach their own teams what they learned. It’s planting a bigger seed and making us better.”
One of the initial ideas that surfaced from the incubator program was based on a dating app model, where employees were paired up with someone in a function that they wanted to learn more about – for example, a marketing associate wanting to learn about finance. That idea extended to restaurant teams and into a program now called Career Connect, in which a select number of restaurant employees are paired with someone at the corporate office who works in a field they’re studying.
Since its launch, there have been seven incubator sessions, each including about 50 people from various functions. This latest session, however, feels different because of the global aspect.
“We should have more restaurants internationally than we do, and to me that’s a positive,” Mezvinsky said. “You see KFC, McDonald’s, Pizza Hut and just look at those [international] numbers – Taco Bell is far from those and that’s the opportunity that gets us excited. But it’s not easy to take a brand that has low awareness outside of the U.S. consistently. This program helps us codify how to do that. We’re democratizing the challenge and the opportunity on how to make this a truly global brand.”
Contact Alicia Kelso at [email protected]
