Innochat Transcript – 13 August – The Effects of Booms and Busts on Innovation
August 13, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
David W. Locke stepped in this week with a great framing post and moderation of the topic: The Effects of Booms and Busts on Innovation. Many thanks to David for his efforts!
A vibrant discussion was had and the perils of commoditization came to light as a pattern that drives down innovation performance due to resultant cost pressures and resource constraints. It was also interesting to see discussion on how companies focused on responding to market cycles need to pay attention to their own product lifecycle management, too.
David Locke’s tweet: “Fast followers don’t innovate. They just drag your price down.” certainly points toward the competitive environment in a post-boom world. Survival outweighs all other factors. Perhaps the most telling tweet he offered was his assessment on the current state of the economy: “It’s not just biz not usual, there is no biz, and will not be any biz for a very long time. Boom ate future.”
Ouch
Innovation & the Status Quo: The perils of groupthink, stereotyping and system justification
August 9, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 2 Comments
Everything is in a state of flux, including the status quo.
- Robert Byrne
Effective innovation demands embracing change. Unless you are completely dissatisfied with what you have now, the idea of forsaking some of your present discomfort for the pain of full-blown change not only seems unlikely, it is downright foolish. This is the conundrum faced by those tasked with improving their organization’s innovation culture. (“Wet noodle at the ready? Push! Push, I say!”)
Regardless of whether we choose to embrace it or not, change happens. The rules of participation are frighteningly simple—lead, follow, or get out of the way (with a hat tip to General Patton.) But here’s the issue: what we say we want to do (innovate) is not necessarily what we end up doing (clinging to our known circumstances), because so much in our individual psychology is reinforced when we gather with others in groups. We fall prey to our inability to avoid groupthink, we rely on stereotypes, and we cling to our current circumstances by embracing system justification.
Mine! Mine! Mine!
If you’re not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at forty you have no brain.
- Winston Churchill
As much as Churchill’s quote above rankles me, I cannot deny it. The young easily seek out and embrace the new, because they have a bias towards discovery. They are “wired” to look for ways they can differentiate themselves from their elders, and even classify themselves as distinct and separate from their peers based on their passing passions.
The young, and perhaps the young-at-heart, are predisposed to innovation. They possess things fleetingly—not with less longing or even covetousness, but simply with the notion that something newer and brighter and shinier will arrive soon. For them, the novelty of the new outweighs the inconvenience of making a change, because it is relatively easy to move on to the next new thing if you haven’t lived with the old thing for very long. (This may be one of the primary reasons why consumerism has gained such a toe-hold among burgeoning middle-class youth worldwide.)
Those older and, if we are casting about for additional generalizations, wiser do seem to slide into conservative patterns. The pace at which they exchange the old for the new slows down. Fads pass by at an alarming rate. Innovations in technology and customs become more elusive. Why? Primarily the status quo, like some extraordinary gravitational object at the center of our lives, begins to take hold and lock things into our personal orbits. This causes habits to form around the objects and ideas that comfort us, including existing products and services. And we hold on to them dearly, as though they were the true bedrock of our existence.
In light of this, is it any wonder that innovations struggle to come to life in organizations where management systems and processes are usually governed by those in place the longest?
The problem with habit-forming
The riskiest thing we can do is just maintain the status quo.
- Bob Iger
We have a cognitive bias for the status quo. People tend not to change an established pattern of behavior unless they have a direct and compelling incentive. Status quo bias is a reliance on the status quo in the absence of supporting evidence in its favor, or even in the case of evidence for not supporting its sustenance. Arguing to preserve the status quo is usually happens when people oppose a large, often radical change. Status quo bias accepts the present situation without the benefit of any inquiry or conversation about its merits.
Hard at work supporting the status quo is system justification. System justification is a theory within social psychology that holds that people not only want to see themselves and their own groups favorably, but they also want to look favorably on the overarching social order (the system they are justifying). A consequence of this behavior is that existing social, economic, and political arrangements across organizations (small or large) are often preferred, and any alternatives to the status quo, if conceived of, are maligned or avoided. System justification works to make the present circumstances unassailable.
The status quo, like a pack-a-day smoking habit, is a hard habit to break.
When faced with a bias-led desire to retain the status quo, newly conceived innovations may face the psychological equivalent of the immoveable object. Breaking through that requires putting the status quo front and center. It means not accepting it at face value, but rather examining it to reveal its deficiencies and incapacities in a public manner. Only by opening up the status quo to analysis can we make room for new thinking and behavior that attends innovation.
But that is only the beginning.
Yes, we’re all individuals
Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.
- Erica Jong
Along with the impossibility of shedding an unexamined status quo, we are also faced with unexplored attitudes that provide support to the status quo by reinforcing our thinking about people in our organizations. This stagnant thinking is the result of stereotyping. Stereotypes are insidious, standardized and simplified concepts of classes or groups of people based on some prior assumptions. They are often learned by observing others, and may be highly contagious, and possibly one of the most harmful forms of groupthink pervading social structures.
As much as we might believe we are unique and truly individualistic in our world views it is remarkable how much stereotyping is at play in the life of our organizations. Our familiarity with negative stereotypes in terms of gender roles or race may lead us to believe we are beyond that, but in organizations, stereotyping is rife. Consider the ways in which we stereotype engineers, or accountants, or human resource professionals; how often do we fall prey to the casual shorthand of referring to all members of a business function in the same general terms? By doing so, we prevent our ability to see circumstances clearly, seeing behavior and explaining it away, rather than observing without judgment in order to form true insights.
The peril of stereotypes, especially when buttressed by the warm embrace of the status quo, is that they leave little room for the novel. They dismiss or disregard differences at the expense of perceived uniformity, and cut off yet another path to creativity and innovation.
Look anew with fresh eyes
The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew.
- Abraham Lincoln
If ever there was a time that we needed to innovate, it is today. The status quo is not an acceptable alternative. A stereotypical view of the people around us will give us no source of joy, either. We must break our habits and see the world around us with fresh eyes. That might even mean taking a close look at where we stand (or sit) in the world, too.
By moving our position, and choosing to question what we think we know, we can begin to create room for more innovative solutions to the pressing demands of the present. To keep doing what we are doing seems not only foolish, it may be downright dangerous.
What can you see anew?
Innovation Herds: Me-too-ism & the dumbness of crowds
July 26, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 3 Comments
Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ.
- English Proverb
In honor of the recent football (okay, soccer) World Cup—and congratulations to South Africa for pulling off a sterling tournament (Bafana Bafana!) and the Spaniards for their first tournament victory—it seems appropriate to consider the impact of the herd on innovation practices. Not just any herd, though; this is the herd that forms when two opposing packs of 5-year-olds play the glorious game: the herd of Pee Wee Soccer.
Sound and motion with little to show for it
For those of you who don’t have children or have not seen children this age playing soccer, you have missed what certainly is an experience. The rules of soccer seem immaterial. Yes, there is a ball in play. Yes, there are referees and linespeople. Yes, there are goals at each end of the usually shortened field and two equal-numbered teams of players. The basic framework is the same, but the way the game is played is quite…different.
The pervading game objective practiced by both teams is to quite literally “crowd the ball”: where the ball goes, that’s where all players attempt to go, except for those few who become distracted by a parent or sibling on the sideline, or by the color of the sky, or by something bright and shiny, or need to re-enact football hooliganism an so on. You get the picture. What forms is a tight pack around the ball, hiding it from the spectator’s view, and which moves as a herd up and down the field. Occasionally the ball will “escape,” only to be recaptured by one of the team members who, in their inability to run and dribble the ball simultaneously, will stall until the rest of the members from both teams re-form the herd.
No one here but us sheeple
The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What of this herd? And what does it have to say about the impact of the herd mentality on innovation? A short explanation can be found here.
Given our complex worlds with their voluminous sensory inputs, we are wired to adopt a series of mental shortcuts (termed heuristics) that enable us to process only the amount of data necessary, in as short a time as possible, to meet our immediate needs. Think of heuristics as experience-based models that help in problem-solving and discovery. They drive much of our daily behavior without us even recognizing it. The reason they are effective is that they relieve us from treating every circumstance as critically important, offering relief from having to think too hard. Is it really necessary to calculate the optimum parking space at the mall, taking into consideration timing, prevailing weather, shopping patterns, etc.? No? Right—open space, here I come!
By employing heuristics, we create a series of short cuts that enable us to focus on more complex issues, more holistically and systemically, as the need arises. Heuristics, however, reinforce situational thinking and action. In recent studies conducted at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just 5 percent to influence a crowd’s direction—and that the other 95 percent follow without realizing it. If we hearken back to the heady days of the dot-com book in the early 2000s, we can see this pattern in the practices of developers, who threw together “me-too” websites; institutional investors, who threw money at anything with a website; and stock market investors, who piled their money into every “sure thing” they heard about from their hairdresser, dog walker, or cab driver. And that herd behavior ended well, didn’t it?
Wise crowds and the benefit of discomfort
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
- Archibald MacLeish
Unless we take steps to separate ourselves from the crowd and seek to break our ingrained patterns of thinking, we will continue to be drawn to the herd. In James Surowiecki’s bestseller The Wisdom of the Crowds, he noted that there are highly functional types of groups that possess not a herd mentality, but an inherent wisdom. From his perspective, if four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts. Surowiecki says that wisdom will prevail even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need 1) diversity of opinion; 2) independence of members from one another; 3) decentralization; and 4) a good method for aggregating opinions. In short, effective groups need guidelines (like heuristics), but ones that are focused on differentiation and not similarity. “Me-too” has to be retired so that “What if” might prevail.
Unfortunately, when wisdom meets the herd, the prevailing outcome is the dumbness of the crowds.
To reach beyond the herd, organizations must embrace difference and the discomfort that comes from not adopting the first, or easiest, answer to a presenting challenge. Clay Shirky, a professor in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, described in his book Here Comes Everybody the benefits of groups breaking out of the herd mentality and moving toward “collaborative production”:
Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of coordination.
Shirky, pp. 109
Over time, even the Pee Wee Soccer team learns how to play the game. Each player discovers his or her own strengths, and a good coach will recognize those differences and create something greater than a mob out of them. Their efforts become grounded in collaborative production. In our organizations, innovation processes that support our thinking and don’t provide ready answers give us the opportunity to develop solutions that reach beyond the herd. We can choose to stretch past the simple and explore the complex so that our solutions are new and not “me-too.”
We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
- General George S. Patton
Being in a herd is actually a matter of choice, one that must be made consciously in order for a range of alternatives to be revealed. In a competitive marketplace, would you rather be in the herd, where the view rarely changes, or out front? I thought so.
Innovation in the Rear View Mirror – The challenge of revisionist history and hindsight bias
July 9, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 3 Comments
I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
- Winston Churchill
Raise your hands if you have ever met someone who has a tendency to relive their glory days. You know, that one person in a group who fondly remembers better times, or who always finds the present lacking because “the last time this same thing happened, there was a much better result”? We are not talking about the story teller, who fires up those around them with their passionate recounting of a victory or a discovery, nor even someone who occasionally reminisces. We’re talking about the person with a pathological need to live in the past, who might be physically in the present but whose mind is a year or ten in the past. Strangely enough, they keep visiting the present, trying to capture us and cart us back there with them.
We’re going to do what we’ve always done (and wonder why we always get what we’ve always got)
May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.
- Irish Saying
As we noted in a previous post, storytelling has a vital role in a healthy and vibrant organization. This type of storyteller is not the same. The resident revisionist historian simply cannot let go of the past. With perfect hindsight they see how things were so much better before, and that when change occurred, it put us on the road to ruin. The revisionist doesn’t seek to use their past experience to inform their present-day actions. They would rather live in the past. Over and over and over again.
What students in the United States knew of George Washington’s youth was that he apparently chopped down a cherry tree on the family property. Unfortunately, this is a blatant piece of revisionist history. An archaeological dig at the Washington family home found no such cherry trees. In fact, additional research uncovered that the original biographer of Washington, Mason Locke Weems, fabricated the story in order to make the general, first president, founding father, and all-round statesman “more honest”! Strange to think that aggressively pruning a prunus avium and not lying about it would be considered a honest act.
This fabrication and the apocryphal story built upon it lend little to Washington’s character, and revisionist history lends little to the life of an organization. Sorting the truth from fact can be a running battle that can exhaust an organization, leaving fewer resources for creative endeavors, and drain the will of the organization.
A friend of mine, Sam, used to tag people as “radiators” and “drains.” Which I believe he picked up elsewhere (perhaps here?) Now, I’m not one for labels. They’re inflexible and terribly difficult to remove once in place. But his notion that people either radiate energy to those around them or they drain it from them — like so many dim-witted psychic vampires — rings appallingly true.
How do you think this plays in an organization attempting to embrace and extend its ability to innovate? Not well at all.
Looking forward but only seeing the rear view mirror
In today’s complex and fast-moving world, what we need even more than foresight or hindsight is insight.
- Anonymous
Another powerful, distorting perspective present in the psychology of organizations is hindsight bias. This is the inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been observed experimentally in a variety of settings, often where defined levels of expertise are expected, including politics, sports, games, and medicine. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out to be correct. This inaccurate assessment of reality after it has occurred is also referred to as “creeping determinism.”
How does hindsight bias impact an organization’s ability to innovate?
By disguising past performance, hindsight bias makes it difficult to determine how original actions may have resulted in a specific outcome. The memory of events may become so distorted that it bears little resemblance to the reality of what occurred; that makes any potential lesson learned not only poor but potentially hazardous.
Learn from your mistakes – don’t relive them
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Frank and honest sharing of information is for a wider benefit. It creates a mental space for new ideas to crop up or flood in. This differentiates it from the dynamic surrounding those who are “revisionistas” and “hindsighteers.” (There should be a club for this which involves hats with rearview mirrors attached, I’m sure.) In this dynamic, any benefit, if it can be called that, is derived primarily for themselves. Their approaches leave little room for learning, positive affirmation of true success, or the opportunity for discovering a more holistic solution to the pressing challenges being addressed.
Mistakes and missteps for anyone interested in innovation are a gift. They help define more clearly “where you ought to go.” In being honest about our challenges and the qualities of our successes, and not disguising them or explaining them away through false tales, we will build towards innovations that are truly extraordinary.
Innovation & Authority – Why accepting authority may mean dumbing down
June 28, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
Think for yourself and question authority.
- Timothy Leary
When introducing innovation into existing, stable organizations and systems, you must navigate around authority. Like the tip of an iceberg, the influence of authority across an organization may be quite visible, but that only accounts 
for a small percentage of the influence it has on the successful introduction of an innovation. The types of authority involved are not only the explicit authority that comes with subject-matter expertise, role definition, and position within a hierarchy, but also the perception of authority, real or imagined. That influence lies hidden from view but is no less profound, especially when you run into it.
Rather than dwell on the explicit authority, we’ll explore three different aspects of perceived authority: directed deference, projection bias, and asymmetric insight. Each bias offers a different slant on the challenge of authority to the viability of innovation. Once again, forewarned is forearmed.
I don’t know much, but I know I love you
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
- Albert Einstein
There is an ongoing infatuation with the idea of the heroic leader in organizations that belies the true extent of their power and capability. Setting aside his tin ear and habit of only opening his mouth to exchange feet, Tony Hayward, the ever-hapless and likely short-term CEO of BP, is a case in point. While serving as a focal point for the ire of a nation looking on in horror at the disaster playing out in the Gulf of Mexico as a result of BP’s oil spill, Mr. Hayward can personally do little more than remain the public face of his company. Our expectations of him as a leader have not been met. For some reason, we actually expected him to correct the damage his company has wrought. A similar pattern exists in the way people appear to perceive President Obama. In both cases, the circumstances these leaders find themselves in overrun the public’s perception of their responsiveness and capabilities.
Each leader has been measured and found wanting. But the reverse is true, too.
We love the myth of the heroic CEO. The man or woman who, through their personal excellence, intestinal fortitude (aka, guts), and general capacity for delivering results saves the ailing enterprise is a tale we love to hear. Much of the reporting of a company’s success refers to the role of a heroic CEO. This too is a false perspective. We ascribe collective success to individuals, especially in circumstances where we have little understanding of the context in which success was achieved.
This mindset is termed directed deference, and it represents the tendency to value an ambiguous stimulus (e.g., a company’s financial performance) according to the opinion of someone who is seen as an authority on the topic. For those who seek to innovate, it means that what is and is not possible may be impacted by our perspective of those who lead us. If we fail to question our perspectives, we may kill an innovation before giving it an opportunity to grow into something meaningful.
I’m feeling you
All authority belongs to the people.
- Thomas Jefferson
Another aspect of the way our perspective on leadership can influence innovation choices is found in projection bias, the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one’s future selves) share one’s current emotional states, thoughts, and values. The weight of our own perspective means we may color our choices based on personal experience rather than the facts on the ground.
The impact of projection bias on innovation is one of homogeneity. The inclination to look across the organization and see only ourselves, or slight variations of ourselves, limits what we can conceive. Our leaders, and their motivations, look like our own (or what they would be if we were in the same position). This means that our attempts at innovation may suffer from small ambitions and a limited will to see them to success. Or we may misread what the organization can tolerate and over-commit resources to fruitless endeavors.
Knowledge and understanding are essential to avoid the pitfalls inherent in this slanted perspective.
I know you are, but what am I?
Rather than having a twisted perspective of a leader’s motivations and attributes, what if we think we know others better than they know us? A reversal of the directed deference perceptional bias is the illusion of asymmetric insight, which occurs when people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers’ knowledge of them. Instead of seeing an authority figure external to us, we find one in ourselves. Falling into asymmetric insight bias means we believe our keen powers of insight and remarkable personal ability to assess the mannerisms and patterns of behavior in others enables us to stay one step ahead of the experience curve. At an extreme, we consider ourselves flawless prediction engines.
The only problem with this is that in the absence of data, our predictions are not rooted in any basis of reason, and our successes come from pure luck rather than wisdom.
From an innovation perspective, we are mentally running through the childhood taunt, “I know you are, but what am I?” a never-ending response to all perceived or actual slights or criticisms. Whether ignoring the evidence of a particular situation or ascribing our innovation success to our ability to second-guess others’ motivations, we are playing a foolish game.
How do we address these biases? How do we contend, in the absence of any meaningful information, with the over-reliance on position or status as a signifier for comprehension, wisdom, or insight? The answer comes through observation and engagement. By taking the time to assess the ways in which our innovation efforts are perceived and understood, we can gain more data that will inform our decision-making and design practices. But unless we seek to close the gaps in our ignorance with data gathered through inquiry instead of our own biases, our innovation efforts will struggle to be realized.
Anyone who in discussion relies upon authority uses, not his understanding, but rather his memory.
- Leonardo da Vinci
Innovation & Memory – Recollection plays havoc with our innovation efforts
May 28, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The true art of memory is the art of attention.
- Samuel Johnson
The news is shocking, but true. Memories are fictitious! And it seems the more we call on them the more likely they are to bend and shift over time. Most of us have snapshot memories – those memories formed by extraordinary events. For some it might be their wedding day, or birth of a child, or a hole-in-one while playing golf. Unfortunately, for most of us, the most commonly shared snapshot memories are usually formed by catastrophe and disasters widely reported in the media. 
As clear and detailed as these memories seem to us, as we reflect on them and share them with others psychologists find they are surprisingly inaccurate. Our inaccurate recall influences how we respond when facing similar circumstances; which means our memories can be quite detrimental to our ability to effectively innovate.
Hand me my rose-colored glasses
Memory is deceptive because it is colored by today’s events.
- Albert Einstein
When bringing new products to market the stories of success told within an organization often fail to capture the impediments to success along the way. Our tendency is to believe that the decision making processes in organizations are robust and analytical enough to prevent biases. We gather data from a variety of sources and build our product portfolios based on “the facts”. However, even if someone has sought and assessed the alternatives for investment in a neutral manner, they may still remember data selectively to reinforce their expectations. This effect is called selective recall, confirmatory memory or access-biased memory.
There are conflicting psychological theories about selective recall. Schema theory predicts that information matching prior expectations will be more easily stored and recalled. Some alternative approaches say that surprising information stands out more and so is more memorable. Predictions from both these theories have been confirmed in different experimental contexts, with no theory winning outright. What is more interesting is the influence our remembering of past success holds over our current choices.
In remembering our previous successes Karim Nader, a neuroscientist at McGill University in Montreal, has established a theory stating that the very act of remembering can change our memories. This theory runs counter to the established perspective that once a memory is formed it remains largely intact. Even more challenging is his statement that our most vivid memories are actually prone to the most change over time. He believes that it may be impossible for humans or any other animal to bring a memory to mind without altering it in some way. Like an old magnetic audio tape (remember those?!), the more times it is replayed the more degraded the sound becomes, our recollections are “rewritten” back to memory in a different part of the brain and somewhat altered by the way our recollection was triggered.
When we remember the successful delivery of a new product or service to market, we may be miss-remembering the circumstances around that release. Our memories, influencing our present choices about innovation opportunities selected for funding and development, may actually be leading us astray. How we fondly remember our past success may reinforce our positive attention towards products or services we think are similar our past successes. This blinds us to present risks and may jeopardize our intended outcomes.
Refusing to make the mistakes of the past
Many a man fails as an original thinker simply because his memory is too good.
- Frederick Nietzsche
This unwittingly biased view of the world cuts both ways. Where our remembered successes might trigger us to attempt to repeat them, by neglecting the hazards we had to overcome, our remembered failures might steer us away from what might conceivably be future successes. Hindsight bias comes into play and each recall of our failed efforts not only reinforces their impact, and our desire to avoid repeating them, it serves as the basis for predicting future failure. In addition, when we set aside our memories as they are re-written back into our synapses the new research suggested that they are changed. That change is often an amplification of the extent of the remembered failed attempt.
The pattern of confirmation bias is our tendency to prefer information that confirms our preconceived notions of how circumstances might play out, regardless of whether they are true. It may sometimes be used to encapsulate the following three cognitive biases by which people can reinforce their existing attitudes toward their innovation efforts: by selectively collecting new evidence that highlights or exaggerates the risk involved with a new endeavor, by interpreting evidence in a way that is biased towards finding hazards in the attempt, or by selectively recalling information from memory about our past failures and applying that to the present situation.
Where sometimes our memories influence us to see the world as full of possibilities, they can also hinder our ability to take the appropriate risks that are necessary for all innovation. Our fear failure, influenced by our remembered failure can prove just as detrimental to our mistaken memories of success.
Memories are additional data – treat them as such
We cannot change our memories, but we can change their meaning and the power they have over us.
- David Seamands
If the process of creating memories and remembering is so fallible, how can we minimize its impact?
One method is to be clear about the data being used to influence decision making. Make your thinking visible so that inherent biases may be called to account. When conducting an assessment of alternatives, be sure to seek counsel that is external to the decision making team especially if that team is long-term and has a wealth of shared experience. To avoid the undue influence of memory biases seek people who have different perspectives and experience. That experience will be rooted in different memories and may help mitigate over-reliance on our personal and collected recollection of what we think may have occurred.
Another method for combating our fallible memories is to directly address the amount of risk involved in the innovations we choose to pursue; our memories provide context for the risks we perceive in the present. We can address that risk by using short interval delivery strategies. This approach creates milestones that are much closer together (rather than months, usually weeks, or even days in high risk scenarios) and the scope of work being completed is usually more contained. This enables us to keep our focus on the present performance of our innovation efforts
As a practice in innovation, rather than relying on our memories to influence our choices, perhaps it is best to focus on making new memories. What do you think? How do your memories influence how you innovate?
Innovation Framing – the challenge of blinkered thinking
May 10, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
Two quite opposite qualities equally bias our minds – habits and novelty.
- Jean de la Bruyere
The life of the mind has such a significant bearing on the ability to innovate. We know that a fruitful mind is fundamental to the applied creativity and invention of innovation. Our time and attention are studiously focused on the creative spark, the genesis of new ideas, and the process of ideation. In this effort the mind can be stubborn, unwilling or simply distracted. 
Recently we explored the power of anchoring and the ways it can prevent us from abandoning an idea that is past its prime, or how it might prevent us from seeing the value in a different perspective, or the usefulness of another’s fresh take. Unfortunately that is only one of many ways in which our minds can prevent us from being truly, madly, deeply…innovative.
It’s my hilltop and everything looks fine from here
We don’t see the world the way it is. We see the world the way we are.
- Anaïs Nin
We think we are broad-minded and open to new ideas; actually, we look where we’re told and think in circles. Now, I’m not saying that we are all sheeple. But a little deluded about our good selves? Absolutely. There is a whole world of marketing that is based on self delusion.
Consider the concept of “green washing” – essentially the habit of nefarious companies painting a thin film of environmental friendliness on their products in order to appeal to our better natures. Oh, and sell more of their stuff. It’s objectionable. It’s dishonest. And it works a treat.
Why?
Well, many of us like to think of ourselves as being good stewards of the environment, as long as it doesn’t require too much effort. Those who recycle everything, have taken to growing their own food bio-dynamically in their backyards and have forsaken their cars for other communal or less aggressively carbon-footprint-enlarging forms of travel are among the minority. A vocal group, yes, but small. The keen but passive majority wants being “green” to be easy.
Willing and eager companies meet that need by framing their products in ways we immediately relate to. They use terms like, ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘energy efficient’ and use colors that evoke Spring days and clean lines. The contents of the packages are not so different as their ‘bad’ alternatives but because of the way these products are framed for us, we buy them. Often that purchase is at a premium. Because “it’s good for the environment” and we want to do good.
When it comes to how we see the world, we are the heroes of our own stories. We consider ourselves immune to marketing and yet statistically we fall prey to the same well-positioned point-of-sale display in the supermarket as the next person. We like to think we are open minded, but as was illustrated in the movie “Crash” we have deep-seated biases and prejudices that flash to the surface without us realizing it.
You really want to see the world the way it is? Really?
Bias and prejudice are attitudes to be kept in hand, not attitudes to be avoided.
- Charles Curtis
We don’t want to see the world the way it is. In fact we have a whole series of techniques, cognitive biases, which we have developed to help us not see the world the way it is. They are there to help us cope. To help us sort through the nearly infinite number of sensory inputs we experience each day so that we can make meaning of our surroundings. Framing is simply one other dominant device in the bias tool kit.
If anchoring locks us into a particular perspective, preventing us from seeing something differently, framing has an opposite effect. Framing is a set of personal filters, emotional, psychological, and intellectual constructs that we use to gather, sort, organize and analyze information about the world around us. Frames are our mental blinkers. The shades that focus us on what we think we really want to be thinking about. Framing influences the background context of our choices, often as simply as in the way in which a question is worded.
Framing enables us to act with ‘pseudocertainty’. It eliminates or lessens doubt as a way of short-cutting our need for analysis. The old saw originated by Mark Twain, that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, is another representation of the way in which framing occurs as it reveals the persuasive power of numbers. A key issue with framing is that it may be acted upon us, via marketing or through a desire to influence, or we may frame issues ourselves through our beliefs, education, ethics, etc.
How does framing influence innovation?
As a process of short-cutting our need to analyze or explore a situation or issue more deeply, especially our understanding of the immediate context, framing blinds us to possibilities and options. We simply don’t ‘see’ alternatives because of the influence of framing. We look where we’re pointed or only where our blinkered perspective will allow.
A classic example of this is from the work of Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman and his partner Amos Tversky. (We’re big fans of Kahneman and Tversky at Primed Associates!) They offered a group of research subjects two scenarios, both with essentially the same data but framed differently. In it, the subjects were asked to make a choice between two alternatives. Due to the way the scenario framing changed, the majority of subjects flipped their choices. Same data, simply re-framed meant a very different result.
I am committed to my strategic focus on…Oh look! Kittens!
When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.
- Max Planck
Framing is a psychological version of the Heisenberg Principle in action. In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states “by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot simultaneously be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.” For the lay person – when you focus and look at one aspect of a situation, other aspects become less clear. Framing positions us to understand one perspective which lessens the impact, influence or even visibility of another alternative. We get blinkered.
We need to fight being framed. (Or stop taking our own framing at face value.)
In innovation, it is necessary to see things we haven’t seen before. To combat the influence of framing, to expand the range of possibilities, it is necessary to call it out. Questioning assumptions is one way of addressing the undue influence of framing. Another way is to literally take the opposite position on data. If we reverse our position previously unseen options might be revealed. As our perspective greatly determines what we see, changing that perspective means we see things anew. Finally, we can often build our way out of how we are framed by exploring new approaches through design thinking and prototyping. A prototype is a great tool for helping us reframe our view of a challenge.
What’s your perspective? How blinkered are you?
Manage the Message – or Live with Chaos
September 8, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The secret of all victory lies in the organization of the non-obvious.
- Marcus Aurelius, was Roman emperor from 161 to his death in 180. The last of the “Five Good Emperors”, and is also considered one of the most important Stoic philosophers
One of the greatest challenges in the large, complex business operations of today is the creation of a shared understanding of the common goal. Each person, let alone each group, has a perspective on the mission and vision of the organization. They may or may not overlap like so many sets in a Venn diagram. The are many reasons for the differences in perspective not the least of which is that we each have an overwhelming tendency to see the world from our own hilltop. As individuals that perspective is driven by our upbringing, or social influences, our education, our beliefs and mores, etc. The way we are primed in our formative years. When we combine in specialist groups it is compounded by our functional expertise and being surrounded by others with similar experiences, as well our shared perspectives on why other functional groups behave in certain ways. This makes for a diabolical mix when we are attempting to introduce new innovations into either work practices or the delivery of new products and services to market.
In this circumstance each organization is beset with its own variants on a theme; all share the universal affliction of organizational politics. It must be said that organization politics exists wherever there are more than two people. Not only is it a part of organizational life, its manifestation is actually neither good nor bad. The problem is that the worst attributes of organization politics manifest themselves as behaviors that foster ill-will and cause the organization to focus predominantly internally. Literally eating itself from the inside out. How this usually plays out, means the organization takes its eye off the market and begins the slide into poor performance and possibly death. The only thing that can cut across the chaos, confusion and corruption of rampant organization politics is a common and universally understood goal.
What will become compellingly important is absolute clarity of shared purpose and set of principles of conduct sort of institutional genetic code that every member of the organization understands in a common way, and with deep conviction.
- Dee Hock, is the founder and former CEO of the VISA credit card association.
In 1968 Dee Hock convinced Bank of America to do the not-so-obvious, to give up ownership and control of their BankAmericard credit card program to create a network of banks that could issue a common credit card. The new company, called National BankAmerica, was a non-stock membership corporation equally owned by its member banks. Then with the member banks aligned in 1976 the name was changed to one you probably know very well today – Visa. One of the greatest challenges Hock faced was helping what would eventually be over 25,000 member banks come to terms with the shared common purpose of a universally accepted currency substitute. Until 1976, the member banks had offered a range of bank network credit cards with names such as, BankAmericard, Chargex, Barclaycard, Carte Bleue among several others. Each name reflected an independence and politics often at counterpoint to the concept of a unified approach to credit card acceptance. Each trying to gain dominance. The opportunity for confusion and discontent was marked.
What Hock did was remarkable. He was determined to bring the various international networks together into a single network with a single name internationally that would be in the best interests of the central corporation. At the time many countries were reluctant to issue a card associated with Bank of America, even though the association was entirely nominal in nature. For this reason, in 1975 BankAmericard, Chargex, Barclaycard, Carte Bleue, and all other licensees united under the new name, “Visa” with a common and consistent brand. By changing the game, he enabled the member banks to reach beyond their usual competitive natures to embrace a politics of inclusion, essentially the wisdom of the commons. The more universally accepted Visa became, the better off they would all be. In 2008 Visa evolved yet again, when it was one taken public in one of the largest IPO’s ever.
If you are going to introduce change, be it internally or externally to market the lessons are clear: Choose a message and get in front of it – employ direction and action rather than response and reaction as your tactics for communicating. Build a coalition of collaborators based in the strength of mutually shared understanding. Supersede the chaos and problems of organizational politics and mange your message for long-term success.
The Chaotic Organization – Oxymoron or way of life
July 24, 2009 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
What is the purpose of structure in an organization? The intent is usually to create efficiencies for the creation of value through specialization, and the subsequent leverage of capabilities and resources. Many organizations, especially those struggling to create new value experience periods of chaos. That said, they do tend toward self-organization after a time (provided that no more change is introduced.) The only problem is that they don’t optimize through that process. The resulting sub-optimization leads to more chaos and confusion as the organizational ties of communication, relationship, processes and systems begin to unravel. Where is your organization on the spectrum?
Chaos Incarnate? – or – Organization Personified?
Twitter: DrewCM
- Last few days in Australia before returning to the USA. Great trip.
- Greetings from Uluru / Ayers Rock! Where it is raining but the views and surroundings are spectacular. (And the internet access is spotty!)
- Better late than never: #innochat Transcript – 19 August – Innovation Backwards? With thanks to @CASUDI & @Renee_Hopkins http://ht.ly/2tOe3
- For those looking for #innochat transcript this weekend - it is coming - just a little slowly due to the time difference! (mine, that is)
- Thanks for #FF and RTs @innovatorsmix @MeghanMBiro @Jabaldaia @CreativeSage @FHInnovation @Renee_Hopkins @Gwen_Ishmael and #innochat gang