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 Failure & Ownership: What happens when we own our successes and abdicate our failures
July 23, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
It is possible to fail in many ways…while to succeed is possible only in one way.
- Aristotle
Innovation is a high-stakes endeavor. Much may be risked on the hoped-for chance of reward. The success or failure of a single innovation may win or lose reputations and careers. In some organizations, the retribution for failure may be swift and harsh, while the rewards for success may be just as fickle. An innovation approach that drives toward internal winners and losers in an organization is not built for long-term success. The trouble with that binary perspective—one in which innovation is a zero sum game—is that it negates the true value of the innovation process. That value resides in the opportunity to rapidly learn and adapt.
Learning as a means of advancing an organization’s strategic intent is nothing new. Peter Senge captured an incredibly useful model for the “learning organization” in his book The Fifth Discipline. He proposed that learning organizations are those in which members continually expand their capacity to create new solutions and obtain the results they desire. Senge saw that by expanding patterns of thinking, where people were able to see the systems in which they were operating from a holistic perspective, organizations could set their collective aspirations free. This required that organizations focus not on individuals but on the larger range of interactions within the organization and between affiliated organizations.
Which sounds like an easy prospect, but is in practice quite difficult. Without care and attention, the learning organization runs hard into the Darwinian determinism of the present-day competitive organization—the kind where only the successful survive and the less than successful are afforded “opportunities for personal growth outside the organization.”
Where has the love gone?
If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style.
- Quentin Crisp
Given that we have been exploring cognitive biases, mental models, and the social psychology influences on innovation, it’s fitting that we should leave this subject area with a look at the impacts of success and failure on both individual behavior and organization performance. Organizations, with their competitive pay structures and performance measures, make membership and participation a high-risk game. Those who know how to play the game, sometimes in spite of their relative productivity and output, succeed, while those who struggle to position themselves strategically, or who perceive that “playing” is beneath them, are left wondering “what happened?” as they observe less-deserving peers receive recognition, rewards, and advancement.
What we observe in these circumstances are the results of “adaptive bias.” Adaptive bias is the notion that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors (misunderstandings derived from faulty perception.) Consider it a higher level of self-preservation. As with many biases, it addresses uncertainty by driving the subject (or subjects) to more concrete action.
Perhaps Oscar Wilde assessed the situation correctly when he offered that, “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you place the blame.” For regardless of the effort expended, if you cannot align yourself with success in a highly competitive environment, you will not receive personal recognition. For some, an organization with this kind of scorekeeping causes them to go to extraordinary lengths to claim ownership of successful endeavors while distancing themselves from failures.
Captain of your own destiny or cruise director on the Ship of Fools?
A man may fall many times, but he won’t be a failure until he says that someone pushed him.
- Elmer G. Letterman
For our organizations to be more successfully innovative, it is necessary to elevate the competition from the individual play level to the market performance level. If competitive performance systems remain intact inside organizations, then the scramble to claim ownership for innovations will continue. The net effect of that jockeying for position is short-term, escalating, divisive conflict (as opposed to generative conflict) and a long-term erosion of organization trust. Not only are these both an impediment to innovation, they are hazardous to an organization’s health and viability.
An organization that gears itself for driving and supporting competitive internal systems will nullify the collaboration necessary for large-scale and system-wide innovation by fostering another bias in the member population. Known as the “self-serving bias,” its presence means that individuals perceive themselves as responsible for desirable outcomes but not responsible for undesirable outcomes. However, the act of failure avoidance denies us the opportunity to learn, and in attempting to position our failure as someone else’s, we perhaps doom ourselves to repeating it.
A global high-technology company, which shall remain nameless to protect the guilty, would be considered highly successful by most measures. It is big, powerful, and has played a significant role in creating and moving markets. Unfortunately, today that company is beginning to reap the rewards of the competitive culture it has sown. In this organization, ideas must “fight for survival” and only those people who can passionately, loudly, and often angrily argue their case prevail. Those who fail are derided, while those who appear to succeed move into management roles, only to perpetuate this pattern.
The resulting organization is one that is driven by fear and conflict, moving from market misstep to market misstep with little to signal that it can recapture its earlier flair for innovation and success.
The leadership of many an organization falls into this pattern of internal competition without questioning its role in the success of their organization. They repeat what they have observed, learned, and actively supported in their past roles—because if it worked in the past, it must surely work in the present. Their inability to question the value of internal competition results not in a learning organization but one that survives by paying lip-service to collaboration and cooperation, while leaving carnage in its wake as the assignment of blame continues apace.
Failure in innovation is not to be avoided, it is to be embraced.
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
- Winston Churchill
What we actually need to practice is the art of failure ownership. Unlike the pain of an internally competitive landscape, the process of failure ownership requires that an organization support intellectual curiosity and an inquiry into the nature of how systems operate and interrelate. Innovation thrives on the ever-engaging quest for discovery that often meets with failure along the way. But failure is not an end-point, it is merely a way station. We need to enthusiastically own failures to the extent that we can unpack them, observe their genesis, and understand their triggers. With that learning in hand, we can then advance our innovation intent further by “failing forward fast.”
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 Folklore & Fairytales – Self deception and the stories we tell
July 6, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and therefore never scrutinize or question.
- Stephen Jay Gould
As a process to connect people and transmit ideas within organizations, effective communication is essential for fostering innovation. 
Aristotle told us, nearly two and a half thousand years ago, that if communication is to change behavior, it must be grounded in the desires and interests of the receivers. Organizational life relies on folklore and myth to create a connection between its members that influences their behavior, including the creation of innovation.
Folklore serves as mental scaffolding to help us gather, sort, organize, and support our thinking about the world around us. From an organizational standpoint, folklore provides what Ronald A. Heifetz termed in Leadership Without Easy Answers a “holding environment.” A holding environment enables a witness to the folk tale to distance her or himself from present reality. It enables the conception of possibility, and is a key ingredient in sense-making. To understand how it can inform, or impede, innovation, it’s necessary to explore folkloric communication and the way it helps define boundaries for action and dialogue in the life of organizations.
A billion little pieces
The universe is made of stories, not atoms.
- Muriel Rukeyser
Storytelling reveals and explores the potential of individuals and the social context in which they find themselves. Stories open the organization to the power and relevance of innovation as the organization members seek to grow and evolve it over time. Folkloric communication helps to define organizational reality, providing deeper levels of meaning. By capturing reflections of the past and displaying them in ways that are engaging to the present, it brings to light the fundamental building blocks of the organization which can then be used for creative ends.
In their reflective work on the possibility of a more holistic model of organizational life, A Simpler Way, Rogers and Wheatley note that “most people have a desire to love their organizations.” This notion drives much of the latent, often unexamined, innovation in organizations. It also means that organizations embrace stories about themselves that may not be factually accurate.
From the big reveal to the big conceal
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
- Hannah Arendt
The identity of the organization as it is expressed–its potential–speaks to participants’ own potential. Participants, through folklore and stories, envision places for themselves in the organizational whole. They see ways they might add to, or live out, a part of organizational history. Organizational folktales become ways for building shared coherence, defining the “fundamental integrity about who we are.” The key is shared commitment to the intent behind a story. Regardless of whether it’s a tall tale or true account, if enough people in the organization recognize its validity, it will have enough weight to influence practices.
The boundary-making qualities of folklore show organizational participants how to transgress, to reach beyond them, and build new tales. The dual nature of folklore is its ability to define both the boundaries of organizations and the people within it. Folklore in this manner is fundamental to the culture of an organization through its constant interaction with the organization’s own social dynamics.
Culture is both a product and a process. As a product, it embodies accumulated wisdom from those who came before us. As a process, it is continually renewed and re-created as newcomers learn the old ways and eventually become teachers themselves.
– Bolman & Deal (1997, p. 217)
At its root, folklore in organizations is a metaphoric framing device, providing a context in which newcomers to organizations see ways they might engage with the organizational whole and leave their own mark. For this reason, the guardians of organizational folklore have significant power within it. They set the tone by determining when and where folklore may be revealed. They choose the focus of the delivery. Their opinions and attitudes directly color the way in which others may view the organization. Stories are a filter through which others catch glimpses of past organizational life. For any person new to an organization, this may be intimidating or welcoming, depending upon the manner with which the mythology is engaged.
It is vital, however, for people to feel at ease with an organization’s folklore if they are to become an engaged component of the systemic whole and add their own creative spark. Avoiding folktales, or denying their power within the organization, is the denial of an elemental part of how the organization operates. Folktales exist for numerous reasons, and each serves a unique purpose for the organization, be it framing patterns of behavior, orienting newcomers, or galvanizing the weary. For many organizations, however, the concept of a place for myth and folklore is not only foreign to them, it is anathema to their technical and rationalistic worldview. What need do they have for stories when there is a budget to be balanced and a headcount to be reduced?
There are a thousand stories in the naked city
To be a person is to have a story to tell.
- Isak Dinesen
The dark side of organization myths and folklore is that they may be the result of confabulation or impression management. They are tales told with willful, ill intent, and can play havoc with an organization’s success. Sometimes these tales may be used to create distractions, or to hide the true intent of storytellers.
In the case of confabulation, the reporting of events that never happened, it creates confusion and distraction. Rather than reinforcing a deep-seated truth about the organization which all may tap into as a source of inspiration, like the most powerful folktales, it causes chaos and distraction. Think of this factitious behavior as a mild version of Münchausen’s Syndrome, without the tendency to invent illness.
That and four bucks will get you a cup of Starbucks
Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact.
- Robert McKee
A more hazardous practice is that of impression management. In both sociology and social psychology, impression management is a goal-directed conscious or unconscious process in which people attempt to influence the perceptions of others about a person, object, or event. Usually this practice is adopted for the improvement of their own standing within a given social context, and is accomplished by regulating and controlling information in social interactions: access to information, the way that information is presented, and the rules by which it might be shared are controlled.
The resulting distractions, as people seek to sort fact from fiction, cause confusion and frustration. One other victim in this process is the truth, without which clear thinking about innovation is sacrificed.
Impression management is usually synonymous with self-presentation, in which a person tries to influence the perception of their image. Impression management also refers to practices in professional communication and public relations, where the term is used to describe the process of forming a company’s or organization’s public image.
An organization that embraces its mythic traditions and openly embraces its folkloric symbols is one that is living with rare vigor. If the folklore and myth resident in an organization are used to galvanize and energize existing members, and create engagement points at which new members can find a way to contribute and belong, the resulting creativity and innovation will be remarkable.
A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.
- Raymond Chandler
Recap of Day 2 at the World Innovation Forum June 8-9, 2010 – OnInnovation
June 21, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The following is an account of the second day of the World Innovation Forum. For a review of the first day please see here. Speakers for Day 2 included: Seth Godin, Brian Shawn Cohen, Wendy Kopp, Ursula Burns, Joel Makower, Jeffrey Hollender, and Robert Brunner. It must be said that one of the bigger disappointments during the event was something over which HSM, the event organizer, had no control. Twitter, for whatever reason, decided to embrace its inner FAIL Whale and choked for much of the proceedings. This was a disappointment to many for whom Twitter is a great way to keep in touch with the themes of a conference as they arise. Not too sure if that feedback made its way back to Biz Stone (final speaker at the conference on Day 1) but we can only hope so.
That said, for those in attendance the World Innovation Forum itself became a backdrop to a whole lot of innovative happenings and the following is a rapid journey through some highlights.
[The recap of the first day is here]
Using Stories for Design Ideas – new from Johnny Holland Magazine
June 15, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
In a new post at Johnny Holland Magazine, Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks share insights from Rosenfeld Media’s book ‘Storytelling For User Experience’. From the perspective of innovation, which is increasingly wedded to the concepts of design and design thinking both conceptually and in practice, storytelling is a powerful discovery and generative tool. This post offers great perspectives on the use of story to capture current state challenges, and future state possibilities.
“When we say that the design must “tell a story,” we are not just talking about games or interactive fiction, or even about turning a work application into an adventure (“Conquer the benefits allocation maze…”). Instead, we mean the kind of stories that help you create new designs. These stories are used to make you think of new possibilities, give you the tools to encourage a self-reflective kind of thinking—design thinking—or so you can imagine designs that will improve the lives of other people. Stories explore ideas from user research.” More here..
Innovation Perception – the joys and disappointments of expectations
May 19, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
It is one of the commonest of mistakes to consider that the limit of our power of perception is also the limit of all there is to perceive.
- C.W. Leadbetter
The best phrase to capture the spirit of innovation is not, “Eureka!” as some would have us believe. That is more appropriate for the instant of invention. Rather the most fitting phrase for innovation is, “that’s interesting…” 
This fits because it is through the discovery of the unexpected while we work toward solutions addressing our most wicked problems that we begin to tease out the most robust ideas. The willful focus on meeting our expectations is the next cognitive bias that we must address as we seek to build a culture that supports innovation. We are prisoners to perception when we must strive to be open to the possibility of surprise.
Punished for trying
Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.
- Camille Pissarro
Perceptions are often erroneous. Yet, we base much of our decision making on our perceptions of circumstances. Those perceptions are driven by our expectations. The errors of our perception may be systematically related to interpersonal expectations (what we want from each other or anticipate from each other), our in-the-moment motives (our expectation of need fulfillment), value patterns (what we expect to attract us, repel us, what we prize or disregard), and our personal defense mechanisms (our emotional defenses triggered by our previous experiences brought to bear on current circumstances by our present expectations.) With all this going on, all the time, how the heck do we even get out of bed in the morning?
We psych ourselves up to it. This is a true challenge especially when we expect to be punished for our failures.
In a recent Q&A session conducted by the good folks at 800-CEO-READ, Mark Frauenfelder the Editor in Chief of Make Magazine talked about how the current education system is designed to prevent discovery through failure. His approach is to throw oneself directly into the path of failure, as often as possible in order to be “effective.” Frauenfelder sees that the inability to make mistakes is tied directly to the expectation of poor marks unless perfection is attained…
Students are afraid to make mistakes in class because errors result in bad grades. Striving for a “perfect score” takes your mind off the real goal, which is to learn and to be effective. In organizations we are afraid to make mistakes because a mistake is a convenient way for others assign blame. A fear-based workplace discourages risk-taking and experimentation. The worst mistake is to punish people for making mistakes in the pursuit of doing something in better way.
In innovation, if we tie our efforts only to an expectation of success, then our efforts will become smaller over time. Each attempt will have less at stake. We will risk less, because the anticipated blame associated with any failure is too much to bear. And who likes to be punished for trying?
Say…what’s a mountain goat doing way up here in a cloud bank?
People only see what they are prepared to see.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our perception can also make it difficult to see the circumstances around us. There is a classic Gary Larson cartoon drawn from the perspective of looking over the shoulders of two pilots out the cockpit window. The caption reads: “Say…what’s a mountain goat doing way up here in a cloud bank?” Funny and frightening. But this is also emblematic of how our expectations can cause us to miss large perceptional indicators. Our minds are unable to wrap themselves around such a disconnection between what we expected to see and what we actually see.
Rather than seeing that something is different to what we expect, we develop a blind spot to it. This perception bias has been identified for many years. One of the earliest examples was in research conducted by Seymour Smith, an advertising researcher from the 1960’s who saw that people were screening in and out what they were seeing and hearing based on what their expectations were. He noted that,
“They do so because of their attitudes, beliefs, usage preferences and habits, conditioning, etc.” People who like, buy, or are considering buying a brand are more likely to notice advertising than are those who are neutral toward the brand. (Source)
More recently this research was bolstered by the work of doctoral student Alison Jing Xu and her research partner Robert Wyer of the University of Illinois, College of Business. Their research focused on the examination of the power of puffery. Scott Berinato brought this to light in his recent post at Harvard Business Review, The Power and Perils of Puffery, in which he described their experiments in assessing the influence of the perception of their subjects in relation to subjects about which they were familiar or not. As cliché as it might seem, they structured their questions for men around beer and for women they focused on a personal care product, a cleansing gel.
In both situations where the subjects felt they were familiar with a particular product, they were less likely to be influenced by puffery in support of that product. Unsubstantiated claims were a turn-off. But when they were unfamiliar, they were more accepting of the unverifiable claims. It seems expectation, derived from past knowledge and experience, determined what was acceptable or not. When there were greater unknowns, puffery won the day.
How is this reflected in innovation?
Innovation is the attempt to create a new solution where none are known. It seems that when we are faced with the unknown we are more inclined to rely on our unquestioned perceptions, which rest on our expectations, rather than seek to push and explore to seek a deeper understanding. Unquestioned perception is an impediment to innovation because it limits possibilities.
It seems, as with so many other cognitive biases forewarned is forearmed. If we know we are predisposed to perceptional bias that is half the battle. Our awareness of that bias is a signal to dig a little deeper, question a little harder, and fail a little more a little more often. After all innovation is not about any single eureka moment, it’s about the next interesting discovery just beyond the horizon.
If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is – infinite.
- William Blake
Twitter: DrewCM
- RT @TalentCulture: Take Your #Business to the Next Level http://su.pr/2IkpFT #management #corporateculture
- RT @wired: Happy 44th birthday, Star Trek! - http://bit.ly/cOmliD
- @MeghanMBiro Thanks for the kind RT!
- @MeghanMBiro Hey, great news that you'll be at #SOBCon - looking forward to seeing you, too!
- @ralph_ohr Thanks for the RT! Hope you're doing well.