Innochat Transcript – 19 August – Innovation Backwards?
August 24, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Sorry for the delay in getting the most recent innochat transcript posted. The challenge associated with connecting while on the road was greater than anticipated. Needless to say I didn’t expect to be looking at Uluru (aka. Ayers Rock) in the middle of Australia as I type this, but here I am.
Thanks for your patience. Attached is the transcript from the “Innovation Backwards?” chat, which was incredibly well positioned thanks to the great framing post from Caroline Di Diego and excellent moderation by Renee Hopkins.
A favorite tweet from this week’s post? This insight from Jose Briones:
The biggest issue is that in most cases picking winners from the ideation process really means picking favorites.
Innochat Transcript – 5 August – Fixing an Innovation-averse Corporate Culture
August 5, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 3 Comments
Another fun time with the excellent moderation of Renee Hopkins – always a pleasure. A great topic which was well turned over by those present, but as with all #innochat topics there is always room for more. Take a look and weigh in.
And next week it looks like we may discuss: cultural problems in an org where ALL is innovative and nothing actually gets done!
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 Beyond the Average: the challenges of delusions of grandeur and the Dunning-Kruger effect
July 19, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 6 Comments
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.
- Charles Darwin
Innovation is not necessarily a size game. Bigger is not necessarily better. Large organizations keenly focused on innovation benefit from being able to exploit resources, processes, systems, and human intellect in a way that’s beyond the scope of a smaller enterprise or sole entrepreneur. 
Access to a breadth of elements means the possibility of widely divergent outcomes. Unfortunately, with size comes inertia, and one of its causes is the degree to which stable systems create immovable patterns and a certainty that comes with having “seen it all before.”
This kind of organization knows itself. It has a pool of clients it knows well and for whom it meets well-defined, long-term needs. It has access to resources via supply chains it has developed over time, offering little in the way of surprises. You could call this organization “fat, dumb, and happy.” And you would be right. The truth is that it has created a cultural delusion of grandeur, which makes it struggle to innovate.
Dangerous self-satisfaction
There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Howard Johnson’s, MCI, Enron, Pan American World Airways, Digital Equipment Corporation, Marshall Field’s, and the litany of the half-forgotten could continue. Whether willful victims of their own misbehavior or ignorance of the changing needs of their customers and markets, these former market leaders have died the most tragic of unnecessary deaths. They thought they were at the far right of their market’s respective performance bell curves, living in gloriously smug self-satisfaction, and they were punished for it.
The problem with that kind of delusion is that the most obvious contrary data will be ignored until it is too late. I’ve seen clients, thinking that they were indestructible, behave in ways that were completely contrary to their best interests because they refused to believe their previously unassailable market position was not only in jeopardy, it had evaporated. They stuck to their old product lines, offering the same levels of distracted customer service, while their industry competitors passed them by, embracing innovations at all levels of their organizations.
There are some in venture capital circles who will tell you, “If you are not growing, you are dying.” They refer specifically to revenues more often than not. For the adage to be true, a more expansive view of growth is required. Growth need not only be found in revenues, it may also manifest in broader service sets, expanded ranges of customers, and wider social impact, among other factors. The self-satisfaction that comes from past success gets in the way of this pursuit because it usually means we don’t seek out those innovations we need to survive and thrive.
Applied ignorance
No one is satisfied with his fortune, nor dissatisfied with his intellect.
- Antoinette Deshoulieres
Self-satisfaction is not the only path to innovation entropy. Success also reinforces a mindset of superiority. Each success reinforces a belief across an organization that the collective choices made and actions taken are the result of superior intellect and application. Which is fine, except the psychological tendency is to ascribe all success to our direct efforts, regardless of actual impact. We all think we’re above average and smarter than the next person in the room, or our competitors, or worse yet, our customers. (Good grief.)
There is a great saying in the USA: “Even the blind squirrel will eventually find a nut,” which highlights how arbitrary and capricious success may sometimes be. Especially if we are not vigilantly seeking ways to improve and extend our success through innovation.
Proctor and Gamble, under its previous CEO A.G. Laffley, recognized the flaw in perceiving that all success could be derived from within the company. P&G had, for many years, actively practiced ignoring ideas from outside the company, literally living the phrase “not invented here.” They refused to consider the possibility of good ideas existing elsewhere. Under Laffley they defeated this mindset by embracing the idea of “proudly found elsewhere,” which meant that they were willing to use the best ideas no matter where they came from.
The self-awareness of the limits existing within a company were neatly expressed by a CEO who, when talking to his staff, said, “The smartest people in the world are not working for us.” The implication being that if you want smart, look beyond the limits implied by the company’s legal and operational boundaries and the intellect it contains. To innovate at home, look elsewhere. (Open innovation, anyone?)
Certain incompetence
One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.
- Bertrand Russell
Perhaps the most brutal self-deception that undercuts our ability to innovate both at an individual and collaborative level is represented in the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Justin Kruger and David Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will see themselves as heroes in their own story. They tend to overestimate their own level of skill while failing to recognize genuine skill in others. When faced with the extremity of their inadequacy, they also fail to recognize it, often explaining it away due to circumstances beyond their control.
There is relief from this delusion. If a person is able to recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, they can be trained to substantially improve, provided they have the will to address their shortcomings. This is hard work. Faced with this level of effort, is it any wonder that most people prefer to not change, instead continuing their certain incompetence by ignoring it altogether? At this point a passing reference to the Peter Principle might be warranted, but a trip down that path will only lead us to despair.
Don’t despair. Andy Grove popularized one approach to the vigilance necessary to maintain a posture of innovation-driven success. His book Only the Paranoid Survive offers a reminder of what it takes to be successful. To overcome self-satisfaction, and the over-estimation of our abilities, keep striving to be better, to improve, to transform. In the application of consistent efforts toward renewal, not only might you beat your averages, but you might find that innovation becomes the foundation for your enduring success.
How do you prevent yourself or your organization from becoming too self-satisfied?
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
Innovation Anchors – How unwitting fixation blocks delivering new ideas to market
April 30, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
What people want isn’t always what they really want.
- Andrew Ellis
Using focus is a powerful technique for getting things done. It narrows our efforts and gives us a specific target to meet. A dancer, who has been asked to spin in place uses a technique called 
“spotting” to provide a stabilizing point of focus. Spotting has several benefits: it keeps a dancer oriented and aware of the movement, direction, and location of their body in space; it can prevent disorientation caused by lack of visual focus; it increases the overall speed of the rotational spin; it can make the spin appear faster than it is; and it also aids in reducing the dizziness associated with spinning. All of which are excellent goals that serve a purpose during particular sections of a dance that require that motion.
Using spotting to anchor yourself at other times while dancing may not be appropriate.
Find a spot then [re]turn to it
The challenge with focus is that once established it can be hard to break off, even when it might be best to turn our attention elsewhere. We have become anchored to an idea, such as, sticking with a new product in the marketplace when all indications are that it will not be successful. Or, always using the same criteria for selecting services to be developed even though market conditions and customer expectations have changed.
For those who seek to innovate this pattern of anchoring is deadly. For the oft-quoted but rarely ascribed comment bears truth of the matter, “if we always do what we have always done, we will always get what we always got.”
Falling in love with your own idea
Often during decision making, people anchor, overly relying on a particular piece of information or a specific value. This anchor then influences the way they account for other variables in the situation, regardless of any specific relationship between them. Usually once the anchor is set there is a bias toward that value. And each of us is prone to this pattern.
In organizations where ideas battle it out for supremacy, we can find ourselves furiously defending our position when the alternative may be better. We have fallen so in love with our own idea that we cannot see the power of another and perhaps we cannot see the power it holds over us.
One recent example of a whole industry becoming anchored (in the belief that the good times would continue to roll) was the financial services industry with regard to credit default swaps. Much has been written on the subject, such as the great post at Psychology Today is by Eric Jaffe. A great line boils down the entire sorry episode quite neatly, “…that our bubble wasn’t just one of bad investing, it was a bubble of bad thinking.” Rouler less bon temps, indeed.
The process of becoming anchored is not hard work either. We fall into anchoring with relative ease. It is one of our shortcuts for managing the large amounts of data with which we have to contend everyday. And once we anchor on a specific data point it is very difficult to change as Dan Ariely describes in his instant classic, Predictably Irrational. Early on in his book Dan describes an experiment with some students in which he asked them to take the last two digits of their social security number and write them beside a list of objects he provided on a sheet of paper. The objects were wine, chocolate, etc. Nothing of special significance. He then asked the students if they would pay more or less than that number (as expressed as whole dollars) and to indicate that on the paper. Finally he asked them to write down what they would be willing to pay for reach object.
We simply keep coming home
The end result of the Ariely experiment was that those who’s social security end numbers were 0-19 offered the lowest price points while those with social security end numbers from 80-99 offered the highest. And everyone in between offered graduating prices! When asked if their social security end numbers had any influence on the prices they offered everyone said absolutely not. Yet those very numbers anchored each group of students as surely as if they had been classified as such from the outset.
The students couldn’t help themselves because they didn’t even know what had occurred.
But even if they had known about the concept of anchoring another classic aspect of this behavior is that even if we do change our perspective and re-orient ourselves we fall back into an anchored state. We switch one anchor for another. Essentially clinging to our need for a mental shortcut.
Fighting the good fight
I am like a book, with pages that have stuck together for want of use: my mind needs unpacking and the truths stored within must be turned over from time to time, to be ready when occasion demands.
- Seneca
For those focused on innovation, willfully introducing changes into existing stable systems, anchoring is one of many behaviors that needs to be addressed. Because at its heart an anchor is a habit we have created for ourselves. Either through repetition or proximity we have placed ourselves under its influence.
To tackle the effects of anchoring you have to call it out. Unless we do highly rational people will make decisions based on the highly illogical. Past experience, ill-considered under present circumstances. According to social psychologist Tom Pyszczynski, “when our livelihoods are threatened we lock into our current mindsets, ignore open discussion, and view those with opposing ideas not as different but as enemies.” When we seek to innovate, to explore new concepts we need to give ourselves the permission to leave old mindsets behind. This takes practice.
One excellent way to practice is the use of design thinking. Design thinking provides a structured way to explore new ideas to pressing challenges in a manner that is low-threat, yet high yield enough to push the envelope. An excellent recent explanation of design thinking as a model and practice comes in IDEO President and CEO Tim Brown’s book, Change By Design. Full disclosure: I now a reseller of a business simulation based on the design thinking approach developed by IDEO and ExperiencePoint. More on that later.
So, when you stop spinning are you dizzy or ready to weigh anchor to focus on the next new thing?
Innovation Psychology – Innovation is a hostage to what we think and feel
April 27, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
No psychologist should pretend to understand what he does not understand… Only fools and charlatans know everything and understand nothing.
- Anton Chekhov
Why explore the impact of psychology on innovation?
Organization psychology examines the relations between the individual and the tasks he or she is posed, between the individual and the surrounding social context in which he or she find themselves, and between the individual and the formal organizational structure. The practice of innovation, the creation and invention of new products, services, business models is very much at the heart of organizations seeking to increase their long-term success. The psychology of organizations plays a primary role in the effectiveness innovation practices and outcomes.
Also, when we consider a psychological framework for innovation it is also vital to include a broader understanding of social psychology. Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by others; regardless of whether or not that presence is actual, imagined, or implied. This influence is especially important when we factor in the influences on innovation of open source models which reach beyond the formal boundaries of organizations.
In order to create a wider understanding of the psychology underpinning innovation in the next few weeks and months regular posts will focus on those aspects of psychology that hold sway in the practice of innovation (whether we choose to acknowledge them or not.) Topics will include anchoring, heuristics, and biases, as well as cognition, group dynamics and resilience. The intent is to unlock their power and influence and improve their management in the development of robust innovation cultures.
For an innovation culture to be successfully created and fostered over time, it is a necessity to have a better sense of how people interact and engage. So let’s explore…
The Benefits of Perspiration in Innovation – Recap from the 99% Conference April 15
April 15, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 5 Comments
Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.
- Thomas Edison
For those of you for whom the 99% Conference is not familiar it is an exploration of the work of delivering on the promise of creativity. “The goal of the 99% Conference is to shift the focus from idea generation to idea execution, providing road-tested insights on how to make your ideas happen.” The notion is to not provide a space for more ideas to be created but to create the opportunity for those ideas to see the light of day by executing against their promise and delivering them. To that end, today’s sessions at the 99% Conference were a great blend of insights from the fields of culture, business, design, social action and technology. All that, and presents, too! (Note: full day recap = longer post)
Jointly hosted by Behance and Cool Hunting, and their respective Founder / CEO’s Scott Belsky and Josh Rubin, this conference is like catnip to designers and creatives alike. (Side note: as the only visible person wielding a Dell in this very, very Mac-centric universe, it was very interesting how little play technology received.) The conference itself has been run incredibly professionally (which is fantastic considering that this is only the second year it has been run.) From the attendee materials, to the integration with the conference space (The Times Center on 41st), the 99% conference is a very well-designed experience.
To kick things off Eve Blossom, the Founder / CEO of Lulan Artisans, gave an impassioned presentation on her awakening as a social entrepreneur as a result of her response to witnessing the impact sex trade first-hand. She has created a network of designers and weavers who, as artisans, practice their centuries-old techniques while being paid sustainable wages, growing their local economies, and embracing low environmental-impact bheaviors. Her recommendation when faced with the execution of your idea was to recognize that: “It’s bigger than you think. It’s not what you think.” Being open to the possible beyond your initial idea was something that came up in later presentations, too.
The next in the line-up was Fred Wilson, the Founder / Managing Partner of Union Square Ventures. His focus was on how to create the most appropriate framework as you begin to execute your ideas and take them to market. His topic was, 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss, during which he covered everything from husband and wife partnerships (DailyLit founders, Susan and Albert Danzinger) to the Tour Bus model (Hype FM’s Anthony Volodkin). The classic, much-tweeted, line from Fred was a comment posted to one of his sites by Nassim Taleb: “The three most harmful addictions in the world are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
Stefan Sagmeister, master-designer-prankster, delivered a presentation that was very close to his recent TED presentation. Which was okay, but when so many conferences are live-streamed and/or edited and posted for HD review almost immediately, it makes it hard not to feel a little deflated (as Tina Roth Eisenberg alluded to). In all fairness to Mr. Sagmeister, he was not feeling well (a little feverish, he said) and his work does warrant an additional look as it is exceptional
When Jack Dorsey, Founder / Chairman (seems to be a lot of Founders today) of Twitter presented he immediately struck a nerve for me. His early fascination with maps, especially the way in which his desire to overlay live data of activities on a map could give you a better understanding of how a massively integrated system like a city works, gave me the most compelling insight into why Twitter works for me. Additionally it was great to hear his acknowledgment of the power of Twitter users in changing the Twitter experience. Users generated the Hashtag, the use of RT and the @ symbol. His principals for execution were also clear and pointed: Draw (to get the idea out of your head), Luck (being able to recognize a situation that allows build-out of an idea), and Iterate (know your idea must evolve, but also know when to stop it’s evolution so you can move onto the next idea’s execution.) Mr. Dorsey also shared images from the ideation of his latest venture Square.
Jonah B. from HTC rapidly presented the design approach behind the new HTC Incredible phone and landed the execution model they used which was design from the inside out. The phone – she is very pretty.
In one of the most interesting presentations for me, based on the focus of re-envisioning a public space (which leads me to think of re-envisioning cities…but that’s for another post), was delivered by Leslie Koch the President of the Governor’s Island Preservation and Education Corporation. Her past experience in the corporate world was on display as she shared her 5 lessons she has learned in order to execute effectively:
1. Listen and ask the right questions
2. Understand the customer, product and market
3. Develop a strategy and stick to it (but make sure your mother can understand it!)
4. Think big. Act small.
5. Marketing is all.
My favorite line from Ms. Koch came in relation to number 5, to paraphrase: You need to market, but you may not be able to call it that. It’s outreach to some (in the government arena), or cultivation (in the non-profit world), but really it’s all just marketing (business). And you need it too close the credibility gap between what you want to achieve and what you achieve in the short term on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.
As the creator of the 99% Conference and newly minted author, it was great to see Scott Belsky present his vision for tackling the perspiration part of bringing ideas to life. He labeled the problem we face as “The Project Plateau” that time when the energy for implementing an idea dissipates and our progress with it. His new book (mine’s signed!) is Making Ideas Happen and covers key practices such as:
- Generate ideas in moderation
- Act without conviction to keep momentum and rapidly refine ideas (e.g., don’t fall in love with your ideas)
- Encourage fighting within your team (conflict creates opportunity
- Seek competition (it boosts accountability and strengthens the defensibility of your approach)
- Reduce bulky projects to discrete, actionable units (increments of time, milestones and tasks)
Overall, Mr. Belsky’s response is to develop an approach to, “have an idea find a way to survive the project plateau.”
The master storyteller, Jay O’Callahan, captivated the attendees with his imagined dialogue between Neil Armstrong and a failing Navy Admiral in a nursing home. In the story, part of a larger work Mr. Callahan was asked to create for NASA, Neil Armstrong recounts the landing on the Moon. In the telling, Mr. O’Callhan highlighted that stories are dramatic because stories are people, places and a bit of trouble, and that by telling stories people can imagine themselves into the situation. A great lesson for creating stories, but also for execution was that there needs to be Listeners (someone who is a part of yet listening to the story), Appreciations (the way in which a positive aspect of the story is highlighted as “they can be gold”) and Suggestions (on how to improve the story when the story is strong enough to take it.)
The armchair panel discussion between wife and husband partners in Antenna Design New York, Inc., Sigi Moeslinger and Masamichi Udagawa and Scott Belsky and Josh Rubin offered up many gems on the role of effective partnership in enabling execution…
Partnership should be based on need – the need to find complementary traits and match up with them in another. – Masamichi Udagawa
Do a trial project together to test the viability of a working partnership – Sigi Moeslinger
Successful partnerships must yield both a result and the enjoyment of working together – Masamichi Udagawa
Be willing to share the ownership of an idea that comes from the partnership. – Udagawa & Moeslinger
It was obvious that with the give and take in their dialogue that Mr. Udagawa and Ms. Moeslinger’s partnership seems to be a profitable one for them.
As the Executive Director of the Hawthorne Valley Association, Martin Ping wove a tale of the ways in which all aspects of the association in the valley come together to support a self-nourishing system. For Mr. Ping, the work of execution is never-ending. Based on holistic and biodynamic methods everything from farming, to the market garden, dairy, organic bakery, grocery store and school are part of an interdependent system. And it all comes down to an inner picture of what might be and what needs to be. “Everything we know and everything we do started with an inner picture.”
In what was perhaps the fastest and most boisterous presentation, Franz Johansson the Founder /CEO of The Medici Group, talked about the catalyst for new ideas coming from the intersection between disciplines. His book on the subject, The Medici Effect, is a fantastic read. When it came to execution, his approach was to ask yourself the question: “What is the smallest executable step you can take to go where you want to go?” And then when you have defined the response – do it. Then ask the same and do it again. By taking smaller leaps of faith you can test your thinking as you go. Your original idea may only serve as the catalyst for your long-term success and the two may be quite different.
In the last presentation of the day, John Maeda the President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) extolled the virtues of awkwardness in creativity. As a creative himself, Mr Maeda found that becoming a leader (reluctantly) under the direction of a soon to be departing Nicholas Negroponte at MIT, was an awkward process of discovering how a leader creates. One of his colleagues note that, “all artists yearn to struggle, when they struggle they know they’re alive and you lose that when you lead,” as a way of explaining why a student would say she was feeling guilty (she had struggled to fit in but was no longer struggling.) For Mr. Maeda, execution will increasingly rely on the leadership of creatives because they (we) are at the forefront of being okay with ambiguity. It was a great insight which I hope will be willingly embraced by participants.
Finally, I would be remiss in not highlighting two great contributions from the team at Cool Hunting. First, was that the often tedious but all-important job of hosting and emceeing the conference fell to Josh Rubin who did a great job in keeping things moving. Second, Cool Hunting produced a series of videos that were featured throughout the day including snapshots of the work of Hastens, a hand-crafted bed manufacturer in Sweden, Jamie Oliver, the chef who is challenging us all to feed our school children and ourselves better, and the Mast Brothers (master chocolate craftsmen) from Brooklyn (thanks for the chocolate guys!) The videos were great snapshots and were a nice sidebar to the featured speakers.
All in all, a great day out. Much to digest. Much to put into practice. And loads to share with clients
A Better Yardstick / A Better Meter Rule – Measuring Innovation Performance
April 6, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean you should
Any measurement must take into account the position of the observer. There is no such thing as measurement absolute, there is only measurement relative.
- Jeneatte Winterson
One of the great challenges for those focused on improving their organization’s innovation culture is the desire, at the end of the day, to be able to point to something and say, “that’s better than it was before.” That desire, to measure our performance against an agreed upon set of measures, is not a bad thing. The way that need is acted out in the organization is where it comes undone. This is most problematic when the push is to measure in purely financial terms.
The drive to see some kind of return on innovation investment has a strong pull. In a time when every penny, cent, fen, or kopek is being counted with scrupulous accuracy, the notion of not counting the programmatic contribution of innovation in monetary terms seems ludicrous. Unfortunately, if you were going to spend money on a program that offered fast return on your investment, spending on changing your innovation culture would not be the wisest investment. Investing on your innovation culture is a long-term play, as they say. Yet, it should be a focus for investment and it should be measured.
The key initial measures to watch for when building an improved innovation culture are:
Overall we are talking about a process that reduces cycle time.
In fact, the Boston Consulting Group’s 2009 Annual Innovation Report highlighted the fact that cycle time, specifically “time to market,” was one of the most “chronically underutilized metrics” in their survey of companies. Which they also saw as being highly ironic given that many companies identified a lack of speed as their greatest weakness.
I’ll know it when I see it
Our scientific age demands that we provide definitions, measurements, and statistics in order to be taken seriously. Yet most of the important things in life cannot be precisely defined or measured. Can we define or measure love, beauty, friendship, or decency, for example?
- Dennis Prager
Cycle time reduction is a great first measure because it can be applied across all aspects of the innovation processes at play in your organization. From decision-making, to selection of team members, applying the measure of cycle time reduction sharpens the way all innovation is approached. It has a distillation effect. In helping you to focus on speeding up the process of concentrating the right resources on the most beneficial projects, cycle time reduction also demands attention on quality, too.
Poor quality actually results in a systemic drag later in your innovation process. That initial poor quality may also have a knock-on effect, causing an escalation of poor quality further down the line as corners are cut in order to meet the initial cycle time reduction. By managing all cycle times and aligning them with quality practices your organization becomes more robust and resilient. The outcome is not only better performance but faster performance which can be seen across the whole organization.
I can count it but I can’t count on it
The only man who behaved sensibly was my tailor; he took my measurement anew every time he saw me, while all the rest went on with their old measurements and expected them to fit me.
- George Bernard Shaw
In a world of constraints, meting out investments may be a matter of short-term economic survival, but it will not build a foundation for long-term success. To create and improve and innovation culture – a culture that fosters economic expansion and delivers to the top and bottom lines – organizations need to invest in those processes and practices that change behavior. In the post, Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure, we explored the power that comes from building a tolerance for appropriate failure. Recently this was reinforced in Megan McArdle’s piece in Time magazine, In Defense of Failure,
It sounds like a dubious aspiration, but one of the more pressing priorities for America this decade is to preserve our cherished freedom to fail in this country…America allows its citizens room to fail — and if they don’t succeed, to try, try again. Somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of all Americans report that they have considered starting their own business, whereas in Europe that number is only 40%.
Here McArdle talks about the power of this freedom:
McArdle on America\'s Need to Support Failure
How do we measure failure and the power of failure in moving us toward a better, brighter, more abundant future? It should be interesting to note that measuring innovation is also top of mind of one of the world’s most active philanthropists, Bill Gates. His concern is not that we aren’t measuring innovation failure, although he did popularize the concept of “fail forward fast” during his time leading Microsoft, his concern is that most people are failing to measure innovation at all.
When all is said and done – have the right satisfaction measures improved?
Without a measureless and perpetual uncertainty, the drama of human life would be destroyed.
- Winston Churchill
Once again the Boston Consulting Group’s 2009 Annual Innovation Report offers another key insight into the dynamic tension that exists in measuring innovation performance in terms of outcomes. The top measure employed by companies seeking to assess their innovation performance was customer satisfaction but the second highest measure was overall revenue growth. The expense of increasing the former measure would seem to have a direct negative effect on the latter and yet there they are parked beside each other at the top of list of robust measures for innovation performance.
The performance of any innovation truly is measured in the eyes of the customer, be they an internal customer or a market-based customer. Customer satisfaction is the end-of-the-line measure for all innovation. If an innovation cannot drive the performance of that measure then what purpose does it serve? One of the most powerful tools for revealing the impact of an innovation is the Net Promoter® Score (NPS). This concept was first widely made known through the work of Fred Reichheld in his book, The Ultimate Question.
The NPS is both a loyalty metric and a discipline for using customer feedback to directly influence behavior within an organization. One company using NPS to measure its innovation effectiveness is Logitech, the computer peripheral manufacturer, which uses it as the final consumer acceptance testing measure. By using this score Logitech can tweak late-stage products to maximize their effectiveness on release to market. They test. They measure. They tweak. They hold or go to market. It should be noted that the best performing products, with the highest NPS, are also the products with the highest revenue on release.
So, it would seem you can serve one goal with two measures, after all!
There are two possible outcomes: if the result confirms the hypothesis, then you’ve made a measurement. If the result is contrary to the hypothesis, then you’ve made a discovery.
- Enrico Fermi
What have you discovered as you attempt to measure your innovation?
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