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 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
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 & 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 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
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?
Twitter: DrewCM
- Last few days in Australia before returning to the USA. Great trip.
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- 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)
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