Innovation Herds: Me-too-ism & the dumbness of crowds
July 26, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 3 Comments
Great minds think alike, but fools seldom differ.
- English Proverb
In honor of the recent football (okay, soccer) World Cup—and congratulations to South Africa for pulling off a sterling tournament (Bafana Bafana!) and the Spaniards for their first tournament victory—it seems appropriate to consider the impact of the herd on innovation practices. Not just any herd, though; this is the herd that forms when two opposing packs of 5-year-olds play the glorious game: the herd of Pee Wee Soccer.
Sound and motion with little to show for it
For those of you who don’t have children or have not seen children this age playing soccer, you have missed what certainly is an experience. The rules of soccer seem immaterial. Yes, there is a ball in play. Yes, there are referees and linespeople. Yes, there are goals at each end of the usually shortened field and two equal-numbered teams of players. The basic framework is the same, but the way the game is played is quite…different.
The pervading game objective practiced by both teams is to quite literally “crowd the ball”: where the ball goes, that’s where all players attempt to go, except for those few who become distracted by a parent or sibling on the sideline, or by the color of the sky, or by something bright and shiny, or need to re-enact football hooliganism an so on. You get the picture. What forms is a tight pack around the ball, hiding it from the spectator’s view, and which moves as a herd up and down the field. Occasionally the ball will “escape,” only to be recaptured by one of the team members who, in their inability to run and dribble the ball simultaneously, will stall until the rest of the members from both teams re-form the herd.
No one here but us sheeple
The greatest difficulty is that men do not think enough of themselves, do not consider what it is that they are sacrificing when they follow in a herd, or when they cater for their establishment.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
What of this herd? And what does it have to say about the impact of the herd mentality on innovation? A short explanation can be found here.
Given our complex worlds with their voluminous sensory inputs, we are wired to adopt a series of mental shortcuts (termed heuristics) that enable us to process only the amount of data necessary, in as short a time as possible, to meet our immediate needs. Think of heuristics as experience-based models that help in problem-solving and discovery. They drive much of our daily behavior without us even recognizing it. The reason they are effective is that they relieve us from treating every circumstance as critically important, offering relief from having to think too hard. Is it really necessary to calculate the optimum parking space at the mall, taking into consideration timing, prevailing weather, shopping patterns, etc.? No? Right—open space, here I come!
By employing heuristics, we create a series of short cuts that enable us to focus on more complex issues, more holistically and systemically, as the need arises. Heuristics, however, reinforce situational thinking and action. In recent studies conducted at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, researchers discovered that it takes a minority of just 5 percent to influence a crowd’s direction—and that the other 95 percent follow without realizing it. If we hearken back to the heady days of the dot-com book in the early 2000s, we can see this pattern in the practices of developers, who threw together “me-too” websites; institutional investors, who threw money at anything with a website; and stock market investors, who piled their money into every “sure thing” they heard about from their hairdresser, dog walker, or cab driver. And that herd behavior ended well, didn’t it?
Wise crowds and the benefit of discomfort
The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.
- Archibald MacLeish
Unless we take steps to separate ourselves from the crowd and seek to break our ingrained patterns of thinking, we will continue to be drawn to the herd. In James Surowiecki’s bestseller The Wisdom of the Crowds, he noted that there are highly functional types of groups that possess not a herd mentality, but an inherent wisdom. From his perspective, if four basic conditions are met, a crowd’s “collective intelligence” will produce better outcomes than a small group of experts. Surowiecki says that wisdom will prevail even if members of the crowd don’t know all the facts or choose, individually, to act irrationally. “Wise crowds” need 1) diversity of opinion; 2) independence of members from one another; 3) decentralization; and 4) a good method for aggregating opinions. In short, effective groups need guidelines (like heuristics), but ones that are focused on differentiation and not similarity. “Me-too” has to be retired so that “What if” might prevail.
Unfortunately, when wisdom meets the herd, the prevailing outcome is the dumbness of the crowds.
To reach beyond the herd, organizations must embrace difference and the discomfort that comes from not adopting the first, or easiest, answer to a presenting challenge. Clay Shirky, a professor in NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, described in his book Here Comes Everybody the benefits of groups breaking out of the herd mentality and moving toward “collaborative production”:
Collaborative production, where people have to coordinate with one another to get anything done, is considerably harder than simple sharing, but the results can be more profound. New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for wildly differing levels of coordination.
Shirky, pp. 109
Over time, even the Pee Wee Soccer team learns how to play the game. Each player discovers his or her own strengths, and a good coach will recognize those differences and create something greater than a mob out of them. Their efforts become grounded in collaborative production. In our organizations, innovation processes that support our thinking and don’t provide ready answers give us the opportunity to develop solutions that reach beyond the herd. We can choose to stretch past the simple and explore the complex so that our solutions are new and not “me-too.”
We herd sheep, we drive cattle, we lead people. Lead me, follow me, or get out of my way.
- General George S. Patton
Being in a herd is actually a matter of choice, one that must be made consciously in order for a range of alternatives to be revealed. In a competitive marketplace, would you rather be in the herd, where the view rarely changes, or out front? I thought so.
Innovation in the Rear View Mirror – The challenge of revisionist history and hindsight bias
July 9, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 3 Comments
I always avoid prophesying beforehand, because it is a much better policy to prophesy after the event has already taken place.
- Winston Churchill
Raise your hands if you have ever met someone who has a tendency to relive their glory days. You know, that one person in a group who fondly remembers better times, or who always finds the present lacking because “the last time this same thing happened, there was a much better result”? We are not talking about the story teller, who fires up those around them with their passionate recounting of a victory or a discovery, nor even someone who occasionally reminisces. We’re talking about the person with a pathological need to live in the past, who might be physically in the present but whose mind is a year or ten in the past. Strangely enough, they keep visiting the present, trying to capture us and cart us back there with them.
We’re going to do what we’ve always done (and wonder why we always get what we’ve always got)
May you have the hindsight to know where you’ve been, the foresight to know where you are going, and the insight to know when you have gone too far.
- Irish Saying
As we noted in a previous post, storytelling has a vital role in a healthy and vibrant organization. This type of storyteller is not the same. The resident revisionist historian simply cannot let go of the past. With perfect hindsight they see how things were so much better before, and that when change occurred, it put us on the road to ruin. The revisionist doesn’t seek to use their past experience to inform their present-day actions. They would rather live in the past. Over and over and over again.
What students in the United States knew of George Washington’s youth was that he apparently chopped down a cherry tree on the family property. Unfortunately, this is a blatant piece of revisionist history. An archaeological dig at the Washington family home found no such cherry trees. In fact, additional research uncovered that the original biographer of Washington, Mason Locke Weems, fabricated the story in order to make the general, first president, founding father, and all-round statesman “more honest”! Strange to think that aggressively pruning a prunus avium and not lying about it would be considered a honest act.
This fabrication and the apocryphal story built upon it lend little to Washington’s character, and revisionist history lends little to the life of an organization. Sorting the truth from fact can be a running battle that can exhaust an organization, leaving fewer resources for creative endeavors, and drain the will of the organization.
A friend of mine, Sam, used to tag people as “radiators” and “drains.” Which I believe he picked up elsewhere (perhaps here?) Now, I’m not one for labels. They’re inflexible and terribly difficult to remove once in place. But his notion that people either radiate energy to those around them or they drain it from them — like so many dim-witted psychic vampires — rings appallingly true.
How do you think this plays in an organization attempting to embrace and extend its ability to innovate? Not well at all.
Looking forward but only seeing the rear view mirror
In today’s complex and fast-moving world, what we need even more than foresight or hindsight is insight.
- Anonymous
Another powerful, distorting perspective present in the psychology of organizations is hindsight bias. This is the inclination to see past events as being more predictable than they in fact were before they took place. Hindsight bias has been observed experimentally in a variety of settings, often where defined levels of expertise are expected, including politics, sports, games, and medicine. In psychological experiments of hindsight bias, subjects tend to remember their predictions of future events as having been stronger than they actually were, in those cases where those predictions turn out to be correct. This inaccurate assessment of reality after it has occurred is also referred to as “creeping determinism.”
How does hindsight bias impact an organization’s ability to innovate?
By disguising past performance, hindsight bias makes it difficult to determine how original actions may have resulted in a specific outcome. The memory of events may become so distorted that it bears little resemblance to the reality of what occurred; that makes any potential lesson learned not only poor but potentially hazardous.
Learn from your mistakes – don’t relive them
Traditional scientific method has always been at the very best, 20 – 20 hindsight. It’s good for seeing where you’ve been. It’s good for testing the truth of what you think you know, but it can’t tell you where you ought to go.
- Robert M. Pirsig
Frank and honest sharing of information is for a wider benefit. It creates a mental space for new ideas to crop up or flood in. This differentiates it from the dynamic surrounding those who are “revisionistas” and “hindsighteers.” (There should be a club for this which involves hats with rearview mirrors attached, I’m sure.) In this dynamic, any benefit, if it can be called that, is derived primarily for themselves. Their approaches leave little room for learning, positive affirmation of true success, or the opportunity for discovering a more holistic solution to the pressing challenges being addressed.
Mistakes and missteps for anyone interested in innovation are a gift. They help define more clearly “where you ought to go.” In being honest about our challenges and the qualities of our successes, and not disguising them or explaining them away through false tales, we will build towards innovations that are truly extraordinary.
Innovation 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?
Teaching a Person to Fish – Learning and Development for Innovation
March 30, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Why learning how to innovate is as important as the act itself
Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can – there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.
- Sarah Caldwell
It’s like any muscle – you have to use it or lose it
Give a person a fish and they will eat for a day. Teach a person to fish and they will eat for a lifetime.
- Chinese Proverb
Learning is physical. At its most basic level, learning is the process of changing the structure and actions of neurons so they retain information in long-term memory in both the temporal and parietal lobes of the cortex. Increasingly, neuroscience will play a larger role in our understanding of the process of learning.
This doesn’t mean to say that there is still not a wealth of information to be gleaned from cognitive psychology, behavioral psychology, and social psychology as they relate to the way in which people learn. Neuroscience will simply afford us another window into the way our minds work. And what will we do with that knowledge?
What both the behavioral observation of learning and the physical understanding of learning agree on is that for learning to be lasting it must be practiced. In fact, the best learners not only practice, they study – hard. Malcolm Gladwell proposes that for true excellence to emerge the magic number of hours required to dedicated practice and ever-increased proficiency is 10,000. Less than that and the learning may be substantial but will not result in elevated performance. The same can be said of innovation. Unpracticed innovators make fewer cognitive leaps, fewer bold choices, have fewer insights and their innovations are poorer for it.
The approach of IDEO, the design shop headquartered in Palo Alto, takes the concept of the learner even further and describes “T-shaped” people. These are learners who have not only gone deep into an understanding of a particular field of interest (the perpendicular stroke in the “T”), they have also developed a broad awareness and understanding of many subjects (the horizontal stroke in the “T”). A consistent attention to both types of learning increases the utility of these people in the design and innovation domain. Perhaps the Gladwell number needs to be an equation, i.e., 10,000 x 1000 x n? Where “n” is the number of separate domains of learning pursued?
Think differently for different results
Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.
- Chinese Proverb
Innovation fosters new thinking, including the way we learn to think. The way we create the promoters (activities or environmental factors) that support learning is a key component to improving learning and development outcomes. Did you know that there are five key promoters to consider? They are:
1. Innate learning programs (the things we just know, you know?) (Gallistel, 2002)
2. Repetition of information. (Repetition of information – get it?!) (Squire and Kandel, 2000)
3. Excitement at the time of learning (Woo Hoo!) (Cahill & Gorski, 2003; LeDoux, 2002)
4. Eating carbohydrates at time of learning (A personal favorite) (Korol, 2002)
5. 8-9 hours of sleep after learning (To sleep perchance to dream) (Kuriyama, Stickgold, & Walker, 2004)
Very few learning programs actually consciously accommodate one or two of these promoters, let alone all five. Is it any wonder that the process of learning may seem draining and even futile at times? To maximize the learning and development outcomes change the nature of the learning environment, change the perspectives of the participants, and change the delivery mechanism. All can be achieved in simple ways. Use a rapid prototyping method – what can you change in under an hour for less than $100 (or less than $10)?
When considering learning and development focused on innovation practices the inclusion of elements that actually promote learning might be worthwhile, might it not? Take two innate learning programs for example; the first allows us to rapidly associate words and labels to objects within situations, and a second enables us to compute social status and insults to social status. If we acknowledge and fold into our learning and development activities these innate learning programs we can structure experiences that capitalize on them. Improvisational activities, like improv theatre games, could help us unlock the influence resident within these learning programs so that the experience fosters increased innovative behaviors (resilience, risk-taking, generosity, etc.)
Letting go and leaving justification behind
Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.
- Benjamin Franklin
Lessons learned are not necessarily procedural or systemic, they are predominately behavioral and social. One of the key learned behaviors is that with success comes praise and possibly adulation. Well, the process of innovation actually requires that we be less-than-successful at times. Yes, we sometimes have the glorious opportunity to fail (perhaps not the first time, bust certainly more publicly than we would like.)
There are two essential behaviors to learn and develop in order to “make it” as an innovator. The first is the ability to let go of an idea. The concept of ownership within corporate organizational life is one that people learn early. The people with the best ideas not only “win” they also receive the reward of advancement. That may mean access to things previously unavailable, i.e., the offer of increased responsibility, or even greater compensation, perks and benefits.
A successful innovator needs to understand that her idea may actually find greater success when used by another or in conjunction with another person’s idea. They also need to understand that while their idea might be a great idea, if there is no passion for it among the people who need to capitalize on it and bring it to market then it is as good as dead and useless to all. Letting go is an essential learning that is counter to so much we have learned in order to survive in organizations. But letting go is not the hardest lesson to learn for many.
Perhaps a more damnable habit to break is that of justification.
Justification is the hard-earned ability to defend your position in the face of withering opposition. It brooks no alternate view, nor does it easily accommodate modifications to its core or demarcated essential truth. The power of justification is that it makes ideas unassailable (especially when carried out by a master or mistress of the art.) The only problem with justification is that as a practice it allows no room for the new, the additive, or the tangential. Justification creates cul-de-sacs in which innovation goes to die.
Learning how to combat holding onto an idea too tightly and justifying an idea to the point of lunacy are essential practices. Which leads us to the role of exactly that in innovation – practicing what we have learned.
Practice makes permanent – practice with feedback makes perfect
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.
- Douglas Adams
Most have heard of that old aphorism, “practice makes perfect.” My experience, and the firm word of a former business associate, Tom Doyle, is that practice does not make perfect, “practice makes permanent; only practice with feedback makes perfect.”
In order to become better at the art and substance of innovation it is necessary to work on it. In working on this skill set it is also critical to receive feedback and coaching. The application of observational assessment and associated feedback to an innovator enables them to see their mental models reflected in the words of others as well as the way a life time of habits influences how they not only see the world, but seek to change it in the present.
Having a subject matter expert observe and provide feedback, even if they are not a practiced innovator, may be of great benefit to those seeking to innovate. The critical eye is an essential ingredient in improvement. To borrow another Gladwell-popularized concept, that of the maven – a trusted specialist or subject matter expert connected to other like-minded practitioners across a community – it is a given that mavens make the best mentors. Their deep expertise, and the authority with which they can observe, mean that the feedback that they provide can not only provide clear opportunities for growth but may also provide ways to create a step-change in our approach to innovation and the challenges at hand.
After all, while it has been said that those who can – do, and that those who cannot – teach, it is preferable to think on Seneca:
While we teach, we learn.
Innovation Poll – Biggest Barrier to Innovation?
March 16, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
Braden Kelley, an innovation consultant and the editor of Blogging Innovation, is taking a measure of the relative barriers to organizational innovation. He asks, “What is your organization’s biggest barrier to innovation?”
To take the poll, go here. Results are presented immediately after your submission.
Resources for Innovation – The Power of Constraints
February 28, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
The wise stewardship of resources is the task of any organization. How those resources are deployed for maximum gain is the key responsibility of organizational leadership. The only problem with this concept is what happens when wise stewardship comes up hard against the necessary risking of resources for the material benefit of innovation? Unfortunately, in the present “economic unpleasantness” as a dear friend keeps calling the train wreck that is this great recession, stewardship of resources has digressed to hoarding of resources. Save for one notable exception – human resources.
We don’t have the energy to exploit…anything
The greatest tragedy in America is not the destruction of our natural resources, though that tragedy is great. The truly great tragedy is the destruction of our human resources by our failure to fully utilize our abilities, which means that most men and women go to their graves with their music still in them.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
The crisis in our economy is shedding harsh light on the absence of any true understanding of how to overcome the organizational need to protect the bottom-line while also leveraging the most creative asset any organization can access, its people. Instead, jobs have been cut in record numbers. The unemployment rate, not just in the USA but in many Western economies, is approaching record highs. All the while the usual levers are being pulled. Reductions in capacity. Reductions in expenditure. Reductions in our expectations for a more positive future. And this means that a pervasive, innovation averse, risk-avoiding mindset is prevailing in most quarters. It’s simply all, too, hard.
As an aside, it is fascinating that one of the major beneficiaries of the economic downturn is global climate change. Apparently the idling of the voraciousness of the economic engines which has been burning so hot last decade has been a significant boon to the limitation of the emission of greenhouse gases. Thank you for small mercies, I guess. That problem set is still not solved but we seem to have bought some additional time in which to avoid doing anything meaningful. It’s too complex. And hard.
What happens when people stop, well, everything? A cascade occurs, and not a good one. It certainly doesn’t mean resources become instantly abundant and available. No, we can thank the remarkable export of the Toyota Production System (as Lean initiatives) across many manufacturing sectors for the fantastic ability to only produce to demand. This latest cascade means everything becomes scarce. There is no excess. Nothing with which an innovator may play, or test, or prototype. Just like a faucet being turned off. The flow of goods, services, and money has slowed to a trickle or even stopped altogether.
All we are left with, all that we have available to us, are the people who comprise our organizations. And what have we done to them? Nothing save lower their expectations or show them the door.
Serve more than one purpose
The greatest achievement of the human spirit is to live up to one’s opportunities and make the most of one’s resources.
- Marquis de Vauvenargues
Let’s reframe the challenge. What if we take as true that oft-quoted phrase, “our people are our greatest assets”? How does that mindset begin to influence the choices we make about innovating our way out of our current mess?
One creative agency in Toronto, Zulu Alpha Kilo, decided that the best way to advertise itself was to actually take what it does to the streets. They setup a “box” in Dundas Square in the heart of downtown Toronto and on the first really cold day of the season in the city. They placed a team of eight interdisciplinary thinkers into the plywood box where they solicited creative challenges from passers-by – over 117,000 in all some of whom waited over two hours to present their challenges. Twelve hours later not only had the team presented solutions for many problems they had also cracked open the façade of a design agency so the public could see the workings inside. Not a bad piece of self-promotion either to put creativity on display.
Organizations like the agency above that choose to create a meaningful creative bargain with employees seem to be finding their way. Organizations like Google, SAS and 3M, which even in downturns still expect their employees to devote a percentage of their work time to personal projects, also will continue to see the benefit of a similar trust over time. It will be returned in goodwill, enthusiasm and commitment, to say nothing of the possibility of new products and services that might drive top and bottom-line growth. Their people are asked to do more than one thing, they have a “job” to do for sure, but they are also expected to explore and contribute in other ways, too.
While contemplating setting new expectations for our human resources why not also consider setting the expectation that all resources be used in more than one way. Paper being reused for notepads is nothing new, but what about expired materials such as this novel idea from a design student involving expired prophylactics. Yes, the humble condom as haute couture. But the concept of reuse is nothing new. Making it an embedded and expected part of all aspects of production and trade is.
Many technology firms are leading the way. Oracle is continuing to support the work that Sun began even after the acquisition; usually this would be a signal for abandoning “non-additive” projects to the bottom-line. HP has also made reuse a fundamental part of its approach to its business. Now if only “Big Ink” could figure out a way to reclaim the ink on paper destined for recycling! It seems Xerox has a similar idea but has taken a different tact.
These efforts are good first steps but this mindset needs to be seeded as widely as possible. The innovation required to do that may point to a way out of the economic doldrums and toward a vibrant alternative economic reality closer to the cycles presented in William McDonough’s “Cradle to Cradle”. Which doesn’t begin to cover what might be accomplished by repurposing from the private sector to the public sector or from the for-profit to the non-profit.
It’s now how much – it’s how well
Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.
- Peter Drucker
Many artists relish resource constraints, although they might initially grumble at the limitations. Instead they often apply themselves within limitations to create art that is unique and surprising. Sometimes those constraints aren’t only material; their constraints may be social, cultural or even political. Yet still they find a path to success by not taking the box they are handed at face value. This ability to look beyond what is in hand to what is possible with that resource applies in all cricumstances in which innovation can and must thrive.
The work of Inc. Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Kevin Surace the CEO of Serious Materials, is a case in point. He is picking up bankrupt firms that have been strip-mined of all their resources (and their human resources previously carelessly set aside.)He is willing to invest in the R&D and building out production capacity to ensure his company’s long-term health. He is willing to forgo profit to do so, too. He is applying his limited resources, placing bets now, to ensure his economic future. How many other companies are willing to do that today?
Here’s the thing. If we don’t invest time, energy, effort and our resources in innovation now, when we need it most, we are in for a long and painful ride. We need to take the time to innovate. To find the better way. Those who do will be most successful in the long-term. Not because they happen upon a great idea, but because the habit of spending resources on innovation even during down times sets a pattern for revitalization that is necessary for any organization.
Working The Processes of Innovation – Learning to Love & Live Failure
February 12, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · 1 Comment
Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
- Henry Ford
Creating A Structure To Support Things Not Yet Seen
The crucial variable in the process of turning knowledge into value is creativity.
- John Kao
To talk about innovation and processes in the same breath seems oxymoronic. While most organizations are designed to take inputs and convert them through a series of conversion efforts into products or services for sale, they are singularly ill-prepared to bring new things to market. Why?
Existing organizations apply functional expertise in the form of departments like; Design, Product Development, Sourcing, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, Customer Support, HR, IT, and Finance, etc. They take known inputs, apply existing business processes for conversion into value, and produce recognizable outputs. Where’s the point of inflection? Where is are the processes that foster innovation? The whole enterprise is an inherently stable system designed to retain that stability.
To create innovation there must be a structure that can support the exploration, the risk-taking, the resource expenditure without direct monetary return. A structure that supports innovation must capture and support an organization’s ability to reach beyond what it produces in the present to what it might produce for the future. It demands a structure that can seek and use unknown resources, to build the unknown for unknown customers (or at least meet current customers’ unknown needs!)
The challenge is to reach into that unknown and pull some sense of meaning into the present. To use questioning and learning to first understand, then conceive, then sketch, then model, then prototype an innovation into existence. Part and parcel of that process is to be resilient enough to survive the inevitable hazards of the associated failure.
A Framework For Failure
Half the failures in life arise from pulling in one’s horse as he is leaping.
- August Hare
When planning for innovation how we create space for and manage risk (and the possibility of failure) is a primary factor in long-term success. Creating an organizational framework that not only can accept that risk is a primary ingredient in development of the truly new, but one that also has the operational flexibility and resilience to survive the unanticipated failure, is crucial. Yes, the desire to create more first-time successes is strong and should be recognized and valued. But nothing in innovation is ever perfect. Chaos and failure must be expected regardless of whether or not their extent might be anticipated.
A basic process model for innovation might be the following:
At each step there are a series of actions that happen, some sequential and some parallel, but all requiring a vigilance in terms of risk. The paramount question used throughout this process is not framed by “What” or “How” or “How much” but by “Why?” The inquiry contained within “Why?” demands that we constantly test our thinking through every step in the process of innovation. It helps us look beyond the expected and the commonly understood data embodied in the embedded business rules, behavioral norms and measures of our success. This inquiry generates awareness of the wider system of interdependent elements around a design challenge. It also gives us comfort in that it helps us frame possible responses to potential failures. It inoculates us against the pain of failure, keeping us strong for the next attempt.
Beyond High Reliability Organizations
One very important aspect of motivation is the willingness to stop and to look at things that no one else has bothered to look at. This simple process of focusing on things that are normally taken for granted is a powerful source of creativity…
- Edward de Bono
One of the off-shoots of social psychology and organization theory explores the concept of “sense-making”. One of pioneers in this area is Karl Weick. He noted that people try to make sense of organizations, and organizations themselves try to make sense of their environment. They are both navigating an ever-changing situation. What does this mean for innovation processes? Weick asks us to focus our attention on questions of ambiguity and uncertainty in this sense-making. Sense-making is the process of creating situational awareness and understanding in situations of high complexity or uncertainty in order to make decisions. This is a process of inquiry and seeking understanding in a dynamically changing environment. In terms of innovation the environment is the formed by the process of creating something new.
Moving from situational awareness in individuals, to shared awareness and understanding, to collaborative decision-making is a socio-cognitive activity. This approach considers that the individual’s cognitive activities are directly impacted by the social nature of the exchange and vice versa. This is, in a form, a process of co-creation. And the culmination of that sense-making process is one that Weick was also one of the co-developers of, the concept of the “high reliability organizations”. (Others involved in this development were, Karlene H. Roberts, Herbert Simon, and James March.) As noted in Wikipedia.org, “A High Reliability Organization (HRO) is an organization that has succeeded in avoiding catastrophes in an environment where normal accidents can be expected due to risk factors and complexity.” In short is an organization that can be best described as resilient in the extreme.
Organizations that must be successful all of the time continually reinvent themselves. For example, an aircraft carrier uses its functional units slightly differently depending on whether they are on a humanitarian mission, a search and rescue mission, or are engaged in night flight operations training. The same can said for an organization that delivers robust innovations time and time again. They may in fact be termed “highly reliable innovation organization”. They continually reinvent themselves. They build flexible systems that marshal their resources, via their innovation processes, to capitalize on opportunities as they arise. They take great risks, fail often, and yet they endure.
Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.
- Anaïs Nin
The Politics of Innovation – Dodging the Seagulls in “Finding Nemo”
February 4, 2010 by Andrew (Drew) · Leave a Comment
…Business is not a sporting event. Victory for one company doesn’t mean defeat for everyone else.
- James Surowiecki
Playing Games With Innovation
Let’s be blunt, innovation has become the latest political football in many organizations and the competition around owning it has become fierce, if not ugly. For those organizations who do not know how to address their current poor market performance, the concept of innovation is one that is being firmly embraced. It’s hot. 
There is widespread media attention. So many senior leaders have grabbed it with both hands. But, like the dog who doesn’t know what to do with the car once he catches it, these organizations struggle to define what innovation means to them and what it might deliver in terms of improving their fortune.
Due to its popularity and high visibility in the marketplace, the ownership of innovation has become a part of many organizations’ power struggles. Not necessarily innovations themselves. Mostly the levers and resources that may (or may not) drive innovation outcomes. Whoever controls the conversation about the concept also ends up controlling, if not outright budgetary and expense authority, a certain amount of power that comes with the imprimatur of being responsible for the “new and sexy.” Innovation has become something to be batted about and the result is a poorer focus on outcomes.
It’s Not Bi-partisan – It’s A-political
Those who understand innovation also understand that breakthrough products can transform business. True innovations are greater than the desire to improve existing business practices; innovation can drive positive transitions into the future. They enable an organization to achieve a growth trajectory beyond its present state. They unleash huge revenue and profit potential. Because of this inherent capacity for disruption they also often foster competing objectives among an organization’s leaders. Each leader might view innovation from their unique perspective and lose sight of the overall value the business might derive. The result is a breakdown in cross-organizational support due to a reinforcement of functional silos. Within innovation resides the potential for enormous power. Is it any wonder there is a struggle to control it?
Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine. Mine…
- The Sydney Seagulls in “Finding Nemo” (Pixar)
Much like the Sydney Seagulls in the Pixar animated classic, Finding Nemo, everyone has declared innovation, “Mine!” The battle for control over innovation is not unique to any single organization. Within that struggle, and just as pedestrian, is that fact that many senior leaders are hard-pressed to define what they are wrestling over. There are no organized parties around innovation. In fact, the factionalism that occurs is often driven by territorial concerns rather than growth outcomes. The turf battles over the control of innovation-focused resources and the portfolio of innovation initiatives is also hampered by other political matters. One of which would be, the “tyranny of the urgent over the important.” The objective of which is not necessarily to be focused on creating value, but to be focused on the appearance of making a contribution.
The Politics of Survival
This is the politics of self-preservation; which is completely at counter-purposes to the risk required for true innovation. For the sake of political expediency, innovation is often sacrificed as the organization’s attention turns to other, seemingly more important, concerns. In publicly-traded firms, the omnipresent attention of the “market” drives concerns into 30 day-defined horizons. Or, for the longer-minded, that might be stretched out to the end of each quarter. Where the demands of the business require control and systematic delivery of results, in order to meet the market’s demands for consistency and reliability, innovation is quite another animal altogether. It requires an acknowledged risk and the commitment of resources with the desire to deliver a future unknown benefit.
Fortunately, there are a few individuals in some organizations who have come to understand that by neutralizing organizational politics they might better facilitate first a breakthrough idea’s acceptance into development, and then develop that concept into a viable product. They start with a thorough understanding of the social network that exists within the organization. With this in mind they can knit together a coalition of supporters who can provide cover and guidance that exists separately from the organization structure as it is defined in purely functional terms. This gives them the ability to dodge the leadership seagulls. If innovators became more aware of the political actions that contribute to successful project acceptance and became more capable of motivating and taking such actions, perhaps more break-through products would be developed. Politics may make for strange bedfellows, but unless organization politics are either neutralized or circumvented the likelihood of innovations making their way to market may be severely impeded.
How do you navigate the seagulls of your organization to bring your innovations to life?
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