Considering the Roeblings' work. Shot by Benson Kua and licensed under Creative Commons.
One of the most important ideas I've learned about leading a creative studio was shared with me by my friend Paul Bennett.
Paul said:
Always end up on Fridays.
I've been thinking about that for about 100 Fridays.
We've been working with an amazing, fun, ambitious client organization to develop new products and services. As we go about designing new experiences for their customers, our client partners are also doggedly learning new innovation- and customer-friendly attitudes and behaviors.
As our teams were getting to know each other, a phrase I heard from more than a few places summed up the shift the team was making. That phrase is:
"It might not work."
We can say that phrase in at least two ways. The first way is from a place of fear or skepticism, as in:
"But, it might not work."
Saying it that way hedges our bets and sets up for an easy retreat. Understandable. The other, better way to say the phrase starts from a place of possibility and curiosity however. As in:
"It might not work, and that's why we're doing it."
We're working on t-shirts for the team. Early sketch above.
Following up on my earlier post… Building an Experimental Design Culture...
Part 2 of our big inspiring weekend involved not only streaming The Dark Crystal, but also streaming Eames: The Architect and the Painter.
Some of our team at IDEO New York went and saw it in the theater and I had been waiting for a quiet moment to watch it as well. Whereas Henson's studio culture was more of a surprise, the Eames' approach to design - their studio, culture, and journey - was eerily familiar.
That makes sense. The Eames were pioneers in applying design as a mindset and approach to solving new problems. They did so alongside interdisciplinary collaborators across architecture, graphic design, communications, and a host of other disciplines. They loved tackling problems that hadn't been tackled before and being given (or taking as the case may be) the liberty to try new approaches to solve those tough problems. Details, aesthetics, and the senses mattered. Surprises were important.
What inspired me most were how ideas were embodied in an exhibition, or a product, or an interactive experience. That the ideas were embodied though is the trick. They made them, beautifully so. Often the ideas came from the making. And, sometimes, they just made.
They also worked hard, though perhaps in an environment that kept people for reasons that were less overtly familial than Henson's group.
A running theme as you'd expect was learning:
"Let the design flow from the learning."
"Never delegate learning."
"[Their] journey of not knowing to knowing was [their] work.*
*A subtle and underlying subtext to the film was the undercurrent and interplay of credit, devotion, betrayal, and optimism. In this case the quote was originally "His" journey… referring to Charles though while he deserved all of the credit, so did everybody else.
To say that I had an inspiring weekend with Steph would be an understatement.
To kick off the weekend, we visited the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image.
Of course, seeing the Muppets up close was fun. Miss Piggy was resplendent and Rowlf looked even more good-natured in the fleece. I wasn't expecting to be blown away by all of the advertising work that Henson and his team did early on. Especially cool were the really challenging station ID ads - all of eight seconds long - that the Henson crew worked up with super simple four-beat storyboards.
All that was great.
What I really can't stop thinking about is the movie we watched in the beginning of the exhibit. The quick overview of Henson's life and approach to work then encouraged me to pick up a copy of It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider
I think the way Jim Henson blended excitement, excellence, craft, and experimentation with humanity, lightness, and safety was pretty cool. Henson believed in hard work, that some ideas were better than others, that collaboration produced better results, that compassion was paramount, and that the journey was the reward.
It made me want to be a better leader.
(Blaine from the Predator by Dunechaser on Flickr. "I don't got time to bleed.")
I'm re-reading Emergence
A passage just forced me to put down my (paperback) book, log in to Gogo inflight wireless from 27A and reflect. In one section, Johnson describes emergent software systems and the work of Danny Hillis.
One of the many things Hillis has done is write software that "evolved" sorting algorithms. At the time (maybe still?), world-record sorting algorithms took 60 steps to organize 100 numbers. Using an initial pool of code snippets and a process that coalesced full algorithms, Hillis created an evolutionary environment in which algorithms created themselves, each successive generation an improvement on the prior generation. The evolutionary process worked brilliantly until it eventually stalled at 75 steps. The evolutionary process stalled at "local maximums" because the system only rewarded generations that improved upon the prior generation. To get better would require taking a step backwards and certain death.
The solution? Introduce predators. Here's Johnson:
"Before the introduction of predators, a miniprogram that reached a seventy-five-step ridge knew that its offspring had a chance of surviving if it stayed put at that local maximum, but faced almost certain death if it descended to search out higher ground. But the predators changed all that. They hunted down ridge dwellers and forced them to improvise: if a miniprogram settled into a seventy-five-step range, it could be destroyed by predator programs. Once the predators appeared on the scene, it became more productive to descend to lower altitudes to search out a new peek than to stay put at a local maximum."
After 30 minutes or so, the new environment produced algorithms operating in the 62-step range.
Huh.
You have to be willing to eat your own young. Or at least nudge comfortable people down into the valley to learn a little, recombine and search out higher peaks.
Leaders of organizations really need to think about this one.
(Mattsse, Goldfish and Pallette, 1914-1915)
On Saturday, I visited the new Matisse show Radical Invention at the MoMA. On display is Matisse's experimentation with his craft between 1913 and 1917. The show (and the curators) explained a couple of things to me.
First, Matisse would give himself a constraint (the same subject matter, the same color palette) allowing him to focus on variation in technique. Why worry about composition or subject matter if you want to focus on something else altogether?
Second, a piece could evolve quite significantly over the course of several years. One style would morph into another. We could see the faint lines of a prior manifestation underneath the end result. The subject would be shaped and reworked ("The Italian Woman" stands out in this respect). Perhaps Matisse was the inspiration for Photoshop tools?
These principles naturally extend to those of us working on our craft or design skills. By picking a direction or a mode of expression or a technique quickly at the beginning of a project, we can focus our energy on learning or experimenting with other techniques.
(Generic substitutes courtesy of Shazam791 on Flickr and Creative Commons. I hate beets)
Increasingly, I've been grappling with the question of process, tools and methods and its relationship (or not) to cultivating a culture that, at worst, permits and, at best, encourages innovation.
Call it a slow hunch, but I'm coming to the point of view that innovation process, methods and tools are no substitute for innovation leadership.
Sounds trite for sure, but I'd guess that less than 5% of my time in discussions with clients about innovation competency and culture revolve around this hot potato issue. There's no focused effort to develop innovation leaders at all levels within the organizations. Seems like a real miss.
There are different styles of leader for sure - the iconic ones come to mind.
Yet to lead innovation, we each have to learn our way of embodying a certain mindset and behaviors. What makes me optimistic is that I think, through experience, we can develop these competencies.
(Cocktail Party At The Imperial Hotel: March 13, 1961 (Tokyo, Japan) via Jim Kuhn)
Good ideas can come from cocktail parties and coffee shops. Especially if the crowd has deep and diverse expertise and are experimental / action oriented. Unfortunately, lots of cocktail parties aren't like this. As a result, the ideas often suck.
Good ideas can come from spending time with the people in your organization and network, asking them what hunches they've cultivated and what support they need to try them. But most leaders don't invest the time to do this or have such a supportive mindset. As a result, people are left stewing and fermenting.
As an innovation leader, can you go to better cocktail parties? Can you do a better job of sourcing brilliance from people in your organization?
*This post was inspired by a great dinner last night with Dave Blanchard. The idea of "sourcing brilliance" was taught to me by Anese Cavanaugh.
(Check out Kristian
Bjornard's fun Flickr pages. He did a design a day in 2010.)
Last Wednesday, it occurred to me that a preoccupation with process can really impede the pursuit of revolutionary innovation. By process, I mean a focus on what happens between when an idea "emerges" and when it first gets to market.
Instead, leaders should communicate constraints and conditions and then actively support action. Focus on the bookends, not the books.
) seems to be built in part around his idea of "cultivated hunches." Think of them as wise hypotheses and patterns that you're people have seen. They're out there in your organization. Actively find them, help people develop them and unlock them. If you asked people to share their hunches right now, how many big ideas would be in there?Amazing art from the folks at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in Meadville, Pa. I took these while there for a reunion this weekend.
