do_matic

Delightfully or fundamentally different

How often do you find yourself saying "oh, that's different"?

When we experience something truly new, we notice it. When creating a new customer or business experience, you should design to elicit that feeling of curiosity, interest and wonder in your users and your colleagues. Resist the temptation to round off the edges, especially early in the process, otherwise you might get plain vanilla.

There's real opportunity for companies and teams that do this well. And there's real pain ahead to make it happen, but that pain can pay off.

So how different should things be? When trying to do something revolutionary, I'm looking for things to be fundamentally different. When trying to do something incremental, I want to create experiences that are delightfully different.

So when you're working on a design or innovation challenge, ask yourself whether you've fundamentally or delightfully changed:

The consumer's experience
The competitive dynamics in the market
How you talk about the experience
How something is sold
The ownership model for the user
The moment or mode in which you experience something
The value chain

(Delightfully appropriate photo from macwagen.)

Hey Colin: Which is better immediate or reliable?

Colin asked:

In terms of innovation, which is a better input, immediate or reliable? Longer-term inputs are a safer bet, but the longer I wait the more likely it is that someone may eat my lunch.

First, I can totally relate to the onslaught of information you described. Before it was news tickers at the bottom of my screen, but now it’s all manner of content coming at me live through every device. Can’t we relax a bit? Give ourselves a bit more time to ponder and decide?

Likely not. Not when Netflix just showed up, but could be over sooner than its replacement is profitable. Not when you can choose a new, slightly misleading but wildly successful book title in like 12 minutes. Not only do we notice the slipstream more, we need to learn to harness it better.

Back to the question at hand. (I’m just stalling.)

As an innovation decision-maker, I started from the place of basically wanting both. That is, I want to make the immediate more reliable and to make the reliable more immediate.

To do that, you need a powerful way to process information and inputs. For innovation, the question you pose is often just as important as the answer you find. For the time being at least, I believe we still want and need people posing the questions and making the decisions. Sophisticated number crunching can help, but I don’t think such systems pose or answer innovation questions that well. There are experiments out there (see Hunch), but they help when the question is known and ideally univariate.

So, if innovation is in part about bringing new things into the world, this is where I come out:

I want reliable people posing provocative questions and processing more immediate inputs.

"Reliable people" are those that have learned to spot patterns through experience and many cycles of learning. Such people exhibit a relentless curiosity that drives them to learn and challenge their patterns frequently. Ultimately, I want such people working close to the questions and looking to be surprised and contradicted by what they find as quickly as possible.

With such prevalent access to more immediate data, will people become more reliable sooner? Does immediacy make us better calibrated decision-makers (or allow less qualified decision-makers to make better decisions)? This sounds a bit like trying to bring the Gladwell/Surowiecki discussion from several years ago forward.

Maybe when we have tools or other people to help us process it, but as individuals I think it still takes a lot of experience. But that experience, combined with a healthy dose of humility and history, can come more rapidly than ever before.

Price, value, experience and digital media (or "the atoms or the bits")

I was going to pick up this book. Because VSL told me to. I often do what they tell me to do and they haven't let me down yet.



I was looking forward to the prospect of holding it whilst relaxing in a lawn chair in the backyard this summer (ok, somebody else’s backyard, I live here).

Then I was like... well I wonder if it’s available on the Kindle? Lo and behold, I see down there in the lower left that it sure is. Bonus.

That’s cool, I could get it faster. Immediately even. (Even though my Kindle is at home and turned off, when I next turned it on this book would be there "waiting for me" in all its line item glory sooner than I would ever be ready to read it).

Then I was like... I’d probably want to share this one with my wife Steph or my friend Rene. It would make me look smart and I could nerd out about it with somebody. That couldn’t happen with the Kindle though (and Steph would be like 'get out of here with that nonsense, you nerd'). And this book might have pictures that I want to look at (I don’t think so actually, it seems like a collection of essays.)

Then I was like... what’s the price difference (notice the tardiness of this question)?

$0.21

So the inherent difference in the value of this book is $0.21? Says so right up there. (Apparently a pleasant voice is worth another $8.39, but the robot voice on the Kindle is free.)

Well maybe. Price is what you pay and value is what you get. Amazon sets a price, but we say how valuable it is.

As a Prime customer, I’ve already covered the shipping differences quite nicely for them and order more books than I otherwise would if I was to consider the incremental cost of shipping each time I bought a book (brilliant!). I’ve already bought the Kindle. But... let’s ignore sunk costs for a second (MBA kicks in).

Then I was like... Screw that. I’m offended. I want to buy the paper now because I can share it, hold it and it will get here soon enough for my purposes. That is, sooner than I can read it. If I'm paying to destroy trees, then I want the trees. On the margin, the value of the paper is greater for me (or at least I tell myself). Or at least until and if paper goes away. And paper hasn't yet been wrested from my cold dead hands.

But then again, I can’t stick the book on that “library” of mine for when I travel. Who cares? I’ve got enough book inventory to allow me to shelter in place while revolution and reality shows rage around me. They could give me both. They might someday. They're giving me lots of free books right now with some channel price discrimination. That's both a problem and an opportunity they have: two simultaneous models.

Then it occurred to me... Amazon’s got me. I’m a sucker. I love them, but I’m a sucker. Bezos is an innovation hero, but seemingly my arch nemesis as well. (Okay, okay. I'm my worst enemy.) He's found a price and designed an experience that has me considering paying the same price! I'm trapped, but do I want an alternative?

But at this price, is Amazon really going to change the industry and simultaneously maintain control? Perhaps, but I don't think they are destroying enough value yet!

They need to price this book at 50% the cost of the physical book. But then again, those publishers aren’t that interested in doing that right now either... There’s some breakeven for the production side of the value chain that keeps the creators whole (or even better off), while passing on a savings to me the consumer and winning Amazon share of all these little profit bombs.

If you didn’t have to cover the costs of other aspects of your business (publishing print for example, or shipping toasters), what would you charge? What’s the right price to put food on the table of the authors, editors and the rest of that value chain? What could I cut out? How should I deliver the experience for both consumers and creators?

The pricing out there in this world is really, really dynamic. I'm really in need of knowing more of the details of the margin models though. Anybody know?

So, what did I do? Nothing. Can't decide. Frozen.

The Do Lectures: http://www.thedolectures.co.uk/

I need to find a reason and a way to be there. I never really get to these things very often.

I found this via Russell Davies who's cooked up a clever idea of how to fund a trip to the Do lectures for a lucky attendee of his Interesting, a reverse subsidy of sorts for good.

Collaboration > Trust

Collaboration is a huge part of successful design and innovation. I don't need to quote stats or point to case studies to support that claim. Some outcomes come out better with coordinated effort, diverse perspectives and teamwork. Some outcomes and processes don't, but many do.

I don't know if it goes against human nature or where we've evolved to as "business humans," but we have to work at it. Bob Sutton had a post a while ago that suggested that some version of working together was the natural order of things as "human humans."

I was thinking the other day about what collaboration is, and I started to think about what it isn't.

Collaboration isn't...
... oversight.
... delegation.
... divide and conquer.

It's messy. It's hard. It requires lots of respect and taking personal risks on behalf of a greater good (kind of flying in the face of both the "tragedy of the commons" and the theory of self-interested individuals).

Collaborating with people that have talent and vision and conviction isn't easy. Especially if you see yourself that way. I think one of the tricks is to understand, as a leader and as a team member, when and how to collaborate.

Collaboration means with. You have to emphasize clarity of communications and interfaces as much as components or piece parts.
Collaboration means give. You have to give twice as much as what you'd expect to take away.
Collaboration means together. You have to give yourself over to a greater good or shared purpose. Someone might be accountable at the end of the day, so you have to be willing to support that person either explicitly or through agreement of some shared purpose.

Do you have to trust in order to collaborate? I don't think so. I think collaboration breeds trust, not the other way around. In fact, a fixation on trust or respect before collaboration could set you up for a long wait. Sometimes people ask for trust as a prerequisite for collaboration. As in, "we need to trust each other." I think some of that is just lazy collaboration.

So if you want to build trust give productive collaboration a try.

(Image of a well-secured collaboration from Mar00ned's Creative Commons fueled flickr stream.)

Non sequitur: Why is there no overscore?

(Glyph on brick from Zen's photostream on Flickr.)

I was wondering why if there was a "_", why there wasn't a complementary symbol that is at the top of the line, an "overscore" if you will? You might think of it as the carport of type. Or an omega to the underscore's omega.

I asked some of the world's top graphic designers at work, Mimi and Ken, if they had ideas or if such a character existed (These folks went to the world renowned art school at Yale for their graduate degrees in Graphic Design. Check out this year's student exhibition).

No luck.

Mimi and I even opened up the Glyphs for the Times typeface in InDesign and couldn't find one. There is an overbar, the symbol you might see over an e in the English language to indicate a long "e" sound like "eeek" or "eediot." But in the Times set, the overbar is significantly shorter than I'd like it to be. Mimi explained that if I wanted to I could design my own typeface. Alternatively, I could use some adjustment features to move the underscore up. Now, I have no real need for the overscore (yet). So I suppose I'm going to let this one ruminate for a bit.

What's your purpose (inspiration) for innovation?

On his Design Thinking blog, Tim asked one of the central questions that should be answered when designing an innovation strategy. I've been challenging leaders and innovators with it this way:

What's our inspiration for innovation?

For some, it's people-related. For others, it's technology-related. For others, it's money-related. My sister, an accomplished physician and medical researcher, is motivated by the thrill of scientific discovery. I can work with that. My buddy Joe loves to structure a deal and measures it based on the financial outcome. That one is a bit tougher (and has led to some fallout), but ok. My travel agent Janine truly loves serving people and giving them great travel experiences. Bingo. I'm not judging right now, they're just different.

This isn't just some higher-order, transcendental kind of question though. The way Tim posed it is key: what advantage does a purpose give you and what does a lack of purpose say about your ability to do anything new and interesting over the long-haul?

The answer to the purpose / inspiration question has implications for what an organization should be good at and how it should align its processes and strategy as a result. It says something about how an organization should differentiate itself both in the market and back at the ranch. You can be in the exact same industry, yet have a very different purpose and be quite successful. It frees you up to answer the classic Levitt / Marketing Myopia question more fluidly and perhaps span industries.

But the people aspect is what's primal.

Purpose is inspirational and engaging. Inspiration feeds purpose. Inspiration and engagement drives innovation. To sustain innovation, you need to sustain inspiration and engagement. You might get an extra dose of self-motivated passion from some individuals for a period of time, but they often burn out or leave (we call them "innovators", "mavericks" or "insane"). To have it scale, perhaps you have to select for engagement through hiring and engage broadly through purpose?

The answer to the question gets people up in the morning and excited to come to work most days, staying late to accomplish something amazing or taking a risk nobody's taken before. If you could hire your strategy and innovation team based on their fundamental engagement with a purpose, you likely would.

I suspect that one of the reasons mission, values and purpose statements are so distasteful is that they don't align with what really happens in a company. Consistent disappointment isn't going to consistently get people giving their all. So when companies manage out the connections its a long-term killer and when they half-heartedly try to get them back, it's sometimes just as bad.

I led with some examples of personal motivation. I think that an organization's purpose serves as one basis for forming community collective. Some purposes are more suited to community; especially when there are strong cultural norms. Perhaps that's why some innovative organizations are smaller or why some innovation is pursued most passionately and effectively by individuals?

Whew! What a great question. More on the central questions for designing an innovation strategy soon.

Please comment over at Tim's blog.

Feel that? That's your competition passing you

(Thanks to brontedigital. And the dog? Who knows?)

I woke up this morning thinking about risk, innovation, growth, long-term growth gaps and near-term success. I thought about the adage "pigs get slaughtered" and it occurred to me that deer in headlights get run over.

(Thanks T Hall, sorry deer.)

Companies and leaders, the ones that are interested in doing something better, are out there making investments, learning, experimenting and setting themselves up for the next round of growth. I know because I get to work with them.

If you believe there will be a future, then betting on the future makes sense. Now is not only as good a time as ever, it's an even better time. The opportunity costs are lower. The cost of acquiring capabilities are lower. The constraints are inspiring and force you to build and do rather than ponder and strategize.

So as I'm apt to do when I want to feed my insatiable desire for confirming evidence and like-minded perspectives, I went looking for some and saw this. Nice rundown.

Innovation Measure: Innovation Working Dollars (IWD)

There is a concept from marketing measurement and ROI that compares and contrasts working and non-working dollars. The new media folks don't like it too much, but I suspect that has something do with being measured by folks that don't get it. The concept asks the simple question:

Are we spending our money on and close to our customers?

Let's steal it for innovation.

Non-working dollars are those that are spent on planning, thinking about planning, strategy, and measuring (that's ironic), etc. Working dollars are those that have the potential to influence the customer more directly.

For innovation, influence is important, but so is learning and direct experimentation.

Ensuring that most of the work that you're doing has a chance to result in learning or influence is a good idea. More effort should be spent on prototyping, sharing ideas with users, listening to them directly and designing earlier. If you're living in beta, your ratio would be pretty high. Let's say that for every hour of non-influence and non-learning, you should have two hours of influence and learning:

IWD > 2.0

It seems like a "good" measure. It scales; you can apply it to an organization or a project or a day. It promotes the right behavior; measuring IWD will likely result in more of the right things done, faster.

If you compared your working and non-working innovation dollars, what would you find?

(Note: I'm going to start sharing ideas on Innovation Measures. There are lots of things written about what makes a good measure. The writing on innovation measures so far says a lot of stuff like: there are no silver bullets, the right number is about seven, input/outcome/process, etc. I'm going to try to make, steal or adapt some bullets. I'll probably write stuff that others have already conceived. I'm ok with that, but apologize in advance if it's your stuff.)

Creative Commons image from HJEM's Flickr Stream.