do_matic

It might not work

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.

Building an Experimental Design Culture: Part 2 Eames

 

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.

Building an Experimental Design Culture: Part 1 Henson

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. It's a little gift shop gem, and correspondingly sappy but that's the point.

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.

Emergence, Innovation and Predators

(Blaine from the Predator by Dunechaser on Flickr. "I don't got time to bleed.")

I'm re-reading Emergence by Steven B. Johnson. It's great. Challenging and still fresh. I'm thinking about how the concepts do and don't apply to organizations and the discussion about the The Future or End of Management. How do Emergent behaviors apply in the case of people and ideas? What time horizons and leadership behaviors are necessary to spot and promote 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.

Innovation: Process is no substitute for leadership

(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.

Innovation Leadership: Cocktail Parties or Sourcing Brilliance?

(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.

Interested in revolutionary innovation? Focus on the bookends.

(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.

Constraints and conditions

1. Utilize clear constraints
Let people know they'll get real money, but not a lot of it, to take the next development and learning step.

2. Focus on user and market outcomes
Fund fundamentally different customer experiences or "good enough" solutions to disrupt our own market.

3. Start with impact, wait for mass
Be patient for scale, but impatient for in-market proof and per-unit profitability.

Support action

4. Cultivate hunches
Steven Johnson's forthcoming book (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation) 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?

5. Act, preferably fast
Help people get things shipped to generate feedback from real users, in-market. One of your jobs as a big-shot leader is to help people make progress. Is there an experience out there that you can't prototype or build within 60 days?

Agile/lean thinking and the theory of disruption come together quite nicely when you do this.

Dynamic duos: Bravery, Creativity and Innovation

(There are always others in pictures like this. From Clickflashphotos on Flickr.)

The last two days I've spent at the New York Forum. If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that and hate me for it!

On Tuesday night, I led a session with some colleagues on rebuilding trust in the financial system amongst 20-30 year olds. Definitely lots of energy and fun despite the heady subject. I think they might post the notes, so if they do I'll share them.

After our session, I took the luxury of attending many of the workshops. The morning session on innovation was quite (and surprisingly) good. There were many highlights, but I thought an idea shared by Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy was quite important.

Shelly posited that having a collaborator in the formulation of ideas can be extremely productive. The way I captured it was:

"Having another person helps people to be brave. The other person hears an idea and say, 'hey, I think you have something there' which allows you to go further." (or something like that).

Not teaming for a project per se, instead collaborations that stretch over time that evolve a certain dynamism and trust.

I had the pleasure of chatting briefly with Shelly afterwards and she expanded further noting that often that the skill and quality of the two people might not matter. That is, somebody that's not quite as good could still be the missing ingredient to make the other person truly great. And if you break up the dynamic duo, you might see the greatness fade.

Seems pretty simple and anecdotally true for me. Sign of a good insight.

Leading Innovation: Ignore your instincts, say "yes"

(From Dean Terry's Flckr photostream shared herewith under the auspices of Creative Commons which says "yes.")

When in doubt, don't.

Almost every organization in the world struggles to design and bring new, valuable and cool stuff into the world. With their success, organizations evolve towards consistency and away from variance. As individuals, leaders follow suit. We develop all kinds of strengths and behaviors that help us to perform well at "consistency tasks".

To avoid being too smart, leaders looking to encourage innovation have to learn to catch themselves and overcome the urge to say "no."

Great innovation leaders learn to start with "yes." They see the possibility of new options, give the gift of emotional support for those bringing them new ideas and provide the instrumental support to help these new options progress. The strong ones survive anyway.

See Chapter 16 of Oribiting the Giant Hairball ("The Office of the Paradox") for more on this.

Design and Innovation: A culture question?

(Some beautiful fungal cultures from Petrichor's Flickr stream.)

I'm in a lot of discussions with clients concerning the idea of creating, developing, instigating and encouraging a more innovative culture.

In these discussions, I've been putting a finer point on the idea of what an "innovation culture" truly is and comparing and contrasting that with other types of cultures. In some instances, a company might not really want or need to create an innovation culture at all.

In particular, I've found myself distinguishing amongst the following cultures (and at an individual level, mindsets):

• Innovative
• Entrepreneurial
• Design
• Human-centered
• Inventive
• Operational or Efficient or Productive

What would you add? What do you see as the similarities and differences of each?

Horizon Three Innovation: A today problem or a tomorrow problem?

I've been working with a lot of clients lately that use the "Three Horizons" growth framework explained first (?) in The Alchemy of Growth, a book by a set of McKinsey consultants from the late 1990s. Here is McKinsey's enduring ideas explanation of the framework.

For the most part, I'm seeing people misuse this framework. Rather than managing the horizons concurrently, people are using the horizons as a taxonomy for organizing ideas (sounds like a "horizon three idea") rather than to assess relative activity ("do we have a steady stream of S-curves stacked up on the horizon?"). In a sense, they are using the framework to do exactly what it's meant to prevent.

Horizon Three innovation is here today. You just aren't working on it.

I heart Jeff Bezos

(Made with the help of iCrushALot) 

Bruce pointed me to this interview with my innovation hero Jeff Bezos in Newsweek's interview issue. Bezos describes three elements of their success:

1. Start with the customer and work backward, learning the skills necessary to serve them as you go
2. Be an inventor, willing to go down unexplored pathways and be pleasantly and cheerfully disappointed in what you find; always think like it's "Day One" [edited by me]
3. Have a long-term orientation

This excerpt is so, so true and it brings home the patience and persistence that it takes to be a repeat innovator:

There are two ways that companies can extend what they're doing. One is they can take an inventory of their skills and competencies, and then they can say, "OK, with this set of skills and competencies, what else can we do?" And that's a very useful technique that all companies should use. But there's a second method, which takes a longer-term orientation. It is to say, rather than ask what are we good at and what else can we do with that skill, you ask, who are our customers? What do they need? And then you say we're going to give that to them regardless of whether we currently have the skills to do so, and we will learn those skills no matter how long it takes. Kindle is a great example of that. It's been on the market for two years, but we worked on it for three years in earnest before that. We talked about it for a year before that. We had to go hire people to build a hardware--engineering team to build the device. We had to acquire new skills. There's a tendency, I think, for executives to think that the right course of action is to stick to the knitting—stick with what you're good at. That may be a generally good rule, but the problem is the world changes out from under you if you're not constantly adding to your skill set.

Learning to think and do small / PB in the FT

I really enjoyed my friend and colleague Paul Bennett's recent piece for the FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/a63acc20-f5ac-11de-90ab-00144feab49a.html

Paul's essay triggered a few connections for me.

First, there's how to get big companies to learn to move fast, or perhaps move at all. I've written about it here a bit (Small to learn, Get generative by thinking small) and Colin's "Business in Beta" pattern on IDEO.com does a really great job of capturing this trend.

Here's Paul:

What hit me was the scale of the enterprise and how a small seed of an idea could be world-changing in its impact.

..and...

Personally, I have long believed that not every idea has to be mega, mammoth, gargantuan or a billion dollar disruption. Often, the small, well-designed, intelligent and, most importantly, do-able ideas are infinitely better.

... and the pièce de résistance...

Rather, it sees it as the best way to learn how to get closer to its consumers - in the field through experimentation and prototyping, rather than intellectualising and theorising - and to bring that learning back into its core business and apply it there. It is learning-by doing rather than death-by-discussion.

Second, there's a motivation link to doing and being able to connect to something bigger than yourself, but not so big that you can't see yourself in it. It's super important for innovation. Leaders need to ensure an organization's people stay inspired. Tim Brown talked about it here and I shared some thoughts here (What's your purpose?)

I'm about a third of the way through Dan Pink's new book on motivation. Pink certainly foreshadows early in the book the link between purpose and new corporate forms such as the L3C, Fourth Sector/For Benefit and Yunus' idea of "social businesses."

There's something inspiring and motivating about working for something other the machine trying to make a big, big impact. Chip Heath (along with his brother Dan) describe the importance of connecting to something bigger than ourselves to help make an idea, innovation or story sticky (e.g., the accountant who put a man on the moon). I see folks struggle with this all the time at companies big and small. I suspect that's one reason organizations aren't always flat - motivation and purpose can be found by organizing smaller cohorts amidst the big (e.g., "hot teams").

Paul again:

Employees want to work on things they believe in, in places that support those belief systems. Creating impact outside has huge impact inside.

...and Paul quoting an exec...

"Even the people in Paris who book our travel to Bangladesh feel like they are part of this project..."

I guess the only thing I'd say in response is the importance of commitment. You need to mean it, act like you mean and get people to feel like you mean it. People can smell the bullshit. And if they smell it, they'll wait you out. Seems like Danone is doing it.

Leading Innovation: Power and Trust

 

(Looking strong. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sheeshoo/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

As organizations continue to demand more creative output from their people, leaders will start to hear two requests a lot more:

"I want to feel empowered."

"I want to feel trusted."

You can spend a lot of time and effort trying to answer these two requests directly, but I think the right answer is a bit more subtle.

Rather than trying to help people feel empowered, I believe a more worthwhile goal is to help people to feel powerful.

Rather than helping people to feel trusted, you'll do well to help them learn to trust themselves.

If you're hiring for a role that's going to demand a lot of creativity, finding people that feel powerful and trust themselves will go a long way.

As a leader, you can also help to cultivate an environment of safety, inspiration and clarity, though not all creative environments exhibit these qualities in equal measure.

These qualities will become ever more important as companies begin to evolve away from traditional hierarchical structures towards different models over the ensuing ten to fifteen years (you still have time).

Hierarchies are wonderful because they tell people what they can rely on. In the absence of these hierarchies, we'll have to find new things to rely on. Starting with ourselves.

Leading Innovation: What great bosses do

(Image and hunger courtesy of Esther17's photostream and Creative Commons.)

Bob asked what great bosses do to encourage innovation. It was an excuse for me to look back and see if I could synthesize some perspectives on that as well. I think many of these ideas and thoughts are very similar to what he communicated, but I think there are some new ones in there too. It's all a bit circular as I'm sure I'm influenced not only by my own experience, but also Bob's and others thinking.

Share Direction, Give Permission, Provide Support. Commit.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/05/leading-innovation.html

Understand the range of outcomes. Seek the one you want.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/08/growth-and-innovation-what-are-you-commiting-to.html
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/04/small-to-learn-and-big-to-win.html
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/06/fundamentally-different.html

Give teams an excuse to be wrong.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/05/seven-chances.html

Focus on feelings as much as actions.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/05/how-does-it-feel-to-innovate.html

Get out from behind your desk.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/10/innovation-measure-time-since-last-contact-tlc.html
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/07/innovation-measure-time-to-first-feedback-tff.html

Stretch while paying close attention to where, why and how things snap.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/10/innovation-elasticity-or-why-things-get-killed.html

Be interested in being wrong.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/11/innovation-loves-mistakes.html

Have a purpose.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/06/whats-your-purpose.html

If everyone agrees, go back to the drawing board.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/05/whats-the-role-of-consensus-in-growth-innovation-and-design.html

Understand how to encourage and channel and develop intuition.
http://www.ryanjacoby.com/2009/09/intuition-innovation-collaboration-and-credibility.html

Don't mitigate risk. Mitigate the cost of failure.