do_matic

To get it right, be interested in being wrong

Mrs. F was my first grade teacher. She was wonderful. At the start of first grade, she handed out those big, thick pencils - the ones without erasers. I asked Mrs. F why our pencils didn't have erasers. She said, "so you'll take your time and do things right the first time." Though I love her still, I think Mrs. F had the right pencils but the wrong message.

To do new things - things that are delightfully better and fundamentally different - you have to be really, really interested in putting things out there and being wrong; making mistakes and loving it.

I meet lots of folks in my work: designers, innovators and business people. It's a rare person that's confident enough to have their ideas critiqued. Even more seldom is the person that seeks feedback on an idea after it has been delivered. If you get it wrong, it sucks. If you got it wrong and it's your only shot, it really sucks. We confuse critique of an idea with a critique of us. I've certainly felt that way.

Great designers and innovators see evaluation moments as learning opportunities. They couple confidence with humility and curiosity. Some really amazing designers certainly possess a "never look back" approach. I think that works really well when what you're doing is closer to art.I don't think it works as well for innovation. I find with practice that it gets easier and easier to be wrong - you hate the sting, but you seek it.

So next time you hear something akin to "that's the worst idea I've heard in a long time." Say "Perfect, when did you know it was awful?"

Innovation elasticity (or why things get killed)

(Remember these games?)

At some point during an innovation project you ought to wake up in the middle of the night, eyes wide open, screaming into the void: "We're thinking of doing what?"

Although scary to you and your neighbors, this is a great moment. If you aren't waking up in the middle of the night, you might not be pushing hard enough. The trick is to embrace that fluttering feeling and to understand the situation. If you don't, you risk incrementalizing or even killing some really great ideas.

Usually, the business opportunity or experience is stretching "too far" along one or more six key dimensions of growth:

Users: needs, contexts, behaviors, mindsets, jobs, etc
Offerings: product/service, value proposition, pricing, positioning, channel, etc.
Positioning/GTM: how you go to market
Business Model/Culture: margin model and prioritization scheme
Process & Organization: how you get things done
Scope: the business you're in

Your brand, your management and your investors are the "anchors" that snap you right back to what you know you can do today. Business designers should be working with their teams to design novel approaches and strategies to navigate and maintain the right level of tension, balancing growth, opportunities and risk.

Some companies and organizations are capable of stretching more than others; they have higher innovation elasticity. Similarly, certain organizational and innovation governance strategies, like heavyweight teams, help provide slack in the system.

You shouldn't stretch just for the sake of stretching. Nor is it realistic or strategic to stretch infinitely in any direction. People that suggest as much, while often alluring, usually don't know what it takes to get things done. There ought to be some tension in the system. But understanding how nimble you are along each of these key dimensions can help you systematically foresee and deal with the hurdles over time.

Colin responds: Measuring Innovation

Between Colin's response, prototyping some measures and the rich discussion in the comments, I think we've arrived at a really great answer.

We don't know the one thing we'd measure for innovation.

But I'm glad we tried to answer it.

First, let me say I like Colin's idea of measuring personal experimentation. It's a good innovation measure that would likely lead to improvement.

Experiments require action. Innovation loves action. Experiments are fun. Innovation loves playfulness. Experiments, unlike tests, are designed for learning. Innovation loves learning. Experiment has a nice "tone" to it. Unlike "test," "experiment" takes some of the pressure off of being right and lets you work your way to what's right.

Many small experiments often get there faster than big initiatives or projects. Innovation loves velocity. Colin's measure implies an ongoing process that starts at human scale and also scales to an organization. Innovation loves it when everybody can see themselves in it.

It would be important that such a measure not feel like a quota, otherwise you'd likely not get the variance in experiments - the process learning that's so critical. However, if an organization simply said, "we want you doing a lot more personal experimentation and we're going to tell you the kind we want, let you do it and support you in it" that would probably have a big cultural impact.

From the comments, Gabe's idea of an index says a lot. An index tries to bundle disparate factors into a predictive or explanatory telling of the whole. It's like Prego, it's in there.

In a sense, an outcome measure is an index. I hadn't thought of things like that before. There are myriad factors that lead to an amazing (or terrible) outcome.  The challenge with indices is that they perform at a level of abstraction that is hard to affect as an individual. It's hard to grab hold of and change the Prego. Contrast a broad index with a concrete outcome measure and you'll see what I mean. For example, "we need to improve our 'open innovation score'" vs. "50% of our ideas need to come from the outside."

OK, if we don't know exactly what to measure, yet it's worthwhile, then what?

Simple. Design measures. (Or at least simply stated.)

Innovation measures, just like an innovation strategy, can and should be designed for a company's given situation, culture, brand and people.  When designing innovation measures, I assess organizational readiness, approaches and outcomes of the process itself. Diego and I were tossing this around a couple of years back and described this as being considerate of what happens before, during and after the process or a project.

So, here's a list of some design principles for innovation measures. Innovation measures should:

- Be concrete, otherwise we won't connect to them
- Scale, ideally from human-scale to organization-scale, so we see ourselves in them and can impact larger goals
- Be designed to improve, not to solely prove
- Encourage action, inspiration, intuition and feelings of safety, excitement and joy
- Have an expiration date; what you need to improve will likely change
- Have a bias towards experimentation, breaking things and learning

(Photo courtesy of Leo Reynolds and Creative Commons)

Intuition, innovation, collaboration and credibility

 

(There's a good idea in there somewhere. Some bokeh courtesy of u07ch's stream on Flickr.)

Intuition is fire for creativity: absolutely necessary yet potentially dangerous when wielded clumsily.

Intuition describes a personal process of connection-making and idea generation that occurs at a subconscious level. In a sense, intuition describes what it's not: a systematic, rational process of analysis. When working alone, a personal process works great. (I always like my own intuition when I'm having some.) In collaborative and interdisciplinary settings, it gets a little stickier. Here are some thoughts I've had about intuition reflecting on collaborating for innovation.

Embrace intuition and make it concrete
Leaders of creativity and innovation should embrace and encourage intuition in their people. If it's not acceptable to have and share intuitive ideas at all points throughout a creative process, then the process is broken. People should be bringing to life unconscious connections informed by their innate sensibilities, outside inspiration and practical experiences. Leaders should encourage and support systematic inspiration-gathering and sketching of all forms.

Honestly discuss
Early in a creative process, when divergence dominates*, intuition is extremely important and sometimes all you really have to get going. But early, intuitive ideas aren't easy to judge as you transition towards convergence. Collaborators get curious about why something is good or the origins of an idea. If you have a nascent idea and can't describe its provenance (because it sprang forth from your subconscious), you could end up having a tough situation on your hands.

At the same time, individuals bring a wealth of experience to life through an idea or in a decision**. These experienced folks might say an idea or decision just "feels right" based on their experience. But if you find yourself saying that, and only that, you're missing an opportunity to share that experience.

Channel intuition
Here are some ideas about how to wield intuition in collaborative and creative organizations:
    ▪    Encourage intuition and lay the foundation for it to occur (promoting, inspiration, sketching and safe, early sharing)
    ▪    Bring intuition to life through "sketching" and concrete design
    ▪    Accept that your intuitive idea might not be the right idea
    ▪    Explore in advance why others might find your idea "good": whether they be a user, a team member or a client
    ▪    Be honest as a team about whether one person's intuition (experience) is more valued, and then be open to ignore that hierarchy if the merits of an idea dictate that you do so
    ▪    Embrace critique
    ▪    Be open to the fact that others will be curious about your intuitive idea's underpinnings
    ▪    Claim and share your experience if you have it; others will learn from it
    ▪    Don't steamroll with "my gut" when you're really talking about your experience
    ▪    Don't use "my gut" to replace "I don't know" when you really just don't know
    ▪    Make it safe to say "I don't know"

*My gut (ha!) says that, in team settings, intuition is more practically valuable for divergence than convergence because of the friction involved in justifying intuitive decision-making. That makes a willingness to detach from an idea during convergence really important as a designer.

**I'm finding it useful to think of two "types" of intuition in individuals: inspired and informed. Sometimes the most experienced individuals, those who might exhibit a high degree of informed intuition, could use a dose of inspiration. Likewise, some of the most inspired individuals would do well to learn from and listen to the experience of others.

Growth and innovation: what are you commiting to do?

(It's like the pedestrian's creed. From grebo_guru on Flickr.)

Recently, I've been working with companies to design their innovation strategy and to develop a culture of innovation. In related meetings with executive leadership teams, I've been asked to share my opinion on the common pitfalls these companies will face. There are plenty of them, but one stands out recently as a subtle but important challenge.

In a prior post, I described some innovation leadership imperatives:
Share Direction
Give Permission
Provide Support
Commit

The last imperative, handled poorly, can lead to trouble. Leaders and project teams often fail to align themselves and their colleagues around what they are committing to do. Failing to communicate that intention can lead to mismatched investment, timelines and expectations.

For example, "leadership" might be committing to develop new commercial platforms that represent $100s of millions in potential. A pilot team, for the exact same project, might just be trying to learn about a market that's new to them. The team might receive a budget commensurate with a full-bore market blitz, while what they need is a program designed to help them cheaply investigate a new area. They didn't decide whether they should go small to learn, or big to win.*

Ask yourself and your colleagues, what are we committing to do:
to start?
to learn?
to win?
to change?

It might feel like a scary conversation to have, but it's far scarier not to have it.

* I've been digging the WSJ / MIT SMR Business Insight collaboration lately. Here's an article that describes the idea of experimentation at scale.

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.

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.)

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.

Leading Innovation: In Seven Words

(L to R: KLBW, Theartigrade, Rudiriet)

Many people must confront what it means to lead innovation without having done it. If you find yourself in that situation, follow the advice of Bob Sutton and spend as much time as you can understanding the nature of the work.

Beyond that, you can go a long way towards becoming a leader of innovation by keeping in mind seven words. Here are the first six:

Share Direction
Give Permission
Provide Support

The tendency is to focus on the second word of each of the first three pairings: Direction, Permission and Support. They feel concrete and leader-ly. To encourage the actions you want, the first words (Share, Give, Provide) are more important however.

With Direction, you should listen for opportunities, not assume you know them. Don't tell someone how to do the job, but instead help them discover the right question.

Permission is a gift, you have to be generous with it.

Support isn't just about books and methods and tools, you have to see yourself as a provider of energy, optimism and emotional support too.

What's the last word? Think Jeff Bezos.

Commit

Designing an innovation strategy and promoting a culture of innovation takes years, not months. It's a learning process that takes learning, investment, failure and risk. Without leadership commitment, employees might choose to "wait it out" or risks that don't pan out can put a halt to the whole show.

Consensus: The insidious limiter of growth

(Appealing, yet somewhat lonely, plain vanilla cupcakes from Euni's Flickr stream.)

What's the role of consensus in design and innovation?

Probably none. If everyone agrees, it might be time to go back to the drawing board.

Experience shows that one way you can tell if a design and innovation effort is working is that it's comfortably uncomfortable. The team should be exploring the edges and pushing towards the new.

If it isn't new, you aren't learning.
If it isn't new, it probably isn't a meaningfully differentiated offering.
If it isn't new, you aren't going to get the attention of a new user.
Since new offerings and new users are how you grow, then you're probably not growing.

When you're at the edges, people are bound to disagree on the right path forward. If everyone on your innovation or design team agrees, you probably aren't pushing hard enough. That's a tough reality and one of the hidden facets of what is usually a team sport.

So, what can you do to help inform your decision? Here are some options.

Observe and interpret what the ultimate user wants: Design research is meant, in part, to uncover explicit and implicit functional, emotional and reflective needs of a user. Getting out into the field to really look deeply and listen faithfully makes the difference.

Test, validate and repeat: Most large scale organizations know this well. Unfortunately, the thing about traditional validation and the use of benchmarks is that they are actually a form of consensus (albeit with folks or a standard that isn't even in the room).

Design for "yourself": There's a school of thought that says you can and should design for yourself. Steve Portigal has an article (the first in a series I believe) in Interactions magazine that discusses this point of view. I think this usually doesn't work for most large-scale companies (with notable exceptions of course) because most of their people are not the user.

Show the user: Build a prototype and show it to someone. Anyone. Projective methods, a type of design research, puts a question in front of someone to let them react. Let your users' reactions influence you (not necessarily guide you), refine what you're making and helping to craft how you'll tell the story of what you're making.

Build it, see what sticks and learn from it: The less the experiment costs, the better. Build a discovery-driven plan and you'll know what to learn.

Leading Innovation: How does it feel?

I heard this the other day and was blown away:

Leadership is not about what you say, or even what you do. Leadership is how you make people feel.

I'm definitely no leadership savant (just ask my colleagues), but I know that this is a leadership maxim that definitely applies to the task of leading innovation.

Why? First, innovation is about action - doing stuff, taking risks and learning from it. Second, as Donald Calne said "Reason leads to conclusions, emotion leads to action."

You put those two ideas together and you can see why how you make your team and teammates feel is paramount. That's been something I've been learning, albeit messily, over the last decade of project work and four years of business design. I imagine I'll be learning it for as long as I do this work.

If you want to understand this better than I could ever convey, check out chapter sixteen ("The Power of Paradox") of Orbiting the Giant Hairball.

If you want to scan a range of emotions (many of which you should avoid creating), check out the image to the right (via Kevin Kelly's Blog) from Scott McCloud's awesome book Making Comics.

If you want to safely play with how to get emotions from people, check out: http://www.grimace-project.net/

If you want to lead innovation, go try to make people feel passionate, safe, driven, supported and directed.

Seven chances

(Leo Reynolds has all kinds of cool pictures at Flickr.)

I heard an amazing story several weeks ago from the person that leads innovation at a very large US company. Without giving too much away, I wanted to share it.

A leader had a hunch that there was the opportunity for a low-cost, time-saving consumer product. The trick was that there was nothing else like it. To get it right would mean the team would need to develop new technology, craft a new brand and enable a whole new consumer experience. Simply put, it was going to be hard if not impossible.

The leader told their team: "You've got seven chances. Don't come back to me until you've succeeded or you've tried and failed seven times."

The team got it right on the fifth try.

The story starts in the late 1960s. The product was launched in 1970, creating a whole new category in the process. It is still sold, quite successfully, to this day.

That's amazing innovation leadership.

If you gave somebody seven chances, how many do you think it would take for them to get it right?