Innovation and High Performance

Introduction to the iLands of Innovation

2009-04-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

What is Innovation?
While we may think of innovation as the emergence or creation of something completely unique, the dictionary definition suggests something more modest—and maybe more valuable to the practitioner. To innovate means simply to renew. It means to bring some idea into the world that is new or that can be presented as new. Innovation allows for the uncovering of the next new thing, or for the repackaging or repositioning of something that was new years ago. An innovation is either a new creation or the shedding of new light on an old creation. An innovator can either uncover the next best thing since sliced bread, or simply find a new way to package or brand sliced bread.

It’s possibly intriguing for the innovation practitioner to consider that any activity of renewal qualifies as an innovation. Instead of cheapening or demystifying the process, it can make innovation more accessible by removing it from the realm of unattainable talent. Some innovations have greater consequences and reach than others—a very few will change everything about the way we live. But the process for coming up with the large innovations is the same as that for coming up with the small ones. Intellect plays a role, but high IQ is not a prerequisite for innovation. We are not all Einsteins.

One Process for Finding Innovations?
The tantalizing question concerning innovation is whether the consistent emergence of new ideas can be reduced to a process. I tend to think not. I’m aware that others will disagree with this position. I believe there are factors that may increase the likelihood of finding innovative ideas. But I’m skeptical about finding any one process that can be learned and practiced over and over to “train up” the innovation muscles and produce consistent, predictable results. However, just because there may not be a single, catch-all process doesn’t mean that there might not be many processes that help tap into the innovator’s inner sanctum of insight. The lack of any single process does not mean that innovative thinking, insight and activity is not something that all of us can experience many times over and become comfortable with.

And, of course, it’s also possible that someone may discover THE sole, foolproof process tomorrow. That kind of discovery would tremendously level the playing field and create all sorts of new problems in the innovation quest to be solved. We use innovation to create value or advantage. If the innovation process could be commoditized, its intrinsic value would be lost.

Intuition and Insight
What keeps the innovation process from being reduced to a series of steps is the “intuition principle” or the “insight effect.” At some point in many innovation processes there comes a time where the introduction of something totally unexpected causes a shift in thought or perception. Unfortunately the totally unexpected cannot be programmed. The two tend to be mutually exclusive. We all get our inspiration from somewhere—but that somewhere feels more like nowhere than some corner convenience store we can frequent over and over.

We are all innovative by nature. Some of us are merely clever, others are geniuses, but we each have a talent for seeing things differently. A different viewpoint is always a window on some fruitful field just full of ripening possibilities for renewal. We all create many innovations throughout our lives—we just don’t label them as such, and in failing to do so, miss the opportunity to explore the workings of our own ingenuity. This kind of exploration may be more valuable in the long run than a pursuit of a single holy grail innovation process.

Innovation is a practice
Set aside time to look for new ideas or remake old ones. Better yet, reframe the way you approach your normal day's work and see at least some of it as an exercise in innovation. Every so often, just allow your innate curiosity to arise and ask the questions why and how and most important, what if? Keep in mind the definition. Innovation happens when something is brought forth that is new or treated as if it were new. Don’t become discouraged. I recommend that you keep between five and ten innovation projects running at once. Some will race ahead, others lag behind. Some will provide unexpected input into others, even if they're only remotely related. At least one will be successful at any given time, and that is encouraging. Keep track of all the new things that you discover and the new ways you look at something you thought you knew everything about. Take a few minutes to write down a list of new things that you want to discover, or things you’d like to see in a new way. These can be anything from a relationship to a hobby to inventing a new prescription drug or a new joke or a new way to approach dating or the next big thing in telecommunications. Anything’s game.

Remember, even if you discover something new that others find to be old hat, it’s still an innovation so far as you’re concerned, and in that sense it’s a success. The wonderful thing about innovations is that they lead to more innovations. So even a tiny breakthrough can be exploited and happily pursued down the path to a bigger, different, or more meaningful breakthrough.

What if you’re a solo innovator? What if you work alone, or you’re the boss or you’re a single parent? Ultimately innovation can only truly be practiced through collaboration with others—even if it is limited to bouncing ideas off of someone else. You can be innovative all on your own, but know that it can be easier in some respects and more fun to be innovative with others. Besides, you will eventually have to try your innovation on someone else to see if it’s truly new or if it can be perceived as new. Having others to bounce ideas off of is important. Because if innovation is about different perspectives or viewpoints, then it helps to have some of those viewpoints around. Besides, none of us really works alone. There are other people who directly or indirectly influence our work and our thinking. Best to take that into account and make the most of it from the start.

What is a Valuable Innovation?
Now it’s true, strictly speaking that any renewal is an innovation. But it may be useful to consider what a valuable innovation is. A valuable innovation is bringing forth something that’s new or is perceived as new, and that matters to someone. It may matter to you, or one other person, or many people, or to the whole world, but it has to matter. How can you tell if it matters? People will buy, borrow or mimic the idea. They’ll appropriate it in some way and use it because it appeals to them--they find value in it.

An innovation that doesn’t matter to anyone isn’t necessarily a dead end. It could be a step towards bringing forth something down the line that really matters. OK, so it could be a dead end. So what? Try something else.

22 iLands of Innovation
There’s a quality of innocence or playfulness that seems to lurk about the paths of innovation and that’s where I’d like to start. Imagine a chain of islands extending from the frigid poles to the sun-drenched tropics. Each island is inhabited by people who have mastered one of the keys to successful innovation. There’s no one right way to visit all or some of the islands. Each explorer is free to create a unique pathway based on curiosity. I selected twenty-two iLands to use as seeds for writing about innovation. Each iLand is a word beginning with the letter “i”. The description of each iLand will include some ideas to try in your own innovation practice. Sometimes you’ll get results. Sometimes you won’t. That’s how it goes. If one approach seems blocked, try something else. You can even try out words in pairs or threes or fours. Think about them together to see if you get any insights. The twenty-two iLands will appear over the next few months. I hope you enjoy visiting them with me.

Permanent Innovation Blog

2008-01-17T17:46:00.001-08:00

It seems that most of our blogging energy is going into the Permanent Innovation blog so if you are reading this please wander on over and check that out.

thanks!

Crowdsourcing

2007-05-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

You've heard of outsourcing. You've heard of the concept of opensource for things like software development (the browser - Firefox - and the operating system I'm using - OSX - to write this post are both opensource). Now, there is a developing movement called Crowdsourcing (which is still emerging and being defined). The general idea is that a 'crowd' of generalists can make better decisions than a single expert.

The following model is being developed by Sami Viitamaki from Finland. It is an attempt to explain the idea of crowdsourcing from the point of view of a company that wants to engage in collaboration with customers or customer collectives.

Most of the models evolving around crowdsourcing involve digital and/or virtual interactions - to engage people from disparate parts of the world in what we call 'different time, different place' collaboration. A good example of a company doing this is Cambrian House. Cambrian House defines Crowdsourcing as:

Crowdsourcing is when people gather via the Internet to create something and share in the profit – often without ever meeting each other in person. The products of these collaborations are referred to as crowdsourced.

In our work we still recommend and use 'same time, same place' collaboration for groups of up to 100s of people. This intensive, face-to-face collaboration can accelerate the interactions and solutions generated by the group. In Sami's model he talks about the need for specific facilities where the collaboration takes place. He is referring to virtual facilities.

We also see the need for specific facilities where collaboration can take place. The following is an example of a physical environment designed specifically for high level collaboration.

To read about Sami's model in more detail click here.

The Experience Economy is becoming the Conversation Economy

2007-04-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

The Experience Economy is becoming the Conversation Economy. A recent article in BusinessWeek suggests that markets are now conversations and thus, we are in the conversation economy. The article suggests that social networking - connecting people of like minds - facilitates conversations. Conversations lead to relationships which lead to affinity - and affinity is what helps communities form around a brand. The article goes on to suggest that companies and marketing directors need to understand this phenomenon and begin to participate in it.

WELCOME TO THE CONVERSATION ECONOMY
Marketers today find themselves in a frantic race to get people talking about their brands. Everyone wants to produce something "viral." Call it the conversation economy. One of the engines driving online growth is the fact that communities are forming around popular social platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, Flickr, Ning, Twitter and the rest. These platforms facilitate conversation, and markets are now conversations, as the Cluetrain Manifesto pointed out years ago. Conversation leads to relationships, which lead to affinity. Brand affinity, as companies like Harley-Davidson show, can cause communities to form around them. Thus, anyone who plays a role in branding needs to become a "conversation architect." Marketers, businesses and designers need an intimate understanding of how these platforms are evolving and influencing human behavior. Marketers need an in-depth understanding of why so many people love to incorporate these services in their digital lives. Just as YouTube changed how we watch and share videos, some emerging media applications are changing how we interact with each other and with brands. That's viral marketing. Today, we market to each other. Actually, we always have, but now we're doing it in a more digitally connected way. When we find friends on a social network, we swap stories about products and services we like or dislike. We share knowledge and expertise. We define a new kind of currency, fueled by conversation and founded in meaningful relationships. (Business Week 9 April 2007)

Along similar lines, a recent article in IndustryWeek suggests that communication leads to innovation. In this article they are specifically referring to leaders communicating with employees to help stimulate creative problem solving. I would add to this idea the notion that leaders that do communicate like this have a philosophical approach to business that includes continual and never ending improvement.

COMMUNICATION CREATES INNOVATION
It's a cliché, but it's true: Problems really are opportunities in disguise. So tell your employees about problems and see if they can help devise an innovative solution. For example, when a paper mill worker saw all the wasted paper scraps littering the mill, he thought of binding them into pads, thus inventing what we now call legal pads. Effective leaders see problems as opportunities to improve, then communicate that message to the rest of the organization. This kind of leadership is the single most important factor in developing an innovative culture, says consultant Jim Garrick, a Lean Process Improvement professional. Observe someone who supervises people or manages an enterprise. You'll see they spend most of their time communicating. They talk with people -- one-on-one, in meetings, on the phone. They write letters, e-mails and reports. One result of all this communication is that employees are made aware of problems. What you do with these opportunities-in-disguise can then become the path to increased profits. "Incorporating ordinary staff in the generation of ideas is actually the real secret behind the amazing productivity of the greatest manufacturing companies in the world," Garrick says. Many companies pay lip service to the notion that employees are their most important resource, but too often they're seen merely as a cost, making it difficult to tap into their creative ideas or invest in their development. (Industry Week 4 Apr 2007)

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Iacocca on Leadership

2007-04-22T13:49:00.001-07:00

I'm sure this is making the rounds of blogs everywhere but I think it's important - so here it is again.

Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

Had Enough?

Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."

Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out!

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of l ies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real. I'm hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don't vote because they don't trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

Who Are These Guys, Anyway?

Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy.

And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people . We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

Where are the voices of leaders who can inspire us to action and make us stand taller? What happened to the strong and resolute party of Lincoln? What happened to the courageous, populist party of FDR and Truman? There was a time in this country when the voices of great leaders lifted us up and made us want to do better. Where have all the leaders gone?

The Test of a Leader

I've never been Commander in Chief, but I've been a CEO. I understand a few things about leadership at the top. I've figured out nine points, not ten (I don't want people accusing me of thinking I'm Moses). I call them the "Nine C's of Leadership." They're not fancy or complicated. Just clear, obvious qualities that every true leader should have. We should look at how the current administration stacks up. Like it or not, this crew is going to be around until January 2009. Maybe we can lea rn something before we go to the polls in 2008. Then let's be sure we use the leadership test to screen the candidates who say they want to run the country. It's up to us to choose wisely.

So, here's my C list:

A leader has to show CURIOSITY. He has to listen to people outside of the "Yes, sir" crowd in his inner circle. He has to read voraciously, because the world is a big, complicated place. George W. Bush brags about never reading a newspaper. "I just scan the headlines," he says. Am I hearing this right? He's the President of the United States and he never reads a newspaper? Thomas Jefferson once said, "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate for a moment to prefer the latter." Bush disagrees. As long as he gets his daily hour in the gym, with Fox News piped through the sound system, he's ready to go.

If a leader never steps outside his comfort zone to hear different ideas, he grows stale. If he doesn't put his beliefs to the test, how does he know he's right? The inability to listen is a form of arrogance. It means either you think you already know it all, or you just don't care. Before the 2006 election, George Bush made a big point of saying he didn't listen to the polls. Yeah, that's what they all say when the polls stink. But maybe he should have listened, because 70 percent of the people were saying he was on the wrong track. It took a "thumping" on election day to wake him up, but even then you got the feeling he wasn't listening so much as he was calculating how to do a better job of convincing everyone he was right.

A leader has to be CREATIVE, go out on a limb, be willing to try something different. You know, think outside the box. George Bush prides himself on never changing, even as the world around him is spinning out of control. God forbid someone should accuse him of flip-flopping. There's a disturbingly messianic fervor to his certainty. Senator Joe Biden recalled a conversation he had with Bush a few months after our troops marched into Baghdad. Joe was in the Oval Office outlining his concerns to the President, the explosive mix of Shiite and Sunni, the disbanded Iraqi army, the problems securing the oil fields. "The President was serene," Joe recalled. "He told me he was sure that we were on the right course and that all would be well. 'Mr. President,' I finally said, 'how can you be so sure when you don't yet know all the facts?'" Bush then reached over and put a steadying hand on Joe's shoulder. "My instincts," he said. "My instincts." Joe was flabbergasted. He told Bush, "Mr. President, your instincts aren't good enough." Joe Biden sure didn't think the matter was settled. And, as we all know now, it wasn't.

Leadership is all about managing change, whether you're lea ding a company or leading a country. Things change, and you get creative. You adapt. Maybe Bush was absent the day they covered that at Harvard Business School.

A leader has to COMMUNICATE. I'm not talking about running off at the mouth or spouting sound bites. I'm talking about facing reality and telling the truth. Nobody in the current administration seems to know how to talk straight anymore. Instead, they spend most of their time trying to convince us that things are not really as bad as they seem. I don't know if it's denial or dishonesty, but it can start to drive you crazy after a while. Communication has to start with telling the truth, even when it's painful. The war in Iraq has been, among other things, a grand failure of communication. Bush is like the boy who didn't cry wolf when the wolf was at the door. After years of being told that all is well, even as the casualties and chaos mount, we've stopped listening to him.

A leader has to be a person of CHARACTER. That means knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the guts to do the right thing. Abraham Lincoln once said, "If you want to test a man's character, give him power." George Bush has a lot of power. What does it say about his character? Bush has shown a willingness to take bold action on the world stage because he has the power, but he shows little regard for the grievous consequences. He has sent our troops (not to mention hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi citizens) to their deaths and for what? To build our oil reserves? To avenge his daddy because Saddam Hussein once tried to have him killed? To show his daddy he's tougher? The motivations behind the war in Iraq are questionable, and the execution of the war has been a disaster. A man of character does not ask a single soldier to die for a failed policy.

A leader must have COURAGE. I'm talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn't courage. Tough talk isn't courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn't mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.

If you're a politician, courage means taking a position even when you know it will cost you votes. Bush can't even make a public appearance unless the audience has been handpicked and sanitized. He did a series of so-called town hall meetings last year, in auditoriums packed with his most devoted fans. The questions were all softballs.

To be a leader you've got to have CONVICTION, a fire in your belly. You've got to have passion. You've got to really want to get something done. How do you measure fire in the belly? Bush has set the all-time record for number of vacation days taken by a U.S. Pr esident, four hundred and counting. He'd rather clear brush on his ranch than immerse himself in the business of governing. He even told an interviewer that the high point of his presidency so far was catching a seven-and-a-half-pound perch in his hand-stocked lake.

It's no better on Capitol Hill. Congress was in session only ninety-seven days in 2006. That's eleven days less than the record set in 1948, when President Harry Truman coined the term do-nothing Congress. Most people would expect to be fired if they worked so little and had nothing to show for it. But Congress managed to find the time to vote itself a raise. Now, that's not leadership.

A leader should have CHARISMA. I'm not talking about being flashy. Charisma is the quality that makes people want to follow you. It's the ability to inspire. People follow a leader because they trust him. That's my definition of charisma. Maybe George Bush is a great guy to hang out with<>at a barbecue or a ball game. But put him at a global summit where the future of our planet is at stake, and he doesn't look very presidential. Those frat-boy pranks and the kidding around he enjoys so much don't go over that well with world leaders. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who received an unwelcome shoulder massage from our President at a G-8 Summit. When he came up behind her and started squeezing, I thought she was going to go right through the roof.

A leader has to be COMPETENT. That seems obvious, doesn't it? You've got to know what you're doing. More important than that, you've got to surround yourself with people who know what they're doing. Bush brags about being our first MBA President. Does that make him competent? Well, let's see. Thanks to our first MBA President, we've got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we've run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Ira q. And that's just for starters. A leader has to be a problem solver, and the biggest problems we face as a nation seem to be on the back burner.

You can't be a leader if you don't have COMMON SENSE. I call this Charlie Beacham's rule. When I was a young guy just starting out in the car business, one of my first jobs was as Ford's zone manager in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. My boss was a guy named Charlie Beacham, who was the East Coast regional manager. Charlie was a big Southerner, with a warm drawl, a huge smile, and a core of steel. Charlie used to tell me, "Remember, Lee, the only thing you've got going for you as a human being is your ability to reason and your common sense. If you don't know a dip of horseshit from a dip of vanilla ice cream, you'll never make it." George Bush doesn't have common sense. He just has a lot of sound bites. You know, Mr. they'll-welcome-us-as-liberators-no-child-left-behind-heck-of-a-job-Brownie- mis sion-accomplished Bush.

Former President Bill Clinton once said, "I grew up in an alcoholic home. I spent half my childhood trying to get into the reality-based world, and I like it here."

I think our current President should visit the real world once in a while.

The Biggest C is Crisis

Leaders are made, not born. Leadership is forged in times of crisis. It's easy to sit there with your feet up on the desk and talk theory. Or send someone else's kids off to war when you've never seen a battlefield yourself. It's another thing to lead when your world comes tumbling down.

On September 11, 2001, we needed a strong leader more than any other time in our history. We needed a steady hand to guide us out of the ashes. Where was George Bush? He was reading a story about a pet goat to kids in Florida when he heard about the attacks. He kept sitting there for twenty minutes with a baffled look on his face. It's all on tape. You can see it for yourself. Then, instead of taking the quickest route back to Washington and immediately going on the air to reassure the panicked people of this country, he decided it wasn't safe to return to the White House. He basically went into hiding for the day, and he told Vice President Dick Cheney to stay put in his bunker. We were all frozen in front of our TV's, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush's moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he'd regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq, a road his own father had considered disastrous when he was President. But Bush didn't listen to Daddy. He listened to a higher father. He prides himself on being faith based, not reality based. If that doesn't scare the crap out of you, I don't know what will.

A Hell of a Mess

So here's where we stand. We're immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We're running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We're losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

But when you look around, you've got to ask: "Where have all the leaders gone?" Where are the curious, creative communicators? Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence, and common sense? I may be a sucker for alliteration, but I think you get the point.

Name me a leader who has a better idea for homeland security than making us take off our shoes in airports and throw away our shampoo? We've spent billions of dollars building a huge new bureaucracy, and all we know how to do is react to things that have already happened.

Name me one leader who emerged from the crisis of Hurricane Katrina. Congress has yet to spend a single day evaluating the response to the hurricane, or demanding accountability for the decisions that were made in the crucial hours after the storm. Everyone's hunkering down, fingers crossed, hoping it doesn't happen again. Now, that's just crazy. Storms happen. Deal with it. Make a plan. Figure out what you're going to do the next time.

Name me an industry leader who is thinking creatively about how we can restore our competitive edge in manufacturing. Who would have believed that there could ever be a time when "the Big Three" referred to Japanese car companies? How did this happen, and more important, what are we going to doabout it?

Name me a government leader who can articulate a plan for paying down the debt, or solving the energy crisis, or managing the health care problem. The silence is deafening. But these are the crises that are eating away at our country and milking the middle class dry.

I have news for the gang in Congress. We didn't elect you to sit on your asses and do nothing and remain silent while our democracy is being hijacked and our greatness is being replaced with mediocrity. What is everybody so afraid of? That some bobblehead on Fox News will call them a name? Give me a break. Why don't you guys show some spine for a change?

Had Enough?

Hey, I'm not trying to be the voice of gloom and doom here. I'm trying to light a fire. I'm speaking out because I have hope. I believe in America. In my lifetime I've had the privilege of living through some of America's greatest moments. I've also experienced some of our worst crises, t he Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the 1970's oil crisis, and the struggles of recent years culminating with 9/11. If I've learned one thing, it's this: You don't get anywhere by standing on the sidelines waiting for somebody else to take action. Whether it's building a better car or building a better future for our children, we all have a role to play. That's the challenge I'm raising in this book. It's a call to action for people who, like me, believe in America. It's not too late, but it's getting pretty close. So let's shake off the horseshit and go to work. Let's tell 'em all we've had enough.

By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

Excerpted from Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Copyright © 2007 by Lee
Iacocca. All rights reserved.

Staying Even is Falling Behind

2007-04-19T19:41:00.000-07:00

In an article by former Michigan State Superintendent of Schools he says that Michigan schools are not preparing young people for the 21st Century. As a respected educator I hope he is listened to (and it's interesting to me he is using language that sounds a lot like a consultant - which he is!)...

As Michigan attempts to catch up with the 21st Century, this state must realize that our children have to compete with the children of the world, not just those from adjacent school districts or states. It is imperative that policy makers and educators address the fact that in a hyper-competitive, entrepreneurial, information age, the old way of providing education must be altered -- and sooner rather than later. Michigan's students must be the recipients of an agile system of education and public policies that effect substantive change.

Further on he says,

In a rapidly changing world, staying even is falling behind.

These are well articulated and clear challenges for education - and also one of the clear arguments for there being NO ONE RIGHT ANSWER for public education in this country.

One of the strategies our firm advocates as a viable strategy for enterprises to use to 'catch up' or 'stay even' is to increase their own capacity to learn. The faster an organization can learn the more capable they are in dealing with/adapting in a world of rapid change.

There are several viable strategies to consider to increase the capacity of an organization to learn. One of these strategies is to have many experiments taking place simultaneously to enable the organization to learn fast. Another way of saying that is to develop a capability to do rapid prototyping. Quick cycles of testing theories (plan, do, study, act).

Another strategy organizations can use is to do things in parallel instead of doing them in a serial fashion (doing things at the same time instead of one after the other). This strategy is not an easy one for older, western educated managers to learn but it's really important to help shrink life cycles for product development, strategy development and innovation.

Click here to read the entire article by the former Michigan State Superintendent of Schools.

Innovation Champions and Networks Survey Results

2007-03-29T10:30:00.000-07:00

The results of our February 2007 Innovation Champions and Networks Survey are now available at PermanentInnovation.com

The purpose of the survey was to explore the role of innovation champions and networks in organizations.

"Innovation Champions" are individuals and/or teams of people who promote, encourage, prod, support, and drive innovation in their organizations. They may be in senior management positions, line management, staff, or operations roles. They may work in an ad-hoc manner, or in a highly structured program such as a Game Changer system.

"Innovation Networks" are self-organizing, ad-hoc teams of people who work together as required on innovation projects in their organizations.

W. Edwards Deming on the Future of Capitalism

2007-01-26T14:41:00.001-08:00

Extrinsic motivation slowly destroys self esteem, dignity, cooperation and a yearning for learning - all of which are innate and high early in life. They are diminished throughout our life by what Dr. Deming calls the forces of destruction - of which extrinsic motivation is one of these destructive forces.

Fast Cycle Times

2007-01-17T13:08:00.001-08:00

Talk about shrinking cycle times. This small company used a trade show floor to generate product ideas from passers-by (or potential customers) and then used online tools to vote for the best idea - then product prototypes. All in 4 days. Now the top products are going into production.

Racing from idea to prototype at Macworld
Mophie, which makes a line of iPod cases, used a good chunk of its booth to solicit attendees' designs. The company got 150 ideas in about four hours at its booth. A quick round of online voting helped the company choose three finalists. By Friday, the last day of Macworld, the company had marketing pitches and rough, but working, implementations of all three finalists.

High Performance Book Writing?

2007-01-12T11:10:00.000-08:00

This could be a very significant change in the way books are written - if it works. To date, almost all books have been written by one person or several people collaborating on an effort. A few books have been written as compilations of individual author's essays.

MIT and Wharton are experimenting with having up to a million people write a book on how community process influences and changes business. What's amazing about this so far is that people participating are not only writing the book but they are changing the software being used to write the book.

If you would like to contribute to this book go to We are Smarter than Me.

Getting Customers Involved

2006-09-04T12:36:00.000-07:00

In the collaborative design sessions we facilatate we know diversity in the participant mix provides for a greater chance of creating a robust strategy, product or service innovation. In choosing the right participant group we often suggest including customers (or potential customers some times) in the process. Depending on the innovation being explored these could be customers considered 'friends of the family' or they could be customers that have more challenging relationships.

We've found that customers appreciate being invited and the level of engagement and ownership in the process customers demonstrate far outweigh the risks.

Here's an article by Michael Schrage about including customers in the product design process.

My Customer, My Co-Innovator
by Michael Schrage

Cambridge, Mass., August 31, 2006 -- It's difficult to create products that customers want without understanding what they really need. Now that simple realization has spurred companies such as Cisco, Procter & Gamble, and Goldman Sachs to work together with their customers at the earliest stages of the innovation process, while making the entire process more transparent throughout the value chain. As a result, information flows freely between company and customer, designers have a clearer picture of what customers need, and the resulting products are more successful in the marketplace.

I'd by interested in your comments and feedback. Would you feel comfortable including customers in your product design process? Are you already doing that?

Learning and Work

2006-08-17T19:42:00.000-07:00

In a planning process with Ford Motor company back in 1996 I suggested they make the assembly line both a production line and a place for continuous learning and improvement and not to think of these as different things to take place at different times and places.

I don't think Ford heard what I meant but it seems that Toyota has done just that:

MAKE IT REAL
Doing leads to learning. Instead of confronting students (or employees) with abstract concepts, take the lesson out into the real world. Make it real: That's what Bob Moses did when he created the Algebra Project. He took his middle-school students around Boston in search of experiences that demonstrated the practical uses of math. A ride on the subway became a lesson in coordinate graphing and negative numbers. When Moses taught students about displacement, he had them measure the dimensions of their own bodies. Students always had to "participate in a physical event." Follow-up studies have confirmed the benefits of Moses' experiential curriculum. Ninety-two percent of his Algebra Project graduates in Cambridge went on to upper-level math courses, twice the rate of students not in the program. The same philosophy works outside the classroom, too. Look at Toyota. In many ways, its Georgetown, KY, manufacturing plant is a school that happens to produce cars. Because Toyota doesn't distinguish between learning and doing, it's willing to stop the assembly line any time a problem crops up on the floor. With its philosophy of constant self-improvement, turning out slightly fewer engines each day is a small price to pay for teaching its workers how to turn out better ones. (Seed 19 Jul 2006)

Why is learning and work separated? Doesn't it make sense to connect the learning to the work? In every day situations there are times and places that can be great learning opportunities if we take advantage of them.

And continual learning creates an environment that leads to both incremental improvements and breakthrough innovations.

Innovation Blogs

2006-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

I'm just checking out the list of innovation blogs at Technorati and I've signed up for an account. Check it out.

Technorati Profile

As I find cool innovation blogs I'll link to them here.

Permanent Innovation

2006-08-14T10:29:00.000-07:00

InnovationLabs is pleased to announce that our new book, Permanent Innovation, is now available for purchase or download.

We welcome any feedback you may have on the book. Please email your comments to Langdon at LMorris@innovationlabs.com. Enjoy the last few days of summer, on the beach or wherever your summer travels take you!

Innovation Labs

2006-04-08T16:04:00.000-07:00

I've just become aware of an article that was published back in November 2005 in BusinessWeek Magazine. It's called "Mosh Pits" Of Creativity: Innovation labs are sparking teamwork -- and breakthrough products.

It's a great article and points to a growning trend of companies employing new environments and processes for breakthrough products and services - and even calling them innovation labs.

Speaking of which, St. Petersburg College in St. Petersburg, Florida has recently opened a Collaboration Lab on campus. This facility, co-located in the Epicenter with the college's Corporate Training department and the St. Petersburg Visitors and Convention Bureau, would position the College as a strategic partner and community resource for the entire St. Pete/Tampa area.

The One Right Answer

2006-04-02T09:20:00.000-07:00

Understanding the nature of collaboration is like looking for a black cat in a dark room.

Creating the definitive principles of collaboration and collaborative events is like looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat.

Finding the one perfect design for a particular collaborative event between human beings is like looking for a black cat in a dark room where there is no cat and someone yells out, "I've got it!"

I don't know where I first heard that parable. I do know that it didn't refer specifically to collaborative design like I've written it, but the format is pretty flexible and any number of topics could be substituted.

Maybe some day we'll understand the complexity between human interaction to such a degree that for a given situation there will be only one best approach or design for helping people work together to create something outstanding. In the meantime, I've got my money on two things:

1) The compexity of any situation surrounding a collaborative event and the number of unknowns prohibits us from finding foolproof tools for helping people work together;

2) The adaptability of human beings favors successful experimentation with a wide variety of approaches to desiging and facilitating collaboration, implying an evolutionary pathway.

In other words, there doesn't have to be a right answer for designing and supporting any given collaboration between people. Furthermore, I'm implying that a dogmatic approach to designing collaboration may actually lead to sub-standard results over time. There isn't any magic to this conclusion: it only means that I believe we are learning more and more about how and why people work together and that this learning is folded into experiences that help us to learn more.

These experiences don't necessarily help us to test hypotheses about collaboration because that implies that there is a one right answer that won't be challenged over time. Hypotheses are just fine if you're dealing with systems that might be susceptible to immutable laws. Then there's something to be proven and a null case to be tested. Understanding collaboration is different than finding principles in mathematics or relationships in Newtonian physics or solving for the balance in chemical equations.

If you're a practitioner who designs collaborative events and facilitates them and your techniques haven't changed over the past five years, it may be time to take a broader look at the field and see if there isn't something new that you should be playing with. Chances are that you can continue in your comfort zone and provide good results to your clients.

But chances are that if this is a learning field and an adaptive, evolutionary one as well, your approach could use a radical shake-up. It may be time to loosen up the belief systems a bit.

Neutrality

2006-03-20T16:37:00.000-08:00

Our approach to consulting is collaborative in nature and requires facilitation of meetings and design sessions at various points in the engagement. Out of the 1960's the mantra for facilitators was neutral servant of the group. In order to allow all ideas a place at the table, it was important for the facilitator to be neutral, certainly with respect to the possible solutions, but also with respect to the general areas of subject matter as well. To hold a position meant unfairly swaying the group in one direction. Because a facilitator steers process, it is unfair of them to use the process as a tool to also promote an agenda.

Nice in theory.

In practice, it's hard for a facilitator to be neutral and in many cases it may be detrimental to the group and its progress towards a solution. A seasoned facilitator has seen hundreds, perhaps thousands of groups working at similar challenges. This accumulation of experience yields an acumen that has a place--a verbal place--in many sessions. Indeed, it may be that in the 1990's we entered into the era of the facilitator-consultant who brings deep knowledge of group process and knowledge of solutions sets to common problems as well. Or at least brings frameworks of knowledge that can be applied to specific challenges. The facilitator still has an ethical obligation to avoid malicious manipulation of the group, but an equally ethical obligation to not let the group stumble in the dark when he or she could shed some light on the path.

Here's an example from last week. Our facilitation team was working with a group of non-for-profit organizations who were all members of a national coalition. They were trying to decide on a broader purpose for the coalition: a mission and some overarching goals. Our team was facilitating the session. At one point Michael and I had a discussion in the back of the room about whether to intervene. It seemed that the group really had two missions instead of one. The mission for the first idea supported an existing initiative that had a 20+ year history and was coming out of adolescence into adulthood. To move further and increase scale, it needed to standardize some aspects of service delivery and training and build infrastructure. The mission for the second idea supported a nascent initiative just in its infancy as a collective idea for the members to work on. The first second idea is much more idealistic, much broader in scope and possible impact and much more complex to undertake. The first idea is simpler in scope and application but will have a much smaller impact. The group naturally was pulled between these two ideas, trying to meld them into one.

The situation and its solution sound simple as I explain it now, but at the time most of us were pretty perplexed. Michael generated a little sketch in the back of the room and showed it to me. It depicted the two ideas in serial fashion over time with idea one ramping to scale and then feeding resources into idea two. He wanted to introduce it to the group. I balked, not wanting to unduly influence the group's direction. I had made a few interventions earlier in the day, both of which influenced the type of solutions the group was generating (not just the process they were using to come up with the solutions). As we talked about it further I made a slight amendment to his sketch to show s-curves of the two ideas and how at this time one idea was in early adulthood and the other was an infant and so they needed to be treated separately. The adult needed some of the mundane things that help businesses consolidate their position and grow market share. The infant needed lots of visioning and little experiments to learn just how to grab the problem and understand it. This conversation took place very near the end of the session.

One of the participants then asked whether any of us on the team had any insights to bring to bear and Michael and I both took the models to the front of the room. I sketched it out and Michael talked it through. It changed everything and led to an incredible insight among the participants and relieved a great deal of stress at the same time.

The whole issue can sound trite the way I've written it but it's an important tenet of our practice. I used to have a dictionary that had two definitions for the word facilitate. One definition was "to make easy" and the other definition was "to make smooth." The first definition is the most common but I prefer the second. At first glance there doesn't seem to be much difference. But the road up to the summit of Pikes Peak is smooth, but walking it isn't easy. Most of the challenges that groups are trying to solve are difficult and to water them down to make them easy defeats the purpose of facilitation. However, to design an event so that the pathway through it is smooth is quite a different thing. For a facilitator to take the paternalistic approach and solve problems for the participants defeats the purpose of the session--to allow the collaborative solution to emerge naturally through the interaction of the participants with one another along this smooth pathway.

Hence the creative tension between employing the skills of a facilitator and the skills of a consultant and the question of neutrality.

Perspective

2006-03-10T18:46:00.000-08:00

On our bookshelf at home we have a copy of Perspective and Freehand Drawing, a high school or college textbook printed in 1919. I was sitting in a chair in the family room and happened to catch the title while scanning the books. It's a book for architects. The first part teaches how to use grids and guidelines to sketch ornamental designs. The second part teaches one point and two point perspective. As I leafed through the book I thought about The Blind Men and the Elephant.

Naturally.

The story came to the West in a poem by John Godfrey Saxe and also has a Buddhist version (the version highlighted above is a Jain version). I'll copy the Buddhist version here.

A number of disciples went to the Buddha and said, "Sir, there are living here in Savatthi many wandering hermits and scholars who indulge in constant dispute, some saying that the world is infinite and eternal and others that it is finite and not eternal, some saying that the soul dies with the body and others that it lives on forever, and so forth. What, Sir, would you say concerning them?"

The Buddha answered, "Once upon a time there was a certain raja who called to his servant and said, 'Come, good fellow, go and gather together in one place all the men of Savatthi who were born blind... and show them an elephant.' 'Very good, sire,' replied the servant, and he did as he was told. He said to the blind men assembled there, 'Here is an elephant,' and to one man he presented the head of the elephant, to another its ears, to another a tusk, to another the trunk, the foot, back, tail, and tuft of the tail, saying to each one that that was the elephant.

"When the blind men had felt the elephant, the raja went to each of them and said to each, 'Well, blind man, have you seen the elephant? Tell me, what sort of thing is an elephant?'

"Thereupon the men who were presented with the head answered, 'Sire, an elephant is like a pot.' And the men who had observed the ear replied, 'An elephant is like a winnowing basket.' Those who had been presented with a tusk said it was a ploughshare. Those who knew only the trunk said it was a plough; others said the body was a grainery; the foot, a pillar; the back, a mortar; the tail, a pestle, the tuft of the tail, a brush.

"Then they began to quarrel, shouting, 'Yes it is!' 'No, it is not!' 'An elephant is not that!' 'Yes, it's like that!' and so on, till they came to blows over the matter.

"Brethren, the raja was delighted with the scene.

"Just so are these preachers and scholars holding various views blind and unseeing.... In their ignorance they are by nature quarrelsome, wrangling, and disputatious, each maintaining reality is thus and thus."

Then the Exalted One rendered this meaning by uttering this verse of uplift,

O how they cling and wrangle, some who claim
For preacher and monk the honored name!
For, quarreling, each to his view they cling.
Such folk see only one side of a thing.

Somewhere in primary education I learned Saxe's poem by heart and assumed for years that every other child in America did the same. So on the few occasions that I've used the parable when facilitating collaborative sessions I've been surprised that few of the participants had ever heard of it.

The story goes to the heart of the challenge of collaboration. Human beings are limited in their perception by the range of their senses and by the mechanics of their brains. Our eyes take in only a narrow bandwidth of the electromagnetic spectrum but they process volumes more data than our ears hear or our skin feels or our noses smell. We build tools to extend our ability to perceive the world, like scanning electron microscopes and infrared cameras. But to compound the issue, our brain tends to discard most of the information that arrives on its doorstep. In fact, we take in only a tiny bit of information until the brain can say, "oh, yeah, that's my bedroom" and then the brain fills in the rest of the information. So we tend to not even see what's before us. This phenomenon has been made famous by the experiments of the Visual Cognition Lab.

So we're limited concerning what information we can take in and we discard most of that in favor of seeing what we believe to be there anyway.

The story only gets worse when it comes to solving complex social problems. And a meeting or collaborative session, regardless of its stated objectives or purposes is really only an exercise in solving a complex social problem. Despite how much data or facts are gathered, presented, manipulated or modeled, the politics and social agendas--usually hidden--predominate. If you can work through the social issues, then there's a chance that some of the facts will become relevant. But remember that "facts" are part of our perception problem--we have a limited and conditioned ability to perceive reality.

This leads me back to the elephant. Often facilitators use the expression "what's the elephant in the room" to refer to some huge problem that everyone knows about but no one is talking about. Making the elephant visible and giving everyone permission to talk about it is one of the keys to solving the social problem. The problem with this problem takes me back to the blind men. Even though there's an elephant in the room, and everyone has permission to talk about it, not everyone is perceiving the same elephant. Unfortunately, they may be using the same words to talk about it but the words have different definitions.

How can this dilemma be resolved? First, people need to gain some idea that they're each looking at the same thing but seeing it differently. This is where I like the blind men and the elephant as a parable. Next, we like to suggest to people that it's not the people who are in conflict with one another but rather their models that are in conflict. If people can separate themselves and their egos from their models, they can more easily solve the problem because they can migrate to other perspectives. And this is the key: migrate to other perspectives. If the facilitator or consultant can aid the participants to change perspectives, there's a chance for success.

Years ago one of the popular exercises in collaborative events was role playing. Participants would trade roles and act out their new parts in a simulation of some sort. So managers would play sales people and vise versa to try to get some understanding of what it's like to live in the other person's shoes. The activity is artificial but can be effective.

The next stage up was to add a realistic context to the role playing, so gaming or simulation was added. This is more effective because there are external control stimuli that the players must respond to. In other words, they can't just make up the theater and play the role, but they have to take input, manipulate it under constraints and then judge the output. Simulations, when properly prepared, are much more effective tools to get people to see other perspectives. But they're expensive to set up.

If you have a group that's amenable to meditation techniques, these can be quite effective because each individual separates him or herself from the point of view they have been holding. Our personal views of the elephant tend to define ourselves to ourselves. We believe that if we yield our point of view, that's losing and that makes us a loser. So to even suggest that we should trade points of view can be anathema. But if we can understand that the point of view and the feelings about that point of view can be separate from our Self--if we can detach ourselves from them--then we can deal a little more dispassionately with the elephant.

We also describe several ways in which model conflict can be resolved, and we let everyone know that all of these outcomes are legitimate. We also try to get the group to work through possible outcomes in each scenario. Here are the scenarios in order from least compassionate and creative to most compassionate and creative.

Two models are in conflict: A and B. How might the situation be resolved?

No resolution. Each party takes their model and goes home. Or they bloody each other into a stalemate. They agree that the problem remains a problem to be resolved at some later time. So long as they agree to this or are both too fatigued from the battle, it's a legitimate outcome.
War. A defeats B or B defeats A. It's also a legitimate outcome if one party bullies the other party into submission. Sorry folks, but this is the way parts of our world works. Acknowledge it.
Concession. A wins or B wins. The other model is discarded. So long as both parties agree, this is also a legitimate outcome.
Compromise. Take half of A and half of B and put them together to create a solution. Each party agrees to discard the remainder of their solution. In this case, neither party can entirely let go of their egos, so it's a common way for things to be resolved in the West. But it's far from ideal.
Soup. Take a part of A, a part of B, and a part of C that you invent together. This approach is getting somewhere. The parties actually work together to create something new in order to make the cobbling together of their two models. When collaboration happens in the real world, much of it looks like this. You really can't just put the two models together--usually they require some glue or filling inbetween them.
The Third Way. Hold both A and B in thought in dynamic tension--accept them both as true--until a third solution emerges that may be completely independent of either A or B. In an experiment, researchers put a monkey and a banana in a room with two ways to get to the banana. The researchers wanted to see which way the monkey would choose. The monkey found a third way.

Here's how these resolutions stack up in a sequel to The Blind Men and the Elephant.

No resolution. The blind men can't agree about anything and either fight over their ideas or stalk away. Note that they are ignoring any further exploration of the elephant...
War. The blind man who thinks the elephant is like a wall pummels the man who thinks the elephant is like a snake until he caves in. Now we all believe that elephants are walls. This is called progress...
Concession. The man who believes that elephants are like ropes is persuaded by the man who thinks elephants are walls. Walls, after all are such impressive things and besides, it's time for tea.
Compromise. The guys get together and build a wall with a snake attached to it (combining their two models) and proclaim it the science of elephantism. Now we're enlightened...
Soup. After looking at the science of elephantism a bit more they agree that there is some space between the snake and the wall, and something of a difficulty in attaching the snake without killing it. So they model something between the snake and the wall and maybe come up with something that looks like a head.
The Third Way. They all trade places, examine the elephant again, step back and realize the limitations of their metaphors, ride the elephant in motion and after much deliberation, discard their old ideas for a more complex, but more accurate living systems model.

So back finally to perspective in drawing. You may be familiar with one, two and three point perspective. The one, two and three refer to the number of vanishing points on the drawing. But in a real drawing, the shadows, sloping roof lines, and so on each have their own vanishing points. A real drawing may have a dozen or more vanishing points and all of them are necessary for the final image to emerge yet none of them alone are sufficient to depict the complete model.

Creativity by Addition and Integration

2006-02-27T15:25:00.000-08:00

A previous post introduced the subject of creativity and briefly described a technique for finding ideas by subtraction. This post continues the theme of creativity but takes up the technique of addition. We usually call it creative combination, and it has two levels: simple addition of two concepts, and the more complex integration of two concepts.

The Hairpin Curve
A number of authors have written about the value of combining a challenge with a principle from some other field of study. Holding the two concepts in thought at once can sometimes lead to insights. For example, if the problem is finding ways to improve sales, the problem solver might select a concept at random like a hairpin and put that together with the problem and see what emerges as those two concepts are held together in thought. Hairpins keep hair in place. Maybe we need to put salespeople in place at key accounts. Hairpins have those little waves on one side. Why? Maybe they help hold the hair and keep the hairpin from sliding out. Maybe our sales people need three or four key holds that they can use to keep accounts. There's another type of hairpin that operates like a clothespin--squeeze one end to open the jaws and then let go so the jaws can clamp down on the hair...

On and on the ideas can flow. Most of the ideas--maybe 90% of them or more will be useless as ideas but may be very valuable because what's really going on is two things. First, the people engaging in the process are forcing themselves to think differently about their challenge and the difference alone may help open up new domains in the solution space. Second, the people are experiencing massive failure (lots of ideas that lead to nowhere) and if they can learn to become comfortable with that feeling, they'll let go of a lot of the fear and tension that inhibits creativity to begin with. So the exercise is beneficial even if nothing comes of it in terms of a solution.

Division vs. Integration
We use creative combinations frequently in our practice and have noticed a few phenomena that may be worth sharing. First is the difference between division and integration. It's easier for us as human beings to take things apart, give them nomenclature and categorize them than it is for us to create synthesis from seemingly disparate concepts. Pattern recognition is difficult for many of us. It's what makes crossword puzzles difficult. If I give you a common word and ask you to list definitions for the word, you'll have little difficulty. However, if I give you a definition for a common word, you'll likely have more difficulty extrapolating from the definition to the word itself. If I give you a category, like birds and ask you to fill the category with related words, again you'd have little problem. First you'd identify types of birds, then characteristics of birds, then other concepts related to birds. You'd build a mind map fairly quickly. However, if I give you four objects: a bird, a cube, scissors, and a car and ask you to synthesize them into an overarching concept, you'd find that a bit more difficult. Division is easier than integration.

Most of the challenges inherent in finding innovative ideas lie in the domain of integration. We're looking to synthesize something completely new out of existing objects or concepts.

There's a facilitation exercise called Yellow Pages that illuminates the problem. Each team is provided with two businesses from the yellow pages and is asked to create a new business that's a synthesis of the two. So, for example, a hair stylist and an irrigation installation company. Try it.

Put One Idea Inside the Other
The first attempts are usually to put on in the context of another. So the Irrigation company gives away free styling coupons or something like that. These ideas may be valuable, but usually they're so pedestrian as to be useless. That's OK if the team uses these initial ideas to just get the mind limbered up and then pushes on. But at some point simple addition isn't enough. What happens when you add apples and oranges? Fruit salad. There's nothing in the composition of the apple or the orange itself that suggests fruit salad. Fruit salad is an emergent concept.

Abstracting to Principles
After a while the team may see that both of the firms are interested in grooming in some way. The former grooms people's hair and the latter grooms people's lawns. This approach involves abstracting each business back into underlying principles and following this track may lead to some new valuable idea (usually unrelated to either of the businesses in the original problem). So maybe there are principles in irrigation that can be carried over into the hair styling business. Does hair need hydration? Could irrigation systems dispense conditioners?

Note that both of these ideas are already common solutions employed by both types of companies. This leads to another point. Unless you're really familiar with the styling business or the irrigation business, the ideas you come up with are likely to be very insightful. Some level of familiarity is required with both types of concepts when you're doing creativity by addition.

Popping to a Completely New Idea
The holy grail of this exercise is to come up with a completely new type of business that traces its roots back to either the specifics of the two parent businesses or to the abstracted principles of the two. This result is very rare. That's OK. The general purpose of the exercise in a collaborative session is to just get people loosened up. And to realize how very difficult it is to look at two concepts and have to imagine a third concept that is the offspring of the two.

Maybe the two companies combine in some form of data management that combines a service that shapes data (related to the stylist) and a service that irrigates data, providing it with nutrients like periodic updates (related to the irrigation company).

Impatience
The final phenomenon I'd like to share in this blog with respect to this topic is the particularly western tendency towards impatience when it comes to creativity. We're all brought up in school to believe that every problem has (usually one) right answer and that answer should emerge immediately, often in competition against time (as in testing) or against other people (as in who raises their hand first). But the real world isn't like that. There's competition, true, but there isn't any company that has a monopoly on the solution space. I believe after having facilitated hundreds of collaborative sessions with clients that the average participant has a tolerance for ten or fifteen "wrong answers" max before impatience (and probably humiliation) gets the better of them and they begin to feel either dejected or angry at the facilitator. My experience of the origin of really good ideas, however, indicates that somewhere between 50 and 100 "wrong answers" are required before a really good breakthrough idea comes up. There may be a few other good ideas along the way, but only one really good one out of every 100 (50 if you're lucky).

Somehow we have to get past this tendency. In the few hours it takes to generate 100's of ideas, how much is really lost? A few hours is all. But the potential reward is very large.

Creativity By Subtraction

2006-02-25T14:07:00.000-08:00

Creativity is a part of the innovation process. Often the two are confused as synonyms but innovation includes creativity as a tool or skill (depending on how you believe it happens), not the other way around. Finding a way to generate new ideas involves creativity. Robert Fritz makes some nice distinctions between creating and creativity in his book Creating. He notes that everyone can learn to create something even though we each have different degrees of talent in creativity.

One definition of innovation reads, "to create something new or perceived as new." So the act of creating is fundamental to innovation--bringing ideas to fruition so that they are perceived as new. This newness is important. See my last post on entropy and negentropy for more details, but it's the newness that allows an organization to create a value gap between them and their nearest competitors. That's also why it's still a good packaging and advertising trick to put the word "new" on an item that is basically the same as the last iteration. People are drawn towards something new and different. That ability to draw people to a product or service allows its price or quality or content to be leveraged up, thereby increasing its value not only to the organization that produces it but hopefully to the customers who buy it, the workers who make it and the shareholders who own it.

Good ideas are not a dime a dozen. A good idea is as rare as a good system for executing good ideas. Everything in life that is of enduring value is challenging to conceive and bring to fruition.

Finding good ideas has been a topic for centuries, probably since before Archimedes shouted "Eureka" from his bath. One technique that we use is subtraction.

First, frame the challenge that needs to be innovated. For example, we were writing a bid on some work and the final fee was too high. Or, we had a client that wanted to completely innovate the way education happened at their medical school.

Second, find something that you believe you can't live without and subtract it from the equation. In writing the bid, we removed two phases of work. Then we asked ourselves how we could still meet the objectives of the RFP with the two phases removed. We worked until we understood how that could happen. That cut half the fee. Our medical education client chose to remove tuition from the equation: imagine a medical school that charges no tuition. They worked diligently with this idea to really try to design a school that didn't charge tuition.

Third, play with the ideas until something cool emerges. After we cut the fee in half, we felt that we had lost our distinctiveness with respect to the rest of the field of contenders. While noodling through this challenge, we cut the duration of the proposed phases by 90% and again asked how we would accomplish that. The answer emerged, much to the surprise of us all. Our medical school client while wrestling with the no tuition subtraction discovered several other interesting ideas along the way. These ideas get catalogued because they're really the object and purpose of the exercise. The client also happened to discover a way to conduct a medical college without charging tuition. It's rare for this to actually happen in a subtraction exercise, though.

Fourth, catalog the ideas that emerge and then begin to build models around them. Once the cool ideas emerge, build some models around them to test them. When you test, don't test in order to tear down but in order to build up and strengthen. It's easy to destroy things in this world. It's so much harder to build them. So take even the ideas that don't seem so strong and work diligently to strengthen them. I guarantee you that something excellent and valuable will pop out.

The keys to the whole exercise are two: (1) subtract something from the equation that appears to be absolutely necessary and, (2) play with the remaining challenge with all you'v got. Suspend any sense of impossibility. If you believe that what you've subtracted can't actually be subtracted, you'll never jump to the new perspective that allows you to see new ideas. You need to fool yourself and suspend your disbelief long enough to get to the cool ideas.

Entropy and Innovation

2006-02-24T20:07:00.000-08:00

Entropy is the tendency of nature to dissolve differences. Imagine placing two stones next to one another in a closed, insulated box. One stone is 200 degrees and the other is 0. After some period of time you open the box and both stones are now 100 degrees (ignoring the effects of whatever temperature the inside of the box was at the start of the experiment). This tendency to take structure and order and dismantle it into either randomness or uniformity is one of the key laws of thermodynamics.

Until the two stones have reached the same temperature, I can use the temperature difference to drive an engine of some sort. I can direct the flow of the heat from the one stone through a device that uses the cold from the other stone as a mechanism to "draw" the heat through it, giving up some heat in the process and driving whatever the device is.

This law appears metaphorically in the business world as well. If one company comes out with a certain product, it's guaranteed that sooner or later another company will come out with a similar product. At that point price competition will begin and the profit margins of both products will be worn down until they are commodities with tiny margins. At this point there is little difference between them, and no value is created. If a service company comes out with a new offering, its competitors will work to match its character and flavor (if not its substance) so that the buyer will be able to take advantage of a competitive situation.

The entire organizational process from supply chain through operations to marketing, sales, delivery and service is entropic. Even though we focus on it intently, the best it can do over time is run down to a low margin, par situation in the competitive marketplace.

Several mechanisms can be put in place to fight against this dispersive tendency. They can create the phenomenon of negentropy. Life, for example, is negentropic. Life over successive generations can evolve more complexity and differentiation, swimming upstream against the pull of uniformity. Companies need to find ways to bring this innate property of life into their organizations in more than just an ad-hoc way.

Strategy Formation
One of the oldest tools at a company's disposal, strategy allows the company to look at the playing field differently and either change the field, the rules or the game itself. The ultimate objective is to create greenfield marketspace because the margins are greatest where there is little or no competition (real or perceived in the customer's mind).

Brand
In the old days it used to be called marketing and advertising but nowadays branding has the capability to create a differentiation in the customer's mind that may or may not actually exist in reality. The hope is that the customer generates an affinity that marries his self image with that of the brand, thus reducing the barriers to purchasing while at the same time raising barriers to choosing similar products or services from competitors.

Quality
The performance of the product or service can be improved without design modifications that would imply starting from scratch. At the same time, the economy of production can be improved and the increased efficiency can add to the margin of a product in commoditization by carving out space below the price point. The whole quality and process impovement movements of the last 60 years showed us how to do this clearly in manufacturing; less clearly in services where the relationship and not the process is king.

Intellectual Property
IP in the forms of copyrighting, trademarking and patenting is a method for erecting barriers against competition and the erosion of margin on each dollar of sales. I tend to think of IP as a life extender but not as a negentropic generator. But that's probably a personal bias. I see IP today as a tool gone haywire. Taken to an extreme, it inhibits the fight against entropy because the barriers it sets up make it more difficult for ideas to move across the intellectual spectrum. Some of the things that the patent office allows seem ridiculous. Nevertheless, despite the desire of some organizations to use patents to hedge their companies about with nice, thorny, protective barriers, I believe that the thickening hedges will only spur other companies to find ways to work around them (or countries to simply ignore them). IP is too much of a defensive tool to ultimately succeed. Offensive tools are required for the sustained success of companies.

Innovation and R&D
Ultimately a species can only improve so much in its niche. Once the niche itself starts to change too much, new species must evolve. Innovation is the process by which a company remakes its products and services. In so doing it will likely have to remake itself. That means its systems, organizational structure, and policies (its rules of the game). The tendency of companies to shy away from such transformation is why most companies battle it out by trying to just run their operations engine faster, throwing in a bit of process improvement for spice or building IP hedges to extend the runtime of their products. In the process they generate so much heat and friction trying to drive new performance out of an old engine that they burn up their people, their systems and their structures. But ultimately buggy whips will go by the wayside and most of the companies that made them will either fade away into a dying industry's entropy or be absorbed into other operations for pennies on the dollar. Because the creation of an innovation culture takes time, there is a point of no return for organizations that ignore transformation.

So there you have it. Pick your tools. There are probably others, but these are the big ones. Usually a mix of several is wise, or the sequential use of one then another as the current situation calls for.

The Networked Consulting Firm

2006-02-22T16:32:00.000-08:00

I've been intrigued lately mulling over the possibility that the next big consulting firm might be a network of individual firms. There are four or five elements that are coming together that would support this and make such a network a serious competitor to today's major consulting firms.

1. eBay
I'm drawing on two characteristics of eBay. One is the evaluation system that eBay uses to rate traders. The second is the marketplace of buyers and sellers.

2. B2B Technology and Affinity Groups
Within the network there will be affinity groups. These serve as the analog to practice areas in the major consulting firms. The affinity groups will be subnetworks of consultants who like working together and who have complimentary skills that together give them the breadth of abilities to tackle difficult challenges. It's likely that leadership will emerge by situation. Job-based contracts keep teams of consultants together for the duration of each job, providing some security for clients and for the team members themselves. It is also likely that consultants will stay members for longer periods of time than the current average turnover in major consulting firms.

3. Creative Commons
A creative commons license would allow members to use each other's IP but more importantly to adapt it and feed it back into the network for others to use. The best would tend to be used more. Databases of IP would hold rating and use information for members to use. This rapid adapatation could keep the network ahead of the competition.

4. Member-based Support
The network would be formed as a membership organization that can provide a number of valuable services from insurance, to basic legal support (contracts, etc.), to assistance with accounting, to discounts for purchases. Members would provide basic financial information to the membership organization so that the combined financial strength an be used in larger RFP's. Rapid deployment team building allows larger teams for big deployments to rapidly come up to speed. Members submit case studies and non-proprietary information after each job so that a repository of knowledge by industy and company segment can be built and accessed by all.

The network would also benefit from its lack of overhead. No major buildings. No battalions of staff. No top heavy structure that requires overworked junior consultants to support the income of senior partners.

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Future of Facilitation

2006-02-02T10:28:00.000-08:00

PART II

A number of years ago I wrote some simple rules for facilitation of ideation and idea development with large groups using some of Stu Kaufmann's ideas around patch logic (from his book At Home in the Universe). The rules weren't quite right but the execution over the years has yielded some surprising results.

People in collaboration seem very uncomfortable not knowing what's going on. I should rephrase that because it's impossible for a person to know what's going on in a collaborative endeavor. Instead, people accept an illusion that they know what's going on. So they tend to want to stay in large group all the time so they can hear everything, for example. In reality, they're hearing almost nothing. Imagine sixty people in a room working on a problem of creating a strategy for a new product launch. One of them can talk at a time. If each one talks for a minute, then over the course of an hour each person talks only once. What does each person do with the other 59 minutes? Listen? Highly doubtful. Even with the best of active listening skills, a person fades away after fifteen minutes or so. Take notes? Well, so now we have sixty sets of notes and doodles. What's the value--collaboratively speaking--in that?

If I put the 60 people into ten teams for an hour, now ten people get to talk at once. Ten more get to capture ideas on a flip chart at the same time. Everyone gets to speak for six minutes. The pace of the dialog acclerates. Further, if I give each of these teams an assignment to create something then I end up with ten products. Even if eight are worthless, the value of the remaining two probably eclipses whatever a group of 60 might have come up with together.

Now if I ask the 60 people to solve the problem individually for 20 minutes and then get into ten teams to put their ideas together to create something, I've got 1200 minutes of intense creation and involvement by all the individuals, followed by 400 minutes of intense discussion (one speaker at a time in ten teams for 40 minutes). Compared to the first example, I've leveraged 60 minutes into 1600 minutes of "speaking" versus 60 minutes of speaking.

Now comes the problem. People at some point feel like they're not connected to the rest of the teams and want to hear what they've been doing. It's necessary for them to know what the other teams have been doing because the next stage in the process is to take the ideas and solutions and recombine them together in another iteration of work. This represents the opportunity for crossbreeding and a test for the fitness of the ideas. Through the iterations, the most fit solution will emerge without need for any other decision making approach. But if I have ten teams talk about what they just did in succession, that's about 100 minutes. And you know what happens in those 100 minutes. That's right--one person at a time talks and everyone else zones out. HUGE waste of time.

There are some alternatives. One is to have representatives from each of the ten teams go out to other teams during the process and find out individually what they've been up to and bring those ideas back. So, in each team, one person stays in place and the remaining five people split up and go to five other teams. Rotate once more and now each team of six has touched each of the other teams in the session and they return with the ideas to their home team and incorporate the ideas into the product. Now I've used 20 minutes and each team now has information from every other team.

Or... if there is time, each team posts its results. The best way to do this is with a picture, some text that describes the diagram and a brief 3 minute video tellling the story of what went on in the team. The results are posted to an Intranet and everyone can peruse whatever they want to as the session moves forward.

The most difficult problem left to solve is how to move the work to the next round. In other words, let's say that the group of sixty people is working on coming up with a new product. They might do a couple of rounds generating new product ideas as individuals and in teams. Some rotating between team rounds would cross-breed the ideas and some interesting ones would emerge. Now what? We need to move the best ideas into further modeling and testing. So we need a method to tell which ideas are the most fit--even if it's as simple as the interest that people in the group take in them. Then we need a way for people to sign up to work on the ideas they're most interested in. And we need a way to document everything so that teams have a record of the ideas moving forward. And a record of the individuals associated with each idea so they can go back to the source and ask questions of them for clarification. A report of a team's idea is terribly compressed and it takes interaction with the people who were on that team to unpack or uncompress the ideas back to understandability.

Personal Transformation

2005-12-03T09:28:00.000-08:00

A lot has been said about leadership and the need for leadership to drive innovation in an organization. In many cases, creating an innovation culture creates a transformation in the organization.

In my discussions with educators and business people about change and transformation it has become clear that one of the pre-requisites for transformation that is not your top down, dictated, transformation is for leaders that have been through a 'personal transformation'. This means either there will be a 'transformed' person with a vision leading the change or the people involved in the change will need to go through a personal transformation as part of the change process.

One of the reasons for this is simple - people cannot design something they are not familiar with (something that isn't in their frame of reference). When asked to design something new people will generally design something similar to what they already know - unless they have new input, new information or new models.

One of the places that new input comes from is people - and people that have gone through a personal change (a personal transformation) often have a different point of view, and some times, a different experience to bring to the design.

There are also several qualities of a leader or a person that has been through a personal transformation that I feel are important demonstrations or evidence of their change. A few of these qualities are:

They can admit they are wrong - in public
They can say they made a mistake - in public
They can say, 'I don't know' - in public

In my opinion, these are also characteristics of leaders that will be successful in the 21st Century as it is nearly impossible for any one person to be able to see clearly and keep up with the pace of change we are experiencing.

These characteristics inform us that this person is not just a leader but they are also a learner and they are comfortable with their own learning (and letting others see they are learning).

Complex Adaptive Systems and the Future of Facilitation

2005-09-26T10:27:00.000-07:00

PART I

The last two weeks were fascinating for me professionally. First I went to Santa Clara to attend a conference put on by the Santa Fe Institute on the basics of complex adaptive systems. Then last week I was able to attend the Legg Mason Thought Leader Forum in Baltimore. The line-up of topics between these two conferences was impressive:

Geoffrey West on scaling laws in living systems up to the size of cities
Murray Gell-Mann on an overview of complexity science
Josh Wolfe on the future of nanotechnology from a venture capital perspective
Richard Foster on creative destruction in companies and industries and the future of the healthcare industry
Bill Gurley on massively multiplayer Internet gaming
Sue Becker on the evolution of the Internet over the next ten years
Scott Page on the role of diversity in economics and organizations
Graham Spencer on evolution in open source systems with Wikipedia as an example
James Surowiecki on the wisdom of crowds
Bill Miller on capital markets and complex adaptive systems

In some ways the last two weeks were the highlight of my career. In another way they represent only the beginning or perhaps a turbocharger to push me on to new ideas. I've been interested in complex adaptive systems (CAS) since 1990 when I first read the book by M. Mitchell Waldrop. I have worked ever since to fold some of the ideas that I've encountered into my business--facilitation of large groups of people through the creation of new ideas, to strategies for positioning them, to planning for implementation.

Traditional facilitation places a facilitator in the front of a room of people, adds a documentor (or a scribe to draw on flip charts) and equips the facilitator with two sets of tools: human behavior tools so he can manipulate the contribution of various group members (encouraging some to speak up and others to restrain their verbosity for example); and some rudimentary tools for managing the time, usually wrapped up in the creation of an agenda, or sequence of discussion topics.

Facilitation has been evolving, though, since the 1970's when Doyle and Strauss popularized the method I sketched above in their book How to Make Meetings Work. Today, I consider Harrison Owen to be one of the most evolved practitioners in the field. First of all, his method, called Open Source Technology is open source. Anyone can read the book, apply the ideas, and adapt them. Second, in his model, the facilitator spends a brief period of time at the beginning of a session to set the stage (literally) and create an envelope of energy to support the process as it unfolds. Then the participants actually create the design for their session in a sort of marketplace approach where sponsors for topics of conversation post advertisements for their sessions on a large matrix event calendar and everyone signs up for what they want to participate in. When done correctly the result is a group of people working in a sequence of parallel discussions. The biggest challenge that I haven't understood yet is how the group coalesces around emerging solutions and actually goes through a selection process followed by planning. I see how the approach uses parallel work to generate ideas and subsets of a solution but I don't yet see the mechanism for cross-breeding, testing ideas for fitness, and the use of some selection criteria before the surviving ideas fold back into another iteration. These additional components would truly let a group of people generate, plan and execute even a complex strategy without much centralized intervention. Traditional business management would scoff at or shudder at the thought but more curious managers and business leaders will one day figure it out. At that point, no hierarchical organization will be able to move fast enough to compete against an organization that employs massively parallel strategy formation and execution.

The next steps in thinking about how to facilitate large groups of people should be very interesting. On one side lies the development of a host of online tools to aid in the process. Right now the tools are based on old models instead of the concepts of complex adaptive systems and don't really open up the full potential for massively parallel planning (MPP). The people who solve this issue will come from the gaming world where companies like Second Life are learning how to allow the creation and evolution of communities of people online. The group problem solving world probably can't grok this kind of evolution. Bill Gurley's talk illuminated some possibilities along these lines. If people will pay real money to buy fantasy real estate and pay rent to develop it, they can learn to run businesses collectively online.