Archive for October, 2011
You Have a Choice – Act!
Posted by Tim in book riffs, selection on 31 October 2011
There are plenty of excuses for not innovating – for not taking steps to change things. However, if you see a way to make things better and you don’t do anything, then you’re letting your situation control you. If you’re dissatisfied with the situation, you have to change the way you act.
Here is the way that Tom Peters puts it in a post from Innovation Excellence:
I believe there is one and only one source of innovation – pissed off people.
(If you go to the link, you can see a good video from Peters, but I had to take it out of this post since it only autoplays, which is annoying.)
But in addition to being pissed off, you actually have to take action. Here is how Gary Cox frames it in his book How to Be an Existentialist:
Existentialism holds that you can only truly change the way you think and feel about your life by acting differently, by acting rather simply reacting, by asserting your will rather than simply allowing yourself to be swept along by circumstances, by always taking responsibility for yourself and what you do.
When there’s a gap between where we are and where we want to be, we need to innovate.
These are some of the issues that I was thinking about when I did an interview for Brian Driggs’ excellent Distillery series – here is what I said there:
If you could distill everything you’ve learned so far into a single word of advice to yourself, what would that one word be?
Impact
Why does this one word mean so much to you?
For much of my life “think” has been more important than “act”, and that’s been a source of weakness for me. So I constantly remind myself that to get anything done, I have to act. One way to remind myself to do this is to focus on having an impact – on people and on events.
How does this one word impact what you do (or want to do) with your life?
It guides how I interact with people. On my best days, I remember that I’m trying to have a positive impact on everyone with whom I interact. On less good days, that slips down the priority list, but I try to keep it as an objective as much as I can.
What has this word done for you so far?
It’s helped me figure out what things I should and shouldn’t be doing. There are always more opportunities than time, so filtering is really important. Sorting based on impact can be useful at even the very micro level – it’s what helps me in the evenings when I know that writing a blog post does more good than watching television (at least, I hope it does!). It also helps me make decisions about what jobs I should have, and what projects I should be doing. That said, it took me nearly fifteen years in the workforce before I even started to get this right. But what I’ve found is that the more I focus on the impact that I want to have, the better my decisions get.
Here’s another way of approaching it, also from Gary Cox’s book:
If a person really did live each as though it were his last he would spend each day panicking while partying and rapidly reduce himself to a nervous, drunken, insolvent wreck. Nonetheless, a person should live his life recognizing that each moment, each day, is precious and utterly irreplaceable.
If each moment and day is precious and utterly irreplaceable, then there’s really only one choice: act!
Don’t Mistake the Tool for the Goal
Posted by Tim in innovation on 30 October 2011
Is innovation good or bad? Yes!
What do I mean? Tools are neutral – they are only become good or bad through action. Our strategies can be good or bad. Our goals can be good or bad. The vehicles that help us execute our strategies and achieve our goals are neither.
Here’s a case in a point – a brilliant discussion of the uses of powerpoint – it is worth your time to go through it (it’s fast):
This raises an important point: the slides are not the presentation. Instead of attacking powerpoint, we should be attacking people that choose to make bad presentations. Well, maybe we should be trying to help them improve, actually. In any case, the problem is not with the tool, it is with the user.
Innovation is the same – it is a neutral tool. When we encourage people to innovate, this is another case of mistaking the tool for the goal. Innovation isn’t inherently good. We can use it to further good strategies that are designed to make the world better, or we can use to pursue bad strategies that are designed to enrich some at the expense of others.
Either way, the choice is yours.
Efficiency or Exploration?
Posted by Tim in innovation on 29 October 2011
Here is a brilliant post from Randall Munroe on XKCD:
There’s a very simple point here – strategy is about making choices. What we choose to emphasise reveals what we think it important.
Here’s a simple business example: do we choose efficiency or exploration?
In most cases, we need to do both. We need to get better at what we’re currently doing (efficiency) and we need to create new opportunities through innovation (exploration). But if we err, most organisations err on the side of choosing efficiency over exploration.
You could also frame this as choosing the short run over the long run.
Is this really what we should be doing?
Malcolm Gladwell on the Norden Bombsight
Posted by Tim in innovation on 27 October 2011
I’m traveling right now, so I can’t write a lot today. Instead, I have this must-see video from the always-watchable Malcolm Gladwell:
Some important points:
- We get hung up on our technologies: the Norden bombsight made bomb dropping more accurate. However, in most cases, accuracy isn’t necessarily the problem – identifying the right target is the bigger problem. We often get so focused on the technical problem that we’re trying to solve that we fail to understand the (often bigger) underlying problems. Technologies are means to ends, and if we innovate only technologies, we will fail.
- Innovations have unintended consequences: Norden designed his bombsight in an effort to minimize the collateral damage in war. This didn’t happen. It is nearly impossible to know how innovations will be used once they are out in the world.
- We have to innovate for a purpose: how much effort do we really need to put into getting better at blowing people up? Or generating fractionally higher returns from financial instruments? Innovation must be driven by strategy, and strategy must be driven by values.
There’s No Such Thing as a Good Idea…
Posted by Tim in experiments on 25 October 2011
Experimenting is a key part of innovating. In his new book REAMDE, Neal Stephenson has a great description of learning through experimenting:
Much like a teenager who starts playing a new video game without bothering to open the manual, he tried things and observed the results, abandoning whatever didn’t work and moving aggressively to exploit small successes. A profusion of ideas spewed forth from his mind. There was no such thing as a bad idea, apparently. But, perhaps, more important, there was no such thing as a good idea either, until it had been tried and coolly evaluated. It was clear how he had become the leader of a sort of gang back home: not by asserting his leadership but by being so relentless in his production, evaluation, and exploitation of ideas that his friends had been left with no choice but to form up in his wake.
It’s a great quote, and there are several crucial points about innovation in it:
- Prototype everything: the character being described was learning how to sail a boat after being left adrift. He did this by prototyping. We can prototype any type of innovation – a new product, a new service, or a new business model. Actually, it’s not just that we can prototype everything, it’s that we must prototype everything.
- We can win by experimenting faster: this is the principle drives John Boyd’s OODA loop. OODA is a method for winning in complex environments. It stands for Observation; Orientation; Decision; Action. Boyd’s idea is that if you go through this process faster, you will gain a competitive advantage. He developed the model to help fighter pilots, but it has been shown to work in business as well.
- There’s no such thing as a good idea, until it’s been tested: an unexecuted idea has no value at all. It’s not a good idea until we know if it will work or not. It’s a simple point, and an important one, and it’s often overlooked.
Stephenson has outlined an outstanding innovation strategy: prototype everything, experiment as quickly as you possibly can, and don’t think you have a good idea until you’ve tested it. Three steps for innovation success.
Get the Fundamentals Right First
Posted by Tim in innovation on 24 October 2011
It’s been a pretty good year for sports in Brisbane. The big highlight for me was watching the Brisbane Roar win their first A-League football title at the start of the year. The did it by going undefeated over the last 28 games of the season. They’ve won their first three games of the new season too, running their streak to 31 games.
The fast start is encouraging for a few reasons. The first is that they lost a lot of players in the past year through transfers – including team captain Matt McKay and their first three strikers. In addition, the other teams in the league haven’t stood still. Sydney and Melbourne Victory both made major signings. And, of course, just as Nick Gruen describes for the AFL, other teams in the league have tried to come up with tactics to combat the Roar system.
The primary approach this year so far has been to try to press the Roar over the full field instead of letting their defenders bring the ball to midfield unobstructed while the rest of the team sets up. This is how the Roar’s ex-captain Craig Moore outlined it:
Brisbane Roar’s game is built all around passing and moving, and rotating of places as well. They move the ball very well, and teams have struggled with them not only moving the ball at speed but also that they change positions.
Once Brisbane get into that rhythm, as they did against Central Coast, they look like they’ll just take off where they left last season. It’ll be hard work to get a result off Brisbane Roar but it needs hard work.
That’s exactly what Sydney tried last weekend and Gold Coast tried on Friday. The results were 2-0 and 3-0 wins for the Roar. Here are the highlights from Friday’s game – pay close attention to what the announcers say after the third goal:
Over their undefeated streak, the Roar have been absolutely dominant over the last 15 minutes of games. Why? Because they’re the fittest team in the league. Friday the game was close for 70 minutes, and then the Roar scored 2 to put it away. The same thing happened the week before. In his post-game interview, Gold Coast captain Michael Thwaite said that you have to get to Brisbane early, because no one else is as fit as they are.
This is astonishing in several different ways. Not all of the other A-League teams can afford to go and buy international superstars as Sydney and Melbourne did. And not every team has a coach that can come up with a great tactical plan like Miron Bleiberg did on Friday. But all of them could be as fit as the Roar if they just put the work in.
The thing that astonishes me is that this is the easiest part of the Roar system to copy, and no one has.
We see this in business too. Firms often look for quick fixes, like hiring stars or coming up with novel strategies. But none of this does you any good if you’re not willing to work as hard as your competition.
You have to get the fundamentals right first. Working hard doesn’t guarantee winning, but it’s an awfully important first step.
Innovation When All You Have is a Noodle
Posted by Tim in experiments, innovation on 10 October 2011
Most of the inspirational innovation stories that we hear are about technology firms like Google, Amazon and Apple. This sometimes makes it difficult to help people find the connections to their work if they are in less sexy industries, like mining, education or government.
However, innovation is just as important in those industries as well.
There is a great story in the New York Times about the people that make food commercials (found via John Scalzi’s blog). The whole story is worth reading, but the bit that Scalzi quotes is notable:
“I make my living basically taking food and painting a reality with it,” says Mr. Somoroff, leaning back in a chair in his office as the team preps another set-up. “And if I succeed in a given moment, you’re going to go buy that dish because you’re going to identify with the experience we’ve created. To do that with something as banal as food is the challenge. I mean, it’s easy to go out and shoot a beautiful sunset or a beautiful girl. They’re beautiful, O.K.?”
He gestures toward the middle of the studio.
“I’ve got a noodle over here.”
Innovating in high tech firms is like taking pictures of a beautiful sunset – it’s relatively easy. Innovating when you’re in an industry that isn’t usually considered innovative can be a lot harder – it’s like taking a beautiful picture when all you’ve got is a noodle.
As the NYT story shows, the guys taking the food pictures have been incredibly inventive in figuring out how to do it well (although whether they’re creating value or not might be questionable). Here is what food looks like when you don’t do anything with it:
But they somehow manage to make even fast food look like something you might consider eating.
In the same way, you can innovate when you’re in “non-innovative” industries – in fact, if there’s a gap between where you currently are and where you want to be, you must.
John and I recently spent a couple of days working with an industrial firm that has been working hard to become more innovative. In an industry that is very cost-competitive they have taken the unusual step of adding an extra layer of management on their assembly line. On the surface, this looks crazy, but it’s an important management innovation.
With the extra line managers taking care of the problems that crop up each day, the rest of the managers have been able to focus on big picture issues. By doing this, and also working more closely with everyone on the line, they have introduced new production methods that have taken about $4 million per year out of their costs. Now that they have innovated to increase efficiency, they are turning their attention to implementing ideas that could substantially change their industry.
This innovation is the only thing that has kept them in business.
If the food guys can make noodles look great, and if the assembly line people can innovate in a historically non-innovative industry, then you can innovate too.
Ada Lovelace Day 2011 – Inspiration from Jane McGonigal
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation on 8 October 2011
I missed writing about someone on Ada Lovelace Day this year because I was actually teaching my MBA class about a great technology heroine – Jane McGonigal.
I love the concept behind Ada Lovelace Day. In order to encourage more women to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, the day is used to discuss women from these fields that have had an impact on your life. It’s named after Ada Lovelace, who was the world’s first computer programmer and an expert on Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine.
I talk about Lovelace in all of my classes too. But yesterday on Ada Lovelace Day, I played this video for my class:
When we discussed it in class, there were a few good innovation points that came up:
- McGonigal is innovating the business model for gaming by adding a key ingredient – purpose. If we look at the conclusions from Dan Pink’s drive, there are three factors that lead to satisfying work: autonomy, mastery and purpose. Video games currently provide players with the first two – autonomy and mastery. That’s why they’re so addictive. But the games that McGonigal designs also have a purpose – to save the world. That’s revolutionary.
- If you’re going to innovate something, you might as well innovate something that matters. There are plenty of people writing new video games. But writing games that are specifically designed to enable positive changes in the way people live is more rare. In her book Reality is Broken, McGonigal is saying that the games we play should be designed to have an impact in the world. In other words, we need more opportunities to feel what gamers feel, but that we should be achieving this in contexts that pertain to the real world. That’s why I love Evoke – it’s a game, but the real world outcomes are substantial (the website for Evoke is worth some of your time – it’s fascinating). There’s a nice review of RiB by Joe MacCarthy here.
That’s why Jane McGonigal is one of my technology heroes. She is fantastically creative, and she is using her skills and talents to try to create meaningful change. That makes her a great heroine on Ada Lovelace Day.
The Fundamental Problem in Management
Posted by Tim in complex systems on 6 October 2011
The fundamental problem in management is that the world is uncertain, and people hate dealing with uncertainty.
The result of this that they go to great lengths to provide themselves with the illusion of certainty. The Bed of Procrustres by Taleb, which I discussed previously, is primarily concerned with the problems caused by false certainty.
The problem with requiring certainty is that when you do, you fail to act. If you have to know in advance whether or not your innovation will succeed, you won’t innovate. If you have to know in advance whether or not your co-workers will perform, you won’t delegate. If you have to know in advance whether or not your idea will be accepted, you won’t put it forward.
All of the bad aspects of bureaucracy come from trying to build systems that provide certainty in a world that is by its very nature uncertain.
The more businesses I work in and talk with, the more convinced I become that the single most important management skill to develop is a tolerance for ambiguity.
Innovation in Aussie Rules
Posted by Tim in complex systems, innovation on 5 October 2011
Collingwood fan and outstanding economist Nick Gruen wrote an interesting piece prior to last weekend’s AFL Grand Final explaining why he thought his team would lose to Geelong. The underlying premise in the piece is that he thought Geelong would win because they were more innovative.
Here are some of the key points:
If I were to set out the way to win the premiership it would be the way Geelong have managed this season. The basic strategy behind the game changes subtly as sides come up with new approaches. But it takes the best part of a year at least to catch up with some new strategy. Thus we’ve seen Sydney get a premiership from flooding, and then they were unpicked. Then we saw the Saints doing something similar but somehow better. In each case both Sydney and the Saints didn’t have a very good bunch of players. They had a new strategy and players who were thoroughly drilled in how to make it work and they became almost impossible to beat.
The reason it takes time to peg such a strategy back is that, apart from figuring out exactly what they’re up to, you then have to figure out what to do about it. Collingwood has had its forward press going sufficiently well to win last year, but being the worrier I am I was always worried about Geelong, not just because they’ve got the fastest, most direct attacking game in the business, but because they added defence – copied from us – to that strategy.
…
More alarming still is that as I read in an article that someone else may remember and link to (I can’t find it) that Geelong’s stats have changed dramatically in the last five or six games. Their average kick length and kick to handball ratio has gone way up. They’ve basically come up with a way of getting the strengths of their attacking game without the downsides of inattention to defence. And they’re tearing other sides apart.
Whether deliberately or not, this new style hasn’t been really shown to the world for long enough for people to figure out how to unpick it, let alone drill the necessary skills and structures into their players to do so. So I reckon we’re in a lot of trouble. Tehy will pick us apart in just the way Hawthorn picked us apart last week – with lots of pressure against us in defence to stop us getting our run out of defence and with lots of long direct kicking zig-zagging down the centre of the ground and leading out from full forward.
This is an almost perfect description of how business competition and innovation works too.
Someone comes up with a great idea and brings it out. This gives them an advantage for a brief period of time. If they have solid management skills and good systems, they can turn it into a sustained advantage, as Geelong has (they’ve won titles now in 2007, 2009 and 2011). But even when the innovator doesn’t have the resources necessar to win for an extended period of time, innovation can still result in short-term advantages, as in Nick’s examples of Sydney and St Kilda.
Finally, innovating doesn’t guarantee winning. If you innovate, and have good processes, your odds of winning increase. But in the end, you need a combination of innovation, good structures, execution and luck. The good news is that the more innovative you are, the luckier you’re likely to be.
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Tim was named #5 in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2011 at Innovation Excellence.
Tim and John were both named in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2010 at Innovation Excellence.
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