Tim Kastelle

Category: book riffs

  • Two Ways to Select Ideas

    Innovation is more than just generating ideas. Most organisations have more than enough ideas. They might need better ones, but usually they need to get better at selecting ideas, executing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The irony of this situation is that there are a lot of techniques around (and consultants that use them!) designed to help generate ideas, but not nearly as many available for the more difficult steps.

    So it’s been really nice to run across two different methods that can be used to select ideas this week. The first is from the book Gamestorming by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown, James Macanufo. I’m only partway through the book, but so far it is pretty good. The basic premise is that games are the best way to unlock peoples’ capacity for creative thinking. After a brief introduction of some the thinking that justifies the premise, the bulk of the book is taken up with descriptions of more than 80 games that you can play to help with the idea management process (you can see some examples on Dave Gray’s site).

    The thing that I like about the book is that it is not just looking at ideation. They actually consider selection too. Here is how they frame the process:

    Many ideation tools only look at the first part of this process. But in Gamestorming they try to address all three parts. More importantly, they include games that can be used effectively in the explore and close phases too. Note that “close” is equal to “select” – so this is an important area to address.

    They also point out that going through this process is messy, and non-linear:

    Again, I think this is a pretty good approach. They don’t have as many games for the selecting step as for the first two, but it is still a pretty useful resource.

    Nilofer Merchant takes a more systematic approach to idea selection in The New How (recommended to me by Matt Perez – thanks Matt!). Here she is explaining her main ideas:

    The issue that she is trying to address is the gap that many organisations have between strategy development and strategy execution. She attributes this gap to a lack of participation in the strategy development process by those who actually have to make the strategies work – an idea that certainly rings true for me.

    The bulk of her book is taken up with developing a methodology for generating strategic options, outlining how the different ones could work, selecting the best one, and getting people to take responsibility for executing the strategy. The great thing here is that Merchant spends the most time explaining what she calls Murderboarding, which is the idea selection step in the process.

    Merchant says that Murderboarding is not designed to find the ultimate best solution, but that it’s supposed to help you find the best strategy out of the options available. This reflects the main flaw that I see in the book, which is that it is based on the premise that your strategic outcomes are within your control. I don’t think that this is necessarily true. However, if you keep that caveat in mind, there are some very useful ideas in the book.

    Selecting ideas is a critical step in the innovation process, and it’s one with which a lot of the organisations that I talk to really struggle. So it’s great to see people giving some thought to how to address this problem. If idea selection is an issue in your organisation, these two books will be useful resources.

  • The Problem is Actually Making Something

    I had a chance to catch up with a friend last week who recently changed jobs. He is passionate about innovation, and his previous job title had been “Innovation Champion”, a position seemingly custom-designed for his skills and interests.

    So why did he switch jobs?

    That was one of the topics that we discussed. It turns out that the day-to-day reality of the job was a lot more frustrating than the job title suggested, and the problems that he faced are actually very common. There were two main obstacles that he ran into. The first is that his firm made him an “Innovation Champion”, and then the senior managers acted as though that was all they had to do to make innovation happen. There were no structures or processes in place to help him out. There were other Innovation Champions throughout the firm, but they were widely distributed, and there was no coherent, co-ordinated approach to innovation.

    This problem is surprisingly common. There are two approaches to innovation that seem to work well in larger firms. One is to have dedicated innovation teams that are given the task of making sure that new ideas are executed. Sometimes they come up with the ideas as well, in other cases they manage ideas from the rest of the firm. The recent version of Xerox’s PARC Labs is a good example of this approach.

    The other option that works is to embed innovation throughout the entire organisation – make it everybody’s business to come up new ideas, and to execute them. This is the approach that Proctor & Gamble and Zappos Shoes have taken, and with enough top-level support, this can be a very successful way to manage innovation.

    My friend’s firm didn’t do either of these – they ended up with a solution that was neither fish nor fowl. It was stuck in the middle, and the Innovation Champions were left with all of the responsibility for making innovation happen, but no real resources to do so.

    The second problem is that the corporate-level Innovation Champion saw innovation as primarily the act of generating new ideas. If you read this blog with any kind of regularity, you’ll know how strongly we emphasize the idea that innovation is a process, and that in addition to generating ideas, organisations need to be good at selecting and executing new ideas, and at getting them to diffuse. You must be good at all three steps to succeed at innovation over an extended period of time.

    I sometimes think that I spend too much time making this point, and yet, the concept that innovation is only about ideas is distressingly widespread. Scott Berkun recently addressed this issue as well, in a Q&A session supporting the launch of the paperback version of his excellent book The Myths of Innovation:

    Naomi Maloney: Q. Aren’t we really talking about IDEAS?
    Sure. But that’s just more vocabulary. What is an idea? When you’re dead, is an idea you had in your mind more important than an idea manifested somehow in the world?
    You can spend weeks debating which vocabulary is best for thinking about creativity – it is fun to a point. But then you realize you haven’t done any real work towards solving any real problem. I’m happy to yield to other people’s vocabulary if it gets everyone to actually make or design a prototype for something sooner. Most people have an idea for a book / movie / company / product / thing, but never manifest in the world in any way. The hard part is rarely the idea. Or what vocabulary they’re using. The problem is asses in chairs, or at whiteboards, or in code, or in a lab, actually making something.

    This is consistent with my experience and observations as well – the hard part is not coming up with the ideas, the hard part is making them happen.

    This is why I make an effort to get this message across – because if organisations don’t understand these two points, they will not be able to manage innovation effectively. If they fail to do this, then they are at risk of falling behind their competitors, and they are also more likely to lose their most creative and innovative people.
    If they have a dominant position in a completely stable market, they can maybe afford these outcomes. In any other case, though, it’s bad to lose people like this – and eventually it will lead to bad outcomes.

    (By the way, all of the Berkun Q&A post is worth reading – in particular check out the diagram showing the evolution of copyright protection.)

  • Thoughts on Change, Collaboration and Connections

    Here’s an exercise in connecting up ideas based on a few innovation-related quotes that have caught my attention over the past few days:

    If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.

    That’s Umberto Eco, via Stowe Boyd. This reminded me of a point made in Switch by Chip and Dan Heath – they argue that the idea that people naturally resist change is untrue. After all, nearly all of us actively make choices that result in massive change – we get married, have kids, or move to new cities (or countries!). These are all changes that turn our lives upside down – yet we don’t just embrace these changes, we often seek them out.

    Usually, people resist change if they can’t see a good outcome coming from it. Within firms, change is an idea diffusion problem more than anything. As Scott Berkun says in his new column for the Huffington Post:

    Having great ideas for things in our competitive modern age demands as much sophistication in marketing and promotion as it does for the skills of invention alone.

    Next:

    How many designers have been asked to make a “GTA killer”, or a “Guitar Hero killer”, or a “WoW killer”? I personally have heard numerous designers and producers working on unreleased MMO projects describe their game in these terms: “It’s like WoW, but…” I just shake my head when I hear this, because the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is… well, the WoW team. They’ve got their thing, and they’re good at it. Let’s all carve out our own thing, and be the best at it. Truly great games are made by passionate teams who are on fire with the notion of changing the industry. If you are aiming at a competitor rather than aiming to make something fresh and innovative, you’ve lost.

    That’s from Jeff Strain, via the 37Signals blog. This reminded me of the latest from Hugh MacLeod’s daily newsletter:

    The lesson from both is fairly simple – if you are trying to beat a well-established competitor at their own game, you will lose. It’s not enough even to be significantly better than they are. When they are deeply embedded within the economic network, you have to find a new business model, and a new way to win.

    Finally, the Financial Times review (requires a sign-up to read) of the Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson discusses a different aspect of this network:

    To me, the more interesting point is that many more inventions for which private enterprise takes the credit were devised by networks rather than individuals – among them plastic, the typewriter and the light-bulb. It suggests that co-operation is highly valuable for companies as well as individuals.

    The point is already influencing some enterprises – drugs companies are relying more on research done by a network of external providers, and Procter & Gamble has tried to open its research and development efforts. The question that Johnson fairly raises is whether they need to go further in unlocking patent and copyright protections to unleash inventiveness.

    That’s the good side of the network economy: connections make us more inventive. The bad side is that connections can make it harder to get a good new idea to spread – you have to break connections to existing ideas before you can connect people up with yours.

    But doing that is a critical part of changing things. And as Umberto Eco says, if we’re not encountering change, life isn’t very interesting.

  • The Danger of Focus Groups

    Tom Fishburne makes brilliant cartoons about marketing and innovation, and the one in today’s blog post really rang true for me:

    You should read Tom’s post, because he raises some important points about the problems with focus groups. I recently talked about some of my frustrating experiences with focus group research as well.

    The danger of focus groups is that they make us feel like we’re getting close to our customers, which is good, right? The problem comes when we ask focus groups questions which they are not really equipped to answer. If you are trying to figure out which advertising approach to use, focus groups are great for getting comparative feedback on how people react to different ideas. If you want to get a handle on what people are thinking about a particular topic right now, focus groups are excellent.

    But they are not very good for helping us invent the future.

    In Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out, Douglas Rushkoff has several case studies that illustrate firms losing track of what they’re good at, including discussions of The Gap and Levi’s. Here’s what he says about The Gap:

    The Gap lost its way by outsourcing design and manufacturing while holding steadfastly to a seasonal inventory schedule, and by utilizing focus groups instead of real-time store sales as its chief form of consumer feedback. The relative success of H&M and Zara stems from their ability to embrace the business they are in, and respond passionately to the challenge of developing the systems for ordering, inventory monitoring, and distribution that turned their shelves into a recognized and cherished form of fashion media.

    If the challenge is to get close to the customer, then this shows one way to do so that might be better than focus groups – gathering in-depth data on what they are actually doing. Zara has been highly innovative in the methods they use to track stock – this gives them in-depth real-time data on what their customers want. So they are getting close to customers with data rather than through focus groups (for more on Zara’s inventory management, this is a good case study – Zara Case pdf).

    Another approach is to go deep with observation instead of data. This can be done with an anthropological approach – one that Intel has been using successfully for the past few years. Intel anthropologist Genevieve Bell describes how this deep study of peoples’ habits has enabled Intel to create new products in Asia:

    For companies like Intel – as well as organizations like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Johnson & Johnson, Ford Motor Company, Sears Robuck, and Harrah’s Casinos that also employ anthropologists – one of the challenges is that the market that consumes the technology has shifted away from being people just like us to people very unlike us. As your market shifts from the familiar to the unfamiliar, and you move past the assumption that they want to be just like you, one of the challenges becomes finding the right tools to figure out what it is that those people want.

    “It becomes a really big challenge of how do you get a handle on those things,” says Bell. “Ethnography in particular – anthropologists, sociologist, psychologists – we all have a set of skills and expertise that allows us to get a those kinds of things. One of the virtues of what anthropology does when it does it well is to question the way the world works…and de-center people’s notions of fixed and human truths, and say, ‘no, those are actually just local cultural practice.’” In other words, anthropologists try and get companies to question their assumptions and what they take for granted, both about themselves, and, more importantly, their customers. “For me, a lot of the things I got told in the field and a lot of the stories that people shared with me served that purpose of saying, ‘we have all these assumptions about what technology does, but really, those are cultural assumptions and not universal truths.’”

    You should read the entire interview, because it has some excellent insights into how this approach can work.

    The examples of Zara’s and Intel are almost diametrically opposed in how they gather their data. But both approaches go very deep in trying to gain a better understanding of customers. Consequently, both also require major resources, and commitment, to execute.

    That may point out the real problem with focus groups – on the surface they appear to get us closer to the customer, but in the end the knowledge that we gain is relatively superficial. To get genuinely close, we need to commit time and resources to learning about what they need, and how we can best provide it. It is this depth that will enable us to innovatively meet these needs.

  • Be Great at One Thing

    I’m reading Douglas Rushkoff’s book on innovation called Get Back in the Box: Innovation from the Inside Out. It has some intriguing ideas. Here is how he outlines the basic premise of the book:

    Just last year, I got a phone call from the CEO of a home electronics chain, asking if I could devise a new communications strategy for him. He had read one of my books on Internet culture and was wondering if I could help him make use of some of this ‘below the line’ advertising he’d been hearing so much about lately. He wanted his marketing to be ‘less Saatchi and Saatchi and more craigslist.’ By this he meant he wanted to rely less on the expensive, high-concept traditional television advertising created by agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi, and somehow do his communications through bottom-up online communities, like the one that had developed around the craigslist online bulletin board.

    As I reviewed the company’s dossier, product line, and customer experience reviews, I realized this CEO had a much bigger problem than his ads. The chain had lost its way. It had alienated its core customer base by abandoning the electronics business and becoming more of an appliance store. It had pushed design and manufacturing offshore, leaving headquarters without talent who really understood electronics. As a result, the quality of store-brand products had deteriorated, leading customers to buy other brands at thinner margins. Finally, corporate HQ had alienated its store managers through infantilizing incentives schemes, and irritated its employees with oppressive ‘loss prevention’ (antitheft) policies. Yet this CEO really thought a shift in marketing would change his whole business.

    That’s when it hit me: What this fellow needed was not to hire companies who could market like craigslist but to be more like craigslist, himself. That is, simply understand what specific product or service he’s really offering, and then do it as well and expertly as possible. That’s not what he wanted to hear. No, he wanted a new marketing campaign to define his business for him, from the outside in.

    Rushkoff argues that firms can become more meaningfully innovative by gaining this deep understanding of what they do well, and getting better at that. This resonates quite a bit with the key theme in Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd by Youngme Moon. That book included this outstanding graphic:

    In this figure, the five bars show how a product or service performs against an industry average (the dotted line) in different ways. The figure on the left shows how we naturally tend to respond to stats like this – we work on improving the area where we are performing most poorly. This leaves us with average scores across all five categories.

    Moon and Rushkoff are both arguing that a better response would be to do what the is shown on the right side of the figure – ignore the weak area and improve the areas where we are already out ahead of the crowd. Find the areas in which we stand out, and build on those. This is the way to create something that is genuinely different.

    One of the points that Rushkoff consistently makes in the book is that by focusing on this core area, firms will actually become more innovative. His argument is that the deep understanding that you gain by doing so will open up creative new ideas. I think that another factor here is that building a focus on your core point of difference introduces constraints, which also lead to greater creativity.

    This is a pretty compelling argument. Instead of chasing trends, develop expertise that is impossible to duplicate. Instead of making trivial innovations driven by a broad but shallow set of skills, develop genuinely novel innovations driven by deep knowledge. Instead of being average at everything, be great at one thing.

  • Use Culture to Help Select Ideas

    Grant McCracken’s latest book Chief Culture Officer is a really interesting one. The basic premise is that for businesses to succeed, they have to be in touch with culture. In defining culture, McCracken doesn’t make much of a distinction between high-brow and low-brow – he’s more interested in the things that real people are actually interested in – which means that he talks about a pretty broad range of culture.

    Here is a talk that he gave outlining some of the main points in the book:

    There are at least two useful innovation lessons in this.

    The first concerns the value of taking an anthropological approach to learning how your customers think – the value is very high. This is one of the issues with design-driven innovation. A key idea in that approach is that you need to have a deep understanding of what your customers are trying to accomplish, and you can’t get this by asking them questions. You really need to undertake deep observation to get a handle on this. Chief Culture Officer includes quite a few case studies and hints about how to do this successfully. If you are interested in using design thinking to improve innovation, this is a useful book.

    The second useful innovation idea is that culture can be an important screen in helping you select ideas. Here is a quote from the book:

    The secret of success is not “bigger risks.” It is to harvest error, to take new risks more strategically. The motto of tech guru Esther Dyson captures the prevailing managerial wisdom nicely: “Always make new mistakes.” Taking risks because they are risks is an abdication of managerial responsibility.

    Management can’t be Darwinian. It’s not a random evolutionary walk, searching for good options by exploring all bad ones. The point of management is choice. And the point of a Chief Culture Officer is to factor culture into choice.

    I don’t fully agree that management can’t be Darwinian. I think that there is an unavoidable random element in discovering what works and what doesn’t. Nevertheless, the idea that management is about choice is correct. McCracken’s main point is that gaining a deep understanding of culture can improve the choices you make when you select which innovations to pursue.

    I guess if I’m going to take all this seriously, I’m going to have to start watching a lot more television. Or hire an RA to do it and let them be my Chief Culture Officer…

  • Execution is Everything

    Several reviews of The Social Network hit on an critical innovation point – that the value in a great idea is not in having it, but rather in executing it. The topic comes up because apparently the movie deals a fair bit with the lawsuits brought against Mark Zuckerberg once Facebook became successful. Here is how Jeff Jarvis refers to the lawsuit brought by the Winklevoss twins, which alleged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them:

    It’s just business. And as for the Winklevii, they didn’t invent crap. Ideas, especially obvious ones, are worthless; every entrepreneur and geek knows that execution is everything. Zuckerberg’s fellow Harvard drop-out Bill Gates didn’t invent crap, either, but he did execute. That’s business.

    In his discussion of the movie, Lawrence Lessig makes the same point more strongly (both posts are worth reading in full too, as they discuss important issues raised by the film):

    The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

    Why does Lessig think this is absurd? Because, like Jarvis, he believes that innovation is all about idea execution, not idea generation. Here is how he describes it:

    In 2004, a Harvard undergraduate got an idea (yes, that is ambiguous) for a new kind of social network. Here’s the important point: He built it. He had a bunch of extremely clever clues for opening up a social space that every kid (anyone younger than I am) would love. He architected that social space around the social life of the kids he knew. And he worked ferociously hard to make sure the system was stable and functioning at all times. The undergraduate then spread it to other schools, then other communities, and now to anyone.

    There’s not really much to add (especially since we’ve dealt with this topic a number of times already!). In innovation, execution really is everything.

    For some ideas on how to act on this idea, The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble is a good place to start. I’ll talk more about this book soon, but for now, here is Govindarajan making the same point as Jarvis and Lessig – execution is everything!

  • Answer One Question to be a Better Manager

    I learned a lot in my first job as a manager. In part because it wasn’t a traditional business, nor a normal management position. My first real job as a manager was being Station Manager at my college radio station. It was an interesting situation. We had about 120 people that worked at the station. We were a commercial station (one of the few commercial college stations around), so we had advertising.

    The people that sold ads got some commissions, but every other person working there was a volunteer. Not only were they volunteers, but since they were all students at the time, they were volunteers that probably had more important things to be doing than working at the radio station – like studying.

    And yet, the station had to stay on the air. We needed DJs to play records, people to filter through all the music sent to us, people to put together newscasts and then deliver, people to do play-by-play for our university’s sports broadcasts, engineers to keep the transmitter working, producers to make ads, and promotions people to try to encourage listeners to give us some of their time.

    That’s a lot of jobs – especially for a pack of volunteers that all have other things on which they’re supposed to be spending their time.

    And there were crises. The day I was named Station Manager two of the most experienced people at the station wanted to quit because they weren’t happy with how the job allocations for the coming year had been handled. So I had to figure out how to keep them happy, without being able to force them to do anything, and without much in the way of compensation to offer them (other than appreciation).

    In the course of dealing with those problems, and with the other issues that got in the way of keeping the station on the air, I learned a lot about what motivates people, and what rewards them. Some of the things I learned are:

    • Passion trumps everything: passion is what kept the station running. It’s why I got involved with it in the first place. All of us were passionate about finding music and sharing it with people (or sharing the news, or sports). How can you keep a group of 120 volunteers going? Purpose.
    • You can’t use power: when everyone is a volunteer (with more important things that the should probably be doing!), you can’t force them to do anything. If they don’t like the situation, they’ll quit.
    • The number one job of managers is to remove obstacles: when you have neither carrots nor sticks to fall back on for motivation, you develop a different set of management skills. Finding the things that motivate people is one of them. The big one though is figuring out how to clear out the obstacles that prevent people from getting things done. A good manager is not a director, but rather a supporter.

    Most of you aren’t managing all-volunteer organisations, so you may ask: so what? Here’s the thing that I realised though – the more I managed in “real” businesses, the more I realised that all of the lessons I learned at the radio station still held true. Carrots and sticks don’t work very well anymore (see the talk by Dan Pink). Here’s how Douglas Rushkoff puts it in Get Back in the Box:

    These top-down, regimented forms of group cohesion could not cope with the complexity of real human beings interacting with one another. Our newfound ability to embrace more complex dynamics changes all this. Instead of trying to get everyon to conform to a simple set of commands, a great manager, organizer, or leader strives to create an environment or provide the tools through which people naturally cooperate.

    So answer this question then act on it and you’ll be a better manager:

    What would I do differently if everyone reporting to me was a volunteer?

  • Chance Favours the Connected Mind

    Steven Johnson is a fantastic author, and his next book is about innovation. It is called Where Good Ideas Come From, and it comes out next month. It is the result of a few years of study, where he has investigated creative, innovative environments. He explains the key points from the book in this TED talk:

    There are a few key points that are important for people trying to encourage innovation within organisations:

    • Ideas are networks: Johnson maintains that innovative ideas at their most basic level are the result of new, novel connections within the mind. Just as important is the environment in which people are working. Those that regularly come into contact with people having diverse interests and viewpoints are more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Innovation = Connections – one of the key themes that we repeatedly come back to here.
    • If we want to encourage innovation, we need to design workspaces to support it: this conclusion follows directly from the first point. If good ideas depend on interactions between people, we need to take a network view when we design the spaces in which we’ll work. How can we regularly interact with those that are working on different problems? How can we encourage diverse viewpoints? The physical space has a significant impact on these issues, and we need to take this into account.
    • Good ideas are more likely to result from slow hunches: one of the points that Johnson makes is that even when an idea seems to come to us in a flash of inspiration, it usually actually has a longer history behind it. He uses the example of Darwin, who in his autobiography says that the idea for natural selection came to him in a flash one day while he was reading Malthus. However, recent research based on his notebooks shows that the theory had been developing for months prior to that.

    Johnson closes the talk with a great story – he tells how GPS developed from the work of two guys that were initially just curious about whether or not they could track the signals from Sputnik. They figured that out. Then they figured out how to use the doppler effect to figure out where Sputnik was. And through a series of similar small steps, we ended up with GPS.

    The GPS story demonstrates how ideas generate interactively, and how they can have wildly unexpected outcomes once you execute them. It is a great innovation story – and it shows how chance favours the connected mind.

    Note: Here’s another video that has been made to promote the book. It is shorter than the TED video, and uses a completely different set of examples. Both are worth watching. I’m looking forward to the book!

  • Where You Start Determines Where You Finish

    What’s the best way to win with our new ideas? One avenue to follow is to try to make sure that these ideas don’t just improve on what’s currently out there, but instead they carve out a new space for themselves. But how?

    The Design of Business by Roger Martin has some suggestions. It’s a very good book, and I’ll be talking about it some more over the next few days. If you want to read a good review/summary of the book, Anders Sundelin has done a great job with that.

    Here’s a quote that jumped out at me – it’s from Mike Lazaridis, one of the founders of Research in Motion, the company that makes Blackberrys:

    In a business, no matter how good the process is, no matter how much you’ve got it down pat, no matter how much money you’re making, how efficient, you have to always go back and say ‘Is there something fundamentally wrong with the way we’re seeing the market? Are we dealing with incomplete information?’ Because that’s what’s going to get you: it’s not necessarily that some young whippersnapper’s going to come up with some better idea than you. They’re going to start from a different premise and they’re going to come to a different conclusion that makes you irrelevant.

    The part with the added emphasis is the key point. Once an organisation has established a strong position, they are rarely displaced by someone that figures out how to do what they’re doing in a better way. That’s how we end up with technologies, products and systems that dominate markets even though their performance is only adequate, not great.

    The threat comes from someone figuring out a new way to ask the questions about what people need. It’s starting from a different premise that gets you to a novel answer.

    How do we find these different premises? That’s the key question.

    Martin suggests that design thinking is the best way to do this (as does Roberto Verganti in Design-Driven Innovation). He has a list of suggestions for doing this. These include:

    • Seek out people with extreme views, and reframe these in a way that allows you to use them to fuel a creative approach to problem solving. This is similar to the idea from The Power of Pull, which suggests that novel ideas always come from the edges, not the centre.
    • Learn to think both analytically and intuitively. One of the key points in the book is that design thinking is a combination of analytical, engineering type thinking, and the more intuitive/creative approach. We can’t prove in advance that our ideas will work, which makes a pure analytical approach difficult. At the same time, our ideas have to be grounded in some kind of business reality, which makes pure intuition similarly problematic. That’s we need to balance the two.
    • Understand unfamiliar concepts by using analogy. As I’ve said before, using analogies is one of the best techniques around for coping with uncertainty. If you can find an analogy that is different from the one that everyone else in your market is using, you’ve got a chance at coming up with a novel approach.

    Start line -2010 Iditarod

    All three of these techniques help you find a way to start by asking new questions. We need to do this because it is only by asking new questions that we come up with novel answers.

    If we are starting from the same assumptions that everyone else is using, then we are in a race. That’s fine if you have some kind of head start, or if you have enough resources to ensure that you stay in front. However, if you don’t have either of these, you need to find a way to run a different race.

    And the best way to do that is to start by answering a different question.

    (Photo from flickr/AbiznessDigital under a creative commons license)

  • Go That Way, Really Fast

    Today I ran across a thought provoking post by Jeff Atwood with the same title as this one via Fred Wilson’s blog. In it, he explains how his firm’s entire strategy is summed up by this clip from Better Off Dead:

    If for some reason you can’t see the video (or if your attention span is shorter than 27 seconds), here is the quick summary: John Cusack’s character can’t figure out how to ski down the intimidating slope, and Curtis Armstrong’s character tells him:

    Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way … turn.

    Atwood uses the clip as an analogy to make the point that you don’t have to release a perfect product first thing, you just need to improve faster than anyone else. In other words, you can win through out-experimenting and out-iterating your competition. His examples are Chrome and Android from Google. Chrome put out 6 versions in the time it took Microsoft to get from Internet Explorer 7 to IE8. In the course of those iterations, Chrome has gone from an adequate browser to a pretty excellent one. Same with Android.

    This reminded me of something that Chris Guillebeau wrote this week when his book The Art of Non-Conformity was released:

    I really don’t have a strategy besides what anyone can see on the site.
    But yes, friends, there is indeed a method to the magic. The method is called: Dream very big. Decide to do big things and then set them in motion.
    My strategic plan is: say yes to everything.
    The tactic is: get up early and stay up late.
    Whoa, so strategic! I know, I know… I’m really giving away the secrets to the store.
    The point is that you don’t have to figure everything out before you get started. Dreaming comes first; details come later.

    The critical point for innovators is this: when we have a great idea, we need to execute it. It’s great to have a strategy laid out in advance, but the strategy will inevitably change once we start figuring out exactly how to make the idea work. So instead of planning everything out before we start, you can make a pretty strong argument for getting started, and then iterating.

    In other words, Go that way, really fast. If something gets in your way … turn.

  • Our Job is to Invent the Future

    If we are trying to innovate, what is our actual job?

    According to Mark Earls in Welcome to the Creative Age, our job is to invent the future.

    Seems reasonable to me. Here is how he builds that argument:

    …opinions are what you get back from customers once you’ve done something, so they are largely irrelevant to you. They aren’t the precondition for customers doing something or a good guide to what you should do. At all.

    So don’t waste your time with ask/answer research and opinions. Throw away the reassurance of quoting the consumer or stats garnered from opinion polls. Watch your customers, observe them, live with them, but don’t expect them to tell you much themselves. Because they can’t.

    Instead, recognize:

    • It is your job to invent the future – you are the inventors.
    • It is not the customer’s job – they are not good at the future but they might buy your invention if you get it right (or not).

    LeChatNoir and His Contraption (version Two Full Stop Ought)

    I’m in the process of working through some focus group results for a consulting client. Against my advice, they insisted on doing this work to try to figure out the best use for a new piece of technology. So this section from Earls rings particularly true for me at the moment.

    I keep trying to tell them that it is up to them to invent the future – customers may well play a co-creative role in the process, but first my client has to come up with an idea, a proposal to put in front of their customers. It’s their job.

    Since they’re not listening to me, I hope that you will.

    If we’re trying to innovate, it’s our job to invent the future. As simple as that. And as frustratingly, vexingly hard as that too. In any case, it’s our job. Time to get started.

    (photo from flickr/redteam under a Creative Commons License (discovered after searching for “contraption”!))