Tag: Austin Kleon

The Innovator’s Hypothesis: Michael Schrage Tells Us How to Take the First Step
Imagine that your organisation currently doesn’t innovate at all, but you’d like to do more (this might not be much of a stretch for some of you). What’s the best first step?

Many organisations start with strategy. After all, we can’t innovate without a plan, right? Others will jump straight into forming an innovation team and telling them to start innovating. Some will take a light touch, and just have the CEO to tell everyone to innovate more because it’s really important.

None of the these are the best first step. None of these create action.

Experiments create action – start there.

The thing is, this is harder than it sounds. Here is a quote from Austin Kleon from his book Show Your Work:

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

I highlighted the key point – the real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

I’ve talked about this before. The problem with innovation strategies, and teams, and CEO exhortations is that they are mainly designed to take you along the innovation spectrum – they help with that. But they don’t get you across that gap from doing nothing and doing something.

Experiments will.

Though he doesn’t frame it this way, that is one of the key points that Michael Schrage makes in his new book The Innovator’s Hypothesis: How Cheap Experiments are Worth More Than Good Ideas. The book does two main jobs: it makes the case for experimenting as your core innovation skill, and it outlines the 5x5x5 technique for effectively running experiments.

First, the gospel of innovation. Schrage makes the case that most organisations overvalue great ideas. Here is an example of what happens as a consequence:

But I had to ask: Why was his group so sure that “big bang” strategic approaches were best? Both on paper and Excel, my experiments offered far greater bang for the buck – and faster – than the grand plans did. Why did a simple, cheap experiment provoke such visceral negative reactions? What hot button did it push?

His response said it all. “We think we know what he problem is,” he said. “We want a plan that’s big enough to solve it without putting our revenues at risk. You didn’t help us with that.”

The company he was working with there? Blockbuster.

Technology is one of the critical drivers of the growth in experimentation. Here is what Schrage said in an earlier piece with Eric Brynholfsen:

Technology is transforming innovation at its core, allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds and prices that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly.

The result? Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.

And that makes innovation, the lifeblood of growth, more efficient and cheaper. Companies are able to get a much better idea of how their customers behave and what they want. This gives new offerings and marketing efforts a better shot at success.

His method for doing this is pretty cool:

The 5x5x5 design is simple and straightforward. A minimum of 5 teams of 5 people each are given no more than 5 days to come up with a portfolio of 5 “business experiments” that should take no longer than 5 weeks to run and cost no more than 5,000 euros to conduct. Each experiment should have a business case attached that explains how running that experiments give tremendous insight into a possible savings of 5 million euros or a 5-million-euro growth opportunity for the firm.

This will work. Schrage has plenty of examples – but it also makes intuitive sense. I love this approach for a few reasons:
- The best way to become innovative is to innovate more. Developing an innovation strategy doesn’t actually achieve this, but running a bunch of experiments sure will. Put another way –
- Experiments will help you bridge the gap between doing nothing and doing something. By definition, running experiments require you to do something. None of the other popular first innovation steps do. They are designed to set up you to innovate. Experiments get you innovating – big difference.
- It helps reduce perfectionism. This is a big enemy of innovation. If we have to have our ideas perfectly formed before we can execute them, then nothing will ever happen. The emphasis on learning that is inherent in this approach is a great tool for working around this problem.
- It shifts us from looking at expected returns to considering affordable losses. The whole point of experiments is that they are frugal – especially compared to the processes that we often use to try to help implement innovation.
If you think you know what the problem is, like Blockbuster, ~~you’re probably wrong, like Blockbuster~~ this approach will be challenging to implement. But if you’re willing to try things so that you learn, then this approach is great.

It might even make it unnecessary to develop a formal innovation strategy. But one thing that you do need is a clear sense of purpose. That helps set the challenge that will be the organising principle for the experiments.

Here is one last quote from the book to explain why you should experiment with experiments:

The rhetorical and substantive importance of a provocative hypothesis to real-world innovators is difficult to overstate. The Googles, Amazons, Apples, Netflixes, and Capital Ones – not to mention world-class research universities – fluently hypothesize and culturally commit to experimentation in ways utterly alien to most commercial enterprises. These firms don’t insist on performing lots of interesting experiments because they’re rich; they’re rich because they insist on performing lots of interesting experiments.
12 October 2014
You Should Start a Blog Right Now
You should start a blog.

Here’s why:
1. Writing helps you figure out what you think. Even if no one else in the world reads your blog, there’s huge value in writing. Consider this from Nilofer Merchant:
  
  I write to hear an idea unfold. I need to write with space because what I think will come out and what comes out are not the same and it’s as if the story is unraveling itself letter by letter, sentence by sentence.
  
  It’s the same for me. It’s probably the same for you too.
2. Writing helps others learn. Blogs were invented to teach. This week Dave Winer called for a return to blogging – saying:
  
  The mission of blogging is to empower all of us to go directly to each other with our expertise. So if you know something as well as anyone else, or you learn something or know something that should be shared, then you should share it on your blog.
3. Blogging helps you turn your flow of ideas into a stock of content. Stock is important – it is findable, and searchable. Austin Kleon says:
  
  My favorite way to think about how I operate online is the “stock and flow” metaphor that writer Robin Sloan has borrowed from economics: your “flow” is the steady stream of stuff: the tweets, the posts, etc.; the “stock” is the more permanent stuff that people find over time, like, say, books or products. What I like to do is constantly turn my flow into stock: a tweet will become a blog post which will become a blog tag which becomes a book chapter.
4. Blogging is fun! Lots of fun.
5. You create opportunities. I’ve met a ton of cool people through my blog. I’ve been able to collaborate with with great people like Ralph Ohr and Nilofer Merchant. Ralph’s blog helped him get a new job. If you share ideas that help people, it opens doors.
6. A blog is your own piece of real estate on the internet. John Battelle makes a strong argument that you need to be building permanent content, and that you need to own the real estate that you build on:
  
  As publishers – and I include all marketing brands in this category – the question then becomes: “What terrain do we claim as ours?”
  
  Deciding where to lay down roots as a publisher is an existential choice. Continuing the physical metaphor a bit further, it’s the equivalent of deciding what land to buy (or lease). If your intention is to build something permanent and lasting on that land, it’s generally a good idea to *own* the soil beneath your feet.
7. Finally, blogging helps you build your skills. Remember, the big gap is the one between doing nothing and doing something, not the one between lousy work and great work. Why am I willing to consistently put some of the world’s worst drawings on my blog? In part, because they’re still better than what we get from everyone that says “but I can’t draw” and then doesn’t. Because it helps me build my skills. And because, very slowly, I’m getting better. That is how we build a craft. You might feel that you don’t write well, but the best way to get better is to write. Write all the time.
That’s the why. What about the how?

Sacha Chua covers that in her No Excuses Guide to Blogging. You should download it and read it. She looks at these issues:

Blogging is important. It puts a stake in the ground. It helps you learn. And it helps you connect.

I’d love to hear what you’ve got to say.

Why not start now?
5 March 2014
Writers Write, and Innovators Innovate
How big does a new idea have to be to qualify as an innovation?

I read another blog post this morning that tried to tell us that only really big ideas count as innovations. It started something like this:

Innovation is a buzzword now – it’s used so much that it’s lost meaning. Every firm in the world claims to be innovative. But are they really? Does a new flavour of gum really count as innovation? Of course not. Here are five easy steps that will help you do real innovation – big innovation.

The post is, like the many others on this theme, nonsense.

Look – I’ve argued before that we need to be aiming higher, and this is still true. BUT, that doesn’t mean that only big ideas can be innovative.

Austin Kleon has a great way to think about this in his excellent new book Show Your Work. He says:

Amateurs are not afraid to make mistakes or look ridiculous in public. They’re in love, so they don’t hesitate to do work that others think of as silly or just plain stupid. “The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act,” writes Clay Shirky in his book Cognitive Surplus. “On the spectrum of creative work, the difference between the mediocre and the good is vast. Mediocrity is, however, still on the spectrum; you can move from mediocre to good in increments. The real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.” Amateurs know that contributing something is better than contributing nothing.

I highlighted the key point – the real gap is between doing nothing and doing something.

In other words, we think that the gap is here:

In this view, the opposite of awesome work is terrible work. But it’s not – the opposite of awesome work is no work at all:

That’s why so many people write about how to get work started – because that is actually the big hurdle that we face. Kleon addresses this some in Show Your Work, and it as a big theme in the books from The Domino Project, including Do The Work by Steven Pressfield and Poke the Box by Seth Godin, and in The Flinch by Julien Smith (still available for free on amazon). That’s why Anne Lamont says that the biggest step in writing is getting down a, well, [lousy] first draft.

It’s the same with innovation. The big gap isn’t between people and firms doing incremental innovations and those doing big disruptive ones. The big gap is between those that aren’t innovating at all in any form, and those that are.

Here is why the “only big ideas are innovative” meme is dangerous:
- You need to be on the innovation spectrum. If I’m working with a firm trying to improve their innovation outcomes, it is much easier to have an impact with the firms that are at least doing something. They’re on the innovation spectrum. The firms that are tough are the ones that aren’t doing any innovating at all. The biggest gap is between doing nothing and doing something.
- You can’t tell which ideas are big in advance. Big innovations usually start small. If we start screening for size too early, we’ll knock out too many ideas that could actually be big. That’s why we need to build our skills in experimenting – this is how we figure out which small bets are promising.
- It’s too easy to be critical if you’re in the “doing nothing” group. The biggest issue is that the critics are almost always in the “doing nothing” group. The people that have already done it know how hard it is, so on average they tend to be more generous with people that are putting in the work. The people that tend to be the hardest on incremental innovators are the people that have never done anything innovative themselves.
Here’s the deal:

Writers write.

Painters paint.

Photographers shoot.

And innovators innovate – even if it’s just small stuff.

Remember that from little things, big things grow. Start trying new stuff now.
1 March 2014
Don’t Set Goals, Make New Habits Instead
How I Became Large

“Double cheeseburger, no pickles, no ketchup, in a value meal, upsized, with a pepsi.”

That was my lunch order nearly every day at Burger King after we moved to New Zealand. The “no pickles, no ketchup” part was interesting – that was the easiest way to order a burger with only mustard. The BK point-of-sales system didn’t have a key for “only mustard” – instead, it had keys for what to exclude – “no pickles” and “no ketchup.”

One time I asked for a double cheeseburger with mustard only, and the response was “<pause> So… no burger, no bun?” That’s when I figured out I had to learn how to speak Burger King.

Anyway, the point is, that after 3.5 years of this, I had put on 50 pounds or so. Well, since I was in New Zealand, I had put on 23 kg or so.

I had gotten into a bad habit.

How I Became Less Large

When we moved to Australia, I got a new job, but that terrible lunch habit persisted.

Eventually, I said enough is enough. My goal for several years had been to lose weight, but nothing happened until I changed my habits. I changed what I ate. Lunches were now salads, I cut out soft drinks, more exercise and so on – there aren’t really any secrets to this. Over the course of a year, I dropped about 30 kg, and I’ve kept most of that off for ten years now.

Now I have better habits.

As Neil Perkin succinctly puts it: systems trump goals.

What New Habit Will You Build?

While the human body is a complex system, weight it still a relatively straightforward input-output process. So we can address it through habits. Charles Duhigg wrote a great book on how to break bad habits and build better ones – The Power of Habit. Here is his flow chart for building habits (click on the image to see it full-size):

The problem with goals is that most of them are too big, and they take a long time, and that requires work. That’s also what makes them worthwhile! But on a day-to-day basis, you need to figure out how to build the habits that will eventually get you to your goals.

If your goal is to lose weight, you need to change your eating (input) and exercise (output) habits.

If your goal is to write a book, you need to change your writing habits.

Austin Kleon wrote a great post yesterday on breaking goals down into habits. He says to do something small, every day:

Figure out what your little daily chunk of work is, and every day, no matter what, make sure it gets done.

Don’t say you don’t have enough time. We’re all busy, but we all get 24 hours a day. People often ask me, “How do you find the time for the work?” And I answer, “I look for it.” You find time the same place you find spare change: in the nooks and crannies. You find it in the cracks between the big stuff—your commute, your lunch break, the few hours after your kids go to bed. You might have to miss an episode of your favorite TV show, you might have to miss an hour of sleep, but you can find the time to work if you look for it.

What I usually recommend: get up early. Get up early and work for a couple hours on the thing you really care about. When you’re done, go about your day…

Do the work every day. Fill the boxes on your calendar. Don’t break the chain.

This approach works pretty well for most of our personal goals. But what if our goal is to make our organisations more innovative?

That’s a bit trickier. The main reason is that innovation is a lot more complex. Complex systems are trickier because they require us to approach our goals indirectly. This excerpt from John Kay’s terrific book Obliquity outlines the issue:

If you want to go in one direction, the best route may involve going in the other. Paradoxical as it sounds, goals are more likely to be achieved when pursued indirectly. So the most profitable companies are not the most profit-oriented, and the happiest people are not those who make happiness their main aim. The name of this idea? Obliquity.

…

What is true of forests is equally true of businesses. The great corporations of the modern world were not built by people whose overriding interest was wealth, profit, or shareholder value. To paraphrase Mill: their focus was on business followed not as a means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something else, they found profit by the way.

This is how Hewlett Packard described it: “Profit is a cornerstone of what we do… but it has never been the point in and of itself. The point, in fact, is to win, and winning is judged in the eyes of the customer and by doing something you can be proud of.”

Obliquity is relevant whenever complex systems evolve in an uncertain environment, and whenever the effect of our actions depends on the ways in which others respond to them.

Innovation is another thing that we need to approach obliquely. So what habits should we build to help? Here are some ideas that I’ve run across in the past couple of days:
- Take care of yourself. Jason Cohen points out that we are happier and more productive when we get enough sleep, exercise, and take time to think.
- Practice divergent thinking. It’s a mistake to jump straight to solutions when we’re trying to innovate. First, we have to explore a broad range of ideas. Olaf Kowalik writes about how to use divergent thinking to do this – and this is a key innovation skill.
- Read widely. Jorge Barba makes an important point at the end of his post recommending some innovation books to read:
  
  One more thing: everything is connected in some way, so read about anything and everything. Not just books that have “innovation” in the title.
  
  Yes – definitely do that.
To innovate, you need the process, but you also need to muddle your way through a bit. So some of the habits you need to build are oblique – like getting enough sleep. Others are more direct, like blocking out time for thinking and allocating resources for building your ideas.

The main point is that things that are worth doing take effort over an extended period of time. You need to build habits that will ensure that you make that effort.

As we hit the new year, don’t set goals – start building new habits instead.

Related articles
- 7 Healthy Habits for Entrepreneurs
31 December 2013