Tag: Seth Godin

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
When Should We Adopt a New Idea?
Often, it’s easier to predict long-term change than it is to figure out what’s going to happen in the short-term. This makes it really hard to develop a sensible innovation strategy.

Kodak invented digital photography, and they knew full well that eventually this would become the dominant technology. In 1997, they predicted that this transition would happen – around 2017. They picked the long-term trend absolutely correctly – it’s the timing they messed up.

Looking backwards now, everyone thinks that the trends were obvious. Why couldn’t the get this right?

It’s not as easy as it looks – and getting this right is going to become increasingly important as the rate of technological disruption increases. Chunka Mui and Paul B. Carroll in their new book The New Killer Apps
outline six technologies that, in combination, will drive this change: mobile devices, social networks, cameras, sensors, cloud computing and emergent knowledge.

Here’s another example of how this might work – let’s take a look at the construction industry.

One of my collaborators likes to say that the last big innovation in construction was the invention of the brick, in Egypt a couple thousand years ago.

That exaggerates things a bit, but still, it’s not the most dynamic industry around.

And yet, things might be about to change.

A construction drone builds a wall

If you put together those six technologies, you can start to see some change coming. Cameras, sensors and mobile devices can let you build a wall with a construction drone.

Now, combine this with Building Information Modeling (BIM):

Building Information Modeling (BIM) is a digital representation of physical and functional characteristics of a facility. A BIM is a shared knowledge resource for information about a facility forming a reliable basis for decisions during its life-cycle; defined as existing from earliest conception to demolition.

BIM uses more of these technologies. When you store the files in the cloud, you can access the plans both on site and in the office. If you network the data internally, you can start to track learning from project to project, creating emergent knowledge.

Now, combine this with sensors – and we can start to track every piece of material, every piece of machinery and every person on a building site.

This is the future of building. But, when?

One of my students has put a lot of thought into this, and here is one of her experiences:

Two weeks ago, I was working with the lead asset management consultant from XXX, who is currently designing the asset management system for the Department of XXX. I broached the subject of BIM with him, and he had a surprisingly negative view. His view was that it was just an IT fad that held no value, and that asset management practitioners would just go back to using excel spread sheets to manage their processes.

This illustrates several important innovation issues:
- Fear is an important obstacle to innovation. How can you possibly think that people will be using spreadsheets to manage projects forever? Partly, it’s fear. Here is how Seth Godin describes it:
  
  … as Steven Pressfield describes it, the resistance. The resistance is the voice in the back of our head telling us to back off, be careful, go slow, compromise. The resistance is writer’s block and putting jitters and every project that ever shipped late because people couldn’t stay on the same page long enough to get something out the door.
  
  The resistance grows in strength as we get closer to shipping, as we get closer to an insight, as we get closer to the truth of what we really want. That’s because the lizard hates change and achievement and risk.
  
  The resistance is why the first stage or responding to disruption is ridicule. Fighting through this resistance is one of the keys to innovating.
- You can see the S-Curve in action. Why do ideas spread though an S-Curve:The time it takes to work through the period marked X always takes long than we expect it to. One of the reasons for this is that it takes some time to figure out how to build a business model around the idea.That’s what is happening with BIM right now. At the moment, it is at the flat part of the curve. BIM is expensive, so only top end customers will look for construction bids that use it. However, as it gets used more, costs will come down, and then projects run using BIM will become substantially less expensive than those using spreadsheets for planning. That’s when it will start to take off.
- BIM will win because of emergent knowledge. Platforms that build emergent knowledge have been winning for a while now. Google’s search algorithm gets smarter the more people use it. Nike Fuel gets better at helping you exercise as it compiles more data from its growing user base.This might help crack one of the biggest innovation problems in project-based firms: if we learn something in one project, how do we transfer that knowledge to other ones? With BIM, this learning will be recorded, and communicated. This is huge. It means that the firms using BIM will start to have much smarter internal networks. This will be part of what drives the costs down. Emergent knowledge will win again.
The tricky part if figuring out when the change will happen. You can get away with your spreadsheets for a few more years at least. But that won’t last forever.

It’s probably a good time for construction firms to be thinking about this.

And if even building construction has to be thinking about disruption today, it’s probably a good time for you to think about the impact that these technologies might have in your industry as well.
20 February 2014
New Markets Need New Tools

Do tools go extinct?

For a long time, all furniture was made with hand tools – saws, planes and hammers. At the time, that was all we had.

Over time, there has been a lot of innovation in woodworking tools. Now, instead of using a hand plane, if you’re doing average woodwork, you use an electric planer. It’s faster, and it’s usually more accurate. So if you’re doing average work, it’s much less expensive, and more convenient, to use the new tools. Most modern wood furniture is made with power tools.

But what about the old tools? Well, today, the people that use handplanes don’t use them to do average work – they use it to do fine woodworking. The old tools are still around, but they are put to a different use.

Kevin Kelly says that no tool ever goes extinct, which is probably true. He argues:

With very few exceptions, technologies don’t die. In this way they differ from biological species, which in the long-term inevitably do go extinct. Technologies are idea-based, and culture is their memory. They can be resurrected if forgotten, and can be recorded (by increasingly better means) so that they won’t be overlooked. Technologies are forever.

Even though cars put the horse and buggy out of business, you can still buy craftsman-level buggy whips. So two things happen – the old tools are used in new ways, or they persist in other locations. Kelly says:

A technique or artifact may be rare in the developed world but quite common in the developing world. For instance, Burma is full of ox-cart technology; basketry is ubiquitous in most of Africa; hand spinning still thriving in Bolivia. A technology may be enthusiastically embraced by a heritage-based minority in modern society, if only for traditional satisfaction. Consider the traditional ways of the Amish, or modern tribal communities. Often old technology is obsolete, that is, it is not very ubiquitous or second rate, but it still may be in small-time use, as many old-fashioned ways are.

The tool trap

There is a trap with tools. They work very well in a particular setting, but when the environment changes, if you keep trying to use the same tool in the same way, you can go out of business. Here is how Seth Godin describes it:

One study found that when confronted with a patient with back pain, surgeons prescribed surgery, physical therapists thought that therapy was indicated and yes, acupuncturists were sure needles were the answer. Across the entire universe of patients, the single largest indicator of treatment wasn’t symptoms or patient background, it was the background of the doctor.

When the market changes, you may be seeing all the new opportunities and problems the wrong way because of the solutions you’re used to. The reason so many organizations have trouble using social media is that they are using precisely the wrong hammer. And odds are, they will continue to do so until their organization fails. PR firms try to use the new tools to send press releases, because, you guessed it, that’s their hammer.

The best way to find the right tool for the job is to learn to be good at switching hammers.

I think that’s half right. The important point is that when we need a new tool, if we keep using our old one, we will fail. So one solution is to learn how to switch hammers. The other solution is to find a new way to use our existing tool.

Changing environments create innovation opportunities

As markets change, innovation opportunities are abundant.

Last week I wrote a bit about this in relation to higher education and the growth of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). You can see the tool problem at work here.

For years, the hammer for academics was the lecture. That was the way we delivered ideas to people. So in many MOOCs, people are trying to simply duplicate their classroom delivery online. They’re using the same tool in the new context. This approach will fail.

There are two possible responses. One is to build a skill with a new tool. The MOOCs that succeed over time will not look like a university lecture theatre that has just been transferred online – it will be something completely different. We don’t know what that tool will look like yet. In this option, we need to innovate the tool.

The other response is to get really good with the old tools, and turn it into a craft. As we do our annual collaboration with the Wharton Business School in their Global Consulting Practicum, it reminds me how powerful this can be. It is basically finding a new use for the old tool – here we are innovating the business model around the old tool.

However, if you follow this option, it means that the size of your potential market goes from really big, to pretty small. This can be hard for larger organisations to adapt to – they are built for size. That is why most universities are concentrating on MOOCs – because with those they can stay big.

And it’s not just education facing these choices. We’re seeing similar change in retailing, most media, and many other industries. The changing environment leads to innovation opportunities. You can innovate the tool that works in the new environment, or you can innovate the business model that supports the old tool. The one thing that you can’t do is try to keep thinking that the old solutions will work in exactly the same way in the new market.

17 January 2014
How to Succeed in a TL;DR Culture
TL;DR – when attention spans get shorter, we can either accommodate this by going short ourselves, or we can do the opposite and go deep.

Our attention spans may or may not be getting shorter – the evidence is pretty mixed at the moment. But one of the symptoms of shorter attention spans is the Too Long: Didn’t Read (TL;DR) idea – the meme that gets pulled out whenever someone is yammering on online.

There are two possible responses to people avoiding stuff that’s too long:
1. Go short. If everyone wants short, snappy ideas packaged up in easy to read formats (list posts!), then the way to reach everyone is to go short. If that’s where the masses are, that’s where you need to go.
2. Go deep. The other option, of course, is to do the opposite – go deep instead.
This thought was triggered while I was reading Seth Godin’s colossal book This Might Work/This Might Not Work, which was one of the rewards in his kickstarter campaign for The Icarus Deception.

He called it the behemoth before it had a name, and it’s a good example of going deep. It collects probably a couple thousand of his best blog posts, and it puts into one gigantic 800 page book – and you better make sure you bend your knees and keep your back straight when you try to lift it.

Of course, he’s also gone the other direction, and put a bunch of shorter eBooks through The Domino Project. His argument there is that the 250 page book is an artefact of the financial constraints of publishing physical books. Books have normally been about that long because it’s an economical number of pages to print, and it’s about what people expected for their money. But as we shift to digital, and pricing is back in play, neither of those constraints holds any more.

You get an advantage when you go to the extremes – short or deep. The behemoth points us to a third option too: go special. But average is pretty dangerous.

As readers, we face the same choice. We can give in to TL;DR, and skip the harder stuff. Or we can go deep too.

Godin tells this story about one of my favourite writers, David Foster Wallace:

A guy asked his friend, the writer David Foster Wallace,

“Say, Dave, how’d y’get t’be so dang smart?”

His answer:

“I did the reading.”

No one said the preparation part was fun, but yes, it’s important. I wonder why we believe we can skip it and still be so dang smart.

So maybe the opposite of TL;DR is I Did the Reading (IDTR).

The challenge with going short is that this is the world of the outlier – it’s a blockbuster business because you’re aiming for the masses. In news, this is where the Huffington Post has gone. The newspapers that have managed to stick around have been in niches, like The Financial Times, or they have made a point of going deep, like The Guardian.

The same thing is coming in higher education.

For a long time, if you were an academic, it was fine to be average – in fact, most of us were. But the same changes in technology that are wreaking havoc with newspapers, book publishers and record labels are changing the environment for education as well.

In this environment, average is really dangerous.

The Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) represent the advent of education as a blockbuster business. Now, instead of having 25 or 100 students in a class, we can have 1000s. That’s a big change. We’re still working out how MOOCs should be structured – just recording lectures combined with assessment lacking any depth at all is a lousy model, even though it’s currently the one receiving the most hype. This is the go short option.

Ultimately, the way forward has to be a system that is built for this technology, like the Connectivist courses put together by George Siemens and Stephen Downes. This is the go special option.

There are business model issues here as well – MOOCs don’t make much money – a feature for Siemens and Downes, who value access, and a bug for those that are trying to use them to get rich.

Eventually, this will get sorted, and MOOCs will be the blockbusters of education – they will fill the “Head” position in this graph from Godin:

What’s the go deep option? I think it’s probably going very high touch. This can be small team experiential learning, or small seminar/workshop classes, or something else that has a very low student/teacher ratio. And the teacher won’t teach – they’re more likely to be a coach/mentor/facilitator. This is region 2 in Godin’s figure – the niche. Region 3 is the long tail, the area where someone makes a little bit from lots of transactions across a wide range of products. I’m not sure what this would be for education.

The interesting thing here is that being an academic in charge of a MOOC and being an academic in charge of a high touch small class both require skills that the current “average” academic doesn’t have at all. The squeeze here will be on people that are just regurgitating material that has been put together by others. You’ll either need to generate new knowledge and be great at communicating it to live in the blockbuster section, or you’ll need to be good at the high touch work that goes into niches. Both require your own deep knowledge and great communication skills.

TL;DR is definitely a part of our culture now. I’m not sure that we need to give into it though by going short. If that’s what everyone is doing, then there are some real advantages to going deep. That’s a pretty good way to be remarkable.

And if you made it all the way to this line of the post, now you can say IDTR! At least, some of it…

Related articles
- Lol My Thesis is the TL;DR of college essays
- The Cobainification of David Foster Wallace
2 January 2014
This Might Not Work

The Most Important Phrase in Innovation

What’s the most important phrase in innovation?

You could make the case for “That’s interesting.” Lots of great ideas start with curiousity. If you want to become more innovative, increasing your awareness of what’s going on around you is a great way to start. And when you find interesting things, you can start to learn more about them.

Another candidate is “That really bugs me.” We know that a lot of innovation is irritation-based. When things don’t work right, we want to fix them. It’s an important innovation driver.

My vote for the Most Important Phrase in Innovation goes to “This might not work.” You can’t innovate without saying this. If there’s not a measurable chance that your idea won’t work, then it’s not new.

That’s the back of the bonus book that was part of Seth Godin’s kickstarter project last year (for an interesting discussion of that, see this from Dan Blank, and his follow-up interview with Godin). It referred to a few things – the idea of making a 1200 page book out of blog posts, and raising money to fund a book through kickstarter, and launching it without publisher or media support, etc.

Godin has been consistently running experiments over the past few years (like the kickstarter campaign, and The Domino Project), trying to figure out what the next business model for publishing might be. Here is a clip from his blog post today, talking about the blockbuster mentality in Hollywood:

But since they pay so much, they have no choice, they think, but to say, “This must work!” So they polish off the edges, follow the widely-known secret formula and create banality. No glory, it seems, with guts.

Every meeting is about avoiding coming anywhere near the sentence, “this might not work,” and instead giving ammunition to the groupthink belief that this must work.

And as soon as you do that, you’ve guaranteed it won’t.

If you think that it must work, you’ve guaranteed it won’t.

In other words, you can’t innovate without saying “This might not work.”

The Key to Innovation is Experimenting

Journalism is in turmoil right now – no one has any idea what the next business will look like. It seems like the the big publishers and news firms will only try out ideas they believe must work. And so, they don’t.

When faced with a high level of uncertainty like this, we must experiment. I saw a great example of this today in an inspiring talk by Mia Freedman. She talked about being named editor of Cosmopolitan Australia at the age of 24, and how she eventually left that position. After a brief foray into television, she started a blog – mamamia.com.au (you can hear or read the full story in this interview with Timbo Reid). Mamamia is now one of the most popular websites in Australia.

It all sounds pretty straightforward, right?

Not really. Freedman did a great job of then explaining all of the challenges she faced in building the site, the points where it might have did, and some of the doubts that she had as she went along. It became clear that all the way through, “this might not work” was very real.

If you think about, the idea of leaving the position of Editor of Cosmopolitan, Cleo and Dolly to start a blog would have sounded insane when Freedman did it. And yet, she that’s what she did. And now, she might be figuring out what the next business model for media looks like.

The Flipside to “This Might Not Work”

Why are we willing to try things when this might not work?

Because it might work.

The only way to change things is to try things that might not work. This, of course, does not guarantee that things will work out – your idea might be truly nuts, or impossible. But we have to aim high. The reward when we do is that this might work.

Innovation is challenging because to innovate we must seek out uncertainty. For most people, this isn’t comfortable – that’s why we don’t like “this might not work.” Nevertheless, if we want to do work that makes a difference, that’s where we need to be. To grow we have to try, stumble, and learn.

So give it a go. It might work.

7 November 2013
The Unknown Knowns of Innovation
The Most Common Innovation Mistake in the World

A while ago I was talking to a local CEO who wanted to make his organisation more innovative. As we talked, he got increasingly excited, and after 30 minutes he went out and called in as many as his senior leadership team as he could find. So we had 9 people crammed into his office talking about innovation.

After a bit of discussion, one of the managers hesitantly said “You know, we had an innovation program before.” And then everyone in the room got this strange look on their face.

I thought for a minute, and then said “Let me guess. You made a big internal announcement for your new program, and then you asked everyone in the organisation for their innovative ideas. You were flooded with submissions and everyone was excited. But then you didn’t have any way to choose the best ones, and no money or time to execute them, so nothing happened. Then everyone that put in their ideas got pissed off, and at the end of it, things were worse than when they started.”

It turns out that’s exactly what happened. How did I know this? It’s not that I had any inside information, or that I’m all that smart. It’s just that this is the most common innovation mistake that I run into.

The biggest mistake people make is confuse having ideas with innovation. They’re two different things – innovation is actually the process of idea management.

The Problem with Unknown Knowns

We’ve all heard about known unknowns, and unknown unknowns, and how it’s the things we don’t know we don’t know that cause trouble. This is true.

But there are also things that we know are true, that seem to be unknown because no one ever acts on them. Here’s an example I took this picture a couple of minutes ago at 10:39 am at the coffee shop here at the business school:

That’s the line of people that left their desks at exactly 10:30 to get their morning coffee. If you had left your desk at, say, 10:25 instead, the number of people in line was 0.

At some level, everyone knows this. But still, everyone still leaves their desk at 10:30, not 10:25. It’s an Unknown Known.

The Unknown Knowns of Innovation

There are some things about innovation that we know from many years of observation and research. Here are three of the most important ones that we know, but don’t act upon:
1. If you want different outcomes, you have to manage differently.
2. You build an innovation capability by changing your culture, which requires a lot of hard work.
3. You only see the results of this hard work over time.
If you think about the “innovation program” that failed, you can see that it didn’t take any of these three things into account.

There have been a bunch of great posts about this topic over the past couple of days. I recommend that you read all of them. Here are some highlights:

Jorge Barba speaks about how hard it is to become innovative through copying:

To innovate you must overcome the need for step-by-step recipes.

Yes, I’m serious. As I’ve said before, there are plenty of methodologies that you can use to get started. But there is a much deeper reason for discounting methodologies…

Perception separates innovator from imitator.

That is why there is nothing linear about innovating. While other practitioners are infatuated by frameworks and templates, I believe template thinking does not equal innovation.

Jorge was building on a post by Henry Doss, who says that innovation can’t simply be something that you bolt-on to business as usual:

Applying overtly linear thinking to innovation strategy leads us to a kind ofpost hoc ergo propter hoc world, which goes something like this: “Look, this (company, geography or organization) is innovative. These are the things that seem to be different about them. So, let’s do those ‘different things’ the same way, and we’ll be innovative too!” Then, various mixes of components and features of innovative cultures are identified, extracted, and sprinkled into non-innovative organizations, stirred around and . . . well, usually, organizations just keep on operating more or less the way they did before they attempted innovation. We may refer to this as the “law of innovation inertia.”

Jeffrey Phillips responded to Jorge’s post by reiterating the fact that building innovation capacity requires time and effort:

Copying a “best practice” method or set of tools will take only a month or two. Developing your people and changing a culture can take several years. Here you begin to see the crux of the problem. Management teams aren’t especially good at long term thinking or committing to long term, slow change projects, especially ones with unpredictable outcomes. Quick and dirty, aiming for the proverbial “low hanging fruit” will always win out over slow, careful, constant change. But that slow, careful, constant change is what you can’t copy, and must have, for innovation success.

And, as usual, Seth Godin makes the point succinctly:

Bullet points, step by step processes that are guaranteed to work overnight, proven shortcuts…

If it was easy, everyone would do it.

…

It will take you less time and less effort to do it the difficult way than it will to buy and try and discard all the shortcuts.

To innovate, we have to do things differently. We have to manage differently, and we have to do this over time. If we do, we’ll be more innovative. It’s not easy, and there are no shortcuts. But we know that if we do this, we’ll build our innovation capability.

Oh, and it’s 11:08 now, and there is no line for coffee at all. We know how to get better outcomes – we just have to stop treating the steps to do so like Unknown Knowns simply because they’re hard.
20 August 2013
There’s No Substitute for Doing the Work
The Problem with the Quick Fix

Here’s a question that I get too often: How can you build an innovation capability really fast?

I’ve told the story before of one typical example:

I had lunch a while back with two executives from an organisation that the Business School does a fair bit work with. They wanted to improve innovation and that’s what triggered our meeting.

We talked for a couple of hours about what was happening in their organisation. We talked about innovation as a process, the different forms of innovation, incremental versus radical – all the big topics. It seemed like we were making some progress towards figuring out how we might be able to work together.

Then at the very end of the lunch, the one that’s actually in charge of innovation there leaned over and said“Look, just tell me what piece of software to get and I’ll get it.”

The problem with questions like this is that they demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of how organisations work. People want quick fixes – the problem with the quick fix is that it doesn’t exist.

You Have to do the Work

Two posts this week make the same point in very different ways. First, James Altucher takes on the idea that getting rich playing poker is easy. The whole post is worth reading – Altucher recounts a conversation he has with a friend who wants to start earning money playing poker. Altucher tells him that he has to learn scrabble first:

Me: It takes 1000s of hours to learn Scrabble. Every great poker player I know is a stone-cold killer. You have to kill or be killed. Most great poker players I know are great at all other games and have been since they were kids. A friend of mine spent 20 years becoming a chess master, another 5 becoming a great backgammon player, and it took him 10 years before he made a dime from poker. Now he’s made about $5 million from poker.

10 years, and thousands of hours. To win at poker, you have to do the work.

Seth Godin comes at it from a different angle though. He says that you can’t just have the good parts of a job – you have to welcome the tough parts, because they’re what show that you’re doing something worthwhile. This is his conclusion:

You don’t get to just do the good parts. Of course. In fact, you probably wouldn’t have chosen this path if it was guaranteed to work every time.

The implication of this might surprise you, though: when the tough parts come along, the rejection and the slog and the unfair bad breaks, it makes sense to welcome them. Instead of cursing or fearing the down moments, understand that they mean you’ve chosen reality, not some unsustainable fantasy. It means that you’re doing worthwhile, difficult work, not merely amusing yourself.

The very thing you’re seeking only exists because of the whole. We can’t deny the difficult parts, we have no choice but to embrace them.

The Difficult Parts of Innovation

If you want to innovate more, you do have to put in the work. There is no quick fix. Here are some of the difficult parts that you have to contend with:
1. Every new idea doesn’t succeed. You’ll have to live with some failures.
2. You don’t get everything right the first time. You have to experiment with your business model to figure out what works best.
3. New ideas spread slowly. Once you figure out how to solve a particular problem, it takes at least the same amount of time to get people to adopt your solution.
4. You have to build the innovation skills over time. You need to give the people in your organisation the tools they need to innovate, the time to use them, and the opportunity. Again, this doesn’t happen overnight.
These are all things that slow you down when you’re trying to innovate. It’s part of what makes it hard to be more innovative.

The good news is that when you run into these obstacles, it means that you’re already ahead of everyone else that isn’t even trying. Imagine how far ahead you’ll be once you get over them.

Related articles
- Should You Learn Poker And Make a Lot of Money
1 April 2013
Innovation Happens in the Gaps
What are the connections between these three things?

First: Comics – the magic happens in the gaps between panels

In his terrific book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud explains that comics are special because all of the real action occurs in the gaps between panels – this is the part that readers fill in using their imagination.

A huge amount of effort and creativity goes into making the comic, but then the reader finishes the story in her head.

Second: Tools Don’t Solve Problems, People Do

Here’s an apocryphal story making the rounds of various photography sites:

A well known New York photographer goes to a socialite party. On his way in the hostess says to him, ‘Oh I love your photos, you must have an amazing camera!’. They have dinner and at the end of the night, on his way out, the photographer comments to the hostess, ‘I really loved the food, you must have an amazing stove.

Third: Seth Godin on helping people be more perfect

Check this out from Seth Godin:

Most people in the US can’t cook. So you would think that reaching out to the masses with entry-level cooking instruction would be a smart business move.

In fact, as the Food Network and cookbook publishers have demonstrated over and over again, you’re way better off helping the perfect improve. You’ll also sell a lot more management consulting to well run companies, high end stereos to people with good stereos and yes, church services to the already well behaved.

The Story: Creativity Happens in the Gaps

I see the same story in all three pieces: Creativity happens in the gaps.

I’m a lousy cook. So if I go out and buy The Fat Duck Cookbook, and follow each recipe as closely as possible, I still won’t be cooking like Heston Blumenthal.

Why not? Because I don’t know enough to fill in the gaps. As much as I love Scott McCloud’s book, I disagree with him when he says that “what happens between these panels is a kind of magic only comics can create.” I actually think that applying creativity and imagination in the gaps also explains the other two stories.

We can only sell cookbooks to people that are already great cooks because they have the skills needed to be able to fill in the gaps in a recipe creatively and with imagination. And this is why, as in the case of the photographer and the cook, focusing on tools can be incredibly misleading.

Innovation Happens in the Gaps

A couple of years ago, I met with the senior management team from a really large organisation in Brisbane. They wanted to talk to me about being more innovative. We started by talking about what innovation is, and then quickly went through managing innovation as a process, and a few other key ideas.

Then one of them said: “We tried a big innovation initiative a few years ago and it didn’t work.”

There were nods around the table. I said something like:

“Let me guess. You asked everyone for their ideas. Lots of people submitted innovation ideas, but there was no mechanism in place for choosing the best ones. You didn’t have any budget attached for execution either, so nothing much came out of it. And in the end, everyone that put an idea in ended up feeling disillusioned and morale actually went down.”

As I talked, there were sheepish nods around the table.

They didn’t know enough about innovation to fill in the gaps. They wanted to buy the innovation version of the expensive camera, or the great stove.

They had the same problem that Seth Godin outlines: they’re actually not good enough innovators to benefit from the tools that are available to them.

What Should You do If You’re Just Starting Out?

Forget about tools. You have to build your basic innovation skills.
- You need to get everyone on the same page in terms of defining innovation – and your definition might be different from everyone else.
- Connect innovation to your overall strategy. They are two different things, and innovation needs to support your strategy.
- Build your capability to experiment. Here is a seven-step process for starting to innovate quickly.
- Start thinking about innovation as a process, not as an event (just ideas).
Once you’ve done these things, then you can go out and start buying expensive tools to support innovation. But only then.

There are no innovation short cuts. You have to build your skills first.

Once you have, then you’ll have enough knowledge to really use your imagination. Then you’ll know that innovation happens in the gaps.
5 February 2013
Reading This Post Will Change Your Brain!

Reading this post will change your brain

I’m not sure if the change will be good or bad, but reading this will change your brain. I’m sure you’ve heard the arguments about the internet – google is making us stupid, and even more alarming – using the internet changes your brain! That must be bad, right? Well, not necessarily. The problem with this argument is that everything you do changes your brain.

Using google changes your brain, eating a donut changes your brain, and yes, reading this post changes your brain. The correct question to ask isn’t “does doing X change my brain?” but rather “what activities do the changes enable?” Nicholas Carr wrote the original article Is Google Making Us Stupid, and he understands this distinction. His argument is that the rewiring in our brains caused by internet usage makes it harder for us to concentrate for extended periods, and that we are losing the ability to focus and follow complex arguments. Ironically, his argument is sophisticated enough that a lot of people seem to misconstrue it.

My actual personal brain!

Interactions change us

So yes, using the internet does change our brain. It makes it easier for us to do some things, and harder to do others. Personally, I’m not convinced by the evidence people have suggesting that internet use decreases our powers of concentration. And as for google, well, we’ve been outsourcing complexity to various tools for centuries – I’m not sure how this is all that different.

It was Plato that argued that writing things down was causing a horrible deterioration in our ability to remember things.

That might be true, but it also means that the part of our brains that devoted to remembering stuff could now work on other activities – and some of those have turned out to be pretty useful.

Who do you want your customer to become?

The idea that interactions change us is the central issue driving Who Do You Want Your Customer to Become? by Michael Schrage. Seth Godin outlines the implications of this question in his new book The Icarus Deception:

Everyone you interact with is changed forever. The only questions are: How will they be different? and How different will they be? Author Michael Schrage wants you to ask, “Who do you want your customers to become?” At first this seems like a ridiculous question. Your customers are your customers. Your coworkers are your coworkers. This isn’t true.

Connection creates change. Unless you are selling a standard commodity, the interactions you have with the market change the market. Zappos turned its customers into people who demand a higher level of service to be satisfied. Amazon turned its customers into people who are restless with online stores that don’t work quite as well or quite as quickly. Henry Ford turned his customers from walkers into drivers.

When you disappoint someone (or exceed their expectations), that interaction is going to color all the interactions that person has tomorrow and next year. Apple is talked about more than any other company for one simple reason: They have huge aspirations for who they want their customers to become, and they deliver on them.

… Answering Schrage’s question honestly gives you a chance to describe the change you want to see in the world. Not at the Henry Ford industrial-scale level, of course. No, but even if you connect with six people, you are changing them.

Changing them how? Whom do you want them to become? I’d like you to become an artist. To make connections that matter. That’s my mission.

By writing, Godin wants his readers to become artists. And Schrage himself wants to change how we innovate:

Significantly, they should become managers and leaders who are justifiably more confident that they are asking the right questions when they look to innovate and create new value in new ways. They should have the courage to take smarter risks and the ability to learn faster because they know they’re committed to treating their customers with empathy and respect. Most importantly, they should become more successful. Why? Because successful innovators know how to ask the right questions and create the most value for themselves and their customers. The Ask of this book is that you become an innovator who gets the best possible return on the innovation investments you make in your customers.

Who will we become?

I think that both Schrage and Godin miss an important point though. Yes, when we send our ideas out into the world, they change the people with whom they interact.

But sending these ideas out, and seeing how they interact with people changes us as well.

Asking who you want your customers to become is a great way to clarify your value proposition. Changing your answer can help you innovate your business model. I think it’s a transformative question, and Schrage’s book is definitely worth reading.

But we need to pair this with another question – who do we want to be? If we make our customers stupider, it makes us shallower. If we make our customers more transactional, we’ll often end up greedier.

Here’s the change that I’d like to see from our interactions over ideas: that together we figure out how to make work work better.

For too many people, work is lousy. Most organisations are mediocre, at best (maybe even 90% of them!) We need to innovate how we manage, how we deal with our people, and how we deal with customers.

If my writing this and your reading this helps us take even a small step in that direction, I’d be very happy.

Reading this post will change your brain. Now let’s change our behaviour.

27 January 2013