Tag: social innovation

behaviour changecomplexitydesign thinkingevaluation

Innovation, Change and The Leopard

on May 15, 2019

Innovation is a misunderstood and often misrepresented concept that can provoke fear, indifference, resentment, confusion, or irrational exuberance. To understand the reasons why we can’t ignore innovation we need to look no further than the sage advice in The Leopard, a story of change.

It’s been said that the only true constant is change. Funny that something so constant and pervasive — change — invokes such strong reactions from people. It’s partly why innovation can be such a contentious term. Whether we like it or not, the dynamics of change in our world are forcing us to recognize that innovation is not a luxury, it’s more than just a means to competitive advantage, it’s increasingly about survival.

New Canadian research (PDF) looking at citizens attitudes toward innovation and their perception of it suggests there is much to be done to understand what survival and innovation mean for our collective wellbeing. Before getting to that, let’s first define innovation.

There are many definitions of innovation (see here, here, and here for some), but let’s keep it simple:

Innovation is doing something new to generate value

Innovation is effectively a means to create change. Design is the discipline and practice of how we create change intentionally. While change is often thought of something that takes us from one state to another, it is also something that can help us preserve what we have when everything else is changing around us. To help understand this, let’s look at a lesson from The Leopard.

Change Lessons from The Leopard

One of my favourite quotes comes from the Italian novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa where one character (a young nephew speaking to his aristocratic uncle who seeks to preserve the family’s status) says to another:

If want things to stay as they are, things will have to change

The Leopard (translated from Italian)

I’ve written about this quote before, looking at the psychology of organizations and the folly of fads in innovation and design thinking. It’s about change, but really it’s about innovation and survival.

While individual humans are pretty resilient in the face of changing conditions, organizations are not so easily adaptive. Our family, friends, neighbours, and maybe governments will look after us if things get really bad (for a while, at least), but there are few looking after organizations.

For organizations – non-profit, profit-seeking, and governmental alike — innovation is the means to improve, to adapt, or maintain the status quo. It’s no longer a luxury — it’s about survival. Just as a real leopard has spots that are part of it’s form to survive, so too must we consider examining what kind of survival mechanisms we can build into our forms. That means: design.

Survival, by Design

A recent survey of 2000 Canadians by the Rideau Hall Foundation looked at Canadians attitudes toward innovation and whether Canada was creating a culture of innovation.


A culture of innovation is one where the general public has shared values and beliefs that innovation is essential for collective well-being

David Johnson, Governor General of Canada

There are many flaws with this study. There’s a reason I defined what I meant by innovation at the beginning of this post; it’s because there’s so much confusion surrounding the term, its meaning, and use. I suspect that same confusion entered this study. Nevertheless, there are some insights that are worth exploring that may transcend the context of the study (Canada).

One of these is the tendency among young people (age 18-25) to view innovation as something more likely to be generated from individuals. There is also differences in perceptions between men and women about who is best suited for innovation. What is shared is this perception of innovation as being ‘out there’, which is part of our problem.

If we view innovation as something needed to survive — to change or to keep things as they are– then we need to shift the thinking from innovation being something novel, technology-dependent, and fitting the fetishistic perspective that dominates corporate discourse. That requires an intentional, skillful approach to designing for change (and survival). It means:

From surviving to thriving

The interconnection of social, technological, and environmental systems has created an unprecedented level of complexity for human beings. This complexity means our ability to learn from the past is muddled, just as our ability to see and predict what’s coming is limited. The feedback cycles that we need to make decisions — including the choice to remain still — are getting shorter as a result and require new, different, and better data than we could rely on before.

Survival is necessary, but not very inspiring. Innovation can generate a means to invigorate an organization and provide renewed purpose for those working in them. By connecting what it is that you do, to what you want, to what is happening (now and in the near-present) on a regular basis and viewing your programs and services more like gardens than mechanical devices, we have the chance to design with and for complexity rather than compete against it.

For a brilliant example of this metaphor of the garden in creative work and complexity see Brian Eno’s talk with The Edge Foundation. Eno speaks about the need to get past this idea of seeing the entire whole and enjoying the creative space that takes place within the boundaries you can see. It’s not about simple reactivity, it’s a proactive, yet humble approach to designing things (in his case, music) that allows him to work with complexity, not against it. It allows him to thrive.

More on this later.

Working with complexity means designing your work for complexity. It means being like The Leopard (the book, but maybe the cat, too) and be willing to embrace change as a way of living, not just to survive, but to thrive.

Photos by Geran de Klerk on Unsplash , Adaivorukamuthan on Unsplash,
and Alexandre St-Louis on Unsplash

evaluationsocial innovation

Innovation Evaluation and the Burden of Proof

on May 8, 2019

Innovating is about doing something new to produce value and this introduces substantial challenges for strategy and evaluation. Without knowing what you can expect, it’s hard to know what you have…or where you’re going.

Innovation is one of those terms that is used a lot without as much attention to what it means in specific terms. This lack of specificity might be fine for casual conversation, but the risks (and benefits) to innovation are great and require a level of detail that has a seriousness to it.

When you’re evaluating a new product or service, the risk of developing the wrong thing or leaving something out is substantial. False confidence in success could have detrimental effects on an expected return on investment. Lack of understanding of the effects of a product or service could lead to harm.

Evaluation and strategy in the context of innovation takes on new meaning because the implications are so great.

Scoping investments

The investment in innovation requires considerable tolerance for risk, which is why many countries provide incentives to support it. In the case of many community-serving organizations, innovation is often seen as imperative given the complexity of many of our social issues.

Although Research & Development (R & D) is commonly associated with innovation, often the ‘R’ part of this work is focused on the development of the product or service, not the evaluation. Evaluation focuses our attention on the product or service as it is used, even if that is in an early, restricted setting. Evaluation provides insight into the actual use characteristics, and can be useful in supporting program design, but only if there is investment in it.

While it is difficult enough to balance all of the demands and costs associated with innovating, investing in evaluation early on can yield substantial benefits later on as have been highlighted elsewhere. However, it is precisely because many of the benefits are later in the development cycle that it is so easy to put off investing in evaluation early.

Present thinking, future investment

Innovation is principally about the future. However, as illustrated in other places, it is also about present value as a byproduct of the process of creating new goods, services, and realizing ideas. By thinking this way, program developers have the opportunity to create additional value now by integrating evaluation more fully into the present offering.

Yet it’s in the future where the biggest payoff comes. Just as you might see the glamour and glory that comes with being an innovator like the image above, that kind of success is often based on a simple set of outcomes (e.g., sales, profit, etc..). Those kind of metrics are easy to celebrate, but often disguise what the real value of something is.

Whether it’s in the form of social benefits, additional discoveries, or the role of your product or service as a catalyst for other change, the focus on the end product loses the story told along the way. By allowing evaluation into the process early, the opportunity to tell that story differently and better makes for a more interesting — and beneficial read. That is an innovation story worth writing.

Photo by Austin Distel on Unsplash

design thinking

Leadership & Design Thinking: Missed Opportunities

on February 26, 2019

A recent article titled ‘The Right Way to Lead Design Thinking’ gets a lot of things wrong not because of what it says, but because of the way it says it. If we are to see better outcomes from what we create we need to begin with talking about design and design thinking differently.

I cringed when I first saw it in my LinkedIn feed. There it was: The Right Way to Lead Design Thinking. I tend to bristle when I see broad-based claims about the ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to do something, particularly with something so scientifically bereft as design thinking. Like others, I’ve called out much of what is discussed as design thinking for what I see as simple bullshit.

To my (pleasant) surprise, this article was based on data, not just opinion, which already puts it in a different class than most other articles on design thinking, but that doesn’t earn it a free pass. In some fairness to the authors, the title may not be theirs (it could be an editor’s choice), but what comes afterward still bears some discussion less about what they say, but how they say it and what they don’t say. This post reflects some thoughts on this work.

How we talk about what we do shapes what we know and the questions we ask and design thinking is at a state where we need to be asking bigger and better questions of it.

Right and Wrong

The most glaring critique I have of the article is the aforementioned title for many reasons. Firstly, the term ‘right’ assumes that we know above all how to do something. We could claim this if we had a body of work that systematically evaluated the outcomes associated with leadership and design thinking or research examining the process of doing design thinking. The issue is: we don’t.

There isn’t a definition of design thinking that can be held up for scrutiny to test or evaluate so how can we claim the ‘right’ way to do it? The authors link to a 2008 HBR article by Tim Brown that outlines design thinking as its reference source, however, that article provides scant concrete direction for measurement or evaluation, rather it emphasizes thinking and personality approaches to addressing design problems and a three-factor process model of how it is done in practice. These might be useful as tools, but they are not something you can derive indicators (quantitative or qualitative) to inform a comparison.

The other citation is a 2015 HBR article from Jon Kolko. Kolko is one of design’s most prolific scholars and one of the few who actively and critically writes about the thinking, doing, craft, teaching, and impact of design on the people, places, and systems around us. While his HBR article is useful in painting the complexity that besets the challenge of designers doing ‘design thinking’, it provides little to go from in developing the kind of comparative metrics that can inform a statement to say something is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. It’s not fit for that purpose (and I suspect was never designed for that in the first place).

Both of these reference sources are useful for those looking to understand a little about what design thinking might be and how it could be used and few are more qualified to speak on such things as Tim Brown and Jon Kolko. But if we are to start taking design thinking seriously, we need to go beyond describing what it is and show what it does (and doesn’t do) and under what conditions. This is what serves as the foundation for a real science of practice.

The authors do provide a description of design thinking later in the article and anchors that description in the language of empathy, something that has its own problems.

Designers seek a deep understanding of users’ conditions, situations, and needs by endeavoring to see the world through their eyes and capture the essence of their experiences. The focus is on achieving connection, even intimacy, with users.

False Empathy?

Connecting to ideas and people

It’s fair to say that Apple and the Ford Motor Company have created a lot of products that people love (and hate) and rely on every day. They also weren’t always what people asked for. Many of those products were not designed for where people were, but they did shape where they went afterward. Empathizing with their market might not have produced the kind of breakthroughs like the iPod or automobile.

Empathy is a poor end in itself and the language used in this article treats it as such. Seeing the world through others’ eyes helps you gain perspective, maybe intimacy, but that’s all it does. Unless you are willing to take this into a systems perspective and recognize that many of our experiences are shared, collective, connected, and also disconnected then you only get one small part of the story. There is a risk that we over-emphasize the role that empathy plays in design. We can still achieve remarkable outcomes that create enormous benefit without being empathic although I think most people would agree that’s not the way we would prefer it. We risk confusing the means and ends.

One of the examples of how empathy is used in design thinking leadership takes place at a Danish hospital heart clinic where the leaders asked: “What if the patient’s time were viewed as more important than the doctor’s?” Asking this question upended the way that many health professionals saw the patient journey and led to improvements to a reduction in overnight stays. My question is: what did this produce?

What did this mean for the healthcare system as a whole? How about the professionals themselves? Are patients healthier because of the more efficient service they received? Who is deriving the benefits of this decision and who is bearing the risk and cost? What do we get from being empathic?

Failure Failings

Failure is among the most problematic of the words used in this article. Like empathy, failure is a commonly used term within popular writing on innovation and design thinking. The critique of this term in the article is less about how the authors use it explicitly, but that it is used at all. This may be as much a matter of the data itself (i.e., if you participants speak of it, therefore it is included in the dataset), however, its profile in the article is what is worth noting.

The issue is a framing problem. As the authors report from their research: “Design-thinking approaches call on employees to repeatedly experience failure”. Failure is a binary concept, which is not useful when dealing with complexity — something that Jon Kolko writes about in his article. If much of what we deal with in designing for human systems is about complexity, why are we anchoring our discussion to binary concepts such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’?

Failure exists only when we know what success looks like. If we are really being innovative, reframing the situation, getting to know our users (and discarding our preconceptions about them), how is it that we can fail? I have argued that the only thing we can steadfastly fail at in these conditions is learning. We can fail to build in mechanisms for data gathering, sensemaking, sharing, and reflecting that are associated with learning, but otherwise what we learn is valuable.

Reframing Our Models

The very fact that this article is in the Harvard Business Review suggests much about the intended audiences for this piece. I am sympathetic to the authors and my critique has focused on the details within the expression of the work, not necessarily the intent or capacity of those that created it. However, choices have consequences attached and the outcome of this article is that the framing of design thinking is in generating business improvements. Those are worthy goals, but not the only ones possible.

One of the reasons concepts like ‘failure’ apply to so much of the business literature is that the outcomes are framed in binary or simple terms. It is about improvement, efficiency, profit, and productivity. Business outcomes might also include customer satisfaction, purchase actions, or brand recognition. All of these benefit the company, not necessarily the customer, client, patient, person, or citizen.

If we were truly tackling human-centred problems, we might approach them differently and ask different questions. Terms like failure actually do apply within the business context, not because they support innovation per se, but because the outcomes are pre-set.

Leadership Roles

Bason and Austin’s research is not without merit for many reasons. Firstly, it is evidence-based. They have done the work by interviewing, synthesizing, commenting on, and publishing the research. That in itself makes it a worthy contribution to the field.

It also provides commentary and insight on some practical areas of design leadership that readers can take away right away by highlighting roles for leaders.

One of these roles is in managing the tension between divergent and convergent thought and development processes in design work. This includes managing the insecurities that many design teams may express in dealing with the design process and the volume of dis-organized content it can generate.

The exemplary leaders we observed ensured that their design-thinking project teams made the space and time for diverse new ideas to emerge and also maintained an overall sense of direction and purpose. 

Bason & Austin, HBR 2019

Another key role of the design leader is to support future thinking. By encouraging design teams to explore and test their work in the context of what could be, not just what is, leaders reframe the goals of the work and the outcomes in ways that support creativity.

Lastly, a key strength of the piece was the encouragement of multi-media forms of engagement and feedback. The authors chose to illustrate how leaders supported their teams in thinking differently about not only the design process but the products for communicating that process (and resulting products) to each other and the outside world. Too often the work of design is lost in translation because the means of communication have not been designed for the outcomes that are needed — something akin to design-driven evaluation.

Language, Learning, Outcomes

By improving how we talk about what we do we are better at framing how to ask questions about what we do and what impact it has. Doing the right thing means knowing what the wrong this is. Without evaluation, we run the risk in Design of doing what Russell Ackoff cautioned against: Doing the wrong things righter.

A read between the lines of the data — the stories and examples — that were presented in the article by Bason and Austin is the role of managing fear — fear of ‘failure’, fear from confusion, fear of not doing good work. Design, if it is anything, is optimistic in that it is about making an effort to try and solve problems, taking action, and generating something that makes a difference. Design leadership is about supporting that work and bringing it into our organizations and making it accessible.

That is an outcome worth striving for. While there are missed opportunities here, there is also much to build on and lead from.

Lead Photo by Quino Al on Unsplash

Inset Photo by R Mo on Unsplash

education & learningevaluation

Learning: The Innovators’ Guaranteed Outcome

on November 22, 2018

Innovation involves bringing something new into the world and that often means a lot of uncertainty with respect to outcomes. Learning is the one outcome that any innovation initiative can promise if the right conditions are put into place. 

Innovation — the act of doing something new to produce value — in human systems is wrought with complications from the standpoint of evaluation given that the outcomes are not always certain, the processes aren’t standardized (or even set), and the relationship between the two are often in an ongoing state of flux. And yet, evaluation is of enormous importance to innovators looking to maximize benefit, minimize harm, and seek solutions that can potentially scale beyond their local implementation. 

Non-profits and social innovators are particularly vexed by evaluation because there is an often unfair expectation that their products, services, and programs make a substantial change to social issues such as poverty, hunger, employment, chronic disease, and the environment (to name a few). These are issues that are large, complex, and for which no actor has complete ownership or control over, yet require some form of action, individually and collectively. 

What is an organization to do or expect? What can they promise to funders, partners, and their stakeholders? Apart from what might be behavioural or organizational outcomes, the one outcome that an innovator can guarantee — if they manage themselves right — is learning. 

Learning as an Outcome

For learning to take place, there need to be a few things included in any innovation plan. The first is that there needs to be some form of data capture of the activities that are undertaken in the design of the innovation. This is often the first hurdle that many organizations face because designers are notoriously bad at showing their work. Innovators (designers) need to capture what they do and what they produce along the way. This might include false starts, stops, ‘failures’, and half-successes, which are all part of the innovation process. Documenting what happens between idea and creation is critical.

Secondly, there needs to be some mechanism to attribute activities and actions to indicators of progress. Change only can be detected in relation to something else so, in the process of innovation, we need to be able to compare events, processes, activities, and products at different stages. Some of the selection of these indicators might be arbitrary at first, but as time moves along it becomes easier to know whether things like a stop or start are really just ‘pauses’ or whether they really are pivots or changes in direction. 

Learning as organization

Andrew Taylor and Ben Liadsky from Taylor Newberry Consulting recently wrote a great piece on the American Evaluation Association’s AEA 365 blog outlining a simple approach to asking questions about learning outcomes. Writing about their experience working with non-profits and grantmakers, they comment on how evaluation and learning require creating a culture that supports the two in tandem:

Given that organizational culture is the soil into which evaluators hope to plant seeds, it may be important for us to develop a deeper understanding of how learning culture works and what can be done to cultivate it.

What Andrew and Ben speak of is the need to create the environment for which learning can occur at the start. Some of that is stirred by asking some critical questions as they point out in their article. These include identifying whether there are goals for learning in the organization and what kind of time and resources are invested to regularly gathering people together to talk about the work that is done. This is the third big part of evaluating for learning: create the culture for it to thrive. 

Creating Consciousness

It’s often said that learning is a natural as breathing, but if that were true much more would be gained from innovation than there is. Just like breathing, learning can take place passively and can be manipulated or controlled. In both cases, there is a need to create a consciousness around what ‘lessons’ abound. 

Evaluation serves to make the unconscious, conscious. By paying attention — being mindful — of what is taking place and linking that to innovation at the level of the organization (not just the individual) evaluation can be a powerful tool to aid the process of taking new ideas forward. While we cannot always guarantee that a new idea will transform a problem into a solution, we can ensure that we learn in our effort to make change happen. 

The benefit of learning is that it can scale. Many innovations can’t, but learning is something that can readily be added to, built on, and transforms the learner. In many ways, learning is the ultimate outcome. So next time you look to undertake an innovation, make sure to evaluate it and build in the kind of questions that help ensure that, no matter what the risks are, you can assure yourself a positive outcome. 

Image Credit: Rachel on Unsplash

complexityevaluationsocial innovation

Developmental Evaluation’s Traps

on April 19, 2018

IMG_0868.jpg

Developmental evaluation holds promise for product and service designers looking to understand the process, outcomes, and strategies of innovation and link them to effects. It’s the great promise of DE that is also the reason to be most wary of it and beware the traps that are set for those unaware.  

Developmental evaluation (DE), when used to support innovation, is about weaving design with data and strategy. It’s about taking a systematic, structured approach to paying attention to what you’re doing, what is being produced (and how), and anchoring it to why you’re doing it by using monitoring and evaluation data. DE helps to identify potentially promising practices or products and guide the strategic decision-making process that comes with innovation. When embedded within a design process, DE provides evidence to support the innovation process from ideation through to business model execution and product delivery.

This evidence might include the kind of information that helps an organization know when to scale up effort, change direction (“pivot”), or abandon a strategy altogether.

Powerful stuff.

Except, it can also be a trap.

It’s a Trap!

Star Wars fans will recognize the phrase “It’s a Trap!” as one of special — and much parodied — significance. Much like the Rebel fleet’s jeopardized quest to destroy the Death Star in Return of the Jedi, embarking on a DE is no easy or simple task.

DE was developed by Michael Quinn Patton and others working in the social innovation sector in response to the needs of programs operating in areas of high volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity in helping them function better within this environment through evaluation. This meant providing the kind of useful data that recognized the context, allowed for strategic decision making with rigorous evaluation and not using tools that are ill-suited for complexity to simply do the ‘wrong thing righter‘.

The following are some of ‘traps’ that I’ve seen organizations fall into when approaching DE. A parallel set of posts exploring the practicalities of these traps are going up on the Cense site along with tips and tools to use to avoid and navigate them.

A trap is something that is usually camouflaged and employs some type of lure to draw people into it. It is, by its nature, deceptive and intended to ensnare those that come into it. By knowing what the traps are and what to look for, you might just avoid falling into them.

A different approach, same resourcing

A major trap is going into a DE is thinking that it is just another type of evaluation and thus requires the same resources as one might put toward a standard evaluation. Wrong.

DE most often requires more resources to design and manage than a standard program evaluation for many reasons. One the most important is that DE is about evaluation + strategy + design (the emphasis is on the ‘+’s). In a DE budget, one needs to account for the fact that three activities that were normally treated separately are now coming together. It may not mean that the costs are necessarily more (they often are), but that the work required will span multiple budget lines.

This also means that operationally one cannot simply have an evaluator, a strategist, and a program designer work separately. There must be some collaboration and time spent interacting for DE to be useful. That requires coordination costs.

Another big issue is that DE data can be ‘fuzzy’ or ambiguous — even if collected with a strong design and method — because the innovation activity usually has to be contextualized. Further complicating things is that the DE datastream is bidirectional. DE data comes from the program products and process as well as the strategic decision-making and design choices. This mutually influencing process generates more data, but also requires sensemaking to sort through and understand what the data means in the context of its use.

The biggest resource that gets missed? Time. This means not giving enough time to have the conversations about the data to make sense of its meaning. Setting aside regular time at intervals appropriate to the problem context is a must and too often organizations don’t budget this in.

The second? Focus. While a DE approach can capture an enormous wealth of data about the process, outcomes, strategic choices, and design innovations there is a need to temper the amount collected. More is not always better. More can be a sign of a lack of focus and lead organizations to collect data for data’s sake, not for a strategic purpose. If you don’t have a strategic intent, more data isn’t going to help.

The pivot problem

The term pivot comes from the Lean Startup approach and is found in Agile and other product development systems that rely on short-burst, iterative cycles with accompanying feedback. A pivot is a change of direction based on feedback. Collect the data, see the results, and if the results don’t yield what you want, make a change and adapt. Sounds good, right?

It is, except when the results aren’t well-grounded in data. DE has given cover to organizations for making arbitrary decisions based on the idea of pivoting when they really haven’t executed well or given things enough time to determine if a change of direction is warranted. I once heard the explanation given by an educator about how his team was so good at pivoting their strategy for how they were training their clients and students. They were taking a developmental approach to the course (because it was on complexity and social innovation). Yet, I knew that the team — a group of highly skilled educators — hadn’t spent nearly enough time coordinating and planning the course.

There are times when a presenter is putting things last minute into a presentation to capitalize on something that emerged from the situation to add to the quality of the presentation and then there is someone who has not put the time and thought into what they are doing and rushing at the last minute. One is about a pivot to contribute to excellence, the other is not executing properly. The trap is confusing the two.

Fearing success

“If you can’t get over your fear of the stuff that’s working, then I think you need to give up and do something else” – Seth Godin

A truly successful innovation changes things — mindsets, workflows, systems, and outcomes. Innovation affects the things it touches in ways that might not be foreseen. It also means recognizing that things will have to change in order to accommodate the success of whatever innovation you develop. But change can be hard to adjust to even when it is what you wanted.

It’s a strange truth that many non-profits are designed to put themselves out of business. If there were no more political injustices or human rights violations around the world there would be no Amnesty International. The World Wildlife Fund or Greenpeace wouldn’t exist if the natural world were deemed safe and protected. Conversely, there are no prominent NGO’s developed to eradicate polio anymore because pretty much have….or did we?

Self-sabotage exists for many reasons including a discomfort with change (staying the same is easier than changing), preservation of status, and a variety of inter-personal, relational reasons as psychologist Ellen Hendrikson explains.

Seth Godin suggests you need to find something else if you’re afraid of success and that might work. I’d prefer that organizations do the kind of innovation therapy with themselves, engage in organizational mindfulness, and do the emotional, strategic, and reflective work to ensure they are prepared for success — as well as failure, which is a big part of the innovation journey.

DE is a strong tool for capturing success (in whatever form that takes) within the complexity of a situation and the trap is when the focus is on too many parts or ones that aren’t providing useful information. It’s not always possible to know this at the start, but there are things that can be done to hone things over time. As the saying goes: when everything is in focus, nothing is in focus.

Keeping the parking brake on

And you may win this war that’s coming
But would you tolerate the peace? – “This War” by Sting

You can’t drive far or well with your parking brake on. However, if innovation is meant to change the systems. You can’t keep the same thinking and structures in place and still expect to move forward. Developmental evaluation is not just for understanding your product or service, it’s also meant to inform the ways in which that entire process influences your organization. They are symbiotic: one affects the other.

Just as we might fear success, we may also not prepare (or tolerate) it when it comes. Success with one goal means having to set new goals. It changes the goal posts. It also means that one needs to reframe what success means going ahead. Sports teams face this problem in reframing their mission after winning a championship. The same thing is true for organizations.

This is why building a culture of innovation is so important with DE embedded within that culture. Innovation can’t be considered a ‘one-off’, rather it needs to be part of the fabric of the organization. If you set yourself up for change, real change, as a developmental organization, you’re more likely to be ready for the peace after the war is over as the lyric above asks.

Sealing the trap door

Learning — which is at the heart of DE — fails in bad systems. Preventing the traps discussed above requires building a developmental mindset within an organization along with doing a DE. Without the mindset, its unlikely anyone will avoid falling through the traps described above. Change your mind, and you can change the world.

It’s a reminder of the needs to put in the work to make change real and that DE is not just plug-and-play. To quote Martin Luther King Jr:

“Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can’t ride you unless your back is bent.”

 

For more on how Developmental Evaluation can help you to innovate, contact Cense Ltd and let them show you what’s possible.  

Image credit: Author

innovationpsychologysystems thinking

Decoupling creators from their creations

on June 1, 2017

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The world is transformed by creators — the artists, the innovators, the leaders — and their creations are what propel change and stand in the way of it. Change can be hard and its made all the more so when we fail to decouple the creator from the created, inviting resistance rather than enticing better creations. 

If you want to find the hotspot for action or inaction in a human system, look at what is made in that system. Human beings defend, promote and attend to what they made more than anything. Just watch.

Children will rush to show you what they made: a sandcastle, a picture, a sculpture, a…whatever it is they are handing you. Adults don’t grow out of that: we are just big kids. Adults are just more subtle in how we promote and share what we do, but we still place an enormous amount of psychological energy on our creations. Sometimes its our kids, our spouses (which is a relationship we created), our ideas, our way of life, our programs, policies or businesses. Even something like a consumer purchase is, in some ways, a reflection of us in that we are making an identity or statement with it.

Social media can feel like one big echo-chamber sometimes, but it’s that way because we often are so busy sharing our opinions that we’re not listening — focusing on what we made, not what others made. Social media can be so harsh because when we attack ideas — our 140 character creations sometimes — we feel as if we are being attacked. This is one of the reasons we are having such traumatized, distorted discourse in the public domain.

Creations vs creators

The problem with any type of change is that we often end up challenging both the creator and the creation at the same time. It’s saying that the creation needs to change and that can hurt the creator, even if done unintentionally.

The interest in failure in recent years is something I’ve been critical of, but a positive feature of it is that people are now talking more openly about what it means to not succeed and that is healthy. There are lots of flaws in the failure talk out there, mostly notably because it fails (no pun — even a bad one, intended… but let’s go with it) to decouple the creator from the creation.  In many respects, creators and their creations are intimately tied together as one is the raw material and vehicle for the other.

But when we need to apologize for, make amends because, or defend our creations constantly we are using a lot of energy. In organizational environments there is an inordinate amount of time strategizing, evaluating and re-visiting innovation initiatives, but the simple truth is that — as we will see below — it doesn’t make a lick of difference because we are confusing the creators with the creations and the systems in which they are creating.

Sometimes we need to view the creator and creation separately and that is all a matter of trust – and reality.

 

A matter of trust, a matter of reality

If you are part of a team that has been tasked with addressing an issue and given a mandate to find and possibly create a solution, why should it matter what you produce? That seems like an odd question or statement.

At first it seems obvious: for accountability, right?

But consider this a little further.

If a team has been given a charge, it presumably is the best group that is available given the time and resources available. Maybe there are others more suited or talented to the job, perhaps there is a world expert out there who could help, but because of time, money, logistics or some combination of reasons in a given situation that isn’t possible. We are now dealing with what is, not what we wish to be. This is sometimes called the real world. 

If that team does not have the skills or talent to do it, why is it tasked with the problem? If those talents and skills are unknown and there is no time, energy or commitment  — or means — to assess that in practice then you are in a truly innovative space: let’s see what happens.

In this case, accountability is simply a means of exploring how something is made, what is learned along the way, and assessing what kind of products are produced from that, knowing that there is no real way to determine it’s comparative merit, significance or worth — the hallmark tenets of evaluation. It’s experimental and there is no way to fail, except to fail to attend and learn from it.

This is a matter of trust. It’s about trusting that you’re going to do something useful with what you have and that’s all. The right / wrong debate makes no sense because, if you’re dealing with reality as we discussed above there are no other options aside from not doing something. So why does failure have to come into it?

This is about trusting creators to create. It has nothing to do with what they create because, if you’ve selected a group to do something that only they are able to do, for reasons mentioned above, it has nothing to do with their creation.

Failing at innovation

The real failure we speak of might be failing to grasp reality, failing to support creative engagement in the workplace, and failing to truly innovate. These are products of what happens when we task individuals, groups, units or some other entity within our organizations, match them with systems that have no known means forward and provide them with no preparation, tools, or intelligence about the problem to support doing what they are tasked with. The not knowing part of the problem is not uncommon, particularly in innovative spaces. It’s nothing to sneer at, rather something that is a true learning opportunity. But we need to call it as it is, not what we want it or pretend it to be.

My colleague Hallie Preskill from FSG is big on learning and is not averse to rolling her eyes when people speak of it, because it’s often used so flippantly and without thought. True learning means paying attention, giving time and focus to what material — experience, data, reflections, goals and contexts — is available, and in . Learning has a cost and it has many myths attached to it. It’s difficulty is why many simply don’t do it. In truth, many are not as serious about really learning, but talking about learning. This is what Hallie sees a lot.

The material for learning is what these innovators, these creators, are producing so if we are valuing creation and innovation we need to pay attention to this and entice creators to continue to generate more quality ‘content’ for us to learn from and worry less about what these creators produce when we task them with innovation missions that have no chance to ‘succeed’ just as they have no chance to ‘fail’

A poor question leads us to poor answers.

Consider what we ask of our innovators and innovation and you’ll see that, if we want more and better creators and if we want more and better creations we need to see them in a new light and create the culture that sees them both for what they are, not what we want them to be.

Image credit: Author

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Jaded: Whether You Are a Plant or a Stone Makes All the Difference

on May 11, 2017

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An attempt to innovate – do something new to produce value — is always fraught with risk and a high likelihood that things won’t go as planned, which can leave people jaded toward future efforts. Whether that metaphor of jade is one of a rock (static) or a plant (growth) makes all the difference. 

Innovation is hot. Innovation is necessary. Innovation is your competitive advantage. Innovate or die.

You’ve probably heard one or all of these phrases or one of the myriad variants of them out there. Innovation is a hot word. To innovate is to transform new thinking into new value, but it is used euphemistically to represent all kinds of ‘hot’ things without appropriate framing. It’s not just doing something different, it’s about producing something new that improves on the situation at hand, even if the solution might actually be an old idea re-introduced.

A recent article for the online version of Harvard Business Review suggests that many companies are just giving up, ceding the ‘innovation’ space to large firms with a reputation for innovation. Why? One of the reasons cited is that the developing social and technological change has created a situation where “many firms seem to be unable to keep up with the pace at which this development is unfolding.”

The painful experience of failure

Another reason might be the problem of failure. Failure has become another cool word in the language of business and social innovation (even, government) to the point of being fetishized as something noble. The issue with failure is not just accepting that it can happen, but learning from it and acting on that learning. It also means understanding what failure is and whether an outcome is even best described in terms like “success” and “failure” . Too often in innovation, particularly social innovation, we actually don’t know what success looks like so how is it that we can use the term failure so readily?

Failure is a word with enormous negative cultural baggage. Despite all the positive rhetoric of failure, corporations, social enterprises and governments are judged on their ability to deliver what is expected of them. Expectations are really the key here. If you’re a corporation that promises to deliver a certain rate of return on investment over a specific time period, you’re going to be held to task for that. We can speak of failure positively all we’d like, but try explaining the ‘learning’ outcomes to a group of angry shareholders?

Politicians don’t get judged on their ability to manage complexity, they are judged by making and keeping promises — even if those promises are based on (overly) simplistic ways of viewing complex problems. As we entangle ourselves with more complex problems, the promise of a simple solution will be harder to come by. Yet, it’s that hope for the solution that is what ultimately gets us. As I once read in a newsletter advertising an online dating service in a very cheeky manner:

It’s not the rejection that kills you, it’s the hope.

It’s actually quite true. If you don’t expect to succeed, “failure” isn’t really that bad.

Lowered expectations, risk avoidance & path dependencies

When you’re jaded, you tend to lower your expectations. The analogy of online dating above is also an apt descriptor for ways in which lowered expectations changes the very game of innovation in real ways in people’s lives. As divorce rates approach 50%, it is becoming common that many people are starting over sometime in their 30’s and 40’s and trying, once again, to find love. What’s interesting in terms of dating is that, particularly if you’ve been dating a little, you face two big issues: 1) you’re a bit cautious about what you do or say because you know that things might not last and you want to conserve your energy and 2) you’ve become accustomed to the way you do things on your own.

The result might be less adventurousness, more conservative thinking about the choice of partner, a greater willingness to settle for what is, rather than what could be (risk avoidance). An established pattern of living might also predispose you to looking for partners who are a lot like you, which maintains a level of consistency (path dependence). An argument can be made that this is more about knowing yourself and your preferences than being set in your ways, but there is a fine line between that and resistance to change.

This is exactly what we see in organizations around innovation.

They have tried innovation before, it’s failed to deliver what they expected (because they probably set their expectations poorly, not realizing that the outcomes of innovation could be something other than they had designed for), and now don’t want to try. Or rather, they don’t want to try enough. This is why we see so many organizations trumpet themselves as innovative, when what they are really doing is the most basic, simplistic forms of innovation. Rather than a moonshot, they are looking to simply move the yardsticks just a little.

Plant vs stone

Jade is both a plant and a stone. A jade plant is a solid, semi-broad leafed plant that is well suited to dry climates and a variety of light situations, making it a great houseplant. It’s adaptive, easily transplantable and hearty. Jade, as a stone, is relatively soft and while it is also adaptable, once carved into a shape, it’s no longer going to change.

The jade / jaded metaphor is designed to consider the ways in which we approach developing our innovation potential. A jade plant is still firm, but flexible. It grows and changes over time, but isn’t as free flowing as others. The jade plant offers a useful metaphor for ensuring that lessons learned from past actions inform future strategy, but not to the point where the fear of risk calcifies the organization into a static state, unable to change.

A plant exists largely because it has a steady stream of nutrients, water, sunlight and a reasonable stability of growing conditions, yet conditions that can change and will change over time. This consistency as well as requisite variety (in systems terms) is what keeps a plant alive and thriving. The same is true for an organization. Ongoing, steady innovation, consistency over time and the occasional change in conditions to keep things on their toes (and used to adaptation) are all a part of what makes an organization or individual innovative. Build in a regular practice, become a mindful organization (or practitioner) and consider changes in the way you speak about innovation to yourself and others.

Bruce Lee would advocate that his students become like water. Innovators? They should become more like plants for that water.

Image Credit: Jade Plant by Andrew Rivett used under Creative Commons License. Thanks for sharing Andrew!

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