Tag: Steve Jobs

behaviour changeevaluationinnovation

Beyond the Big and New: Innovating on Quality

on May 1, 2014
The newest, biggest, shiny thing

The newest, biggest, shiny thing

Innovation is a term commonly associated with ‘new’ and sparkly products and things, but that quest for the bigger and more shiny in what we do often obscures the true innovative potential within systems. Rethinking what we mean by innovation and considering the role that quality plays might help us determine whether bigger and glossy is just that, instead of necessarily better. 

Einstein’s oft paraphrased line about new thinking and problems goes something like this:

“Problems cannot be solved with the same mind set that created them.”

In complex conditions, this quest for novel thinking is not just ideal, it’s necessary. However genuine this quest for the new idea and new thing draws heavily upon widely shared human fears of the unknown it is also framed within a context of Western values. Not all cultures revere the new over what came before it, but in the Western world the ‘new’ has become celebrated and none more so than through the word innovation.

Innovation: What’s in a word?

Innovation web

Innovation web

A look at some of the terms associated with innovation (above) finds an emphasis on discovery and design, which can imply a positive sense of wonder and control to those with Westernized sentiments. Indeed, a survey of the landscape of actors, services and products seeking to make positive change in the world finds innovation everywhere and an almost obsessive quest for ideas. What is less attended to is providing a space for these ideas to take flight and answer meaningful, not trivial, questions in an impactful way.

Going Digital Strategy by Tom Fishburne

Going Digital Strategy by Tom Fishburne

I recently attended an event with Zaid Hassan speaking on Social Labs and his new book on the subject. While there was much interest in the way a social lab engages citizens in generating new ideas I was pleased to hear Hassan emphasize that the energy of a successful lab must be directed at the implementation of ideas into practice over just generating new ideas.

Another key point of discussion was the overall challenge of going deep into something and the costs of doing that. This last point got me thinking about the way we frame innovation and what is privileged in that discussion

Innovating beyond the new

Sometimes innovation takes place not only in building new products and services, but in thinking new thoughts, and seeing new possibilities.

Thinking new thoughts requires asking new or better questions of what is happening. As for seeing new possibilities, that might mean looking at things long forgotten and past practices to inform new practice, not just coming up with something novel. Ideas are sexy and fun and generate excitement, yet it is the realization of these ideas that matter more than anything.

The ‘new’ idea might actually be an old one, rethought and re-purposed. The reality for politicians and funders is often confined to equating ‘new’ things with action and work. Yet, re-purposing knowledge and products, re-thinking, or simply developing ideas in an evolutionary manner are harder to see and less sexier to sell to donors and voters.

When new means better, not necessarily bigger

Much of the social innovation sector is consumed or obsessed with scale. The Stanford Social Innovation Review, the key journal for the burgeoning field, is filled with articles, events and blog posts that emphasize the need for scaling social innovations. Scaling, in nearly all of these contexts, means taking an idea to more places to serve more people. The idea of taking a constructive idea that, when realized, benefits as many as possible is hard to argue against, however such a goal is predicated highly upon a number of assumptions about the intervention, population of focus, context, resource allocations and political and social acceptability of what is proposed that are often not aligned.

What is bothersome is that there is nowhere near the concern for quality in these discussions. In public health we often speak of intervention fidelity, intensity, duration, reach, fit and outcome, particularly with those initiatives that have a social component. In this context, there is a real threat in some circumstances of low quality information lest someone make a poorly informed or misleading choice.  We don’t seem to see that same care and attention to other areas of social innovation. Sometimes that is because there is no absolute level of quality to judge or the benefits to greater quality are imperceptibly low.

But I suspect that this is a case of not asking the question about quality in the first place. Apple under Steve Jobs was famous for creating “insanely great” products and using a specific language to back that up. We don’t talk like that in social innovation and I wonder what would happen if we did.

Would we pay more attention to showing impact than just talking about it?

Would we design more with people than for them?

Would we be bolder in our experiments?

Would we be less quick to use knee-jerk dictums around scale and speak of depth of experience and real change?

Would we put resources into evaluation, sensemaking and knowledge translation so we could adequately share our learning with others?

Would we be less hyperbolic and sexy?

Might we be more relevant to more people, more often and (ironically, perhaps) scale social innovation beyond measure?

 

 

Marketoonist Cartoon used under license.

 

 

 

behaviour changeeducation & learninginnovation

Isolation: The New Innovator’s Dilemma

on March 27, 2014
It's can be a long, lonely climb

It’s can be a long, lonely climb

 Innovators transform the world around them in big and small ways and while a successful effort can be lauded by pundits, politicians and the public there is a long road to making change happen. That road is also a lonely one and doing things different means more than just innovating and experiencing what it means to be resilient firsthand. 

Clayton Christensen’s seminal book The Innovator’s Dilemma has been one of the leading sources of thinking-inspriation in business and social innovation. The book reflects the challenges with those seeking to introduce new ideas, products or services into established markets (or ecosystems) in the aim of addressing both people’s present and future needs.

These innovators — change-makers — risk disrupting the very markets they seek to influence bringing uncertainty for everyone. What innovators bet on is that the changes they introduce will have wide-ranging, positive benefits even if they don’t fully know what those are before setting out. Not surprisingly, these efforts are not always welcome at first and the road toward understanding and acceptance is a long one.

Innovation means doing something new and while we like to talk about new, many don’t actually like doing ‘new’ because that means questioning and changing things. Indeed, change — profound change — in thinking is often vigorously opposed as Albert Einstein pointed out in a quote that is paraphrased as:

Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds

This opposition is a challenge for anyone, but the long slog towards innovation is not only hard on the spirit, it is often a lonely path.

The lonely lives of leaders

To innovate means to lead through ideas and products. We live in a society that admires and elevates the innovators. No better or perhaps inspiring example is the 1997 advertisement from Apple as part of the Think Different campaign in the 1990’s.

What is missing from the platitudes, plaudits and celebrations is the quiet, often lonely, life away from the attention that successful innovations bring (nevermind those that are not deemed successful). To innovate is to lead and to lead is often to be lonely by definition because there are few leading and more following. This leadership by thought or action is often what makes leaders appear creative, innovative and — as Seth Godin affectionately calls being weird. A study discussed in the Harvard Business Review and dissected in Forbes pointed to high rates of loneliness among those at the CEO level, which is among those who “made it”. Consider those who haven’t yet “made it”, who haven’t had their idea “succeed” or take off and it might feel even more lonely.

At a recent workshop I conducted a participant expressed publicly a sense of gratitude for simply having the opportunity to connect with others who were simply open to seeing the world in the same way that they were. In hosting a learning workshop for social innovators a positive byproduct was that attendees who might have been isolated in their activities and thinking in one context could come together in another.

Innovation, because it is new, means that innovators have few peers available to directly commiserate with and may need to find ways to connect on idea, method, philosophy or role, but rarely something direct. That requires extra work in the search and more effort to connect in the finding, which takes time and energy — two things innovators are often short of.

But that doesn’t diminish the value and importance of time and energy and directing it towards efforts to reduce isolation.

Creating deep community

Paul Born, Director of the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement, recently published a book on creating deep community connections as a necessary means of fostering transformative change. Born offers four pillars to a deepening community are:  1) sharing stories, 2) taking the time to enjoy one another, 3) taking care of one another, and 4) working together towards a bigger social goal.

While there is little to argue with here, these pillars rest on the ability to locate, co-locate and create the space to share, enjoy, care and collaborate in the first place. For many innovators this is the hardest part. Where do we find the others like ourselves and how do begin to frame this journey?

There is a reason that innovators have flocked to tools like the Business Model Canvas and the Lean Startup method to help people define, refine and develop their products and mission. It’s easy to point to firms like Apple as examples of clear-focused innovators now, but 20 or 30 years ago it wasn’t so clear. Apple’s overall mission and vision are easy to see lived out in hindsight, not at the beginning. A read of Steve Jobs’ biography illustrates how often his way of approaching the world clashed with nearly everyone and everything and how difficult life was for him.

But Steve Jobs happened to be challenging the world in a place that would come to be known as Silicon Valley. For the last thirty years the San Francisco bay area has been a spark for creative thinking and innovation, one of many hotbeds of business and cultural transformation that Richard Florida documented as home of the Creative Class(es). But not all innovation takes place in these centres and even within such centres it might be hard to connect when an idea is ill-formed or new. We lose out when innovation is only done in certain places by certain people.

(Social) innovators are part of a diffuse and sometimes lost tribe.

Troubled language

If you look at the language that we frame innovation we reveal many of the problems with not only our ideas, but what we do with them. As mentioned in previous posts, we privilege terms like creativity, but often ignore craft. We aspire to be learners, but often don’t like real learning. We tout the role of failure in design and innovation, yet our overloaded cultural baggage attached to the term prevents us from really failing (or asking such tepid questions we don’t really stretch ourselves).

Having access to social media and electronic communities offer a lot and something we didn’t have before, but its very difficult to forge strong, connective bonds mediated through a technological interface. Technology is good at initiating superficial connections or maintaining deeper connections, but not so good at creating deep connections. Those deeper connections as Paul Born points out are the things that sustain us and allow us to do our best work.

The dilemma is how to allocate time and resources in cultivating uniqueness, depth and connecting to similar innovators when that pool is small or integrating more with those in the convention system. Of course innovators need to relate to both groups at some level because an innovation doesn’t grow if we only connect to ‘true believers’, but at different stages it matters how we’re allocating our time, energy and enthusiasm particularly along that journey up Mt. Isolation.

Options

There is no ready answer for this problem. Indeed, the lonely path to being different, weird or constructively challenge the harmful or less effective parts of the status quo may be one of the most wicked ones innovators face.

For those interested in social innovation there are a few examples for those who want to find peers and connect:

  • The Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement (mentioned earlier) has different communities of practice focused on various aspects of community building and social innovation. They host events and have created a vibrant community of learners and action-oriented professionals across Canada and the United States;
  • LinkedIn has a number of topical groups that have evolved on a variety of social and innovation topics that include local, global and topical foci;
  • The Social Innovation Generation Group convenes formal and informal events connecting those working in the social innovation space in the Greater Toronto Area and across Canada;
  • Meetups are self-organized gatherings on virtually every topic under the sun in communities across the globe. Check out and see if there is something near you;
  • In Toronto and New York City, the Centre for Social Innovation is a part co-working space, social action community, and venture incubation support group that connects and enlivens the work that social innovators do. They have many events (many are free and low cost) organized by their members that seek to bring people together and offer skill development. If you’re in Ottawa, check out The Hub. In Calgary? Check out EpicYYC ;  In Vancouver, visit the great folk at the HiVE. Throughout the United States Impact Hub spaces offer innovators options to work and connect and in Cambridge, MA there is the amazing Cambridge Innovation Centre for innovation more broadly. MaRS in Toronto offers another option.
  • Lastly, CENSE Research + Design hosts a series of webinars and free and paid workshops to create capacity for social innovation. For more information visit: www.cense.ca/learning .

References:

Born, P. (2014). Deepening Community: Finding Joy Together in Chaotic Times (p. 216). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Wheatley, M. (2006). Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World (3rd. ed., p. 218). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Wheatley, M. (2007). Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time (p. 300). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Wheatley, M. (2010). Perseverance (p. 168). San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler Publishers.

Photo: Mt. Isolation This Way on Flickr by Tim Sackton used under Creative Commons License. (Thanks for the great shot Tim and making it available for others to use!)

businesscomplexityinnovation

What’s the big idea and how are you going to make it real?

on February 6, 2014
What is your strategy?

What is your strategy?

Concepts like design thinking and developmental evaluation are best used when they help ask big questions before seeking answers. How we frame the problem is much more important than the solution we generate, but that way of thinking means going into an area that is much talked about and rarely delivered on: strategy.

Many companies and human service organizations are getting desperate for solutions to the vexing problems they face. However, it may be that the organizations are as stuck finding solutions because they are tackling the wrong problem.

Problem framing is among the most critical, yet often overlooked, steps in design and innovation and often leads to more solutions that fail than those that succeed. Asking better questions is a start and developing a strategy from that is where to go next.

The big idea is your problem, making it real is the strategy to solving it.

What is the big idea?

Herbert Simon wrote about problem forming, framing and solving as the central tenets of design. Albert Einstein, another Nobel laureate, was famously (mis?)quoted as saying this about the discovery process:

If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.

Like so many of these ‘famous’ quotes, its origins are murky and the (hypothesized) original is much less poetic, but the spirit of the phrase is that problem finding and forming is enormously important for innovation. Case studies from design missions, innovation labs, and my own personal experience suggest that this ratio of 55 and 5 in resourcing is probably not far off from the truth.

Problem forming is also tied to a greater sense of mission, which is where a lot of organizations get it wrong. A clear, appropriately scoped mission provides the boundaries for creativity to flourish and innovation efforts to focus. Steve Jobs charged Apple with the mission of developing tools to enable people to create. That may have started with computers, but it soon grew to software with features that were design-forward and attractive, and then mobile devices and the ecosystems that powered them. When viewed from the mission of enabling creativity, the move to being a music and bookseller isn’t a leap from Apple’s roots as a maker of desktop computers.

Where are you going?

Strategy is about saying what you don’t do as much as it is about saying what you do. It also means saying what you do clearly and meaning it. Both of these have enormous implications for what a program focuses on and what feedback systems they develop to help them innovate and guide their strategy moving forward.

A good, simple resource on strategy is Howell J. Maltham Jr‘s recent book I Have a Strategy, No You Don’t. In the book the author illustrates the many ways in which we claim strategy when really it’s a wish. Malthan asserts that a strategy has:

  1. A purpose
  2. A plan
  3. A sequence of actions or tactics
  4. A distinct, measurable goal

However, most importantly according to Maltham is that this all needs a narrative – the story of what you do and how you do it. Too often we see the absence of narrative or a lack of connection to any of the four components above. Apple has famously developed a strong narrative for how it operates and realizes it mission.

Maltham’s four-point description of strategy works when you are dealing with simple and maybe slightly complicated systems; those with some measure of predictability and control. It doesn’t work well for complexity, which is where many human services are either immersed or shifting to. For that, we need some form of adaptive strategy that provides guidance, but also works with, rather than against complexity. Yet, it still requires a narrative.

Strategy for complex times

Like the above cartoon from Tom Fishburne, the tactics should not precede the strategy. It’s interesting to see how often the term tactic and strategy get confused and conflated. It’s easy to see why. Tactics are tangible. They — like 90% of meetings, answering email and phone messages — offer the illusion of productivity and impact. Getting hundreds or thousands of likes, followers, and re-tweets is a proxy for impact for a lot of people.

But if you’re looking to make real change, it doesn’t matter so much that you’re doing stuff, but rather whether you’re moving stuff.

It’s why adaptive strategy is difficult, because it means moving your ideas, your thinking, your relationships and your operations to constantly re-calibrate your focus. Just like looking at birds through binoculars or watching a football game from the stands, you need to constantly adjust your focus to maintain engagement. The same thing happens with strategy.

At the same time, difficult shouldn’t be the reason not to do something.

This is the new thinking that is needed to innovate and that is why many organizations seek to do the wrong thing righter by doubling down on trendiness to appear innovative without thinking deeply about what the big idea is and how it is supposed to become real. Whether static or adaptive, the narrative will tie that together. So what is your organization’s story and do you know how to tell it?

 

businesscomplexitydesign thinkingevaluationinnovation

Developmental Design and The Innovator’s Mindset

on August 16, 2013
Blackberry Swarmed By Ignorance

Blackberry Swarmed By Ignorance

Blackberry, once the ‘must have’ device is no longer so and may no longer even exist. Looking back on how the mighty device maker stumbled the failure is attributed to what was done and not done, but I would argue it is more about what was unseen and not thought. Ignorance of the past, present and future is what swarmed them and a lack of developmental design in their culture.

Today’s Globe and Mail features the above-pictured story about how and why Blackberry lost out to Apple’s iOS iPhone and Google’s Android powered phones due in large part to their focus on their stellar enterprise security system and failing to consider what would happen when competitors yielded ‘good enough’ models.  It’s a tale years in telling and what may be the beginning of the end of the once globally dominant Canadian tech leader.

Getting out

Those I’ve known who’ve worked for Blackberry describe a culture devoted to engineering excellence above all, which emphasized technical superiority and attention to the technology over the users of that technology. Perhaps if more of those engineers got out a more beyond their own circles they might have noticed a few things:

  1. Facebook, Twitter and social media sites that all seemed fun at first were quickly becoming more than just pastimes, they were being used as communications tools for everything from family and friends to work;
  2. Cameras were being used to capture photos and videos, share them and edit them (like Instagram and now Vine) for purposes beyond social, but also to take photos of PowerPoint presentations at events, brainstorming whiteboards and prototypes;
  3. The rich media experience provided through other devices meant that the keyboards were less important — typing faster and easier was being weighed against screen dimensions for videos, photos and interactive content;
  4. Workers were passionate enough about these new tools that they would bear the cost of their own phone to use these tools and carry two devices than just rely on a Blackberry if they were required to have one.

I saw this phenomena all over the place. Embedded in this pattern were some assumptions:

  1. Email was the most important form of productivity. (This might also include learning);
  2. Email was fun;
  3. Email got people communicating

Few people I know like email anymore. We tolerate it. Almost no one who is in the work world gets too few emails. Email is a useful and highly embedded form of communication; so much so as to nearly be a form of dominant design in our business communications.

What a little anthropological research on RIM’s part would have produced is some insights into how people communicate. Yes, email is the most pronounced electronic method of communication for business, but it doesn’t excite people like a video does or engage conversation like Twitter can or enable re-connection to close peers or family like LinkedIn and Facebook do. These are all platforms that were lesser served by the Blackberry model. What that means is that email is vulnerable to those things that attract people.

In complexity terms rich media is an attractor; it organizes patterns of activity around it that stimulate creativity in the system. This meant that a lot of positive energy was being directed into these new means of engagement over others and that when given the opportunity to choose and use a device that supported this engagement better people (and eventually the firms they worked for) began to opt for them over Blackberry.

Ongoing innovation

Developmental design is a process of incorporating the tenets of design thinking with developmental evaluation, strategic foresight, business model innovation and contemplative inquiry. It means constantly evaluating, assessing, designing and re-designing your product offerings as things change and developing a constant attentive focus on where you are, where you came from and the weak and strong signals that indicate shifts in a culture.

This is a new way of doing innovation development, evaluation and strategy, but it is the necessary ingredient in a space where there is high levels of complexity, rapid churn in the system, and high demand for action. Increasingly, this is no longer just the domain of high tech, but banking, retail, healthcare, education and nearly every system that is operating in multi-jurisdictional environments. When we (the customer, patients, students…) were very much the same, we could treat our system simply. Now the ‘we’ is different and the systems are complex.

Developmental design is the praxis of innovation.

What would Steve Jobs do?

It is interesting to note that today is the day the bio-pic on Steve Jobs is released into theatres. Jobs knew developmental design even if he never named it as such. He famously ‘got out’ in his own, unique way. He went for walking meetings rather than sat in boardrooms. He watched what people did and channeled his own passion for creating things into a company culture that was designed to create things to help people create things. To that end, he was among the most outstanding innovators of the last 50 years.

Yet, Jobs and his team were good at paying attention to where things had gone (the computer), where they were (increasing bandwidth capability and demand with the Internet), and where they were going (decentralized production). Thus we had a number-crunching machine turned it into a suite for personal creativity (Mac), which spawned a music player (iPod) and online store (iTunes), which led to a multimedia communications handset (iPhone), which inspired a handheld tablet (iPad).

Apple is the most valued tech company in the world because of that vision, one that has been questioned in light of Jobs’ passing on and new leadership in place at the company.

Blackberry is not unique. The leaderboard in consumer mobile technology has changed from Motorola to Nokia to RIM (Blackberry) to Apple to Samsung (Android) in less than 15 years. That is enormous churn in a sector that touches over three quarters of the world’s population directly (more than toilets). While perhaps an extreme case, it is becoming a model to pay attention to for other industries on different scales.

Ask yourself: Are you Blackberry today or Apple yesterday?

If you apply developmental design to your work, you’ll have your answer.