Archive for category variety
Innovation is Impossible
Posted by Tim in book riffs, experiments, variety on 5 January 2012
James Altucher recently suggested that “Eat All You Want of the Foods You Love and Still Lose Weight” would be a great book title – that no matter what was inside, it would sell. It’s easy to see why. Many of us like to eat all we want of the foods we love, and we also want to lose weight, so if we could do both at the same time, wouldn’t that be great?
Well, maybe.
In his new book Relentless Innovation: What Works, What Doesn’t–And What That Means For Your Business
Everyone understands from the beginning how difficult it is to create compelling new ideas in any sutation, uch less to convert those ideas into viable products and services. To compound the difficulty, executives are asking for disruptive ideas while expecting the business to continue to operate at full effectiveness and efficiency. Middle managers receive these messages and understand the unspoken dichotomy in the request: create radical, valuable new products and services but don’t upset the status quo.
Phillips nails the problem – many firms want an innovation program create radical, valuable new products and services but don’t upset the status quo.
If that’s what you want, innovation is impossible.
Relentless Innovation is a very good book. One of the key points that Phillips makes is that one of the major obstacles to innovation is the emphasis that many firms have on efficiency. You can innovate to become more efficient, and many firms do this well. However, to be successful over time, you also need to develop new products and services, and you can’t do this just through efficiency.
Here is a big part of the reason for that. Efficiency is all about reducing variation. When you’re a manufacturer, and you’re using statistical process control to improve the quality of your products, then this is great.
However, innovation that creates new products and services, requires increased variation. You have to try things that you’ve never done before, experiment, fail, learn, and get feedback from customers. This is the diametric opposite of increasing efficiency. Here is how Phillips puts it:
You must shift your thinking to recognize that experimentation and prototyping is as much about discovery and new insights as it is about validation of internal perspectives and theories. Your firm must make it far easier to test ideas, gain new insights, and “fail forward.”
In addition to increasing your experiment rate, Relentless Innovation includes a number of other practical steps you can take if you find yourself in a situation where innovation is impossible (you can check out Jeffrey’s blog too for more – Innovate on Purpose).
To innovate well, you have to become comfortable with disturbing the status quo. Deborah Mills-Scofield addresses this very well in a recent post – listing status quo objections to innovation and good response to each.
You also have to be able to maintain a focus on efficiency while also generating great new ideas. Efficiency reduces variation, but great new ideas increase variation. This is another of the ten tensions in innovation that must be balanced. In each of these situations, you need to think “both-and”, rather than taking an “Either-or” approach.
If you want to innovate without changing anything, then innovation is impossible. To get around this problem, you need to align innovation with your strategy, and build a capability for innovating consistently within your organisation. It’s not easy, but it is possible. Relentless Innovation gives us some good ideas about how to do this, and that makes it worth a read.
Note: If you want a more conventional review of the book (I’m lousy at reviewing), check out this one by Jorge Barba.
Disclaimer: I know and like Jeffrey, and I received a free pdf of the book. I also bought my own copy. I’m writing about the book because of its quality, not because of who wrote it or how I got it.
Being Wrong is the Only Way to Learn
Posted by Tim in book riffs, variety on 6 March 2011
“Who knew doors only cost $30?”
Jason Potts said that to me last week when we were talking about the work he’s doing on his house. The house was severely damaged in the flood in January. For the past few weeks, Jason has been working on rebuilding it. He was telling me about how he’s learned to do a lot of the work – simply through experimenting.
Being wrong is actually an essential part of learning – as Jason’s experience with doors shows. Three months ago he didn’t know anything about installing handles on doors, and now he’s good at it. And the cost was much lower than he expected.
This is common error – we nearly always overestimate the cost of experimenting.
Part of this is because we don’t realise how cheap it is test most ideas. But the bigger problem is psychological – one big problem with experimenting is that we might be wrong. In her excellent book Being Wrong, Kathryn Shulz explains why this is such a problem for many people:
In our collective imagination, error is associated not just with shame and stupidity, but also with ignorance, indolence, psychopathology, and moral degeneracy. This set of associations was nicely summed up by the Italian cognitive scientist Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini, who noted that we err because of (among other things) “inattention, distraction, lack of interest, poor preparation, genuine stupidity, timidity, braggadocio, emotional imbalance,… ideological, racial, social or chauvinistic prejudices, as well as aggressive or prevaricatory instincts.” In this rather despairing view – and it is a common one – our errors are evidence of our gravest social, intellectual, and moral failings.
Of all the things we are wrong about, this idea of error might well top the list. It is our meta-mistake: we are wrong about what it means to be wrong. Far from being a sing of intellectual inferiority, the capacity to err is crucial to human cognition. … Thanks to error, we can revise our understanding of ourselves and amend our ideas about the world.
In other words, being wrong is the only way to learn.
That’s one of the things I’ve been spectacularly wrong about recently. We’ve had a persistent leak in our basement, which became a torrent during the rains that led to the flood. Ever since I first noticed the leak, I thought that it was from a broken drain pipe. My presumption was that the pipe was underneath the bricks, and that we would have to get plumbers in and dig up the whole front of the house to fix the leak.
During the rain, I took a close look at the leak, and realised that my idea about its source had to be completely wrong. So I developed a new idea: that the water was leaking through the gap between the sidewalk and the bricks.
To test this idea, I tried the experiment you can see in the picture. I bought $20 of sealant, and did the world’s messiest caulking job along the two gaps that I thought might be the source of the leak.
Since then, not one drop of water has gone into the basement. My experiment worked. Now that I know what the problem is, I can work on coming up with a solution more elegant that my two messy lines of sealant.
There are some general lessons in all of this home improvement work:
- If things aren’t working right, examine your basic assumptions: I thought my leak would require a lot of time, money and expertise to fix. Jason thought the same about putting in doors. We were both wrong – but we only knew this once we actually tested those ideas.
- Experiments are a lot cheaper than you think: Who knew that doors only cost $30? People that had already tried to experiment with them, I suppose. My new idea about the leak could have been wrong, but the $20 of sealant was a lot cheaper than calling in a plumber to test out my first hypothesis. Find a way to test out your ideas as quickly and cheaply as possible.
- Being wrong is the only way to learn: Schulz’ point is exactly correct – being wrong is not a moral failing, or a sign of intellectual inferiority. It is the only way we can figure out how to do new things.
Experimenting isn’t just for fixing stuff around the house either – experimenting is a critical step in innovating. Earlier this week Jose Baldaia pointed to an excellent post by Amir Khella called How I launched a profitable product in 3 hours. Khella recounts how he developed a new product called Keynotopia which is, beautifully, a rapid prototyping (experimenting!) tool.
Here is part of what happened:
It had been less than a month since I wrote about how I’ve been using Apple Keynote to prototype iPad applications. I debated whether or not I should publish the post, thinking there was nothing new or useful about it. Yet, I decided to do it for the fun of it. What I didn’t expect, though, was for the post to be picked up by some of the most respected bloggers, becoming popular among the design and iPhone communities. In less than three weeks, the post generated more than 10,000 visits and 500 downloads of the iPad keynote templates I posted along.
Khella had an idea, but wasn’t sure if it would work, or even if it was any good or not. Instead of sinking a lot of further thought into it, he ran an experiment. He put together a website just to see if the idea would fly.
And it did. It’s great when your experiments work out this way. But what if it didn’t?
If no one had gone to the page, or if Keynotopia wasn’t useful for people, or if it didn’t work right, or if something else had gone wrong, he would have learned something – and for a pretty small investment, just three hours. If no one tried it out, then he’d know that the idea didn’t create value for people. Then he could move on to his next idea/experiment. If they had complaints about how it worked, then he’d know that the idea creates value, but his execution needs to be better. Then he could fix the problems and make the idea better.
In both of those cases, he would have been wrong about something. And much better off for knowing it.
Being wrong is the only way to learn. If you have a great idea, find a way to test it out. Experimenting is usually a lot cheaper than you think. Just remember Jason and the doors.
Why Making Mistakes is a Key Innovation Skill
Posted by Tim in innovation, variety on 21 September 2010
One innovation topic that consistently gets people worked up concerns the value of failure. Some say that you have to embrace failure when you are trying to innovate. This makes some sense, since part of the innovation process is controlled experimentation. However, that whole ‘embracing failure’ concept tends to rub people the wrong way – and so many others say that we are better off trying to learn from success.
Personally, I fall more towards the embracing failure camp. However, there are two keys to taking advantage of failure. The first is to be aware that there is a taxonomy of failure – it is much better to fail quickly and cheaply – preferably at the levels of ideas or prototypes rather than full products or entire systems.
The second key is that you need to learn from ideas that don’t work. Stefan Lindegaard had some interesting discussions last month around the concept of smartfailing – which is built on the idea that you can systematically learn from ideas that don’t work out.
Earlier this week, Jon Lebkowsky wrote a post that bears on this issue. You should read the whole post, but here is one of the key quotes (which is taken from a post by Thanissaro Bhikkhu):
Several years ago, a sociologist studied students in a neurosurgery program to see what qualities separated those who succeeded from those who failed. He found ultimately that two questions in his interviews pointed to the crucial difference. He would ask the students, “Do you ever make mistakes? If so, what is the worst mistake you’ve ever made?” Those who failed the program would inevitably answer that they rarely made mistakes or else would blame their mistakes on factors beyond their control. Those who succeeded in the program not only admitted to many mistakes but also volunteered information on what they would do not to repeat those mistakes in the future.
This makes a lot of sense. If every idea that we try out works, that’s not a sign that we’re brilliant, it’s a sign that we’re not trying out enough ideas. In that circumstance, we are not generating enough cognitive variety.
Innovation is an evolutionary process – to work well it depends on having a wide variety of ideas, a good selection process, and a method for getting ideas to spread. Variety, selection and replication – the three building blocks of evolution.
If all of our ideas work, we aren’t introducing enough variety into the process.
That is why failure is important. It is a sign of a healthy innovation process. You don’t necessarily have to embrace failure, but you must be willing to learn from it.
If you combine it with learning, making mistakes is a key innovation skill.
(photo from flickr/fireflythegreat under a Creative Commons License)
Innovation as an Evolutionary Process
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 13 June 2010
Here’s another clip from the video series that we did a couple of years ago for our Innovation Leadership course. This time it’s John talking about how innovation is an evolutionary process:
Generic evolutionary processes have three parts – generation of variety, selection, and replication. This maps on to the three steps in the innovation value chain. The Innovation Value Chain also has three steps – idea generation, idea selection and execution, and idea diffusion. The connections between the two models should be fairly apparent!
Innovation as evolution has some interesting implications, including:
- The ideas that spread are often not optimal solutions to problems, they simply happen to be the best solutions currently available. In other words, our innovations just have to be good enough, not perfect.
- Consequently, the idea that we’re not looking for a perfect execution of our new ideas is a strong argument in favour of taking a build, launch, tweak approach to getting our new ideas out there. We’re most likely to get to the best solutions to the problems we are interested in through an iterative process, rather than through pure development.
- This leads to the last point, which is that the evolution of our great ideas is built on collaborative networks. The sooner we can enlist the help of our network (customers, partners, suppliers, etc.), the more likely we are to come up with the best version of our great new idea.
The economy is an evolving system. Thinking of it in this way gives us some important insights into how to best manage innovation.
The Changing Innovation Process
Posted by Tim in innovation, selection, variety on 10 June 2010
How has the internet changed the innovation process? It has had a number of impacts, particularly on collaborative innovation, which is becoming increasingly important. Here is a short discussion on this topic from one of our previous Innovation Leadership Executive Education courses:
George Dyson has a nice metaphor for the changes involved in answer to one of the big questions from edge.org – how has the internet changed the way you think? (via Simon Bostock’s excellent blog)
KAYAKS vs CANOES
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don’t will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
This same process drives the shift towards distributed innovation. When the raw materials (great ideas) for innovation are relatively rare, it makes sense to try to control the source (creative people) as much as possible. So you hire as many innovative people as you can, and you retain all the resources inside of your firm.
However, when the raw materials are abundant, the problem isn’t finding them, it’s figuring out which ones are good. In this environment, it makes more sense to let idea generation come from anywhere, while you focus on getting very good at selecting and executing great ideas.
All of us are building canoes now.
Experiments – the Key to Innovation
Posted by Tim in experiments, innovation strategy, variety on 28 March 2010
There is a big problem that organisations often face: they want to be innovative, but they also want to minimise risk. This creates a certain amount of tension. If I had to pick the number one thing that I would recommend to organisations that are trying to become more innovative, it would be this: experiment. Experiment all the time. Try everything that you can possibly think of to try. An experimental mindset is absolutely essential to successful innovation.
We were talking about this idea in class this week, and it clearly makes people nervous. I was suggesting that in an uncertain environment, normal strategy tools such as SWOT analysis, five forces and so on are actually pretty dangerous to use. One of the students asked “so everything is chaos, and we throw out the tools and models, then what? What are we supposed to do?”
That’s a good question. I replied that in part this was a rhetorical trick – in terms of the narrative of the class, we were at a point equivalent to just before the end of the Two Towers in The Lord of the Rings trilogy: we’re trapped in a castle surrounded by tens of thousands of orcs, Gandalf is missing, the hobbits are spread all over middle earth, and we have absolutely no idea what is going on. How do we navigate from this point to the five different happy endings that conclude the story?
Again, my answer is to experiment. The tools that I have talked about previously that are designed for linking innovation to strategy are all built around experimenting. The way to combat high levels of uncertainty is to spread your bets. Try as many cheap experiments as you can.
There must be something to this idea, because I’ve run across three different people saying basically the same thing in the past three days. The first was Dan Ariely:
They asked me what I thought the best approach was. I told them that I was willing to share my intuition but that intuition is a remarkably bad thing to rely on. Only an experiment gives you the evidence you need. …
Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.
Unsurprisingly, he goes on to make a case for the value of experimenting. Part of this reluctance is that experimenting leads to short-term losses – if you try several things to find out what works best, you have wasted resources by trying the ideas that end up not working. Or do you? Rita McGrath doesn’t think so:
If your organization can approach uncertain decisions as experiments and adopt the idea of intelligently failing, so much more can be learned (so much more quickly) than if failures or disappointments are covered up.
So ask yourself: are we genuinely reaping the benefit of the investments we’ve made in learning under uncertain conditions? Do we have mechanisms in place to benefit from our intelligent failures? And, if not, who might be taking advantage of the knowledge we are depriving ourselves of?
She includes a list of conditions that can lead to what she’s calling ‘intelligent failures’, the approach that she outlines is both good and practical. Then I ran across this by Bob Sutton:
The final point that Jeff Pfeffer and I make in Hard Facts is about failure. We emphasize that is impossible to run an organization without making a lot of mistakes. Innovation always entails failure. Most new products and companies don’t survive. And if you want creativity without failure, you are living in a fool’s paradise. It is also impossible to learn something new without making mistakes. …
Failure will never be eliminated, and so the best we can hope for from human beings and organizations is that they learn from their mistakes, that rather than making the same mistakes over and over again, they make new and different mistakes.
To be innovative, we have to try out new ideas. Some of these will fail. If we’re smart, we’ll set up our experiments so that we can learn as much as possible from the ideas that don’t work.
We face an environment that is filled with uncertainty. This makes planning dangerous. The best possible way to meet this uncertainty is not with intuition and guesswork, but with experimentation. If you can combine experimenting with empathy, then you’ll be building a formidable innovation capability.
(Photo from flickr/jurvetson under a Creative Commons license)
You Don’t Need Any More New Ideas!
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 30 December 2009
Scott Berkun let out the secret of innovation today in an outstanding blog post. It’s a secret that Rowan Gibson tried to let out of the bag recently, and so did Braden Kelley on Blogging Innovation. I’ve tried to tell you about it too, using both analogies and statistics. The secret idea of innovation is this:
You don’t need any more new ideas.
Here is Berkun on the what we really need:
If there’s any secret to be derived from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or any of the dozens of people who often have the name innovator next to their names, is the diversity of talents they had to posses, or acquire, to overcome the wide range of challenges in converting their ideas into successful businesses.
That’s it. The problem is executing your ideas. Here’s an example – yesterday I talked about mousetraps – here are some interesting stats.
The patent for the flip-trap mousetrap design was filed in 1899. That’s a better mousetrap, right? We’re still using that design over 110 years later, so it’s probably pretty good. And yet, since 1899, the US Patent Office has granted over 4400 mousetrap patents. They receive more than 400 new mousetrap patents every year. So there’s no shortage of ideas. But fewer than 20 mousetrap designs have led to products that have actually made money. The problem in innovation is executing your new idea, and getting it to spread.
There is so much effort put into improving innovation by generating more ideas. This isn’t necessarily wasted effort, but it’s not the smartest use of resources. My MBA students evaluated innovation within their firms:
This approach is flawed, and my MBA students demonstrated why. They came from a wide range of organisations – huge multinationals, small start-ups, government departments, and educational institutions. Despite these different backgrounds, their findings were remarkably consistent – only 3 of the 60 organisations that they work in are ideas-poor. The other 57 (that’s 95%!) have problems with either selecting or diffusing ideas.
Here’s more from Berkun:
The closest thing to a real secret is this: In my years studying and teaching all things innovation, there’s one fact that’s the hardest for people to swallow and it goes as follows – To invent or create is to take a bet against the unknown. No matter what you do, you are still betting you can do well in the face of many things that are out of your control. Don’t like that? Don’t want uncertainty? Then do something else. Comfort with risk and uncertainty is the real secret. Or at least acceptance of the fact you can work your ass off for uncertain rewards.
Where does this leave us? Here are some conclusions:
- If you’re going to get some help to improve innovation at your firm, don’t focus on generating ideas. Get help on selecting ideas, or on getting them to spread. Those are the hard parts.
- Innovation is a bet – you’re betting that your new idea will work better, that it will meet needs, that it will fit into the value network. All of these things have to happen for your innovation to work. Like Berkun says, this is a leap into uncertainty.
- Most of the innovation problems that organisations face are problems with innovation diffusion – the challenge is to get your new ideas to spread.
The new idea that I’d like you to accept is that you don’t need any more new ideas. Instead of generating more ideas, let’s develop some plans for getting better at executing our ideas. That seems like a good idea heading into the new year, doesn’t it?
How to Assess Your Innovation Capability
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 18 December 2009
How do you know how good you are at innovation? One of the tools that we have found very useful for assessing innovation within organisations is the Innovation Value Chain. The tool was developed by Morten Hansen and Julien Birkinshaw and published in an article called The Innovation Value Chain in Harvard Business Review in 2007.
I’ve talked about this before – There are two key points with this model. The first is that there are three stages in the process of innovation: idea generation, selecting & developing ideas, and diffusing ideas. The key part, however, is that all three parts of that process have to be working well in order to innovate.
The three step aspect of the innovation process is important. Measuring idea generation, selection and diffusion helps organisations get around the problem of simply equating innovation with ideation. Organisations that do this often find that they have plenty of ideas, but they’re still not being very innovative. This is because innovation actually doesn’t occur until you execute new ideas. To do that, you have to be good at having ideas, but more importantly you also have to be good at selecting ideas and getting them to spread.
This leads to the second key point of the Innovation Value Chain – your innovation process is only as good as your weakest link. This is not simply a linear model of how things happen, it is a description of a complex system. For example, if you are bad at selecting ideas, people will become less willing to give you their new ideas. This means that there are feedback loops between the three parts of the process. If you are going to improve your innovation, the whole system has to get better. You can use the IVC to identify your weak point and take steps to improve it. Then you can move on to whichever step is your weakest point now. If you keep doing this, you will build excellent innovation capability within your organisation.
Here is a Special Deal!
Our research has shown that while organisations usually first try to improve their idea generation, 95% of the time, this is not their weakest area. I’m curious to see how broadly this is true – so I would like you to please
In exchange for your time, I’ll give you some feedback on your results. If you’d like some information about what your organisation’s innovation strengths and weaknesses are relative to others who have taken the survey, just leave an email address when you take the survey. If you would like several people from your organisation to take the survey, I can compile the results – just have everyone indicate the name of the organisation when they fill out the survey. All results are, of course, confidential. To get the most meaningful results, please tell everyone you know that might be interested about this survey. Thanks for your help!
Innovation is about more than just coming up with new ideas. If we’re going to be innovative, we have to be able to execute new ideas. The Innovation Value Chain is one tool that can help us get better at this.
What is an Innovation Culture?
Posted by Tim in innovation strategy, replication, selection, variety on 27 November 2009
Here are the slides + audio from the talk I gave this morning for the UQ Centre for Educational Innovation and Technology‘s planning day. One of the things that they were working on was thinking about what they want their innovation culture to be, so Phil asked me along to give some thoughts on that. I’m not sure how close my talk was to what he wanted, but I gave it a go. It’s too bad I didn’t record the Q&A at the end, because some really good ideas came up during that too. They’re a really bright group and I’m looking forward to seeing what they’re able to do.
Even though slideshare says that this runs for over an hour, the talk is just 18 minutes.
As usual, if I sound like Jabba the Hut, you have to upgrade your flash player – slideshare doesn’t play well with older versions.
Also, I’ve added an index page with links to all of the talks that we’ve put up. There are a couple more (with video) coming soon!
focus on process, not tools
Posted by Tim in book riffs, innovation strategy, networks, replication, selection, variety on 22 November 2009
I’m reading Kill All Your Darlings by Luc Sante at the moment, which is very good. It includes a number of pieces on culture, many originally from Village Voice or the New York Review of Books. Sante is a fantastic writer and there are a number of great lines throughout the book, but one just jumped out at me in his piece on the photographer Walker Evans.
He had never been a camera snob, or even, although he was a superb printer, much concerned with the mechanics of his art (once when a student asked him what camera he had employed to take a particular shot, he became irate, declaring the question tantamount to asking a writer what sort of typewriter he’d used).
I love this little story for a number of reasons. The simplest is because I’ve never been a big fan of camera snobs, or anyone that gets too hung up on equipment. Equipment can make some things easier, but it can’t replace knowledge and experience accumulated over time.
The second reason that I like the quote though is that it illustrates a problem that we often run into in firms that are trying to implement a new innovation program. Often these initiatives come about because someone at the top has said something like “innovation has been one of our ‘core values’ for values, so we better start doing something about it.” The first thing that always happens in these cases is that the organisation goes out and gets some software. It might be something that supports message forums for Communities of Practice, or a tool for capturing ideas. The flaw in this approach is that the minute you approach Knowledge or Innovation Management as an IT problem, the initiative is dead.
Managing innovation is a people and process problem, not a technical one. Yes, it helps to have some tools to use, but if you want your organisation to be more innovative, you have to be good at generating ideas, choosing the best ones, and getting those ideas to spread (variety, selection and replication – an evolutionary process). These are people problems, and they are often network problems. Get your processes right first, then you can get some tools to help facilitate them.
If you focus on improving the innovation process, not the tool, you will be much more likely to be successful.
(photo by Walker Evans)
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Tim was named #5 in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2011 at Innovation Excellence.
Tim and John were both named in the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2010 at Innovation Excellence.
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