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A student team from our Creating Infectious Action (CIA) class at the Stanford d.school needs your help: they are trying to create a movement to transform part of downtown Palo Alto in to a pedestrian zone. Here's their idea:
I like how this team has used the design thinking process to end up with the creation of this movement as a goal. Given a short but sweet design brief to go "Kill Gas", this team spent a lot of time hanging out with business owners, store workers, and citizens on the street in downtown Palo Alto. They prototyped various solutions, and kept learning as they went. They ended up with several very interesting design directions, and picked the pedestrian-only urban park as the way to go. I think they were wise, for two reasons.
First, this direction, executed well (which we'll see -- the quarter isn't over yet!), has strong potential to knock it out of the park across what I consider to be the three key principles behind creating infectious action:
Second, I think a pedestrian-only zone in Palo Alto would be a Good Thing. I grew up in Boulder, where part of Pearl Street was transformed in to a pedestrian mall when I was a kid. A few decades later, it's still the beating heart of the town, a fun place to be in touch with the community.
Here's where they need your help: if they can gather 1,000 pledges of interest by May 27, a former mayor of Palo Alto will take their multi-stage implementation plan before the city government. As I write this, they have 883 887 supporters and four days to go. It would be awesome to see them blow through the 1,000 barrier in a big way.
If you would like to support this team and their cause, you can do it in one of the following ways:
Last but not least, please print out this flyer and stick it on your front lawn or in the back window of your car.
Thanks for helping this remarkable movement catch on fire!
If you use Twitter, please consider tweeting this blog post to help spread the word! And if you blog, a post mentioning the movement would be much appreciated! Mahalo.
23 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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Since you will fail when you take on the challenge of bringing something new in to the world, it's useful to adopt the mantra of "Failure sucks but instructs". Repeat that mantra a few times, and then hark back to Raney's Corollary:
None of us want to fail. But when we do, we have a choice to make: we can choose to learn from the failure, or we can choose to avoid dealing with what the world is trying to tell us. Time and time again, history shows us that innovators who get stuff done are also the ones who best learn from their failures, which may be legion. Think James Dyson cranking out thousands of vacuum cleaner prototypes, the Wright brothers crashing their kites and gliders over and over, and even the rational marketers at Amazon hypothesizing and testing across multiple web platforms each and every day. Each is a lesson in the power of success driven by cycles of failure coupled with learning.
Failure sucks, but instructs. The wisdom is out there. Can you accept it?
This is number 14 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. Your feedback is most welcome.
20 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I'd be posting these videos even if Paul Bennett and I weren't colleagues at IDEO, so rich and fascinating is this conversation between Paul and Egill Helgason, the host of the Icelandic show Silfur Eglis. Design thinking is a central theme of their time together, and they touch on many important topics of the day, including transparency, community, and how we might move ourselves out of this mess. It's definitely worth a listen.
And don't worry -- it's all in English! Enjoy.
19 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
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I saw two cool things today which renewed my faith in the ability of us all to innovate anywhere. There are tons of things right under our noses which would benefit from a rethink. Today's examples come from two organizations that usually go by their three initials.
The first is Apple's brilliant rethink of "banner" and "skyscraper" ads in the online version of the New York Times:
In these ads, the PC and the Mac guys on the right interact with the Apple Customer Experience banner on the top, and then with the bald guy from the Sopranos in the "Hair Growth Academy" ad on the left. It's funny, witty, clever, and catchy. And it's the first web ad I've clicked on in, well... forever. It's a nice example of an incremental innovation, and I'd love to see the resulting web metrics.
The second piece of inspiration is the Intern Auction being held by Crispin Porter + Bogusky on eBay:
Not only is it a fun way to raise awareness of CP+B's intern program, but it also provides a market check on the value of an internship to clients. Just to be clear, the auction is to buy the services of the intern, not to buy the internship itself. I wonder how much more the internship would sell for in that latter mode?
Thanks to both the NYT and CP+B for an making this an inspirational Monday.
18 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)
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This is the second of my favorite talks coming out of this year's TED conference. Seth Godin takes us through his ideas about leading tribes. I think he does a fabulous job of describing a different way of leading, a way that seems like the perfect fit to our highly networked, interconnected, and (potentially) interdependent world.
His three questions at 14:15 are priceless.
You can't manage a movement. But you can lead one, even cultivate one. Don't be a sheepwalker -- try and lead the tribe that matters most to you.
12 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
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I saw this video clip earlier this week. I love it.
In it I see the following principles we've been discussing over the past few weeks:
Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world
Principle 6: Life life at the intersection
Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't
09 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)
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Odds are your innovation efforts will fail. Bummer. Big, big bummer.
It's tough to bring something new in to the world. Your chances of survival improve with a process informed by design thinking, but it's very likely some key factor -- across desirability, viability, or feasibility -- will not quite be there, and things will go pear-shaped.
This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to win, to make things happen. Quite the opposite: because the odds are so low, it means working even harder, pushing as much as you can to get things right. I don't know about you, but I really hate failing. It feels bad when it happens from a big-picture point of view; I have no problem with a prototype failing (that's a good thing, per Raney's Corollary), but I loathe the idea of something failing at a systemic level. Yuck.
But acknowledging that failure is a likely outcome enables us -- if we work with the end in mind -- to make a leap to a more productive state of being. That state of mind is the focus of Principle 14.
This is number 13 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. Your feedback, ideas, and comments are greatly appreciated.
07 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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Leading people to innovative outcomes has much more in common with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control management techniques. Whereas the later is concerned with efficiencies, coping with scarcity, and always being on top of things, cultivating is about embracing variance, abundance, and the idea of living at the bottom of things. A leadership model based on a cultivation mindset can be found in the following four defining behaviors of cultivators of innovation:
1) Being at the bottom of things
Flourishing gardens come from being at the bottom of things. Instead of pursuing the traditional management goal of being on top of things -- with the lucrative by-product of being at the top of things -- the leader-as-cultivator makes it their job to live simultaneously at the bottom and in the middle and on the edges, dealing with things that might seem like plain manure to outsiders.
It's not lonely at the bottom. The bottom can be a messy place, but it is the wellspring of success when it comes to fostering creativity. With plants, as with people trying to act in creative ways, you can't tell them what to do, but you can try to support what they need to do, matching essential resources to tasks at hand. This is not traditional, I'm-the-heroic-boss leadership. Instead, the creative cultivator takes satisfaction from tending to the health of the overall garden, and wisely leaves the kudos for smelling great and looking good to the roses.
2) Trusting what is there
Creative cultivators trust what is there. A wise cultivator resists the temptation to "dig up the seed as it is growing", as it were, to check if people are being creative enough. Many breakthrough innovation initiatives are stifled by linear project timetables more appropriate to incremental efforts. The paradox of cultivating innovation is that confidence in outcomes is itself an enabler of innovation; a wise gardener knows that roses are the best authorities on the creation of rosiness, and until they bloom, only checks in to see if they need more food and water. Furthermore, creative cultivators trust that the right answers -- though not necessarily the ones they would have thought up themselves -- will emerge from their gardens. So much about what makes a creative organization tick is tacit; it is about what's there and what it creates in an emergent way, rather than what a few brains wish to have happen via explicit processes and goals.
3) Embracing the ecosystem
By their nature, gardens are part of larger ecosystems. Healthy gardens readily accept inputs from the outside world. Rain, seeds, nutrients, soil: we needn't worry where they come from, we just care about their integrity and how they help us grow good stuff. Encouraging variance -- the generation of weird or unexpected ideas -- is a key goal for someone cultivating a creative culture. Anything that encourages variance through the cross-pollination of ideas from outside sources (very much the function of bees) should be reinforced. And as we're sadly seeing out in the world, gardens without the benefit of bees soon stop producing.
Thinking about the long-term health of all stakeholders in an ecosystem is also a signature act of a cultivator. Innovating is a long-term endeavor and requires a great deal of patience, investment, and fortitude. Actions that value short-term productivity over the long-term health of the garden and its larger ecosystem are not conducive to lasting success.
4) Taking a bird's eye view
Finally, creative cultivators do all of the above while simultaneously curating the garden from a bird's eye view. Managing a portfolio of creative endeavors requires knowing how many plants a certain piece of land can support and then pruning or culling as need be. As Principle 9 states, sometimes you have to prune (or kill) ideas and projects. Doing the most with the resources at hand, listening to what works and what doesn't, and guiding growth to be something unique and wonderful – that is the essence of strategy, and of gardening as well. Most importantly, by taking a bird's eye view, a creative cultivator creates the context for plants to grow in accordance with a strong vision of how the garden should evolve. In organizations, this means having points of origin that can inspire individuals to be creative in certain ways, and not others, and to innovate in the right directions.
Taken together, these four ways of leading should help innovations flourish. Instead of trying to manage innovation, we must move to a model of leadership that's all about cultivating it.
This is number twelve in a series of 21 principles. Your feedback is most welcome.
06 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
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Given all the challenges we face in the world, we need to everyone to innovate. Everyone is potentially creative and able to bring something new in to the world. The idea that there two types of people: "creatives" and everyone else, is but a myth, albeit a damaging one at that. Up and down an organization, everyone needs time to innovate.
If you're sitting at the top of an organization, or in a position with a high degree of gravitational pull, you need time to innovate. To get the most out of it, your time spent innovating should take the form of helping other people grow and setting things up to be successful. Your innovations will deal with setting the stage in the right way for the right things to happen, and with architecting systems, teams, and structures so that appropriate behaviors emerge given the innovation challenge at hand.
If you're working on the front lines of an organization (where some might describe you as being at the "bottom"), you need time to innovate. Because you are doing the critical work of the organization, you're the most in touch with the people who benefit from its offerings. You can use the tools of design thinking to start making a difference today in how you make those people feel. Figure out what they need that you're giving them, make some prototypes, and start testing them. Cycle though that and improve the way things get done. It takes time, but the potential benefits are enormous.
Note well that I'm not saying that everyone should be creative all the time. Far from it: we need people to be executing when they should be executing. Land that 747 safely, mend that broken leg, receive that shipment of returned goods, and file that tax return. But for the critical questions of how, let's give everyone more time to make it all better.
This is the eleventh of 21 principles. I really do appreciate your feedback and ideas.
04 May 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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