metacool

Where's your place for failing?

I heard this statement expressed the other week while walking around the campus of a thriving business:

                "This is the building where we do failure"

A very simple statement, but very deep.  It referred to a building dedicated to the support of prototyping behavior.  In other words, a place where people are encouraged to craft probes in to the future, each designed to bring back a bit of evidence meant to guide decision making.

What I also found significant about this place is that it is open to anyone.  It's not a special lab or skunkworks for a select group of people.  Anyone can walk in and do failure.  I think this is an important kind of resource to have available if your organization is serious about engaging in innovation on a routine basis, whether that innovation be incremental or evolutionary in nature.

There's a Field of Dreams aspect to having a place designed for failure.  You have to believe.  In particular, three points of belief are key to sustaining a place for failure, otherwise it won't get used in the right way or even understood:

1. You can prototype anything
2. You can prototype with anything
3. Failure sucks, but instructs

At the end of the day, having a place responsible for the creation of variance, fueled by intuition and experimentation and optimism, is key to making failure instructive and productive.

 

metacool Thought of the Day

"There are those who do the real work of the world, and those who hound them."

- William F. Milliken

My workplace is a weird and wonderful place

As a rule, I don't write much of anything here about my job at IDEO, but in this case, I have to make an exception.

Here's what life looks like in place that likes to build stuff, do stuff, and generally kick ass.  We have a yearly Halloween party where various IDEO'ers put together costumes, scarf some pizza, and generally have a good time.  This year, however, the ante got upped, and things were, well... thrilling.

In what kind of organizational culture do people dedicate multiple lunch hours to practice dance moves?  This one.  Creative genius at work.  And look at the all the obvious love and support they get from assembled coworkers.  Cool.

DigitAll magazine

Here's a link to an interview I did with Samsung's DigitAll magazine.  Also interviewed are Dave Lawrence of Shimano, Pandora's Tim Westergren, and Chris Beard from Mozilla.  There's some interesting stuff in there.

metacool Thought of the Day

failure sucks, but instructs

Another golden insight from Indexed

For my MBA friends (apologies to Dr. Porter)

Designing by influence

The current issue of Fast Company has a great article about the way HP's corporate design group influences the rest of the organization.  I found the article fascinating -- it's a great example of designing for business.

It's also a good example of why there's no silver bullet when it comes to getting an organization to integrate the design process in to the way it goes to market.  I love most of Apple's products, but I also realize that the way it goes about innovating -- a centralized, low-variance, top-down approach -- isn't the answer for every organization.  With HP, for example, you have a decentralized company where the leaders of individual business units are very powerful.  A centralized innovation model based on power wouldn't work well there.  As the article shows, what does seem to be working at HP is an approach based on influence, as well as on showing the distributed decision makers what could happen.  It's all about looking hard at the constituent parts that make up a culture -- people, resources, processes and values -- and then structuring a congruent approach.  Good stuff.

Strategy that makes your hands bleed

I'm mildly addicted to cable TV.  I simply can't get enough of two shows on Discovery Channel: Dirty Jobs and Build it Bigger.  Both of these shows revolve around a witty, game, and willing host who puts himself in to the middle of projects where things are being built, renovated, restored, maintained, or torn down.  These aren't shows about stuff, they're shows about the reality of making stuff and keeping stuff viable.  I call them "build" shows because they deal with atoms, not just ideas, and atoms tend to have a mind of their own... building things is a tough past time.  Talking about doing things is one thing; doing them is quite another.

I'm a big believer in knowing how to build things before you begin to decide what to build.  In other words, at an individual, team, group, and organizational level, deeply understand execution before you engage in strategy.  If innovation is about using ideas to make a change in the world, then the ability to execute is vital, and the ability to know what can be executed is even more important.  Building informs one's ability to know what will work the next time you go to the strategy board.

Building is not only important as a way to shape one's ability to formulate strategy.  Especially important is the notion that building is strategy, or that building as you go is a key way to coax an emergent strategy in to being.  The other day I was shooting the breeze with a colleague who made the observation that the way we (him, me, and design thinkers in general) formulate strategy is by making our hands bleed.  We in other words, we take our notions of strategy and build them, whether they be of bricks or bytes, and we let the results kick the crap our of precious notions of what should have worked.  Sometimes building a prototype will literally cut your fingers  -- or, heaven forbid, take them off -- but even a HTML protoype can deal a nasty sting to one's ego.  But that's the way to go. Know by doing, do because you know.

Perhaps strategy should make your hands bleed.

Finding Steve Fossett

I just spent part of an hour looking for Steve Fossett via Amazon's Mechanical Turk.  Fossett has been missing since he took off in a Citabria on September 3.

It was very easy.  I searched about 7 square kilometers of Nevada in just 40 minutes.  Here are the directions given by Amazon:

Instructions

You will be shown a single satellite image. The task is to flag any satellite images which contain foreign objects that may resemble Steve's airplane or parts of a plane. Steve's plane will show up as a regular object with sharp edges, white or nearly white, about 21 pixels long and 30 pixels in wingspan.

Notes

If in doubt, be conservative and mark the image. For complete coverage, we've set up this HIT such that multiple people will cover the same area several times over. Please do your best, but do not worry that missing one little detail will be tragic. It will get caught.

Marked images will be sent to a team of specialists who will determine if they contain information on the whereabouts of Steve Fossett.

Friends and family of Steve Fossett would like to thank you for helping them with this cause.

          

You basically just scan, and click "yes" or "no".  Here's what the interface looks like:

Per the open source dictum that many brains make deep bugs shallow, I hope that in this case many turks make a lost plane findable.  This a striking yet tragic example of the power the web has to facilitate networked collaborations of broad scale and scope.  You can help here.

Director's Commentary: the Ferrari F2007

Here's a Director's Commentary by proxy.  Former Formula 1 mechanic turned author and commentator Steve Matchett walks us around some of the aerodynamic details on the Ferrari F2007 Formula 1 car. 

Warning!  There's a lot of gearheadedness here.  It's a quick watch though, and even if you're not in to the extreme technological thinking that goes in to a modern F1 car, it is worth thinking about this:  what might happen if all the human ingenuity currently being poured in to carving out the tiniest margins of relative performance were instead focused upon creating paradigm shifts in the way we move across the planet?  That would be mind-boggling, I suspect.

Unfortunately, motorsports has become largely a game of incremental innovation.  It needs to be a place where revolutionary innovation is not just encouraged, but essential.

Well, a guy can dream.  Until then, tomorrow's Grand Prix is at Monza, my favorite circuit on the calendar.  It's the hallowed ground were the greatest racers like Nuvolari, Fangio, and Moss all plied their craft.  I might even get up at 4am to watch it live. 

Go Massa!  Forza Ferrari!

A wonderful book about an amazing innovator

The past few weeks I've had the pleasure of making my way through a wonderful book about the amazing life and times of Bill Milliken.   The title is Equations of Motion: Adventure, Risk and Innovation.  An MIT engineer by training, Milliken's varied and exciting life makes Indiana Jones seem a wimp by comparison, and places Buckaroo Banzai in the category of simpleton.  Here's his bio from the publisher of the book:

William F. Milliken was born in Old Town, Maine in 1911. He graduated MIT in 1934. During World War II he was Chief Flight Test Engineer at Boeing Aircraft. From 1944, he was managing director at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory (CAL/Calspan), retiring as the head of the Transportation Research Division, which he founded.

Bill joined the SCCA in 1946 (Competition License No. 6) and contested over 100 races as well as holding many responsible club positions. Milliken Research Associates was founded in 1976 and continues as a foundational research asset to the automotive and auto racing industries. Bill remains active in MRA, which is now run by his son, Douglas L. Milliken.

Bill is co-author of Race Car Vehicle Dynamics and Chassis Design. He is an SAE Fellow, member of the SCCA Hall of Fame, recipient of the SAE Edward N. Cole Award, the Laura Taber Barbour Air Safety Award and many other citations for innovation.

Today Bill lives in the Buffalo, New York area with his wife, Barbara. He continues to consult with racing and chassis engineers. He jogs around the half-mile track behind his home and spends several evenings at the gym.

This book works on many levels.  It's a fascinating look at the world of aviation pre- and post-WW II.  You get a ringside seat at the dawn of the sports car movement in the United States.  It is an honest glimpse at what life was like in America around the turn of the Twentieth Century, and what it feels like to enter early adulthood under the weight of a major economic depression.  Most of all, it's a tribute to what it means to be a racer, to be an entrepreneur and a generative person, to get up each morning and say "How am I going to change the world today?".

I believe "design" is a verb and "innovation" is best thought of as the outcome of relatively tight set of behaviors and life attitudes embodied to their fullest by people like Bill Milliken.  He designed his life, and continues to live a remarkable one today.   

I love this book.

PS:  if you don't have the time (or inclination) to read Equations of Motion, please take a look at this charming profile of Milliken written by Karl Ludvigsen: Mister Supernatural

Imagining innovative behavior, vividly

I don't believe creativity is about thinking outside of the box.  I think it's about making connections across otherwise unconnected boxes; it's about pattern recognition.

So, if you will, please indulge me as I communicate a creative link I just made across the writing of two of my colleagues/friends/fellow bloggers, Bob Sutton and John Maeda.  Lately I've been thinking a lot about what happens when human nature meets the need for organizations to be scalable and sustainable, and I think Professors Sutton and Maeda have -- quite independently -- hit upon a key point.  First, Maeda:

When I was younger, I often tended to think the worst of others when I felt sleighted in some seemingly unfortunate way. "I have been wronged because other person X has intentionally wronged me with motive Y." I punish the other person by publicly expressing person X's (alleged and) imagined motive Y.

Often you discover that your imagination has done its work the way it should -- it imagined something happened in elegant detail without ever actually happening. The net result is not only embarrassment, but even worse your own poor intentions or habits with respect to others are revealed. You imagine most vividly what you do yourself.

The best route is to avoid situations of thinking ill of others by enacting exemplar behaviors yourself. You are likely to be in a better position as you are in a better mood and more resilient to adopting negative behavior -- thus affecting your surrounds with the positive energy necessary to do amazing things in this world.

And then Sutton, as expressed in two points from his "15 Things I Believe" manifesto:

6. You get what you expect from people. This is especially true when it comes to selfish behavior; unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm, not an unwavering feature of human behavior.

8. Avoid pompous jerks whenever possible. They not only can make you feel bad about yourself, chances are that you will eventually start acting like them.

I believe quite strongly that people are more likely to engage in innovative behavior when they are in a flow-like state of happiness.  It's hard to be innovative when you are unhappy yourself, because as Maeda says, "You imagine most vividly what you do yourself."  And it's hard to engage in innovative, value-creating behavior when you're only looking out for Number One -- all the innovative cultures I've had the pleasure to work in were notable for their relative lack of narcissistic behavior.  If, as Sutton says, "... unvarnished self-interest is a learned social norm...", then innovative behavior should be one, too.  People aren't innovative or not, but their behaviors, thoughts, and attitudes are.

Thank you for the connection, John and Bob.

metacool Thought of the Day

"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."

- Sir Ken Robinson

Sometimes the best brainstorms...

... can happen as "estorms". 

It's all about maximizing variance.  So if you can include 20,000 people instead of 20, why not go for it?

You go, Brad!  Can't wait to pay it a visit when I'm out in Boulder.

A school for learning

I'm fascinated by Fuji Kindergarten, as profiled by Fiona Wilson in Monocle magazine.  Fuji Kindergarten is a school whose building was designed by Tezuka Architects.

I wish my kids could go to Fuji Kindergarten.  I wish I could have gone to Fuji Kindergarten.  I wish I could go now.  Fuji Kindergarten, I reckon, is what happens when "chutes and ladders" meets a thought experiment about education which goes back to first principles.  What  makes it so unusual an educational institution is that it places the most emphasis on learning, rather than on teaching.  And on students rather than teachers (and, I'd wager, on teachers rather than administrative staff...).  Think about that one for a while.

Next time I travel to Japan, I'm going to try and visit Fuji Kindergarten.  In the mean time, I'm going to try and apply some of its lessons to our own school project over here at Stanford, called the d.school.  Perhaps we can work harder to make the architecture really support the learning process behind design thinking.

By the way, I'm beginning to really dig Monocle magazine.

The Name of the Game is Work

The big thing about playing video games used to be that they were the new golf, a novel way to hang with friends and business associates in order to maybe bond, collude, or even get some productive work done.  But it's not just about golf anymore:  Aili McConnon from BusinessWeek just published an article about the intersection of work and gaming, and I'm here to tell you that video gaming is about work.  I even landed a quote in there referencing the lessons to be had from playing MMOG's: 

The lessons learned in these games become increasingly useful as companies become less command-and-control and more a series of distributed networks around the world.  The future of work is here; it's just disguised as a game.

The article also talks through some interesting game-related stories from McKinsey, J&J, and Philips, and also has a great insight from my Stanford d.school partner in crime Bob Sutton. 

I really do think that you can learn a lot about where this whole Web 2.0 thing is going by playing games online.  Learning by doing, serious play, and all that.

It's time for BarCamp!

Innovators of the world, unite!  Check out BarCamp this weekend.

There's an interesting software innovation cluster evolving in downtown Palo Alto, and I'm happy to report that part of BarCamp -- DesignCamp -- will be held at one of our buildings at IDEO.  Perhaps I'll see you there (if I'm not breathing octane at the Monterey Historics, that is).

Innovating past the leading edge

An extra heaping serving of power-on oversteer, anyone?

This video is a hot lap of Laguna Seca as seen by driver Michael Sheehan behind the wheel of a gnarly -- gnarly! -- 1968 McLaren M6B Can-Am racing car. To be precise, this doesn't seem much like driving a normal car to me; it seems to have much more in common with being strapped to the tip of an ICBM.  Here's what lighting the wick on a M6B feels like, in the words of Sheehan:

This was the car driven by ex-Formula 1 driver (and race winner) Jo Bonnier. The car has in the neighborhood of 600hp and weighs in around 1,700lbs. It's an aluminum monocoque, which is very different from modern racecars. Think of it as sheet aluminum origami secured with rivets. The only "safety cage" to speak of is a not very confidence inspiring main hoop, braced only with a stringer from the center top of the hoop back to the head on the engine, which is secured with removable pins.

Let me honest by saying that I currently feel like someone has beaten the crap out of me with a baseball bat. My lats, shoulders, pecs and upper arms are sore from wrestling with the car. I have a bruise/abrasion the size of a Coke can on my right buttock from sitting directly on the aluminum floor. Don't ask me how, I still don't know. Oh, and despite the earplugs, my ears are still ringing. All in all, I couldn't be happier and I wouldn't change a thing. Every muscle ache brings a happy memory back from yesterday.

Aside from being remarkably gnarly, the McLaren M6B is the tangible expression of a wildly successful innovation program called the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am.  Can-Am was a racing series which attracted the very best engineers and drivers.  What made it unique was its lack of rules.  The only real constraints facing the teams particpating in Can-Am were time, money, and the physical layout of the tracks to be raced on.  When it came to what you wanted to race, the sky was the limit -- and it engendered some incredible designs, including the some very advanced aerodynamic and structural solutions.  And horsepower came oozing out of every nook and crevice, leading up to the amazing Penske Porsche 917, whose dominance effectively killed the series, because it "cracked" the code -- no further innovation was possible given period technology, no matter one's budget.

What's the lesson for creating innovative behavior?  It's that macro conditions matter the most when your goal is to push the state of the art.  Setting macro context is more important than mapping out a golden strategy at the micro level.  If you want to produce astoundingly innovative solutions in a revolutionary sense, perhaps the best thing you is to set a few very broad boundary conditions, such as time and money, and then let everyone go do their thing.  In this way, Can-Am was very much an early type of automotive X PRIZE, if one which pursued a very different performance vector.  Just as in an X PRIZE competition, the governing body behind Can-Am declared set amounts of prize money, told people where and when to come and do performance tests, and then watched lots of adult human beings spend lots of blood, sweat, tears, and cash in the pursuit of victory.  Can-Am was the ultimate in high-variance automotive innovation, and at the right end of the Gaussian distribution of car designs came things like the M6B.  And they were awesome.

For the serious UGG types among you, here's a twenty-five minute video of Sheehan driving a race around Laguna Seca:

The annual Monterey Historic Races are on August 17-19, and the West Coast staff of metacool will there in force.  The races are not just a great chance to see historic pieces of machinery such as the M6B in action, but are a wonderful way to appreciate the ingenuity, courage, and sheer beauty involved in this human endeavor we call design.

Open Source Hardware

I'm violating the "metacool employees shall not write blog posts past 10pm on a school night" rule by posting this, but I'm simply too excited not to.  As a recovering mechanical design engineer who has a thing for software in general -- and a big thing for open source software in particular -- Brad Feld's recent post about Bug Labs is just plain cool.  I can't wait to see what comes out of this.

Of course, there's nothing that says that only software creation can benefit from an open source approach.  Mozilla has shown that you can take an open source approach to marketing.  And Threadless says something (if not something deep) about open sourcing content.  These are exciting times to be in the business of creating stuff.  Yes indeed.

This notion is nothing new.  The ur open source piece of hardware is the Chevy small-block V8.  Hubba hubba.

Wordless

I've been tracking my usage of Word versus Google Documents over the past month, and for the first time I've done more work "online" than "ondisk".  In many, many ways, working with text and spreadsheet documents online is a much better fit for the realities of my life.  For example:

• I'm really wary of losing my data.  I think Google takes better care of my data than I ever could.
• I'm wary of mechanical breakdowns.  My last PowerBook got bent like a banana (wasn't my fault).  It could happen again.  But I never want to lack access to my data again.
• I use multiple computers.  I'm so over lugging my five-pound laptop to and from my work office and home and to classrooms at Stanford.  Much better to be able to access things from any computer.
• I like to share.  When it comes to thinking and creating, I'm an extrovert.  I like to share, or to have the  option to share, documents with other people.  You can do that with Word, but the tracking and rev control features provided by Google are far superior, in my opinon.

Yes, I need an Internet connection to access this stuff.  But, at least where I live, WiFi is almost as ubiquitous as clean, running water.  And yes, Google has my data and it's public (so I don't put private stuff up there for now), but our government reads my emails and probably listens to my phone calls, so...

None of my reasons for liking software as a service are new.  In fact, they're exactly the talking points I used when I was responsible for marketing an accounting "software as service" offering -- QuickBooks Online Edition -- about six years ago, before this stuff was cool (by the way, QuickBooks Online has over 100,000 customers now... sweet!).  But Google's apps, as simple as they are, really hit a sweet spot for me.  As does the Typepad service I use to put up this blog, the Gmail I use to talk to people who email me from this blog... and many other apps.  It'll only get better when I start (I hope) using an iPhone in a year or two.

I'll be at the iMeme conference tomorrow, so I hope to hear more about where "software" is heading.  But I'm convinced this stuff is for real.  It has crossed the chasm, and Google is ready to seriously disrupt Microsoft's Office.  This is good for us users.

More Garage Majal...

My Garage Majal post touched a nerve.  Had a great discussion in comments, and received some strongly worded emails.  Thanks for those -- I learned a lot from the feedback.

Brendan Eich of Mozilla wrote a post back in April called Open Source and "Openness", and it sheds some good light on the argument I was trying to make about "brilliant networks".  Here's a quote:

Successful open source projects combine meritocratic leadership, "doing" more than "talking", and breadth through well-scoped extension mechanisms. It's not enough to do great work by oneself: each committer who has the stamina and remains engaged must spend time listening to users and developers, grooming helpers and successors, and refactoring or even redesigning to support what becomes, module by module, a platform.

I think we're entering a period where a new style of leadership -- let's call it web leadership -- is emerging.  Brilliant networks aren't bereft of great leadership.  Far from it.  It's just that the leadership style required in a network is something quite different from what we're used to.  Something to ponder over the next few weeks.

Innovation Lessons from Garage Majal

Here's an interesting article about Ron Dennis, the leader of McLaren.  That's him on the right in the photo above, accompanied by the author of the article, semiotician Stephen Bayley.  It's a fascinating walk through the McLaren Technology Centre, which is where wickedly beautiful and effective machines like McLaren F1 racers and the Mercedes SLR are wrought.

One can't read about Ron Dennis without thinking about Steve Jobs.  Both have created high-performance organizations which are able to innovate on a routine basis.  Both run organizations which are hierarchical and honest about it.  As Dennis remarks to Bayley, "Dust can be eliminated," and I think that's as much an organizational metaphor as a statement about the level of hygiene found at McLaren.

How does one organize for innovation?  I'm beginning to think there's a bimodal answer at work:  either build an organization around an exceptionally "right" individual like Jobs or Dennis, and have every aspect of it amplify their personal decision making abilities, or build a powerful network of individuals, a la Mozilla, which determines what is "right" based on the power of thousands of individuals -- some talented, some not so -- making deep bugs shallow.  In other words, brilliant dictator, or brilliant network.  Between those reigns the mediocrity of committees and task forces and focus groups.

What do you think?

Prophet of Innovation

I haven't posted anything about innovation in the last week or so because I've been busy making my way through the wonderful pages of Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction. 

Penned by Harvard Business School's Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation is an entrancing look at Schumpeter's life and work.  I'm less than a third of the way though its 736 pages, and I've already learned a great deal about this subject innovation which is so dear to my heart.  It's Schumpeter who lent shape to many of the ideas, constructs -- even a worldview -- which inform life here in Silicon Valley, as well as in any economic system where advancement is valued more than stability. 

I've been hearing from a lot of folks that this "innovation thing" has peaked.  As a fad, perhaps.  But as a way of seeing the world, let alone a pragmatic way to improve the quality of life on this planet, innovation is much more than just the hottest management trend.  What Schumpeter saw 90-odd years ago is still in force today, and though context may change, I believe he uncovered some basic truths about the way that macro and micro economic policies can create a fertile field for innovative behavior to flourish.

I love this book.

Meine erste Million

I recently wrote a brief essay on the subject of "Der wird Millionar" for the Folio magazine of the Swiss newspaper Neue Zurcher Zeitung.  I talked about the design of the Toyota Prius -- I've been thinking a lot about the Prius lately -- and, more broadly, on the topic of how green products need to become much more red.  In essence, on what I believe is the critical importance of understanding what makes for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness and then building that sensibility in to green market offerings.

The essay is available here.  I wrote in English, but I think it sounds cooler in German.

Be sure to check out all the other "Der wird Millionar" essays in the issue by this amazing group of thinkers and doers:

• Luca Turin
• Jan Chipchase
• Regine Debatty
• Saul Griffith
• Reto Wettach
• Warren Spector
• and last, but absolutely positively not least, my favorite blogging buddy Russell Davies

Why Ivy Ross rules

Amdextrous Magazine recently ran a wonderful interview with Ivy Ross.  The interview was done by Alison King, and I find it simply stunning.  I've read it many times over, and I hope you find it as interesting as I have.  Here are a few fascinating excerpts.

On the importance of meaning:

Let's face it.  Everyone has everything.  We are not about price anymore.  Everything exists at every price level.  It's about the connection you find with the object.

On the power of unleashing your personal design thinking process:

I had to think about my own creative process.  What I did for myself was feed myself.  I took on a question and ate absolutely everything I could.  I allowed myself freedom to explore, without restrictions, and at a really organic pace.  I was like a kid.

On the drivers of innovative behavior:

I also believe that creativity and innovation are built around trust and freedom.  Companies don't get that.  They think it is a process.  It is really about creating trust between the people creating and the freedom to go to new places.

Go ahead, and download this PDF of the interview and give it a read.  You won't be disappointed.

More news from the world of CIA-KGB

Dennis Whittle, the Chairman and CEO of Global Giving, is blogging about the student projects which were launched a few days ago in my CIA-KGB class at the Stanford d.school.  The class project ended up being a good experience because Dennis and many others from Global Giving gave an enormous amount of their time to help support the students in their work to create infectious action around the idea of social entrepreneurship in general, and Global Giving in particular.  Here's an excerpt from his blog:

I was absolutely stunned by what each [group] could deliver in such as short period.

I was, too.  And since I think innovation only happens when real change is made in the world, I'm looking forward to seeing the impact of the six student projects over the next few months.  Here's the first of Dennis's posts on the class: 

You did THAT in FOUR weeks?

Chaos... Variance... Volume

John's Maeda's Liu Lecture at Stanford was, as expected, excellent.

Three themes from his words and thoughts are buzzing around my head:

1. Chaos:  when we think about organizations, we want to create order, right?  Maybe.  When is chaos a desirable state of being?  Good question.  Perhaps it's when chaos begets...
2. Variance: weird ideas are the stuff of breakthrough innovations.  If you're not creating weird stuff, you're not producing those sixth-sigma disasters/opportunities which light the way to new paradigms.  To create variance, you need to do stuff in high...
3. Volume: the way to create a few great things is to crank out a lot of bad crap.  As Bob Sutton says, "...the most creative people don’t have higher hit rates, they just do and make more stuff."

Buzz buzz.

metacool Thought of the Day

"A beautiful side effect of making things is you start to look around and wonder, 'how did they do that?'; you learn to see, analyze, and appreciate different approaches, well-made things, and clever solutions."
- Lili Cheng

Flying ARSES and other adventures in design thinking

oooooph.  I just took Bob Sutton's new Flying ARSE self-assessment test, and I barely threaded the needle between unbelievable perfection and being a borderline arse.  It's a fun little test, and a good reminder that The Brand Called You is but a fragile flower, easily damaged in liminal spaces such as an airliner.

I love the fact that Dr. Robert Sutton, esteemed Stanford tenured professor, is enthusiastically putting up quick and dirty web apps like this, the original ARSE test, and -- my favorite -- ArseMail.  He does them without a lot of drama, ships something quick-like, and then starts iterating them to perfection based on feedback from real users.  And he taps a system of connected mavens to spread the word.  Sounds like creating infectious action to me.  Doing cool stuff and shipping it. 

Design thinking and doing, in other words.

Embracing Risk

I have a new article about design thinking and risk in the Spring 2007 issue of Rotman Magazine (PDF download).  It's on page 57 of what is a quite impressive collection of articles -- lots to chew on in there.  Low risk, I assure you.

This one, as with Getting to Where You Want to Go, is a result of my continuing professional collaboration with Ryan Jacoby, one of my colleagues at IDEO.

As always, please let me know what you think with an email or a comment below.

update 28may07:  I'm pleased to announce that this article can now be found over at BusinessWeek magazine

Spreading Firefox, Creating Infectious Action

After just two weeks of work, CIA-KGB students launched their solutions to help Mozilla attract and retain users of Firefox.  Actually, it wasn't really two weeks -- it was eight working days and four weekend days.  As you'll see by clicking through on the URL's, below, each team of four students accomplished an incredible amount of work.  When was the last time you went from zero knowledge in a subject area to putting something real and working in to the world in just two weeks?  While working the equivalent of three or four other full-time jobs?  I'm amazed.

For example, the team behind My eBay Fox created an entire toolbar which enables any Firefox user to manage all of their eBay activities directly from the Firefox browser.  Plus, it gives users some additional functionality not available on the eBay website. Wow.  That's the power of the human-centered design process driven by a multidisciplinary team capable of dealing with human, technical, and business factors.

Here they are -- check 'em all out!

My eBay Fox

Firefox Got Your Back

Underdog

Firefox 4 Life

PuckFox Cup

Everyday Hero

It's important to note that this is only a launch and not a final deliverable.  We'll be tracking the progress and performance of each project over the next 5-6 weeks.  It will be very interesting to see how each of them evolve.

If you don't hear from me...

... for a few months, it's because I'm watching all of these videos.

Hours and hours of amazing insights, stories and ideas, all over at the amazing new TED website. 

It's a good time to be alive.

metacool Thought of the Day

Wouldn't it be great to work in a place where it was okay to wear a sign like this on your back?  At least when working toward evolutionary or revolutionary innovation outcomes?  I know I would like it.

This photo is from Russell Davies's blog, and here's how he describes it:

This is the sign on the back of those blue London 'driver under instruction' buses that London Transport use to teach bus drivers how to, er, drive buses.  It's incredibly disarming. It would be good if someone could attach this message to the internet and then maybe everyone would be nicer. We're all still learning.

Thanks Russell.  We are all still learning -- especially if we're growing.

Clusters and Crazies

Last week I found myself answering some routine questions around the usual "why Silicon Valley and not [insert locale here]?"

And I gave all the usual answers:  great universities, great people who come and stick around, high housing prices that make one desperate to build equity, cluster effects, and a positive (or vicious, depending on how you look at it) cycle feeding all of the above.

But I neglected to mention San Francisco.  Shame on me.  Yes, I think San Francisco, with all of its entrenched looniness and bohemian iconoclasm, is like a little innovation gallbladder injecting creative bile down into the capitalist digestive tract that is Silicon Valley.  Call it trickle down innovation, or a spark plug effect, but I truly believe that all the free thinking (and doing -- lots of doing) up there makes a difference down here in the 'burbs.

In case you doubt me, please turn your gaze to Exhibit A:

7TH ANNUAL'BYOBW'
BIG WHEEL RACE
FREE OUTDOOR EVENT
EASTER SUNDAY, APRIL 8th 2007
4 PM
TOP OF LOMBARD ST, SF
BIG PEOPLE ON KID'S TOYS
NO RUBBER WHEELS
HAND-MADE PRIZES
FUN!

Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go

My IDEO colleague Ryan Jacoby and I recently published a piece in the Design Management Review titled Innovation, Growth, and Getting to Where You Want to Go.

Please give it a read and let me know what you think, or leave a comment below.

Neato stuff going on everywhere

Wow!  Look at all this innovative stuff my friends are up to.  This is all so fun, I've gotta share it with you:

• Bob just shipped ArseMail.  Send one to a friend.
• Reilly was kind enough to post this crashtacular video on his magazine's blog.  The management here at metacool recently instructed us to make dramatic cuts in the number of violent, automotive-themed videos on display, so I'm having to resort to asking my friends to post the killer videos I stumble upon.  Oh, what a pity to see a tasty Glas GT barrel rolled.  Oh, and be sure to wear your seatbelt when carving up a roadcourse in your Beetle.  Yikes -- remind me never to drive a car with swing axles or a trailing arm rear suspension.  Oh wait, there's one in my garage.  Never mind...
• Brian is starting to market Golaces.  I love this product, and have them on my "New Beetle" Converse shoes.  They turn any lace shoe in to a slip-on, and they're a promotional marketer's dream.  Brian is a former student of mine over at the d.school, so this stuff makes me especially happy.
• Russell is starting a conference called Interesting2007, scheduled for June.  Where does he get the energy to do everything he does?  And how is there enough time in the day to do it all?  And with such panache?  Good on you, Russell.  I want to go -- sounds like there will be good cakes served.

How cool is it to live in a time where everyone can have a website to show what they're up to?  Life is good.

The power of mixing

Above is a tasty brew I stumbled upon in the course of some world travels.  Fermented brew plus Kona coffee.  Who knew?  It tastes pretty good, actually... like good coffee.  Iced coffee, that is.

You can either invent something new to the world (hard to do), or you can borrow liberally to build a better mousetrap (easier to do).  Taking an ingredient out of its original context is a good way to innovate, and it can result in some potent outcomes:

• Yield-management practices from the hoteling industry applied to air travel changes the way tickets are priced and sold
• Your chocolate sticking out of my peanut butter
• A big motor squeezed in to a small chassis (the BMW 2002) creates a new category of car, the sports sedan
• Cato and Nash
• A commodity hard drive married up to a Walkman-style player gives us -- you guessed it! -- the iPod
• Tango and Cash
• The caffeinated doughnut

That's a very short list -- thousands of innovative products have come about from taking two known but separate ingredients and kapow! slam! zoom!  putting them together in a way that creates value.  Slamming, smashing things together comes from making cross-industry connections.  And in an interesting way, it's a good strategy for reducing risk.  While unknown in the context of your competitive environment, something like yield management science or Cash or a big car motor is something already tested and proven and evolved by others.  So you're less likely to end up with arrows in your back.

Who wants more risk than necessary, anyhow?  Mix it up.

Introducing Creating Infectious Action, Kindling Gregarious Behavior (CIA-KGB), to be taught starting in April at the Stanford Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford

Wow, what a lot of fun that namestorm was!  The "KGB"  names are still rolling in, and I have to say there was some very creative thinking going on (see Reilly's comments on the previous post below).  The winner is Kindling Gregarious Behavior, because it sounds good, actually describes the content and aim of the course (not a bad thing at all when you think about it) and -- best of all for me -- it echoes the observation that Wikia CEO Gil Penchina made on a panel I hosted at last year's AlwaysOn conference.  Gil made the point that, instead of spending all your time, energy, money and luck building a big bonfire on your own and then hoping that a bunch of other people will choose to come and sit around it, why not identify all the myriad little campfires burning around you and pour a little gas on each one?  That's the way infectious action and gregarious behavior get fed.  It's not about some big top-down mission, though centralized thinking matters.  It's about embracing the power of the community.  It's about kindling.

Anyway, I'm really excited to be teaching CIA-KGB along with a truly fabulous -- FABULOUS! -- teaching team.  We learned a lot teaching CIA last year (and got lots of great coverage in BusinessWeek and other august journals), so this year we've made some tweaks to the class to try and make it an even better experience.  This year's class will again involve a creating infectious action project for the good folks at Mozilla, and will then focus on a project for Global Giving.  I'm very excited to be working with Global Giving, and it already feels good to be brainstorming project ideas with my Mozilla friends.

This will not be your usual classroom experience.  Everything is real, everything is open-ended, and the sky is the limit.  It'll be scary.  It'll be fun.  It'll be something, hopefully, which knocks your hat in the creek.  As if all that weren't enough, it looks like Global Giving will be supporting some summer internship positions for CIA-KGB students who A), kick butt in the class, and B) want to keep working on Global Giving-related issues.  How cool is that?

Are you a Stanford student with Master's standing?  Please consider applying for the course.  You can find an application here.  It's due March 9, and we'll be selecting 24 people to part of the CIA-KGB classroom community.  The journey is the reason we do all of this, and the fruit of the voyage will be more experience with the design thinking process as well as further developing methodologies for creating infectious action and kindling gregarious behavior.

CIA-KGB namestorming progress

Hi.  Lots of great name ideas streaming in for the "KGB" part of CIA-KGB.  Here's a sample:

• Keep Getting Better
• Killer Great Branding
• Knowledge Generating Beauty
• Kindling Gregarious Behavior
• Know Go Bot

I like 'em all.  What I've learned is that the name needs to be of parallel structure to CIA, which stands for "Creating Infectious Action".  If you have any more ideas, let me know.  We'll decide the name soon.

Thinking about Toyota

A must-read about Toyota: From 0 to 60 to World Domination

How does Toyota win?  By coming an evidence-based culture with an eye to the long view.  By investing in incremental innovations to build long-term brand equity, and investing the payback in revolutionary innovations like the Prius.  By paying attention to technical details and to the humans who design and build the cars and those who service and drive them.

It seems simple, right?  Realization and implementation are so tough.

Michael Brecker: Naima

Venture Design, part 23

I love this post from Guy Kawasaki:  Is a Business Plan Necessary?

For all but the most incremental of innovation efforts, a comprehensive business plan is shot in the dark.   You're guaranteed to be 100% wrong.  So why try to be 100% right and successful in planning a business venture, when what the humans who will make or break you really only care about something which is 70% "good" execution?  Don't get me wrong -- a business plan is really valuable as an exercise in logical thinking.  But to mistake it for an exercise in producing a tangible reality is to build castles in the air. 

Don't waste your time.  Build to think.  Just do it.

metacool Thought of the Day

"For the longest time ideation was about throwing out as many ideas as you can. We've realized pretty quickly it's really not about a bunch of ideas, it's about really good strategy, alignment with business, diagnostics, and deep customer understanding...Then, the ideas are no longer just about the product, they're about new business models and how you go to market, and what's your supply chain like."

- Sam Lucente

Public Progress Lists

I suppose a natural extension of the "public to-do list" concept we explored a while back on metacool would be something like a "public progress report".  Assuming the to-do list was on the web and somewhat wiki-like, you'd be able to click-thru on any individual to-do list item to see its status.  The progress report could take the form of a blog.

Once you were there, you could be part of making it  happen.  Offer some advice.  Find out how to help.  Cheer the effort on.  Or just send some love.

A good example of a public progress report is Russell Davies's nonentity fat club blog, which plays yin to the yang of his eggsbaconchipsandbeans blog.  It's been cool to track the progress of his entire getting in shape effort, and it makes me want to run (or walk) out and get a Nike+ setup.  Especially with nifty data services available like Justdoing.it, which allows you to set up a RSS badge of your running data.  For use on your public progress report, of course.

Zooming out to the big picture, I can think of many corporate innovation efforts which could benefit greatly from this kind of transparency.  Not to keep the team members feeling like they're under a microscope, of course, but to tie them to a larger community which could help them along.  It's tempting to think of progress measures solely as a way to evaluate performance; it's much more interesting, optimistic, and useful to find a way to use them to improve performance as it happens.

Memorable Ads, Impossible Dreams, and Being Innovative

My colleague Paul Bennett of IDEO has written an insightful and delightful essay for BusinessWeek: Most Memorable Ads of 2006

Here's an excerpt from Paul:

We're clearly at an inflection point. I'm not even a traditional ad-guy and I've been asked to write this, so what does that say? We're all firmly in this together—marketers, designers, clients, agencies, researchers, ethnographers, art directors and writers, all being sniped at, out-thought, and remixed by consumers younger than our own kids. Hard as it is to say, in most cases, they're as good, if not better, at this stuff than we are. Now, together, we must figure out where to go from here. But before we get in to a whole spiral of circle drumming, chest-beating and problem-solving, let's take a quick tour of some of the highlights of the last year.

But first a warm-up of sorts: Honda's Impossible Dream spot—which aired in December, 2005, and therefore doesn't make the official 2006 list—deserves a mention for Not Being Afraid of the Joy of Great Storytelling, for expansive locations, great nostalgic music, excellent casting, and a fantastically simple premise. In it, a guy emerges from his trailer, mounts a scooter, and then seamlessly moves from product to product, stirring emotions, sweeping us along in his wake, and bringing a tear to many an eye.

I've written before about Honda's Impossible Dream ad in the context of what I like to call tangible brand mantras (you can see the ad by following that hyperlink).  It's an ad I can watch over and over (and I have - maybe 50 times; not as many viewings for me as the original Star Wars, but getting there).  And it's one which is authentic and true even though it's so outrageous and funny.  Honda is a company where the CEO knows whereof he speaks.  It's a company as capable of pulling off revolutionary innovation outcomes as it is innovating on a routine basis.  It's a group of people not afraid of thinking weird but right.  And, above all, it's a company which solves for happiness because, when one gets down to the bottom of it all, that's what drives innovation.

Watch disruption as it takes shape

Check out this update on The Venice Project, which promises to be to the traditional business models behind television as Skype is to your local phone company.

New Economy Models and Old Bridges

A wise person helped me see today that the Golden Gate Bridge is an excellent example of HAAS (Hardware As A Service) which has been living right under our noses for decades.  It's a pay per use business model, and is certainly a lot more affordable than building your own bridge. 

Sounds a lot like B2B plays in Web 2.0 and Office 2.0 to me.

It's all about perceptions, isn't it?  I believe there are very few, if any, new business models under the sun.  The challenge for us is to see clearly, to think creatively, and to apply what we already know to make things new things happen in interesting and effective ways.

flickr photo credit

What class would you want to be part of?

So, I'm starting the planning process for another Business + Design class at the Stanford d.school for Spring 2007.

My big question is: what kind of class would you want to be a part of? 

One choice would be to teach Creating Infectious Action again.  We learned a lot teaching it last year, both in terms of how to structure the class as well the content which was developed in the class by staff and students alike.  It certainly caught people's attention, as in here, and here, and here.  So that's one choice.

The other is to teach something new.  I have some ideas about content and form but I'd like to hear what you have to say.  What kind of a class would you want to take if you were a graduate student at Stanford interested in learning more about design thinking?  Drop me an email, post a comment below, or (best of all), write something on your own blog and send a trackback back over here.

Flickr photo credit

Roads to Innovation at Stanford

I'll be part of a panel discussion at the Roads to Innovation conference at Stanford this coming weekend.  All the panels are stocked with really interesting people.  Given my penchant for unabashed gearhead gnarlyness, I'm a little disappointed that Mario Almondo from Ferrari won't be joining my panel as was previously scheduled.  But he just got one helluva promotion at work, so I can see why he's not schlepping out to California for the conference.

Please shoot me an email if you're going to be attending and would like to say hi.

2007 TEDPrize Winners

Be sure to watch it all the way through to the end...