metacool

Proving vs. Measuring

Earlier this week I gave a talk a the Design Management Institute's yearly International Design Conference in beautiful Manchester Village, Vermont.  I spoke on the topic of innovation metrics, and explored some of our latest thinking from the business design thinkers here at IDEO. 

What was interesting to me was the split nature of the feedback I received from the crowd.  I would say that most of the people resonated with my stated point of view that the innovation process can be made more predictable by thinking in a structured way about where you want to go and then using metrics and measures to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the design process going forward.  A smaller minority of the people present felt that I hadn't argued strongly enough along the lines of "Good Design = Good Business".  I hadn't expected that feedback.

In fact, I didn't try to argue that equation at all.  Not because I don't think that good design outcomes are a key driver of organic growth, but because it's not a provable point.  Success on the market is a complex thing, and it's a gross simplification to tie it back to what I would consider to be the somewhat myopic worldview of "Good Design", which is very much about a fetish for beautiful objects and less about creating good fit to broader webs of individual, social, and economic needs and benefits, which is the realm of design thinking.  Success has many parents, and good design is only one of them.  Instead, I believe that good design thinking can lead to a higher success rate when innovating, and that's the link to good business outcomes.  And that's where employing metrics to gauge and guide the innovation process comes into play -- they're a way to inform and improve the context in which our design thinking occurs.  It's about measuring and aiding the process of value creation via design thinking, not proving that design can create value.

This Thursday: Sustainability Conference at Stanford

The d.school's Clicks-n-Bricks class (part of the Design + Business movement at the d.school) is holding a mini conference on sustainability this coming Thursday.   Here are the speakers:

• Debra Dunn, former  HP Executive Vice-President who (among other things) led their sustainability efforts
• Bob Adams, who leads IDEO's sustainability efforts
• Andrew Ruben, Wal-Mart's VP of Corporate Strategy and Sustainability

Here are the details:

What is Designing for Sustainability?
d.school Mini-Conference Fall 2006
3:30 PM – 7:00 PM
Hewlett 200

And though my marketing professors would shoot me for saying this, it's really hard to beat the value of something which costs nothing.  How can something this good be free?  And it's anything near as good as the mini conference we held last Spring for CIA, it'll be really good.

Thoughts on to-do lists

Do you have a "to do" list?  Odds are you do.  Spoken or unspoken, written or not, we all carry around some sense of the stuff we should be doing (or not).  Companies and organizations do, too.  But they're mostly secret.  Let the world know what you're thinking of working on, and you're screwed, right?  Competitors will copy your amazing strategic plan in a snap, customers won't buy your existing offering as they wait for the next thing to come out, and whenever you have a key project schedule slip, shareholders will sue you for issuing misleading future-looking statements.  Clearly, it would be a bad idea to share one's to-do list with the world.  Or maybe not, if you're a business-by-design kind of organization interested in being innovative in a customer-centric way. 

If brands are about what you do in the world, and not just about what you say you do in the world, and if relationships are built around some notion of trust, then why not do something concrete which shows that you're investing in your relationship with customers for the long term?  And for me, that could mean putting your organization's "to-do" list out in public for all the world to see.  Here's something I saw a few weeks ago while on a sneak preview of Daniel Libeskind's new Hamilton addition to the Denver Art Museum:

This poster to-do list wasn't hidden away in some bureaucratic space administrator's back room.  No sir, the good people of the Denver Art Museum had the guts to print this thing in poster format and place it right smack-dab in the lobby.  Everyone could see it, everyone had to see it.  And I appreciate how open they are with the list:  we haven't put in seating, the store ain't done, and we know there are no signs.  We're working on it.  And as we improve the space, we'll check it off and let you know that we know that these are the things that make or break your museum experience.

Just think what could happen if more organizations put their to-do lists out in public.  I think we'd all feel a lot better about doing business with each other.  Say -- just for the sake of discussion -- that you run the FAA's website and you've found some embarrassing typos on your site.  But you can't fix them right away because your web admin is out hiking in Bora Bora (by the way, they've now been fixed).  What if you could add the "Fix Typos on Travelers page" on your public FAA To Do List blog, right after the entry "Make our site almost as good as that best website ever from Tenacious D"?  Knowing that someone intends to do something, that they are aware of their shortcomings and are trying to improve things, can go a long way toward making you believe.

Even better would be to open up that to-do list to anyone.  So when I find the typos on the FAA website, rather than writing a snarky post on my blog, I help 'em out by entering an item on their to-do list wiki.  Now I'm part of the solution, and probably part of the brand.  It's about leveraging the power of the many to create the best pile of real evidence possible about what works and what doesn't.  At some point along the line this starts to feel a lot like open source.  Might Mozilla really be one be one big public to-do list in disguise?

Back to the Denver Museum of Art.  I wish they had a publicly addressable to-do list.  I would add an entry right now.  Something like "fix those crazy interior angled walls that everyone kept tripping over."

Ouch!

Learning to Innovate

BusinessWeek recently published a great piece about the growing trend of using design thinking as a means to teach people how to innovate.  I'm particularly proud that the Mozilla project from the Creating Infectious Action class I co-taught with Bob Sutton is the lead story in the article:

Tech geeks love Mozilla's Firefox browser, which is impervious to most viruses, but mainstream America has yet to embrace it. How does Mozilla move beyond invention (cool browser, neat functions) to an innovation that translates into market success (a Net tool so hot it upends Microsoft's Corp.'s Explorer)? It's a perfect problem for a classroom case study. So last spring, Mozilla's business development team turned to Stanford University. But instead of going to the business school, they headed for the double-wide trailer that housed Stanford's Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, dubbed the "D-school" on campus. The course was team-taught by Stanford profs and industry professionals. Each student worked in a team that included a B-schooler, a computer science major, and a product designer. And each team used design thinking to shape a business plan for Mozilla.

It made a big difference. A B-school class would have started with a focus on market size and used financial analysis to understand it. This D-school class began with consumers and used ethnography, the latest management tool, to learn about them. Business school students would have developed a single new product to sell. The D-schoolers aimed at creating a prototype with possible features that might appeal to consumers. B-school students would have stopped when they completed the first good product idea. The D-schoolers went back again and again to come up with a panoply of possible winners.

This is a great overview of both the class we taught and the philosophy behind it.  There's a big difference between knowing how to analyze a business situation versus knowing how to create and execute on a business innovation problem.  For more on what we did in the class, here's a post I wrote earlier this year, and best of all is this post by Bob Sutton, which rightfully celebrates the students from the class. 

One thing I'd like to make clear is that I'm not anti-MBA.  Far from it.  I value my management education a great deal, and believe that an MBA provides individuals with very useful set of analytical tools, as well as the ability to thin-slice most business situations.  However, I do think that the typical MBA program is mostly focused on becoming a master of business-as-usual, which is a critical body of knowledge when it comes to running a profitable organization.  One way (and the best way, I believe) to learn how to engage in innovative behavior is to become a master of business-by-design, and that's what we're doing in our Business + Design classes at the Stanford d.school.  Organizations need to know how to do both.  And those organizations need doers and innovators who can bridge the worlds of business-as-usual and business-by-design.

Attention: Mandatory Reading

Roger Martin has written a wickedly good -- and important -- essay about business + design in the latest issue of Fast Company.  It's a continuation of some themes he's been exploring recently, such as the notions of validity and reliability, and of business-as-usual and business-by-design.  In my mind, business cultures of reliability and validity are perfect companions to Christensen's notions of sustaining and disruptive business models.  As Martin states:

And so, as a rough rule of thumb, when your challenge is to create value or seize an emerging opportunity, the solution is to perform like a design team: Work iteratively, build a prototype, elicit feedback, refine it, and repeat. Give yourself a chance to uncover problems and fix them in real time, as the process unfolds. On the other hand, running a supply chain, building a forecasting model, compiling the financials--these functions are best left to people who work in fixed roles with permanent tasks, people more adept at describing "my responsibilities" than "our responsibilities."

Knowing what type of work you're working on is much more than half the battle when it comes to managing for growth.  It gives you a chance ot pick the right tool for the job.  After all, you wouldn't try to fly from Los Angeles to Paris in a single-engine floatplane, nor would you try to drop in to an Alaskan fishing village in a 747.  Match the business tools you have at hand to the business outcome you desire.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Nobody goes through life without encountering obstacles, disappointments, and problems. Nobody can keep from making mistakes or taking a wrong turn. Nobody can escape illness or avoid the specter of failure. Let me point out that coping with success is easy. How you deal with adversity, with failure, and with setbacks will reveal your true character. How nimble you are about getting back on your feet after some large or small disaster or defeat will help you to determine just how far those feet of yours will take you in the world."
- Vartan Gregorian

Thursday Tesla To Do

This coming Thursday, September 14, IDEO will be hosting the good people of Tesla Motors as part of the ongoing IDEO Know How lecture series.  The lecture is open to the public. This should be a good chance to drink from the cup of (electric) gearhead gnarlyness. 

The lecture will take place at 715 Alma St in Palo Alto at 5pm PST.  Enter via the alley off of Forest Avenue between Alma and High streets   There won't be a public videotape available afterward.

Here are some selected quotes from Tesla's website:

Tesla Motors designs and sells high-performance, highly efficient electric sports cars — with no compromises. Tesla Motors cars combine style, acceleration, and handling with advanced technologies that make them among the quickest and the most energy-efficient cars on the road.

“Our goal in designing the Tesla Roadster was to build a car with zero emissions that people would love to drive,” said Tesla Motors co-founder and CEO Martin Eberhard.

The real difference lies in the intent of the designers. For the most part, electric cars have been designed by people who believed we should not drive, and, if we must, then we should drive a bare-bones electric car. In sharp contrast, the Tesla Roadster is a driver‘s car: optimized for performance and handling, beautiful in every detail. Tesla Motors celebrates driving.

It‘s a no-compromise driver‘s car that can accelerate faster than a Porsche 911 and hit a top speed of nearly twice what the law permits. With a range of 250 miles on a single charge, you can use it all day long and not worry you‘ll run out of juice.

Response to the Tesla Roadster has been even greater than we anticipated, and we’ve “sold out” of our special edition Signature One Hundred Roadsters. We’re now taking reservations for our next 100 Tesla Roadsters to be built.

I, for one, am looking forward to the day when I get to lay a big, fat patch of electric torque-tortured tire rubber. 

Update 14sept06:  Tesla has a nifty blog worth checking out

Inspiration in egg whites

I normally shy away from pointing to stuff on other blogs on a routine basis, as I figure you'll find the good stuff anyway, and I have a bias toward creating original (or as original as anything can be in this connected world) material.

But I've had some big milestones with my special project lately.  This week we shipped two new material intake devices.  And we had a successful alpha launch of our upright ambulation initiative.  As with any innovation activities, these required lots of late night effort and were the source of some high drama and tears.  Par for the course when it comes to innovation!

So I'm mostly pointing.   There's so much cool stuff out there!

Today Seth uses egg whites and wheat and peppers to write an ode to the gods of authenticity, quality, and doing stuff to the hilt.  It's a reminder to me that delivering great human experiences (even a humble breakfast) is much more a matter of judgment than of rules.

Scuderia Ferrari and the OR

Bruno Giussani, my fellow TED blogger and BusinessWeekOnline contributor, wrote a cool post about how innovation can come from "... an unexpected juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated ideas or concepts...", in this case the Scuderia Ferrari helping a hospital in England with process dynamics:
Pit-stop for doctors

metacool Thought of the Day

"People are not born craftsmen; they just have the courage to screw things up.  Embrace your inner amateur and try everything. There will always be an expert to take your money and fix the mistakes."
- Mr. Jalopy

 

And, as we're fond of saying around the offices of metacool, "Why not do something NOW?"  If half of life is about just showing up, then the other half (and more than half when you're in the business of getting something good done) is about getting past the excuses, grabbing a wrench, and hacking away.  Fail early, fail often.  Build a prototype.  Think global, drink local.  Catch something on fire.  Why not screw something up today instead of strategizing for the next month?  You might learn something.  No -- you WILL learn something.  What's the worst that could happen?

(note that I use the word "wrench" as a metaphor for whatever it is that you need to do the thing you do)

I love that:  "Embrace your inner amateur and try everything."  Sounds like design thinking to me.

Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness

Ricardo Zonta pulls some doughnuts at the Monterey Historic Races in his 2006 Toyota F1 car.

And, be sure to watch this in-car video of Zonta breaking the Laguna Seca lap record between racing sessions of the Historic races.  The first lap is just a warmup.  The second is the record breaker. 

So fast it's scary.

RIP Maynard Ferguson

The world lost a great innovator earlier this week in Maynard Ferguson.  In my past when playing the saxophone was at the center of my existence, nothing got me more excited than the chance to play a Maynard Ferguson tune with all my friends in our jazz-rock band.  We had lots of fun using his music to blow our audiences away (and in the process removing a good deal of my hearing.  That's life).

Ferguson was a great role model as an innovator, always open to new ideas, new technologies, new ways of seeing himself and being in the world.  And he wasn't afraid to be way out there with some hair-raising, totally crazy, high-altitude trumpet lick.

Yin Yang Innovation blogs (and lawyers)

I've added two cool blogs to my COOL STUFF section.  They're a yin yang combo for innovators.  They're both of a legal bent, but from totally different points of view.  Yes, I know, legal stuff.  Bear with me here:

Patent Pending Blog:  about patents. Obviously.  This blog is a great reminder of how there's really very little new under the sun.  It's good, clean fun, too -- who wouldn't want to read about Harry Houdini's Diving Suit?  And look at those gents in the illustration above.  They're cruising around in a rolling iron yurt, discussing the state of their stock portfolios.  Think of it as a collection of Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness, Antique Edition.

Business Bankruptcy Blog:  no, I don't enjoy looking at traffic accidents.  But this is important stuff for innovators know about, because business viability and sustainability are key to getting stuff done in the world. 

I think if you make the Bankruptcy blog, VentureBlog, Feld Thoughts, and The Economist a part of your regular reading schedule, you'll be way ahead of the new venture business curve.

More thoughts on happiness and innovation

I believe that a strong emphasis on personal happiness is the hallmark of an innovative culture.

Tal Ben-Shahar teaches a class at Harvard on positive psychology, and out of this class has created a nice list of principles for enabling happiness. 

Here are his flow-inducing tips:

1. Give yourself permission to be human

2. Happiness lies at the intersection between pleasure and meaning

3. Keep in mind that happiness is mostly dependent on our state of mind, not on our status or the state of our bank account

4. Simplify!

5. Remember the mind-body connection.

6. Express gratitude, whenever possible.

While his list is couched in the language of personal happiness, I think it's a wonderful one to keep in mind when you're navigating your way through the workplace.  After all, organizations are made up of individuals, so why not apply the same principles for happiness to life at work?  It's not as if work is really a different mode of existence from everyday life.  Or at least, it shouldn't be.  How can we make individuals, teams, groups, and entire organizations happy in their work?  That's when innovation starts.

Bandits on the roads

Bruce Nussbaum and Seth Godin have got me thinking about some ways to "fix" air travel.  As a boy reading about medieval history, I used to wonder what it was like to have bandits on the roads.  Now we know.  The ultimate solution would be to "fix" the root causes of the hatred which drive people to blow each other up, but short of that, how might we improve the current situation?

I agree with Seth that we can do -- and will have to do -- a lot without getting on airplanes.  The state of world affairs is going to sell a lot of Halo systems and iSight cameras alike.  My friend Anthony Pigliacampo runs his cool startup company on Skype.  The tools are already there, and they're going to get pushed hard.  Expect lots of innovation in this space.

But what about the airplanes?  What happens when we have to move atoms and not bits?  I just brainstormed with my buddies Ryan and Omar for three (3!) minutes and it's clear that opportunities abound (just to be clear, and to preserve the reputations of the two gentlemen, some of these ideas (the stupid ones) are mine and mine alone) :

1. Brand Differentiation:  can an American airline step up and provide a substantially higher level of security than what government agencies can provide?  How much would you (or your company or your insurance agency) pay to reduce your flight risk?  What a great way to differentiate a brand.
2. Process Improvement: there's a human threat on a plane, and there's a threat from the stuff we haul on board.  Why not separate the two?  Fly bags on a second airliner.  What if FedEx picked up your bag the day of your flight and delivered it to your final destination?  Lease a laptop from Apple and automatically have one available at your final destination with all your data synched up?  I've had bags transported for me between hotels in Japan and it's cool. 
3. Asset Improvement: what's the civilian airliner equivalent of an A-10 Warthog?  Could a catastrophic incident be contained to merely dangerous?
4. Business Model Innovation:  what's the low-end disruptive business model which utilizes small jets to ferry smaller groups of business travelers to all the places they currently go?  Reduce the size of the target.

And so on and so forth.  The current situation is unacceptable, some good thinking and some guts could make it better.

metacool Thought of the Day

"[W]e must consider the possibility that if Design Thinking is critical, maybe restricting it to designers and protecting them from business people is not actually the most productive avenue to pursue. Perhaps eliminating the need for protection by turning business people into Design Thinkers would be more effective.

... Rather than supplementing modern analytical management with design sensibilities, it is time to integrate design into management practice. The job of executives isn't to protect designers from line management, but to help line management become Design Thinkers. It is time for the management discipline of Design Thinking.

To create a Design Thinking organization, a company must create a corporate environment in which it is the job of all managers to understand customer needs at a deep and sophisticated level and to understand what the firm's product means to the customer at not only a functional level, but also an emotional and psychological level... It must create an operating environment by which line managers experiment with new ways of delighting the customer, realizing fully that some new ideas will fail, but that in failing these efforts have valuable benefits. Even failed experiments help convince customers that the company is aiming high, and the feedback will help them come up with newer, better approaches.

...The great firms of the 21st century will be those that recognize the goal isn't to supplement analytics with design; it is all about integrating design and management."

- Roger Martin

More thoughts on innovating routinely

BWJones, who is a card-carrying member of the Union of Unabashed Appreciators of Gearhead Gnarlyness, snapped this tasty photo above of a downhill mountain biker at work in his bike.  In addition to writing a very cool, extremely gnarly blog, Dr Jones focuses on something called metabolomics.  Fan that I am of all things meta, here's what that means:

Metabolomics is the analysis of micromolecular networks that form the currencies and currents of life.  Every cell exists in a metabolic N-space where mixtures of intra- and pericellular micromolecules are shaped by cell-autonomous and non-cell-autonomous factors. No theory predicts these mixtures, partly due to the paucity of micromolecular profile data from which a coherent model could be crafted. Profiling with single-cell resolution in complex tissues is essential to decoding the interactions between gene expression and environmental signaling.

Sweet.  Now back to that bike.  Look closely at the pedal area.  Interesting, eh?  It's missing the normal chainring and gear set.  The story gets even more interesting when you learn that bike is a Honda.  For a few years now, Honda has been evolving a fundamental re-think of the bicycle power transfer mechanism.  As is typical of their "just build it" culture, they're using racing as the laboratory to push forward the process of iterative information creation, which is a powerful way to innovate whenever you're at the edge of what's known.

Honda is a master when it comes to innovating on a routine basis.  Yeah, so I'm a pro-Honda cheerleader -- hey, I call 'em like I see 'em.  But from the standpoint of routine innovation, Honda is a soul mate to Google, Apple, and other great innovators.  What Honda shares with Google is the ability to routinely go back to first principles on everything it chooses to work on, no matter the market.  From a philosophical perspective, for example, I see very little difference between GMail and a Honda Ridgeline -- both took a product category bereft of innovation and redefined the offering from a blank sheet of paper.  Each was a fairly radicial rethink.  For an example of a milder form of ongoing innovation, look at the parallel between a Honda Odyssey and Google Search.  Both are in the business of doing a mainstream activity -- carrying people and search -- but the each just do it better thant he competition, and they do so transparently and with great simplicity and elegance, so the big middle of the market loves them.

Oh, and by the way, they're about to apply the same penchant for first principle innovation to the small jet market.  Honda, that is.  Not Google.  Yet.

Pink on Returns on Design Thinking

Dan Pink's latest column talks about tracking the market performance of design-thinking companies: Who's your DADI?

IDEO Prototypes the Future

My second IDEO-centric post in as many weeks!  My, how I'm violating the self-imposed house rules here at metacool!

If you're going to be in or near Palo Alto before September 10, and if you're at all interested in innovation, design, and business, I encourage you to check out a nice new exhibition at the Palo Alto Art Center called IDEO Prototypes the Future.  It's a great retrospective of IDEO's work over the years, and more importantly, I think the exhibition does a marvelous job of showing our design process in action.  Innovation need not be a mysterious thing; it's mostly the result of hard work and persistence and optimism coupled with a deep-rooted sense of optimism.  And it doesn't hurt to have a happy group of people who love working together, either.

If I were to attend, I'd download this podcast by IDEO CEO Tim Brown to my iPod, and listen to his personal gallery walkthrough while I meandered through all the stuff on display.  The coolest part of the exhibit for me was seeing the shopping cart we did for Nightline (shown above) with the Nightline show playing behind it.  There's a (slightly) younger Diego there building prototypes and uttering something about a "SUV shopping cart", among other things... I used to think my biggest impact on modern culture would be the bazillions of parts made off of my designs for HP inkjet printers over the years, but now I think it's probably going to be the Nightline video, which has taught lots of people about the human-centric design process in the years since its debut.

So please check it out.  And don't just trust my word for it (I love IDEO, so I am biased, after all) -- see my friend (and fellow We Know member) Ross Mayfield's blog for another review of the show.

July 18 update:  Robert Scoble attended the opening night on behalf of his new company PodTech (which is why I'm on this podcast) and says that the exhibit "... is freaking awesome.  If you're a design nut, you need to see this."

 

metacool Thought of the Day

"Ultimately, it is not so much the goal that we should be concerned about as much as the process through which we attempt to achieve it. A return trip to Mars will require that we invent many new technologies and systems, all of which will have to perform seamlessly to ensure a safe and successful mission. Given the amount of uncertainty involved in such an endeavor, it is naïve to think we can sit here today and identify the date of our first touchdown and the means by which we will get there. Instead, we need to adopt a modular, experiment-driven approach, gradually building and verifying the set of technologies that will be needed for such a mission, while adapting our plans as we learn more about what approaches have merit, and which are likely to be dead ends."
-- Alan MacCormack

Brainstorm Bloggers

Here is a list of people blogging from Brainstorm.

Jurvetson on #4

Steve Jurvetson, who is also attending the Brainstorm conference, provided what is easily my favorite answer to Question #4, "Your most cherished value?"

I'm so happy Steve took the opportunity to talk about the Stanford d.school.  As I like to say when I'm leading classes at the d.school, what we endeavor to teach is the ability to look at the world through the eyes of a child, but matched up with an attitude of wisdom informed by a deep belief in building to think.  That's the path to innovation.

Four Questions

Here are four big questions to ponder:

1. What is the most pressing problem to solve?  Why?
2. Your biggest fear?
3. Three global leaders who will set next decade's course?
4. Your most cherished value?

All four questions were asked of people attending Brainstorm 2006, including yours truly.  Here are my answers:

1. Reversing the trend of environmental degradation and moving to a new paradigm of consumption.  Efforts to slow the decline only delay the inevitable and fail to acknowledge the growth of prosperity-driven consumption -- not necessarily a bad thing -- across the globe.  e need to establish new ways of creating and supporting prosperity that enable growth without destruction.
2. Our seeming inability to prevent genocidal behavior.
3. John McCain, Hugo Chavez, Linus Torvalds
4. Optimism

See more answers from other bloggers at the conference, including Ross Mayfield, Dan Gillmor, and Rebecca MacKinnon

Sir Ken Robinson on TEDTalks

Ideas Worth Spreading. 

That's a topic near and dear to my heart.  And one for which I'm more than happy to play a willing accomplice.

In this particular case, it's both a pleasure and a duty.

 

 

At the TED2006 conference earlier this year I had a peak life experience in the form of a talk by Sir Ken Robinson.  He stirred my soul and reminded me why I was here on the planet. 

I encourage you to take 20 minutes to listen to Sir Robinson.  If you're engaged in any kind of creative endeavors in your life (and we all are), you must see this.  And if you're responsible for the care, feeding, and education of another human being, you must see this.  See his video (and many more) on TEDTalks.

(plus, it's all sponsored by one of my favorite producers of cool products, BMW)

Why brainstorming does work, and a cool new blog

The WSJ ran an article the other week about the flaws of brainstorming as a way to generate new ideas.  As someone who has been formally trained in the art and science of brainstorming, and who has been a passionate practitioner of the process for over 15 years, I found the article disappointing.  I'm not a brainstorming fanatic -- I only use it when it's appropriate to the task at hand, just as I wouldn't use a baseball bat to whisk egg whites -- but it rankles me when reporters don't do their homework and write about something when they're clueless.

And what should that homework have been?  For a comprehensive and wildly entertaining rebuttal to WSJ's argument, I must turn to my Stanford d.school colleague Bob Sutton.  He points out the flaws of the WSJ article on many levels.  Here's my favorite part of his critique:

Not one one of these experimental studies on "brainstorming performance" has ever been done in an organization where it is work practice that is used as a routine part of the work.  Paulus wrote me some years back that he tried to recruit some "real" organizations that did real creative work, but had no luck. To put it another way, if these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex.

I'm really happy that Bob has started blogging.  He brings a wise yet fresh voice to the dialog on innovation, organizations, and design thinking:  www.bobsutton.net

Knowing by Doing and Playing

I'm a big fan of knowing by doing.  I'm an even bigger fan of CEO's who know of what they speak because they know by doing.  If you haven't read it yet, Bruce Nussbaum has written a great post about how a CEO who doesn't "get" technology might not be able to command a towering compensation package in the future. 

True Story: in the process of coming up with the Firefox design project for my Creating Infectious Action class at Stanford, Mozilla VP John Lilly and I held many of our working meetings using virtual networking tools -- call it Web 2.0 if you want.  Our killer app?  World of Warcraft.  Beyond just being The New Golf, the private chat feature in World of Warcraft was a great way for the two us -- busy people with young families -- to find some time to talk on a Friday night without the overhead of conference calls, mobile phones, etc...

Plus, it's more fun than being in a conference room.  Don't ever underestimate the fun factor.  (or my ability to rationalize my subscription to World of Warcraft)

Where are you learning by doing today?

Design Thinking meets Mozilla

Asa Dotzler from Mozilla has written a nice post celebrating the achievements of student teams from the Creating Infectious Action (CIA) class I've been co-teaching this quarter at the Stanford d.school.  Here's a nice excerpt:

After some initial brainstorming with Diego in March and an afternoon in April talking to the CIA class, we saw the first round of work the student teams put together. At that time, there were about six projects and each one had something really cool going on. I especially liked the Faith Browser project because they took the challenge of reaching a niche audience with Firefox extensions -- something I think we should do a lot more of.

The class has moved to other CIA assignments but many of the student teams continue to iterate on their approaches to creating infectious action around Firefox -- and some have even launched entirely new efforts.

What's really exciting to me about all of this is how these small teams (just a few people each) were able to come up with novel ways to create attention and action around Firefox quickly put those plans into action. That a dozen projects were designed and put into the wild -- generating thousands of Firefox downloads, in just a couple of weeks time should be a huge motivator to all of us.

Mind you, this Firefox work was done in just two weeks by six teams with four students each.  And these are Stanford graduate students from the schools of business, engineering, education, and humantities, so they each have three or four other classes assigning work.  And the teams had to start with scratch -- all they were given was the goal of "find a way to spread Firefox to audiences not currently consuming it".  They had to start with ethnographic research to understand why people don't use things like Firefox even though they're better and cheaper (read: free) than any alternatives.  Then they formulated ideas of what could spread and how to spread and then and went, as we like to say in CIA, and "prototyped 'til they puked".

I'm so proud to be associated with this group of people! 

What I love about this class is that it isn't school, if school is a state of mind where everything is theoretical and abstract, up to and including the "real world".  If anything, being in class felt like being the front lines of any "work" project I've ever been associated with.  The downside of that classroom environment is that, as I heard loud and clear from students last week, it's difficult to provide crisp and clear performance feedback.   The upside is that CIA is a weekly reminder that none of us are really able to "know it when we see it".  While we did spend time in class discussing formal theories of how memes diffuse through populations, those formal theories couldn't tell us which, if any, of the Spread Firefox projects would hit it big.  As it turns out, Firefoxies has been generating an order of magnitude more downloads than any of the other solutions.  FaithBrowser, a very, very clever solution which I would have said was going to blow everything else out of the water, hasn't hit volume yet.  But it could well do so -- all of these projects, I believe, are following different S-curves. 

The point is, you've got to build it before you see if they'll come.  And if they don't, you can keep on building...

Creating Infectious Action Mini-Conference

We're holding a mini-conference this coming Thursday, May 4 as part of our Stanford d.school class on Creating Infectious Action.  We're starting at 3:30 and will run until 7pm.  Our current speaker lineup is:

• Paul Saffo, IFTF
• Peter Ebert, SAP
• Jamie Shandro, Stanford
• Steve Jurvetson, DFJ
• Paul Moore, Yahoo
• Perry Klebahn, Hasso Plattner Institute of Design

If you're interested in attending, contact me and I'll send you more info.

Creating Infectious Action: Spreading Firefox

Wow!  We held another session this evening of Creating Infectious Action at the Stanford d.school.  And I have to say that my hat was knocked into the creek. 

Two weeks ago the six student teams were charged with the assignment of spreading Firefox to a target population of non-consumers.  This was not a fictional project.  The masterminds from Mozilla were in class the day we assigned the project, and any marketer out there knows how hard it is to go after people who really could care less about using your offering. 

So.

Since this is a class taught in a design school, we asked the students to use design thinking to come up with human-centric solutions that will help spread Firefox to audiences not currently using it.  Here are some of the solutions -- remember, these represent just two weeks of work.  Done by people who just met each other and were assigned to teams.  And who have lots of other classes to attend to. 

In the solution category of making Firefox more accessible by linking it to pop culture:

www.celebrityfirefox.com
www.firefoxies.com

From the school of tipping-point-maven-connector theory:

www.savegranny.org
www.thesafeinternetguide.com

Targeting a specific, highly connected, maven-centric psychographic lifestyle segment:

          www.faithbrowser.com

Tapping into the "sheep that shit grass" dynamic:

www.foxytee.com

And, one team of students put together an ambitious and compelling paper-based campaign to promote Firefox adoption in a viral, pass-along way: www.firefoxkids.org

Two weeks.  That's a lot of innovation and discovery.

Organizing for Routine Innovation

When it comes to innovation, it's sexy to think about how to make disruptive innovation happen, but it's routine innovation -- making mainstream offerings better for existing users -- that brings in the cash that keeps the lights on.  Autoweek recently ran an article about what it feels like to develop new products at Honda.  I think it's a valuable look inside a high-functioning organization designed to serve up innovation on a routine basis. 

Here are some of the key things that Honda does to increase the odds of making good cars, year-in, year-out:

1. Know how to turn bubble-up ideas into tangible offerings:  the Ridgeline wasn't something that popped out of a strategic planning initiative, but came from passionate people cobbling together a prototype which proved it could be a viable, mainstream offering so that Honda's decision making process could then allocate the resources needed to get it to market.  Many organizations don't know what to do with good ideas which don't come out of their strategy group, even if they recognize them as good ideas.
2. Make clean, efficient decisions:  fly to Japan with a solid business case which points to a proof-of-concept prototype.  Make a quick decision.  Spend little if any time ever debating or defending that decision again.  Focus scarce energy instead on making the Ridgeline or the Civic as good as it can be.
3. Practice evidence-based management: when the Civic development team believed in a specific product feature (summer tires instead of all-weather tires), but knew that a senior manager did not value those tires, they were able to put together a case which was not only heard, but allowed to lead to a favorable outcome.  This is an example of management relying on evidence and not just opinions to guide decision making.  When management forces its opinions even though real marekt evidence exists to the contrary, the odds of creating good stuff really drop.
   
4. Know by doing:  as the leader of the Ridgeline project, Gary Flint wasn't isolated from reality by layers of managers.  He lived the details of the project to the point where, as he says in the article, he would even dust the office.  If you're in there dusting, you're probably also walking around, hearing and seeing the realities of the project.  And if you know those, you'll know the critical things to focus on.  Honda has a long culture of knowing by doing, and of putting people in leadership positions who know -- really know -- the nuts and bolts of the business.
5. Solve for happiness:  Honda has long believed in creating an environment where people who design, make and market things can be happy.  When it comes to innovating on a routine basis, I think the biggest thing an organization can do is set people up to be happy -- routinely -- as they go about their work.

Think Big

My latest BusinessWeek Online column is now live. It's titled Think Big, which isn't a reference to the size of my skull (which is rather large), but to the idea of designing market offerings from a larger point of view which includes -- but is not limited to -- the surrounding business context.

I wrote it to accompany a story called On the Real Cutting Edge, which looks at the work of ten leading design thinkers across a variety of domains.

Director's Commentary: Lutz & The Sky

Another example of the Director's Commentary for design thinkers:  Lutz on the Saturn Sky

One could do worse (a lot worse) than to spending a few minutes learning about what makes the Sky tick from The Man.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Prototyping is valuable, and you can prototype almost anything today and make it look real. Once you've prototyped your idea, you don't have to persuade people to like it -- they can judge it themselves."
- Seth Godin

Creating Infectious Action

The class I'm teaching at the Stanford d.school starts today: 

Creating Infectious Action

More learning from the New Golf

Continuing the "World of Warcraft is a great place to learn about the future of work" idea thread that I've been exploring here and here, John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas have written tasty little article in Wired called You Play World of Warcraft?  You're Hired!.  Here's an excerpt:

It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate.

Want to live a more innovative existence?  Continue to push yourself to be a more proficient design thinker?  Well -- where are you living an experiment that exposes you to new modes of being, new ways of thinking, new behaviors and people?

Learning from Joi Ito

As Tom Kelley said a few weeks ago in the  NYT, "One thing I've learned is that it is important to surround yourself with the kind of people you aspire to be."  The cool part about the web is that you don't necessarily have to hang out physically with the kind of people you aspire to be in order to get the desired effect. 

I believe wholeheartedly in Tom's assertion, and that's why I spend time hanging out online with Joi Ito.  I read his blog.  We chat.  We quest together.  As William Gibson once wrote, the "...future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed."  I'd say the same, with the modifier of "... it's just unevenly distributed, so save yourself some time and check out whatever new thing Joi is up to."

To wit:

• Buying virtual property in order to support "real world" non-profits: Buying an island on Second Life
• Expanding on the "New Golf" meme we've been spreading about World of Warcraft as a way to model new approaches to creative work:  Leadership in World of Warcraft

What Joi does really well is to learn by doing.  He doesn't sit around and pontificate about the future of being online. He lives it.  There's no difference between knowing and doing in his world.

Stanford Student? Sign up for Creating Infectious Action

If you are a graduate student with masters standing at Stanford, you should think about signing up for Creating Infectious Action, a course to be taught by Bob Sutton and yours truly at the Stanford d.school starting in April.  We'll use design thinking to explore how to turn ideas into more than action -- into infectious action!

There's an application involved, of course:

Creating Infectious Action Application 

Not everyone who signs up will be accepted, but it's worth a try.  Why not be one of The 24?

Please follow the directions in the application, particularly when it comes to turning the application in.  If you email it to me instead of to the appropriate destination, it will get lost in the ether and you and I will be severely bummed.

Open Innovation on Google Video

Not many speakers yet, but those that are there are notable; this could get interesting.  Relative to the traditional model of conferences and speakers, this is certainly a disruptive approach.

Cool stuff at TED 2006

Bruno Giussani is doing an incredible job of blogging the TED conference in Monterey.

So far, I've found the presentations by Hans Rosling, Bill Joy, Al Gore, Neil Gershenfeld, Mena Trott, Richard Baraniuk, and Peter Gabriel to be more or less mind blowing.

Plus, as he did at Davos, Loic Le Meur is recording podcasts, including this one of Al Gore's TED presentation.

Feb 26 update: Loic removed the Gore speech podcast, as it wasn't in keeping with TED conference norms.  But you'll be able to see and hear an even more compelling version when the movie comes out in May. )

What I would be doing if I were in NYC next week

I'm curious to know what the 2.0 part is all about (surely the rev number is closer to 9.0 by now?), and the topic and crew will definitely be interesting.  link

metacool Word of the week

Apophenia

definition (from Wikipedia):

The experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data... defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness".

... originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological or mental illness.

If we can downplay the association with psychotic behavior, and also make it more about dealing with meaningful data, then apophenia is a pretty cool word to describe what I consider a critical aspect of design thinking.  Making connections between seemingly disparate things or ideas is a key step toward creating breakthough innovations.  And, as we discussed earlier on metacool, it's how the brain works (if we let it).

From the point of view of creating innovative organizations, one really needs to consider how the identification, care, and feeding of apopheniacs will be carried out.  Who are these people?  What makes them click?  What makes them thrive?  What keeps them from apopheniacking?

Thanks to Bob Giampietro, a truly innovative thinker and doer, for introducing me to this term. 

Designing Flashmobs at Stanford

Students from the Stanford d.school catalyzed a Flashmob yesterday.  They had an assignment to design a manifestation of positive infectious behavior, and this is one result.  Not a typical design assignment, but we're not running your average design school, either.

By the way, this Spring I'll be co-teaching an entire d.school course titled Creating Positive Infectious Behavior with Bob Sutton.

Who knows what cool stuff will come out of it!

metacool Thought of the Day

"One thing I've learned is that it is important to surround yourself with the kind of people you aspire to be. If you hang around with deadbeats and pessimists, you'll end up with a negative view of the world."

- Tom Kelley

All innovation is local?

Tip O'Neill pointed out that "all politics is local."  To some extent, innovation is also a local phenomenon.

Living in a place as innovation-friendly as Silicon Valley or the U.S. as a whole, it's easy to overlook the important role that society, government, and culture play in creating a supportive stage for innovators to do their thing.

In this insightful post titled Public Floggings, Joi Ito uses the Horie/Life Door drama unfolding in Tokyo to show us how easy it is to discourage innovation at the societal level.

On Doing Both

As I make my way through this world of ours -- as Indiana Jones said, it's not the years, it's the mileage -- I'm less and less convinced that anchoring on any single thing is the best way to make progress.  Sure, focus is to be cherished, but it's energy that needs to be focused, not the target.  In other words, don't mistake a narrow field of vision (or a small target) for a focused point of view.

Simplicity should be cherished, but simplistic approaches must be shunned.

I'm still wrestling with the ideas I just threw out above, but John Maeda's post Do Both gave me a big push forward.  In it he says:

Is it cheaper to improve a product's reliability and functionality? Or is it cheaper to improve a product's desirability? Considering the marginal costs of additional research and development, combined with production, testing, assurance, and so forth, the answer is fairly clear. Investing in advertising is a cost-effective way to increase the profit for an existing product. If the campaign is any good of course.

What determines "good"? Is it the copy? Is it the visuals? Is it the celebrity that has been chosen to be the head cheerleader? Seems like there are tons of subjective variables to consider that will ultimately define success or failure... Do both.

Do both.  Do everything needed, no more, no less.  With focused energy.  I think that's a good recipe for innovation.

Loops and venture design

My friend Jim Matheson, who is a superlative pilot in addition to being a great thinker (and doer) when it comes to anything related to the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, wrote an intriguing blog post about the joy that flying brings to his life.  Given a day job doesn't provide timely feedback for any of his big decisions, flying a plane is anything but; every action has an immediate feedback loop, and he derives great satisfaction from managing those feedback loops in order to stay in on top of the plane.

Of course, it's about much more than flying.  On the subject of designing business ventures, Jim makes the following point:

... how do you create intermediate feedback loops in activities that are inherently not given to them so that you can gain better insights into the distant future outcome of an current activity and make mid-point course corrections which can ensure ultimate success? And in situations where there is much more immediate feedback, how do you make better initial input decisions by gaining critical information a priori or perhaps utilize simulated training so that the feedback seems less mercurial and ultimate outcomes less surprising?

Two fantastic questions.  It's something absolutely critical when it comes to creating ventures in situations of uncertainy -- designing things so that you get adequate feedback so that you know what's going on when you need to know what's going on, but not so much that it all seems like noise.

metacool Thought of the Day

"Confront the difficult when it is still easy; accomplish the great task by a series of small acts."

- Tao Te Ching

2006: The Year of Total Design

If you're any kind of soccer fan, you know the meaning of Total Football.  Wikipedia defines it as "... a system where a player who moves out of his position is replaced by another from his team, thus retaining their intended organizational structure. In this fluid system no footballer is fixed in their intended outfield role... Total Football depends largely on the adaptability of each footballer within the team to succeed."

In the world of soccer, Total Football created an entirely new paradigm for how the game should be played.  The fluidity, adaptability, and ultimately, the creativity it engendered markedly raised the performance of teams who adopted it.  And while the system of Total Football is what enabled players to play better than they ever had before, for the system to work required a special type of player.  Soccer legend Rinus Michels put it this way:

Total Football... places great demands on individual and team tactical excellence... An absolute prerequisite, to master such a team tactical aspect, is that all the players possess a positive mentality...

Back to the world of metacool.  I believe there's something called Total Design.  Total Design is to normal design as Total Football is to normal soccer.  It's what happens when you combine wickedly good design thinkers with a human-centered, business-sensitive design process.  Design thinkers who know how to work across professional boundaries, who can play any position, who are flexible, adaptable, yet capable of driving toward a unified goal.  Total Design is about tangible results that change the world for the better, and those results can be, should be, will be, awesome.

You heard it here first:  2006 is the year of Total Design.

 

Innovation starts in the field

This series of photos arrived in my inbox via a friend of a friend.  They were taken somewhere in Thailand.

They show us how important it is to start the innovation process by going out into the field.  If we sit at our desks, or only seek inspiration in situations, people, and aspects of the world familiar to us, we miss out.  We miss out on witnessing the challenges that real people encounter in the course of their daily lives.

Such as trying to transport a toddler when all you have is a motorcycle and sidecar.

It's easy to be judgmental when viewing this photo.  I know I was -- "How could he do this to that kid?", I thought.  But design thinking is about empathy.  Put yourself in his place and imagine how his morning is going.  What did he eat?  Where is he going?  How is he feeling?  Does he do this each morning?  Is this a temporary arrangement?  Is it really as unsafe as it looks?  Is money a limiting factor?  If so, how?  Did he think this arrangement up or does someone else do it, too?  Is there a market for something better?

Judgment is the opposite of compassion, and by deferring judgment, one starts the process of innovation.

Design Thinking for a Monday Morning

Yawn, croak, stretch.  Well, it's Monday morning and now that all of that is over, it's time again to start thinking about the art and science of making cool stuff.  Here are some good reads that caught my attention and blew out the holiday cobwebs this morning:

Success Code for CEO's: get a design
Yet another article about the Institute of Design from the IndiaTimes.  This one features an extensive conversation with Robert Sutton, who is a core member of the d.school.  Robert and I will be teaching a d.school course at Stanford later this year.

Creativity's Economic -- and Sexual -- Edge
The always entertaining Dan Pink is writing a column called The Trend Desk, and this week's edition takes us on a whirlwind tour of mating behavior, BRIC, portion control, and sudoku mania.

Design: The New Corporate Marketing Strategy
This article by Ted Mininni ties a nice bow around a bunch of concepts involving a user-centric approach to marketing.  You need to register for the article, but it's free and worth your time.

Happy reading, and see you around the pages of metacool this week.