Take a minute to scan the montage of images I've collected above. What emotions do they evoke, and what thoughts do they bring to mind for you?
As I look at them, here are the adjectives bouncing around my head: alive, vibrant, crisp, beautiful, engaged, dynamic, iconoclastic, memorable, deep, intriguing, ingenious, timeless.
To pull this montage together, I made quick list of the people, ideas, and objects which have made an impression on me over the years, and then I selected a subset which represented the whole of the list. If you ask me about any of them, I could spend the better part of an hour explaining how they've created meaning for me, how they've influenced the course of my life, how they represent what's good in the world. Your list is undoubtedly different -- it should be different -- and you may question my taste (yes, I do have an abiding fascination with cars shaped like an Air Jordan shoe), but I'd encourage you to take five minutes now (yes, now!) and jot down your own list.
(tick tock)
Are you done?
I'd love to hear about your list. Even without being able to see it, I'd argue the following: every choice on your list represents a person who made choices. A person who knew what they wanted and what they did not, what mattered and what did not, a person who was able to listen to everyone but then do what they thought was right. In other words, a person with a point of view.
What is a point of view? Simply put, it is a crisp accounting of what matters which allows one to say no. In the process of trying to bring cool stuff to life, it is so easy to say yes to everything. It's much harder to say no to the things that don't matter in the end, and that's where the art part of the equation plays out. But I can say one thing definitively: if you don't have a firm point of view about what matters, your chances of doing something remarkable drop to zero. Great things happen when we make choices, and we make good choices when we know what we want.
Above all else, you must have a point of view. Don't leave home without it.
This is number nineteen in a series of evolving principles of innovation. As always, I humbly seek your feedback, critique, and better ideas.
I really like this overview of the creation of the Pulse iPad app. Written by Lisa Katayama of Fast Company, it succinctly captures the big things you have to do to bring something remarkable to market. I especially appreciate the second of the five ways noted in the article:
Define: Are you focused and open to what your team
needs in order to thrive? Define your personal point of view in pursuing
your venture, and then think about what your end user, your team, and
your business need. Even if your end goal is to reach all 6.7 billion
inhabitants of the earth with your product or service, key in on a niche
user to start and identify what works best for him. By observing and
empathizing with the tech geek, for example, Kothari and Gupta were able
to define his need: a better way to catch up with older news and other
treasures that might get buried in linear feeds like Google Reader or
NetNewsWire.
Over the past year, I've outlined 18 of the 21 principles of innovation I've been hacking on. The nineteenth principle happens to be "Have a point of view", and I think the expression of this principle above is just wonderful. Knowing what you stand for, and what you don't, and what is important, and what is not, is fundamental. Without that knowledge, I believe it is impossible to manage the tensions that come with bringing something new to life. Having a point of view not only helps you make decisions, it helps increase the odds that you'll make good decisions -- at least decisions that will feel good to the people you're designing for. I suppose I should get my act together and write up those last three innovation principles...
I also dig this article because of what it says about the Stanford d.school. First, I have to give a tip of my hat to my friends and colleagues Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn, who created and taught the Launch Pad class wherein Pulse was created and launched. They're incredible guys, and I consider myself very lucky to get to learn from them on a routine basis. Second, when George Kembel and I wrote up the "napkin manifesto" for the d.school back in 2004, we had a vision of using "... design thinking to inspire multidisciplinary teams". We thought it would be cool if the next pair of Hewlett and Packard, Filo and Yang, or Sergey and Larry found each other via the d.school. Now, I'm not saying the Pulse is the new Yahoo, but it's very satisfying to see people at the d.school meeting each other, learning with each other, and working together to bring things to life which make a real impact out in the world.
I'm always looking for feedback on my evolving list of innovation principles. What works? What doesn't? What's missing?
Last year Esquire ran this list of aphorisms from the mind of J Mays. I've been holding on to this list since then, and this afternoon I took another look at it. Seeing them afresh made me feel that a few fell naturally into some of my framework of innovation principles. Is it narcissistic to take the thoughts of another person and put them into buckets of your own making? Yeah, probably.
Anyway, here I go... thinking by Mays, buckets by Rodriguez:
"A designer is
only as good as what he or she knows. If all you know is what you've
garnered from fifteen years of living in Detroit, it's going to limit
what you can lay down. If you've had experiences around the world,
you'll be able to design a much richer story for people to enjoy."
"If you go intoa
person's house and look at his surroundings, you'll see exactly who he
is. If you look at the same person in his car, you'll see who he wants
to be"
"What does the cutlerylook
like? What's the plate look like? How's the food laid out on the plate?
Has the environment been completely thought through? Part of the reason
I go to a nice restaurant is to get the entire vibe."
"There have beenmore
not-quite-right Mustangs than Mustangs. It had gone a little bit off the
rails in the seventies, came back in the eighties, and went a little
off the rails in the nineties. We did a lot of research before we
designed the 2005, and we came to the conclusion that the ones that were
really important, the ones that everybody logged in their heart, were
between '64 and '70. I wanted the 2005 to feel like we were picking up
in '71. So I basically erased thirty-five years of Mustangs in order to
get the story focused in everybody's mind again."
"Clichés aremore correct than we give them credit for."
Principle 20: Be remarkable
"Believe it or not, there's an art to plowing a
field. My father had an exact way he wanted it done, a laser-straight
line over the length of the field. I just had to train my eye. If you
lay out the first line wrong, then all the other lines that you disc
will turn out crooked. There was a precision in those fields that I took
into automotive design."
"I'll be the first to admit that there were times when I was
wrong, but it didn't change the fact that I was going to keep trying.
On the other side, if you're just going by the herd rule, that's where
you end up--with the herd."
I was delighted earlier this month to learn that Fortune had named me to their list of "The smartest people in tech".
When it comes to advancing the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, there are inspiring things going on at IDEO and Stanford these days, and I'm very proud to be a member of these teams of amazing people.
Sometimes it's easy to dismiss the idea of doing some prototyping when the "thing" we're working on is as ethereal as a service offering or a software interface. The usual suspect excuses are very predictable:
We can't prototype it because prototyping it is tantamount to building it
We need to design the entire interface if we're going to interact with it on the device, so why prototype it?
We don't have an interaction designer
We don't have a graphic designer
It'll take a few weeks to mock up the interface
We don't have time
But, as the video above shows, where there's a will, there's a way. If you believe you can prototype it, you can. Warning, shameless plug approaching: Elmo's Monster Maker was designed by some of my colleagues here at IDEO, and it's awesome. Not only is it one of my kid's favorite apps, but it's one of mine, too. It's fun, social, wacky, will make you giggle, and in the way of all good games, you just can't put it down.
None of this happened by accident. Perhaps Mozart could dish out an entire perfect opera based on the music in his head, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for getting something out quickly, and then improving it over and over and over until we have to ship it. Iteration makes perfect. Starting is the springboard to perfection.
If nothing else, working on metacool over the past half decade has helped me meet a ton of people I would never have encountered otherwise. And thanks to another friend I met via metacool, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Jörg Bergmeister, one of the most talent racing drivers working today.
Those of you out there whose eyes roll back in your head whenever I talk about cars can rest easy (relaaaxxx -- let those eyes roll baaackkk), because when Jörg and I met, we didn't talk about automobiles so much as about human-machine interface design and how new technologies may reshape the dominant paradigms of automotive design surrounding us today. Our specific topic of discussion was the amazing new Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, and yes we did geek out a bit on gearhead stuff at the beginning of our interview, but on the whole I think we ventured in to some very interesting territory. In fact, we touched on many of the themes I surfaced in this post I wrote a while back about making green red.
By the way, have I mentioned how totally gnarly Jörg's 911 looks?
My favorite part of our conversation came when I asked Jörg about how he stays inspired, and his answer was just wonderful:
Racing is the one thing I love -- well, not the only thing, but I've
done it my entire life and it has been my hobby and I made it my
profession. I'm very fortunate to make my hobby my profession. I think
that's enough inspiration. I just love, love racing.
Words of wisdom. Can you make your hobby your profession, and achieve a "cold fusion" state of permanent personal inspiration. What a way to remain always inspired! I love it.
By the way, have you ever noticed how much the nose of a modern 911 looks like the skull of the ur-land animal Tiktaalik?
If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast! It would be unpredictable. It would consume as much as you dared to feed it. Some days, it would really stink. Yucko! And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out. Most of all, though, it would hairy. Really hairy -- think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer.
However, if you shave a hairball, there's nothing left. You know, it's just a ball of hair, right? But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which -- if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way -- is the source of the new and the wonderful. Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation. As institutions and individuals, we have to learn how to live with the hairball and respect it. If we get enough mileage under our belt, we may even come to relish being in situations of great ambiguity and fuzziness. I know that I can't get enough of being there, which is why I do what I do.
Organizations need to find a way to let the hairball be a hairy mess. The fuzziness of the innovation hairball makes its very presence uncomfortable for mature organizations. Successful organizations have gotten to where they are by being able to sell, ship, and support things on a regular basis. If the honest answer to the question "When will this be done?" is "We have no idea!" (which is what the hairball always says), a mature organization will be sorely tempted to lend clarity and structure to the hairball. "Let's put you on a firm schedule with staged checkpoints!", it says. "Here, let me clean up that mess of hair." Instead, we have to be able to let the hairball be greasy and stinky, and learn how to celebrate it. This is a hard thing to do, as leaving a pool of ambiguity unmopped rarely not squares well with meeting your quarterly numbers. As to where and how to do that, well there are many books written around those subjects, so let's just leave it that we need to let the hair be fuzzy. Don't shave it. Find a place for it to grow.
To that point, my friend Bob Sutton wrote a wonderful post about his own experience of learning to respect the fuzzy front end. In it he quotes Bill Coyne, who led innovation efforts at 3M for many years:
Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky,
glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that
describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front
end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow
the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long-- term
growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on
many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving
leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be
willing to make necessary, healthy stumble.
I really like Bob's post because of the way he relates the need for organizations to build up muscles around grappling with fuzziness with his own personal journey as a design thinker.
As I've said earlier, at a personal level, being comfortable with the innovation process is largely a matter of learning by doing. The more you're in hairy, fuzzy situations, and the more you find your way out of them, the more your confidence in your own creative process will grow. At an individual level, if you want to be able to live in more innovative ways, you need to learn how to orbit the hairball. That phrase, of course, is the title of Gordon McKenzie's masterpiece Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, which occupies a hallowed spot on my bookshelf. For me, McKenzie's masterpiece is a valuable personal "owner's manual", as it helps you find your own ways to avoid the temptation to shave the hairball. It teaches you instead to find ways orbit it when necessary (which may be almost all the time for some folks).
Know thyself. Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one's creative confidence. An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life.
Know thyself.
This is number 18 in a series of principles of innovation. It is an evolving work. Please give me your thoughts, suggestions, and good ideas.
Your brand can't go there? Really? Or is it that you can't imagine a way to get there yourself?
Brands with a fixed identity are not only boring, but are likely to lose relevance over time. While a brand needs to stand for something, to have a firm point of view, it also needs to be able to evolve, to learn, to grow. Brands need not be static entities. Imagine a person who achieved greatness and then decided to remain fixed in place... yes, I don't want to party with them, either.
I admire the marketers at BMW because they seem to be able to conceive of their hallowed brand as a dynamic, living thing. Instead of saying "our brand can't go there", they think "our brand is designed to go places", which I'd wager is why the brand is still so strong after so many year in the market. The dynamic totality of their vision, which encompasses everything from manufacturing to sculpture to R&D to messaging, is centered on the principles of movement and getting to new places, with the risks that come with leaving the safe harbor called What We Know That Works Today.
As a result, they're able to ask an artist like Jeff Koons to mix a little 2010-flavor joy with their current ultimate driving machine to come up with the brand vision above. This beauty, an M3 GT2, will be gracing the streets of Le Mans, France in just a few weeks, taking the brand to new places.
You can go there, it just takes guts. It's a bigger risk not to try.
Yesterday I wrote about serendipity, purpose, and some words of wisdom from Joi Ito. It just came to my attention that my friend John Lilly wrote a great blog post a while back dealing with many of the same themes, plus he ties them to the importance of living within a strong network. Or in a less techie way of putting it, by surrounding yourself with great people and opportunities.
Here's an excerpt -- I just love this stuff:
..for most of the important
turning points in my life, I treated them with a little less seriousness
than, you know, buying my next iPod. Now, I’m not saying that I didn’t
recognize that sometimes decisions would have effects, or that I didn’t
take them seriously. What I’m saying is that a bunch of decisions that I
thought were really important turned out to be not important at all,
and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything (like
when I went to visit an old high school friend in Jamaica who would
eventually become my wife.)
Here’s a quick story to illustrate a turning point that I didn’t
realize until much later. When I was a junior in college, I had decided
to major in computer science, and was starting to get interested in
something called Human Computer Interaction — designing systems for
people to be able to use them effectively. I went to a lunchtime seminar
by a guy named Robert Cailliau — a physicist from Switzerland of all
places — and he brought with him a giant black computer called a NeXT —
Steve Jobs’ creation that would eventually turn into the Macintosh that
we know today. He started giving a demo of a program where you could
bring up a page full of text and pictures, and click on blue underlined
text to get to other pages full of text and pictures. And I remember
saying to myself, “Huh, I guess that’s sort of neat — text &
pictures, click click click.” And the next thing I remember was waking
up when everyone was gathering up all their stuff to leave — I had
fallen asleep — and missed, of course, the first demonstration I’d ever
seen (or most people had ever seen) of the World Wide Web. So there you
go — one of those powerful inflection points in my life — and I slept
through it.
...you
never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect
in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping
strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put
myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of
great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the
odds that I make some really important & good choices that much
better.
Of course, it also helps to be smart, well-educated (formally and informally), and willing to work hard. But obviously context and what you make of it really matters.
Joi Ito has taught me so much since I started reading his writing around seven years ago. More recently I've been able to collaborate with Joi on some stuff, and I can now safely say that the only thing better than Joi on the web is Joi in real life!
Recently at IDEO we've been talking about the difference between having a vision and having a purpose. A vision is something you shoot for, a point in the future, while a purpose is a point of origin, something that guides you. We're of a belief that visions are tough to go after when you desire innovative outcomes because they tend to reduce emergent behavior and serendipity. A single, defined point in the future may be better suited to a top-down, variance-eliminating organization trying to reach a single goal, rather than for one trying to exist in certain way, believing that a guiding purpose will ensure that the outcomes that do arise will be not only appropriate, but likely extraordinary.
Against that context, I just read Joi's latest blog post, Focusing on Everything, which is just wonderful. Here's an excerpt:
One of the great thoughts in the book is the idea that you should set a
general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace
serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to
turn random events into a highly valuable one and
that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by
helping others solve their problems and build things.
I heartily recommend reading the rest of Joi's post -- it is powerful stuff. As someone who took John Maeda's advice to "do both" to heart a few years ago, I find Joi's philosophy of life very reassuring.
"When you come out of college, you’re raw. You have energy. You want
to experiment. You want to learn. You have hopes. You have aspirations.
You want be Oprah Winfrey.
You want to be Steve Jobs. You want to be Bill Gates. You want to be
all that. Slowly, over time, you lose it. And by looking in the mirror
every day as you get older, you fool yourself that you’re O.K. There
has to be another way of looking in the mirror and revisiting what you
really want to do.
So I would say, maybe at the end of college,
write it down honestly, in 100 words or whatever it is, and put it in a
box. I call it the magic box. Revisit it once a year or once every two
years and say, how honest are you to that? Don’t let anybody run your
life. That, in my mind, is very, very important. You should be in
control of your life"
Bill Moggridge, Director of the Cooper-Hewlitt, is blogging about his experiences there, and it's fascinating stuff.
Bill combines an effortless writing style with a keen eye for details and a warm sense of humor. I particularly like his post A Car in the House (but then, I would, eh?). Here's a charming video vignette about what it takes to put a Nano in the Cooper:
What a wonderful opportunity to see the world through the eyes of a truly great designer!
I was fortunate to have breakfast with my friend and collaborator Ryan Jacoby today, and he reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's all about making good stuff. Yes, everything else in your business ecosystem has to be in place, but you need to sell good stuff. An Apple Store without Apple products would be... not so good.
Back to the cup. Having intended to purchase a cheap(er) lunch, I just walked out of Whole Foods with a more expensive lunch, natch. Actually, at around six bucks for a frozen burrito and a couple of yogurts, it is not bank-breaker meal, but I am a semi-Mid Westerner and have a kids to send to college and I'm living in the land of massive taxation... but I digress. Back to the cup: while wandering the isles, I fell prey to a pricing promotion, and though I can never justify a container of Siggi's yogurt at $2.49 per unit, I certainly was up for two of them being promoted at $2.00 a lid. Yes, it would seem that I need to turn in my MBA, but I am not a perfect person nor do I want to go through life making rational purchase decisions.
And how very happy I am right now with spoon in mouth and a wallet $4.00 lighter. Siggi's, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of sampling yet, has exquisite mouth feel. It is thick without being clompy, smooth without feeling excessively processed. It comes in some of the standard yogurt flavors -- vanilla, blueberry, etc -- but also in some unexpected ones, like grapefruit. Love that grapefruit. And none of the flavors feel like they feel off the back of a truck destined for IHOP; they are light and complex, not syrupy and bright. There's a wonderful backstory to Siggi's, too: the company is led by a passionate, entrepreneurial Icelander named Siggi who is crazy about his native skyr yogurt and so found a bunch of wholesome cows in New York and started cranking out skyr. The packaging is eco-friendly and the graphic design meets my psychographic needs. With all of this, $2.49 starts to feel reasonable.
There's no big punchline to this post. Just do good stuff. Just do good stuff. When in doubt, repeat that under your breath: Just do good stuff.
Hi. I was recently asked by the nice folks over at blogs.com to come up with a Top 10 list.
I have lots of favorite blogs. You can see a few of them here to the right of this page, and many more gnarly ones over at Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness. It was actually difficult to come up with a Top 10 list because I like so many different blogs, but after some serious procrastination I whittled it down to ten... or eleven.
Because it works on so many levels, this talk by Dan Barber was by far my favorite of TED 2010.
Without spoiling the talk for you, I love the way Barber takes us on a walk through his life, and has a conversation with us all along the way. And it's a funny one at that. His insights changed the way I think about the relationship between oceans and food; prior to this I did not recognize that one could create an aquatic version of Polyface Farm. Amazing.
This talk is also a master class in public speaking. No, in public story telling. This talk defines the bar by which we should measure pitches for a cause. This is how to start a movement, how to get people to sit up and take notice, take action.
Awesome. And now I'd like to try some of that Spanish fish...
Earlier this year I was very fortunate to have a conversation with Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design. You can read the complete interview here at Aol Autos.
... at the end of the day, I do not tell them to move a line exactly 50
mils lower or higher or more to the left or more to the right, because
if the boundaries are too narrow you really kill all the creativity. I
try to motivate people to think for themselves about the solution and
how they could achieve the goal... Even if I have a solution in my
mind, it is just one possible solution. There might be ten other
possible solutions that are maybe much better, but by giving a
direction that is too detailed or showing a solution, a way to the
solution that is too detailed, I kill all the creativity. One of my
major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of
creativity.
This feels very much to me like a "cultivation mindset". Instead of trying to push his ideas through the system at Porsche, Mauer is trying to develop the ideas of others. He is a curator, a director, a cultivator. As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.
It's just hard to have robust answers about an unknown future state.
Too frequently, taking the time to answer "What about..." questions
doesn't bring you any closer to achieving the goal of creating booming
growth businesses.
I like his essay because it is a nice way to frame the importance of Principle 10: Baby steps often lead to big leaps. By asking too many questions, Scott says, firms avoid taking the kinds of small actions which would actually yield answers. As I noted in my writeup of Principle 10:
As obvious as it may seem, starting something is essential to its
completion. But often times people can't accept the challenge in front
of them, and so they find myriad ways to avoid doing something: budget
reviews, scoping meetings, taking sick time, eating pizzas, buffing
that feature on your last project, surfing Facebook... all fine ways to
delay dealing with reality.
The problem with shifting from "smart talk" to "right action" is that you may end up not looking so smart, at least in the short run. You may do everything right, but you'll still fail, at least in the short term. The trick is to be able to take a longer-term view in which each small failure becomes part of a stairway to success. We learn a lot when things go wrong, because we're forced to reexamine our beliefs and assumptions about how the world works, and in doing so we are more likely to arrive at a hypothesis which, when acted upon, will create value in the world.
For the solo entrepreneur or inventor, this is as easily said as done. For the rest of us who live in large organizations, we can't expect to fail over and over and succeed unless the larger organization is set up to understand. For that we need another innovation principle, which I will discuss here soon.
This talk by Bill Gates was by far the most important given at TED last week (if not my favorite one).
The equation he presents is extremely powerful in the way it structures the conversation around energy and society. Simply put, something has to go to zero, but only one thing can realistically go to zero.
I also found fascinating his discussion of a nuclear power plant which burns depleted uranium as a fuel. Audacious and of a level of complexity which is hard to fathom, this "nuclear Yule log" could offer the kind of radical step-function we need to meet the needs of the equation he presents.
This is twenty minutes well-spent. My hat is off to Bill Gates for helping all us become more informed citizens, and for equipping us with a formidable tool for critical thinking. This was TED at its best.
There were a couple of other talks which also knocked my hat in the creek, so I'll post those as soon as they go up.
"Ship early, ship often, iterate and listen to all of the feedback. I
think that if you have the courage to listen and the ability to take
the feedback and iterate on your product, you will better off than
waiting and trying to deliver something perfect. Imagining your product
or project as a way of communicating with people and thinking of
product development as a conversation might be one way to think about
it."
Things have been a bit quiet here at metacool over the past few weeks. While I've been busy dealing in gnarlyness over at my other blog, I haven't forgotten about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.
In fact, I've recently written two articles which might be of interest to y'all:
I'll be writing more about metacool-ish topics in the world of transportation for Aol Autos in the coming months, and maybe more at BusinessWeek, too. Writing essays like these is not at all like the process of blogging (at least for me), so it was great to have great editorial help from Helen and Reilly to help me along the way.
"Today, what defines the most
innovative, and the most successful, people is their willingness to fail. And,
that’s especially true in journalism, media and advertising...
This is the key to the future for all of us. It’s not how we
deal with success but how we embrace and learn from failure that will define
all of us during the Great Inflection...
Instead, dare to fail. Fail fast. Learn from failure. Build
on failure. Share failure. Understand failure.
Most of all, enjoy failure. Life is so short. Hold nothing
back."
Earlier this week I made the following statement on Twitter (if you're interested in following, I'm @metacool):
Innovating takes courage and faith. You've got to jump from the plane believing your chute is going to pop.
Having thought about it more this week, that statement isn't right. Parachuting out of a plane is not a good metaphor for the act of innovation. Instead, it's all about being able to jump out of planes in a way that's more akin to this:
Don't try this at home, kids. Or this, for that matter.
The reason the parachuting metaphor doesn't work for me is because it makes innovating out to be a solo activity based around a linear, I-have-safety-net process. But, in my experience, jumping out of the plane without the parachute seems closer to what actually happens in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life: when you start the process of bringing something new in to the world using design thinking, you don't know where you'll end up or what is going to be like getting there, but you do know that you can always rely on an iterative, intersection-focused design process achieve your end goal. This concept is illustrated well by three key elements of this video.
First, in this jump, Travis makes the leap knowing that he has a premeditated process for landing safely. There's quite a bit of on the spot improvisation happening in those long seconds after he jumps, but clearly he has a rough sense of what needs to happen and when. In a similar way, innovating with a design process to guide you feels much the same way -- beforehand you don't know exactly when you'll put each component part in to play, but you certainly are intimately familiar with all the tricks and tools at your disposal. And practice makes perfect.
Second, it's all about the team. Innovation may start with an "I", but the reality of making it so given a problem of even mild complexity calls for a team effort. It's a team that gets Travis to the ground safely, and in the same way, a tight, interdependent design team can do things that would be impossible if undertaken alone. In the course of the design process, we become each other's parachutes, as it were.
So, allow me this opportunity to rephrase my original statement:
Innovating requires courage and optimism. When making a leap in to the unknown, you must have faith that your team and process will take you to where you want to go.
Having the courage to leap in the first place is the third and final lesson to takeaway from Travis's parachute-less jump. Without the courage to engage with the abyss with the audacity to believe that you can create something beautiful and valuable for the rest of the world to use, nothing valuable can ever happen.
So, with optimism as your co-pilot, figure out who can help you pull off those jumps you want and need to make in 2010, and go for it!
I hereby propose a new (un)holiday. I'm calling it an (un)holiday because it won't be an occasion for grilling meats and drinking spirits (though that could happen, I suppose). It's not a day of vacation, for it is meant to remind of us to be mindful of our approach to working through certain types of problems. It is not a day for celebrations, but it is celebratory in nature: it celebrates not just an event, but an entire way of being.
I hereby declare December 17 to be Innovating Day.
Innovate. Take action. It's about the verb -- innovating -- and not the noun. Personally, I'm tired of talking about the noun innovation and reading books about that noun, and only want to help people and organizations get in better touch with their creative confidence so that they can go out and innovate. Trying to understand how to get to innovative outcomes via a process analyzing the inputs and outputs of innovation is akin to trying to understand love by reading textbooks on biology and genomics. I'd wager that the best lovers in history didn't read books on the subject. Much better, methinks, to go out and do it in order to understand it. Love, innovate, do, live: you'll come to understand your own self and process in due time. Which is the whole point.
Today is Innovating Day because December 17 marks the anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright completing the first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine. The Wrights were nothing if not intuitive innovators, deeply in touch with a personal design process which allowed them to go where no man had gone before. I won't pretend that the Wrights followed any of the principles of innovating which I've been discussing here over the past year, but I will declare that those principles are largely inspired by the lives of the Wrights. In particular, the events of December 17 helped inspire these specific principles:
I'd like to ask you to do one thing today: as you work your way through a situation that's new within the context of your own life experience, be it big or small, try to mindful of your approach to the situation. Try to see of you can apply any of the principles of innovating to your task at hand. If you're stuck, I highly recommend proceeding with Principle 3 as a starting point.
So, please spread the news and let your friends and loved ones know that December 17 is Innovating Day.
One final thought: as the great Gordon MacKenzie wrote, "Orville Wright didn't have a pilot license". You don't need a degree from a fancy program in design thinking or engineering to start being innovative.
I've had the pleasure of hanging out with Sean Bonner recently, as we've both been participating in Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 for the past few days.
We spent a fun afternoon on Monday having some design reviews with entrepreneurial student teams at Nanyang Technological University (if you want to see a cool example of some killer startup thinking and doing coming out of Singapore, check out Phokki ). We wrapped up the afternoon by debriefing with faculty members over some bubble tea in the student canteen, where Sean shot this photo:
This placard is affixed to each and every table in the canteen. I like it because it comes off feeling okay and not too big-brotherish relative to what it could have been. The messaging here is very subtle, and its author would make a great brand manager. The use of the word "hog" makes it feel less institutional than these things usually sound like, and the quote in bold is a nice signoff. This small sign felt friendly but focused, just like all the folks at NTU. I maintain that, at that end of the day, the power of a brand comes down to how you make people feel, and that those feelings are driven much more by the sum of many fractal interactions than by the positioning statement on your website.
"The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative.
We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments.
It's time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults."
As is her way, Rosabeth Moss Kanter has written an essay which not only hits the the nail on the head, but then knocks it clear though to the other side. Talking about leadership and power in our connected world, she crisply articulates what it means to exert gravitational pull as opposed to hierarchical power. Here's an excerpt:
Today, people with power and influence derive their power from their
centrality within self-organizing networks that might or might not
correspond to any plan on the part of designated leaders. Organization
structure in vanguard companies involves multi-directional
responsibilities, with an increasing emphasis on horizontal
relationships rather than vertical reporting as the center of action
that shapes daily tasks and one's portfolio of projects, in order to
focus on serving customers and society. Circles of influence replace
chains of command, as in the councils and boards at Cisco which draw
from many levels to drive new strategies. Distributed leadership —
consisting of many ears to the ground in many places — is more
effective than centralized or concentrated leadership. Fewer people
act as power-holders monopolizing information or decision-making, and
more people serve as integrators using relationships and persuasion to
get things done.
This changes the nature of career success. It is not enough to be
technically adept or even to be interpersonally pleasant. Power goes to
the "connectors": those people who actively seek relationships and then
serve as bridges between and among groups. Their personal contacts are
often as important as their formal assignment. In essence, "She who has
the best network wins."
This is more than a style of leadership, it is about a fundamental shift in the structure of power and influence, and I believe it is quite representative of an approach that has existed in our more innovative institutions through time. According influence to those who are able to get things done by bringing diverse groups of people together sounds like the job description for leadership in an organization full of T-shaped people. And as far as that goes, I like her essay a lot more than what I wrote in my articulation of Principle 12, so I'm going to have to appropriate some of these ideas.
And by the way, I'd love to connect with you on Twitter, too. You can find me there @metacool
"I'm not sure what a fairy tale is. In terms of the fact that taking
something which was on its knees and almost finished, and arriving
where we have today is for me an exceptional experience. Just seeing
the resolve of people who didn't give up. They were facing being put
out on the street and we said 'we don't know what's going to happen but
we need your support because if it can happen, without your support, we
won't be in a position to do it. And they just did."
His talk isn't the kind of thing you could whip up out of one's imagination alone, but it does depend on his intellect to synthesize the wonderful narrative we hear above. Taking the time to get out in to the world, and then having the ability to see clearly, are two keys to bringing great stuff to life.
At the end of the film Truth in 24, Howden Haynes (race winner Tom Kristensen's race engineer) admits that his team's victory has left him emotionally numb: he's not elated, he's not sad, he's just kind of there, hovering above his elated peers, not able to experience everything you'd expect him to be feeling after having guided his drivers to an underdog victory over the course of 24 grueling hours at Le Mans. I've seen the movie many times (it's my favorite bit of in-flight entertainment), but I could never quite understand why Haynes reacted that way to what seemed to be a peak life moment. But thanks to some friends, the last week of my life has been horizon-expanding, and to be honest, somewhat overwhelming from an emotional standpoint: which brings me to this past Thursday evening, where I found myself sitting in my Beijing hotel room thinking "how in the world did that just happen, and how come I feel this numb?". Now I have a sense of why Haynes felt the way he did, and let me tell you why.
A week ago I hopped on a plane to Beijing to be a spectator at the Race of Champions (RoC). My carry-on luggage consisted largely of one Arai helmet stuffed full of nomex balaclava, and one Amazon Kindle filled up with the latest and greatest reads in business and innovation. Truth be told, I was so excited to finally be headed to RoC that I could hardly read any of those books -- so instead I spent the flight with my eyes glued to the afore-mentioned Truth in 24, watching my heroes Kristensen and Pirro (who would be racing at RoC) race their way through the French countryside. I kept thinking about my helmet up top, too, because ever since I was a boy I had wanted a racing helmet, and now I had one, and thanks to my friends it looked pretty killer, too. Wasn't sure if I was going to get to use it in Beijing, and knew that it was overkill to bring my own when there were plenty of loaner helmets waiting there for me, but I just felt like I wanted it to be this way.
Upon landing, I embarked on a three-day blitz of totally engrossing automotive experiences. I met a bunch of my racing heroes, and even got to break bread with them. I made a bunch of new friends. I got to tour the Forbidden City with the future of Western capitalism. And I got some seriously good rides.
Jean Jennings, an automotive journalist I've been reading since the days when my mode of transportation was a pimped-out Mongoose BMX bike, once wrote that she took up being a co-driver in rallies when she realized that a professional race car pilot could give her a better racing experience than she could get at the wheel herself. That was certainly my experience in Beijing, where I was fortunate enough to ride along with the following kinesthetic geniuses:
For whatever, reason, all of the planets aligned at the end of Wednesday evening's Race of Champions shoot-out, and in space of five minutes I went from being a jet-lagged spectator to sitting beside a very focused Michael Schumacher as he warmed up our orange X-Bow in anticipation of the final against the amazing Mattias Ekstrom. After a couple of warmup laps, and then three laps driven in anger, "we" came in second:
Coverage of my race with Schumacher starts at the 2:56:00 mark on the video (my race with Priaulx is at 0:55:30).
The race itself was amazing, feeling like one seamless set of control inputs on the part of Schumacher as we flowed our way around the track. We lost by just a few tenths, but man was it a great run on this part. My abiding memory will be from our cooldown lap, when Schumacher turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and we both shared a laugh at the site of Ekstrom doing a massive stalled burnout against the barrier. Upon stopping, we shook hands and that was that.
So all of this is why I found myself in my hotel room getting ready for the post-race party, and -- somewhat Hayne-like -- simultaneously feeling ecstatic, happy, and dumbfounded. My heart was yelling "DUDE! TOTAL UNABASHED GEARHEAD GNARLYNESS!!!!!!!!!!" and my brain was saying "wait a second, did that just happen... and with these guys??!!???...". Soul-mind dissonance. Sitting at home at my keyboard today, of course, I'm totally happy, grateful and thankful to have had this amazing life experience.
My intent in writing this post wasn't to toot my horn in public about my blessings, nor was my intention to process my emotions in public. I just needed to write all of this in order to get to a point where I could express my sincere thanks to a whole bunch of special people, and to have you understand why they mean so much to me.
So, here is a public "thank you" to all of the folks who made my time in Beijing so special and memorable, in no particular order: Paul, Martin, Andy, Michele, Travis, Fredrik, Tanner, Owen, Marie-Helene, Tess, Cris, Mattias, Brian, and... many others.
Most of all, though, I want to give a big, heartfelt thanks to Jim Hancock. Jim was the one who invited me to RoC, and he did many things big and small make my time there truly remarkable. Jim and I met several years ago via metacool, and I've learned a tremendous amount from him since then. Not only is he one of the most intuitive, natural marketers I've ever met, he's also an extremely generous and fun person to be around. Above all, he's a pure racer, and I will be forever grateful for this Race of Champions experience, which let me feel like a racer, too.
Dreams can come true -- you just need a little help from your friends.
I bought a Breezer bike last year, and was really happy with it, but as I just can't leave well enough alone, I took to tweaking it. My objective? To turn it into a true object of hipster doofus lust, to make it a stealthy mountain-urban bike in Dutch city bike's clothing.
I'm kicking myself for not taking a "before" photo, but trust me when I say that the bike looks much better now: I've swapped out the stock seat, handlebars, and grips for some much tastier items from Brooks, Nitto, and a Portuguese cork farmer. And the grips are shellacked, natch. I'm still not totally satisfied with the seating position, however.
I took this quick photo today over at Stanford and felt like sharing it, ergo this Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness post.
And now for something not-so-completely-different, on Friday I'm participating in a Digital Think In for National Public Radio. A group of us are going to spend the day formulating and envisioning a digital media strategy for NPR. I'm really excited, as there's going to be some juicy business design involved, especially as we work with issues around the "social", "open", and "platform" aspects of their service.
Anyhow, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them -- please drop me an email or leave a comment. The official Twitter hashtag for the event will be #NPRthink, and of course you can always find me at @metacool.
I'm really happy to be able to point you to Living Climate Change, a conversation that we're hosting at IDEO.
Our goal with this new site is to expand and enhance the debate about climate change, and also to show what might be done about it using design thinking. While I didn't have a direct role in producing any of the video scenarios on the site, I did a modicum of work to support them coming to fruition (Principle 12), and I'm really happy with where we are with this rollout.
There's a lot more to come. Believe me, there's a lot of interesting stories and visions coming to the sight over the next few months! Most important, though, will be your contributions. If you're interested, please take a minute to subscribe to updates from the site, and contribute your thoughts and feelings here.
Over the weekend I spent some time fooling around with an iPhone app called ColorCapture Ben. The way it works is you take a photo of a color you like using your iPhone, and then this app from Benjamin Moore shows you the closest matching color chip from their collection, and then serves up a listing of complimentary colors and so forth. I found that it works equally well sampling a Barnett-Newman style solid color field as it does mixing across the various colors found in a Seurat-like shot of a lawn. Even if you're not in the market for some new paint, it's a wonderful source of quiet, adult entertainment if you ever find yourself, say, attending a live performance of music designed for the toddler-preschooler demographic. As I frequently am.
It's also a great example of Principle 3 at work. Principle 3 states that we must always ask "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?". If you've ever painted a room in a house, you know that there are many areas that could stand some improvement, and indeed there has been quite a bit of innovation lately in the areas of zero-VOC paint formulations, easy-pour paint containers, and new application tools. But those are all about the paint or conveying the paint to the wall, and when you think about it, there's so much more to the painting experience. The beauty of Principle 3 is that, by asking that you put yourself in another human's shoes, it forces you to consider all of the non-obvious aspects that make up an experience:
Another part of the challenge lies in thinking about usage through
time. We often design for those few moments that make up the core
value proposition. But what about all the other experiences? How does
it feel to start using it? What does mastery feel like -- is it
exhilarating or boring? How does using this expand our human
experience? How does it influence our environment? What does it feel
like to extend one's relationship with the offering? Does it help
someone get to a state of flow?
I don't know about you, but for me, the entire process of choosing a paint color is terrifying. Mistakes are expensive, and because it is difficult to sample paint colors accurately, iteration in a baby-step kind of way (Principle 10) is also tough. This is where ColorCapture steps in. For example, for a while I've been meaning to paint one wall of my bedroom green, but I'd rather go clean my garage than have to choose the right color of green amongst the hundreds of choices available to me -- the paradox of choice at work. With this new app, I can take a picture of my wood floor (the dominant color in the room that I need to play with), and then boom!, I have the green I need, or at least a handful of greens. And now I can start painting, and to start painting I'll go buy a gallon of Benjamin Moore Natura.
While I don't think Principle 3 is the most powerful of the principles, it certainly is one of the most foundational. If you can put it in to action, you're well on your way.
Earlier this year I wrote up a preliminary version of the sixteenth principle of innovation, Grok the gestalt of teams. In the spirit of Principle 16, my colleague John Foster just posted a great blog post about teams, called Another kind of team. Do give it a read.
Here are the four principles he outlines:
Proactive Self Disclosure
Conditional Statements
Interpersonal Congruence
Clarity of Purpose
It's a really good post, as you would expect from an subject expert like John! In the spirit of Principles 4, 6 and 8, I'm going to borrow and steal more of his thinking in order to push Principle 16 to a better place. Stay tuned for a revamped version.
As always, your comments, feedback, and ideas are not only welcome, but extremely valuable as I wade through this space.
BusinessWeek has a nice series called Five Questions For... (or 5Q4) where you, the reader/audience/world citizen get to submit a question, and then someone like Helen Walters asks your very question of a luminary. For all of us who think of calling in to a NPR talk show while driving but never do it, or who do call in to something like Car Talk, but never make it on, 5Q4 is a dream come true.
Are you getting the picture? My question got asked. I feel like a bouncy kid right now because Helen Walters asked Danny Meyer to answer my question. I love the web.
Here you go, Five Answers from Danny Meyer:
And do check out 5Q4. Lots of great interviews on there with people who make dents in the universe.
I really enjoyed listening to this interview of Adrian van Hooydonk by Tyler Brule of Monocle. It's a wonderful Director's Commentary, because in it van Hooydonk explores many themes that are relevant far beyond the world of BMW. Anyone engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life will get a lot out of this video.
Some of the high points for me were:
his thoughtful exploration of how the 2009 financial crisis will shape user behaviors in the future
his thinking on what it takes to design remarkable experiences, and his emphasis on the importance of having a strong point of view. When he says that the BMW Gran Turismo is about "traveling in style", I really get what the car is all about. By the way, the Gran Turismo has officially replaced the Honda Ridgeline as the focus of all my automotive fetishistic energy (but Honda, if you're listening, I'd still be very happy if you delivered a Ridgeline to my house one Saturday morning. With a bow on top).
his clear focus on user experience as the wellspring of compelling designs. This worldview, of course, is what Principle 3 is all about.
My favorite part of the interview comes near the end, as Brule and Hooydonk discuss what it is like to bring designs before the board of BMW for approval. Here's an excerpt:
Design is an emotional thing. So, as a designer, I will lean to one or the other design in the final stages, and I can't completely explain why. But my responsibility is to advise the board on which design we should go with, and they don't even expect from me that I can explain it to the last millimeter. In a way, there has to be trust between a board of management and the chief designer.
I could not agree more. In my experience, trust in the informed intuition of talented designers is what separates the great brands from the also-rans. Informed intuition is what allows designers to make good decisions regarding intangibles. In the absence of trust in informed intuition, organizations are tempted to decode intangibles via metrics, surveys and other algorithmic devices, and all the poetry gets trampled.
When it comes to the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, this point is especially important:
As far as I'm concerned, the most important of all, the top of the
hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What's your bias
in dealing with people and problems?... Sure, you can start at the bottom by focusing on execution and
credentials. Reading a typical blog (or going to a typical school for
16 years), it seems like that's what you're supposed to do. What a
waste.
When trying to get something done that's been done before, it's important to look at credentials of execution: Dr. Heart Surgeon, I hope you've done this surgery many times before, and done it well, and had a chance to learn from your mistakes and those committed by others. But when faced by the challenge of creating value where none has existed before, what's important? As Seth points out, it's mostly about attitude and approach. Those are the lifelines to get you from here to over there when everything is foggy and unknown. Those are what get you to a viable strategy that makes certain executional tactics more or less relevant.
If you're trying to create the right team to go after something revolutionary, you can't ask "show me all the similar things you've shipped". You can only ask "how many times have you stepped in to the abyss, and what have you learned about how to do it better?.
If things have seemed quiet around metacool, that's because they have been quiet around metacool.
I was out on a vacation for the past couple of weeks, and took a fast from everything web-related (except for Twitter, which doesn't feel the same to me), including email and blogging and everything else I do via Firefox. I highly recommend it. I should have plenty of stuff coming out over the next few weeks.
Anyhow, the fast is now broken. The photo above was taken at Dirty Al's, home of some of the best fried shrimp I've ever had in my life. I highly recommend those, too.
“I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”