Monthly Archives: September 2021

Developing a Future-Fitness Focus

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Developing a Future-Fitness Focus

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

In a recent article “Organizing for the future: Nine keys to becoming a future-ready company” McKinsey and Co, suggested that the Covid-19 pandemic has added to the pressure to change that has been growing for many years, which is now at a tipping point. Where the most forward-looking leaders and teams see a larger opportunity – the chance to build on pandemic-related accomplishments and re-examine and reimagine the organisation’s identity, how it works, and how it grows. Referring to new research on the organizational practices of 30 top companies, they highlighted how businesses can best organize for the future – and it is all initiated by developing a human-centric, future-fit focus.

Inquiring as to how might we ensure that we capture the best of what we’ve learned and keep the digital momentum going through developing a future-fit focus within the post-COVID-19 world?

What is a future-ready organization?

The article goes on to state that future-ready companies share three characteristics that offer senior executives a “unique unfreezing opportunity” – oby co-creating new adaptive systems, that are purposeful, organic, and human-centric by:

  • Knowing who they are and what they stand for;
  • Operating with a fixation on speed and simplicity;
  • Growing by scaling up their ability to learn, innovate, and seek good ideas, regardless of their origin.

Seeing the world with fresh eyes – unlearning, re-learning, creativity and innovation

All of which need to be initiated and developed through acquiring a new lens: an ability to see the world with “fresh eyes” by letting go of many of our old mental models and paradigms to:

  • Co-create, with others, new openings and empty spaces for unlearning what may have previously been embraced and worked in the past.
  • Focus on developing a new future-fit focus that unleashes purposeful, speed, simplicity, and growth through unlearning, re-learning, creativity and innovation.

Letting go to let come

In almost every aspect of business, we are operating with mental models, paradigms, and mindsets that have become outdated or obsolete, from strategy to marketing, from organizational design, learning systems to leadership, teams, and even to coaching.

This means that the first and most crucial step in shifting towards a human-centric, future-fitness focus involves “unlearning.”

Because many of our old mental models and paradigms, which are mostly unconsciously embodied in our core mindsets, impact the choices and decisions we make, the behaviors we enact, and the results we get – and it seems, that in 2021 we are getting a lot of results that no-one particularly wants.

What do we mean by “unlearning” and why is it important?

A lot of the mental models and paradigms are embodied in our habitual mindsets, that many of us learned in school, university, or college, and even in 20th century learning programs and built our careers on are now incomplete, ineffective, and irrelevant in adapting, and in serving people to survive, grow and thrive the post-Covid-19 world.

This means that to embrace a future-fit focus we have to first unlearn the old ones.

“Unlearning” is not about forgetting.

It’s about paying deep attention and developing the awareness to see, and step outside of our old mental models or paradigms and pay attention, and be consciously aware of the:

  • Mindsets we are embodying;
  • Behaviors we are enacting;
  • and the results we are manifesting.

Either because reality has changed or because current approaches are based on flawed or rigid thinking, faulty premises, and assumptions, or via a different consumer or technological landscape.

To then consciously choose, experiment, make distinctions, and bravely re-learn how to shift towards developing different, diverse, and more resourceful future-readiness.

The good news is that practicing “unlearning” will make it easier and quicker to make the necessary future-fit shifts as our brains become adaptive, through the process of neuroplasticity.

What are the key steps in “unlearning”?

  1. Being fully present, composed, and detached in adopting a beginner’s mind involving periodically challenging, questioning, and reassessing deeply held theories, archetypes, and conventions to provoke and evoke creative new ideas and innovative solutions.
  2. Allowing things to be and not needing to be in control, or in charge, being comfortable with being uncomfortable and willing to explore uncertainty, constraints, and threats as opportunities from a whole person and whole systems perspective.
  3. Wandering into wonder in the unknown to bravely adopt a “not knowing” stance and be more open-hearted, childlike and joyful, by bringing in awe, curiosity, and playfulness into your space.
  4. Recognizing and discerning that some of your old mental models, paradigms, and mindsets are no longer relevant or effective and be open-minded, through being inquisitive, curious, and creative in experimenting with new ones.
  5. Imagining, finding, or creating new mental models, paradigms, and mindsets that can help you adapt, innovate and better achieve your goals and growth objectives and focus on developing your capacity, confidence, and competence in being agile: the ability to create intentional shifts in different and changing contexts to re-program the mind.
  6. Ingraining the new future-fit mindsets as emotional and mental habits through attending and observing, being empathic and compassionate, questioning and inquiring, generative listening and debate, experimenting, smart risk-taking, and networking across boundaries.

What gets in the way of “unlearning”?

At ImagineNation™ we specialize in designing and delivering bespoke adult learning solutions that embrace a range of future fit mindsets, behaviors, and skills.

Whilst we have found that many leaders, teams, executives, and coaches are willing to unlearn, and re-learn, many are not.

Requiring our coaches, trainers, and facilitators to effectively resolve some of the key human-centric blockers to unlearning and re-learning including some peoples’:

  • Rigidity and fixedness in their own points of view and need to be “right” and in control of the situation.
  • Need to always appear to know, and their hesitancy around not wanting to look like they don’t actually know the answers or solutions, and are therefore incompetent.
  • Busyness, where they are too task focussed to make the time to hit their pause buttons, retreat and reflect, to review options for being more effective, productive, and creative, by thinking and doing things differently.
  • Fear of loss, or lack of safety and permission to set aside the status quo to challenge assumptions and explore new possibilities and play with the art of the possible

Towards  a human-centric, future-fit focus

For most of us, the COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath have upended our lives as we knew them,  and according to McKinsey & Co – the resulting pain, grief, and economic dislocation will be felt long into the future.

Reinforcing that the first priority for leaders and teams, therefore, is to become more purposeful and human-centric, to lead and role model a future-fit focus.

Aimed at increasing speed and improving simplicity and by strategically scaling up people’s ability to unlearn, relearn, innovate, and seek good ideas regardless of their origin.

By being curious and creative, connected, empathic and compassionate, confident and courageous, to revitalize, and reenergize, exhausted people, teams, and organizations, currently languishing in 2021.

This is the first of a series of blogs, podcasts, and webinars on Developing a Human-Centric Future-Fitness organisation.

More about us

Find out about The Coach for Innovators Certified Program, a collaborative, intimate, and deep personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 8-weeks, starting October 19, 2021. It is a blended learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of a human-centered approach to innovation, within your unique context. Find out more.

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A Trigger Strategy for Driving Radical, Transformational Change

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A Trigger Strategy for Driving Radical, Transformational Change

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

There’s an old adage that says we should never let a crisis go to waste. The point is that during a crisis there is a visceral sense of urgency and resistance often falls by the wayside. We’ve certainly seen that during the Covid pandemic. Digital technologies such as video conferencing, online grocery and telehealth have gone from fringe to mainstream in record time.

Seasoned leaders learn how to make good use of a crisis. Consider Bill Gates and his Internet Tidal Wave memo, which leveraged what could have been a mortal threat to Microsoft into a springboard to even greater dominance. Or how Steve Jobs used Apple’s near-death experience to reshape the ailing company into a powerhouse.

But what if we could prepare for a trigger before it happens? The truth is that indications of trouble are often clear long before the crisis arrives. Clearly, there were a number of warning signs that a pandemic was possible, if not likely. As every good leader knows, there’s never a shortage of looming threats. If we learn to plan ahead, we can make a crisis work for us.

The Plan Hatched In A Belgrade Cafe

In the fall of 1998, five young activists met in a coffee shop in Belgrade, Serbia. Although still in their twenties, they were already grizzled veterans. In 1992, they took part in student protests against the war in Bosnia. In 1996, they helped organize a series of rallies in response to Slobodan Milošević’s attempt to steal local elections.

To date, their results were decidedly mixed. The student protests were fun, but when the semester ended, everyone went home for the summer and that was the end of that. The 1996 protests were more successful, overturning the fraudulent results, but the opposition coalition, called “Zajedno,” soon devolved into infighting.

So they met in the coffee shop to discuss their options for the upcoming presidential election to be held in 2000. They knew from experience that they could organize rallies effectively and get people to the polls. They also knew that when they got people to the polls and won, Milošević would use his power and position to steal the election.

That would be their trigger.

The next day, six friends joined them and they called their new organization Otpor. Things began slowly, with mostly street theatre and pranks, but within 2 years their ranks had swelled to more than 70,000. When Milošević tried to steal the election they were ready and what is now known as the Bulldozer Revolution erupted.

The Serbian strongman was forced to concede. The next year, Milošević would be arrested and sent to The Hague for his crimes against humanity. He would die in his prison cell in 1996, awaiting trial.

Opportunity From The Ashes

In 2014, in the wake of the Euromaidan protests that swept the thoroughly corrupt autocrat Viktor Yanukovych from power, Ukraine was in shambles. Having been looted of roughly $100 billion (roughly the amount of the country’s entire GDP) and invaded by Russia, things looked bleak. Without western aid, the proud nation’s very survival was in doubt.

Yet for Vitaliy Shabunin and the Anti-Corruption Action Center, it was a moment he had been waiting for. He established the organization with his friend Dasha Kaleniuk a few years earlier. Since then they, along with a small staff, had been working with international NGOs to document corruption and develop effective legislation to fight it.

With Ukraine’s history of endemic graft, which had greatly worsened under Yanukovych, progress had been negligible. Yet now, with the IMF and other international institutions demanding reform, Shabunin and Kaleniuk were instantly in demand to advise the government on instituting a comprehensive anti-corruption program, which passed in record time.

Yet they didn’t stop there either. “Our long-term strategy is to create a situation in which it will be impossible not to do anti-corruption reforms,” Shabunin would later tell me. “We are working to ensure that these reforms will be done, either by these politicians or by another, because they will lose their office if they don’t do these reforms.”

Vitaliy, Dasha and the Anti-Corruption Action Center continue to prepare for future triggers.

The Genius Of Xerox PARC

One story that Silicon Valley folks love to tell involves Steve Jobs and Xerox. After the copier giant made an investment in Apple, which was then a fledgling company, it gave Jobs access to its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). He then used the technology he saw there to create the Macintosh. Jobs built an empire based on Xerox’s oversight.

Yet the story misses the point. By the late 60s, its Xerox CEO Peter McColough knew that the copier business, while still incredibly profitable, was bound to be disrupted eventually. At the same time it was becoming clear that computer technology was advancing quickly and, someday, would revolutionize how we worked. PARC was created to prepare for that trigger.

The number of groundbreaking technologies created at PARC is astounding. The graphical user interface, networked computing, object oriented programing, the list goes on. Virtually everything that we came to know as “personal computing” had its roots in the work done at PARC in the 1970s.

Most of all, PARC saved Xerox. The laser printer invented there would bring in billions and, eventually, largely replace the copier business. Some technologies were spun off into new companies, such as Adobe and 3Com, with an equity stake going to Xerox. And, of course, the company even made a tidy profit off the Macintosh, because of the equity stake that gave Jobs access to the technology in the first place.

Transforming An Obstacle Into A Design Constraint

The hardest thing about change is that, typically, most people don’t want it. If they did, it have already been accepted as the normal state of affairs. That can make transformation a lonely business. The status quo has inertia on its side and never yields its power gracefully. The path for an aspiring changemaker can be heartbreaking and soul crushing.

Many would see the near-certainty that Milosevic would try to steal the election as an excuse to do nothing. Most people would look at the almost impossibly corrupt Yanukovych regime and see the idea of devoting your life to anti-corruption reforms as quixotic folly. It is extremely rare for a CEO whose firm dominates an industry to ask, “What comes after?”

Yet anything can happen and often does. Circumstances conspire. Events converge. Round-hole businesses meet their square-peg world. We can’t predict exactly when or where or how or what will happen, but we know that everybody and everything gets disrupted eventually. It’s all just a matter of time.

When that happens resistance to change temporarily abates. So there’s lots to do and no time to wait. We need to empower our allies, as well as listen to our adversaries. We need to build out a network to connect to others who are sympathetic to our cause. Transformational change is always driven by small groups, loosely connected, but united by a common purpose.

Most of all, we need to prepare. A trigger always comes and, when it does, it brings great opportunity with it.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog
— Image credit: Pixabay

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Innovation Ecosystems and Information Rheology

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Innovation Ecosystems and Information Rheology

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

Rheology is the study of flow. There are many ways to measure flow. For example, Volume Flow is defined as the volume quantity that flows through a given section at a considered time interval. The most common volume units are:m3/s, m3/h, l/h, l/min, GPM (gallons per minute), Nm3/h (normal cubic meter per hour), SCFH (normal cubic foot per hour), among others.

Information rheology is the study of how information passes from the sender to the receiver, the resistance to that flow, and how to address it.

The concept applies also to how products and services flow from one place in the world to another.

A reverse innovation is any innovation that is adopted first in the developing world. To be clear: What makes an innovation a reverse innovation has nothing to do with where the innovators are, and it has nothing to do with where the companies are. It has only to do with where the customers are.

Historically, reverse innovation has been a rare phenomenon. In fact, the logic for innovations flowing downhill, from the rich world to the developing world, is natural and intuitive. After all, it is the richest customers in the richest countries that will always demand the newest technologies. In due time, the costs of new technologies come down, and incomes in the developing world rise. As a result, innovations trickle down. Right?

Be careful. The intuitive assumption that poor countries are engaged in a process of gradually catching up with the rich world has become toxic. It is a strategic blind spot that has the potential to sink an increasingly common aspiration: to generate high growth in the emerging economies. The assumption can even inflict long-term damage in home markets. That is because surprisingly often, reverse innovations defy gravity and flow uphill to the rich world. As a result, a defeat in a developing country half a world away can lead directly to a stinging blow in your own back yard.

How information flows, like on cell phones during riots and protests, is not an exact science. Percolation theory illuminates the behavior of many kinds of networks, from cell phone transmissions to the COVID R number.

Most discussions of innovation ecosystem creation and growth focus on the anatomy i.e. the components necessary to be successful. For example, one author describes the 5P’s of human capital:pillars, patrons, pioneers, professionals and partners.

However, equally as important is the physiology of clusters -how the cluster elements work together .One of the key determinants of an innovative organization or cluster is information rheology. There are three basic elements to the equation.

The first has to do with the number of nodes in the network, both internally and externally. Network theory tells us that the more nodes, the more value. Having one fax machine in the world added nothing. It took a lot to unleash the value , as the development of social media has exemplified.

The second has to do with how the nodes are connected. Some are robust and some are not. The connections between the nodes are called edges.

Finally, and most importantly, the two previous parts are not nearly as important as the velocity, relationships, acceleration and lack of resistance to the flow of information from one node to the next. We usually refer to this as a cluster or innovation district being “user friendly” and is typified by the free and rapid flow of information from one place to the next. Malcolm Gladwell described facilitators in the process as mavens, experts and connectors.

There are many causes of poor information flow, but, fundamentally, they come down to :

  1. 1. The sender does not communicate effectively or in a an appropriate way

  2. The receiver is unaware that the message was sent or does not understand it

  3. The systems for transmitting information and verifying receipt are inadequate

  4. Third party interference muddles the message

Poor information flow in sickcare results in dropped handoffs and referral leaks which are the primary causes of medical errors and waste. The lack of data interoperability is one of the root causes.

There are several kinds of intermediaries that facilitate information flow in an ecosystem.

  • Architects engage in strict agenda-setting and coordination activities

  • Gatekeepers support the knowledge extraction and dissemination of the information

  • Conductors take care of information acquisition, transmission, and task sharing

  • Developers create concrete assets for the network based on knowledge mobility

  • Auctioneers set the agenda and joint vision for the innovation network

  • Leaders motivate and foster the voluntary collaboration and identifying roles of network members

  • Promoter support ecosystem members to work towards the same goal

  • Facilitator bring together quite different, even competing, parties to work together

Whether it is making clinical handoffs better or improving the flow of information in an ecosystem or cluster, the obstacles are substantial and the systems for preventing information flow blockage need to constantly be maintained, which can be costly and time consuming.

If you want to accelerate regional innovation clusters and communities, don’t concentrate so much on connecting the senders and receivers. Focus on removing the barriers to the flow of information and how to push and pull it through the pipes.

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Experience Thinking – The Next Evolution for Design Thinking

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Experience Thinking - The Next Evolution for Design Thinking

GUEST POST from Anthony Mills

Prologue

Design Thinking is an incredibly powerful way to approach the design of just about anything that involves an interaction with people (or other intelligent creatures). Its underlying philosophy of Human Centered Design requires that we develop a comprehensive empathic understanding of the customer and their situation in a particular context. This can only happen when we dissect the situation – using the many different Design Methods available to us – to understand the customer’s underlying values, beliefs, motivations, priorities, expectations, and preferences. From this we understand their real needs and desires. This is what we are doing when we work through the divergence of hypothesis formation, the convergence of hypothesis testing, the arrival at a compelling Point of View, and from that the definition of relevant Design Principles. And it is what empowers us to thereafter work through the divergence of solution ideation and the convergence of solution testing – all to arrive at the most optimal solution to the right problem, reframed at the right level. This results in new innovations that resonate with real market needs. Powerful indeed!

But, there are limitations.

The limitations lie not so much in Design Thinking itself, but rather in how Design Thinking is typically used.

The manner in which Design Thinking is typically used is what we refer to as a “static approach.” That is, it is generally used to understand how a customer interacts with a product or service at one particular moment in time – typically the most critical moment in time – or in one particular mode of usage – typically the most critical mode of usage – as though everything were about this one particular “freeze frame”. It may examine, for example, how they sit in a chair, how they use a toothbrush, how they read a user interface, or how they comprehend a set of service instructions. This can work okay for very simple products and services, but not so much for complex ones. Sometimes the lens of focus is zoomed out to examine more moments and more modes, but rarely does it venture so far out as to truly understand the entire product or service experience in its entirety, as well as the overriding brand experience it must convey. To do this, we need a different approach.

A Different Approach

Fortunately, we have a different approach. We call it “Experience Thinking”, or XT. One can think of XT as a more “dynamic” approach to Design Thinking, in that it seeks to examine the entire product / service / brand experience in its totality. By combining the tools of Design Thinking (the Design Methods) with the tools of Customer Experience Design and Customer Experience Management (CX Journey Maps, Stakeholder Analysis, NPS, etc.), it takes the practitioner through the Design Thinking journey for each and every touchpoint in the entire customer experience – or through whichever touchpoints are of interest. This ends up being far more powerful than the narrow-lens focus of static Design Thinking, albeit at the price of additional work.

Experience Thinking is, in fact, what has allowed companies like Apple, Uber, Mercedes, Tesla, Harley Davidson, Patagonia, and Amazon to all produce such highly differentiated offerings that each deliver a coherent and compelling brand experience. In most cases, this brand experience extends well beyond the product or service itself to encompass a far broader value proposition focused on lifestyle or workstyle enhancement. Experience Thinking understands this, and it understands that the emotional and social outcomes involved are just as important (and in some cases more important) than are the functional outcomes. And so offerings get designed that deliver compelling experiences that satisfy those emotional and social outcomes.

Understanding the essence of Experience Thinking then, the next logical question is always, “Okay… so how does one use Experience Thinking? How do they go about carrying it out?” That is a great question.

A Simple Four Step Approach to Using Experience Thinking

In our work with clients, we have a very specific and defined approach to how we do this. It involves four steps.

Step 1 — Foundation: The Brand Experience

We always begin with the brand:

  1. What is the brand persona or brand DNA that defines this brand?

  2. What is this brand’s relative positioning in the market (is it luxury, mid-tier, or value-line)?

  3. What brand promise is this brand making, and what expectations does this then create for its customers?

  4. What brand language (descriptive, visual, and experiential) is being used to convey this brand promise?

And finally, as a consequence of all of the above, what is the overall brand experience we are attempting to deliver, and what, therefore, is the brand experience lens through which we must design the associated product experience or service experience that is to follow-on from this?

These are all crucial questions. For existing brands, the answers are often already known, though they sometimes have to be polished and sharpened a bit. For new brands, we first must answer these questions before proceeding further. An important implication, however, is that this process does not depend on having an existing brand or even an existing product category; it can just as readily be applied to an entirely new brand and/or product category so long as we can define the above points that we intend to deliver for the brand.

Step 2 — Manifestation: The Customer Experience

Once we have defined all of the above, and thus our brand experience lens, we can then move on to the next step, which is to look at either the entire customer lifecycle (eight stages – four on the buy side and four on the own side), or some particular portion of the customer lifecycle that we are specifically interested in.

Using a relatively standard CX Journey Mapping process, we then design our intended customer experience, making sure that at each touchpoint we undertake careful Cognitive Task Analysis so that we fully understand the cognitive and emotional “dance” happening between our offering / brand / business and our customer, as well as capturing all of the on-stage and back-stage stakeholder actions required to stage this experience as designed (the latter can also be complemented with Swim Lane Analysis to help better visualize the timing of each action). Undertaking Cognitive Task Analysis requires a sound understanding of Experience Psychology. As an aid toward this, we recommend reading any of Don Norman’s books, but in particular The Design of Everyday Things.

Step 3 — Translation: The Product (Service) Experience

Next, having defined the intended customer experience, and in so doing understanding the intended attributes of each of its touchpoints (for example, are certain touchpoints to be fast or slow, simple or complex, what human factors or ergonomics concerns have to be considered, what emotional responses need to be evoked, and so on), we then use a tool that in our case we call the Product Experience Framework, or PX Framework (known generically as an alignment model) to map these experience attributes into corresponding product or service attributes. Such attributes might include, for example, size, weight, location, color, finish, actuation force, ease of interpretation, styling, craftsmanship, and so forth.

In using the PX Framework, we step through each and every “event” involved in using the product or receiving the service. Events represent the individual interactions the user has with the product or service, and as such any given touchpoint can include any number of different events. For each such event, we document all of the pertinent attribute details for the product or service. One can see the structure and content of the PX Framework at The Legacy Innovation Product Experience Framework.

Since highly complex products and services tend to involve lots of events (or potential events), this can end up being a very large document. In some cases, therefore, it is helpful to treat each major subsystem separately, with someone watching the overall product integration so as to ensure harmony between all of them.

Step 4 — Realization: The Design

Finally, having the PX Framework in hand, one is at last ready to sit down and actually design the product or service. They now have as an input to this design a clear prescription of what its attributes need to be in order that using the product, or receiving the service, will in fact result in the intended product or service experience, which will in turn convey the intended brand experience for the affected brand.

A New Design Philosophy — The “Designed Experience”

This approach – and Experience Thinking in general – is incredibly different from what so many designers and engineers are accustomed to doing, which is namely to just jump straight into designing a product or service without any idea whatsoever what its attributes need to be to deliver a particular experience. Indeed, they have not even attempted to define in the first place what its product or service experience needs to be, only that it needs to accomplish some outcome in the end; the assumption being that whatever happens along the way toward that outcome is not particularly important – usually an incredibly erroneous assumption!

We believe so strongly in this approach, in fact, that we have wrapped our entire design philosophy around it and have given that philosophy a name. We call it the Designed Experience Approach, and all of the information arising out of these four steps we refer to as the Designed Experience Model. A key tenet of this philosophy (and of Experience Thinking in general) is that the design of a product or service cannot be considered complete until we have first gone through this process of defining its intended product or service experience, together with its intended brand experience. This process must be done, and the resulting insights must be applied, so that we can design all of the product or service attributes accordingly, thus ensuring the final design is in fact capable of delivering its intended experience.

Recently we taught this design philosophy and its accompanying process to a major American automotive OEM in Detroit. The team we were working with there found this to be an incredibly eye-opening approach, because it finally allowed them to make the connection they were looking for between product attributes and the overall intended customer and brand experiences.

Why & Where?

The final two points that need to be made about Experience Thinking are why it is so important, and where it is most applicable. But these two points are best addressed in reverse order.

In terms of where Experience Thinking is most applicable therefore… it is most applicable anywhere we have a branded business and thus a branded line of offerings. Because they are branded, they have a specific brand promise that they must live up to, and ideally this is a brand promise that differentiates and distinguishes the brand from other brands. The need for differentiation is therefore incredibly strong. As a consequence, we must design the products and services associated with this brand in a highly intentional manner so that their attributes can in fact deliver on that brand promise and ensure the level of differentiation we are attempting to achieve. The contrast to this, of course, would be commodity products and services that are undifferentiated. Such products and services need only accomplish their intended outcomes; how they do so and what happens along the way is not overly critical in their case.

In terms of why Experience Thinking is so important then, it is precisely as described above. In those cases where we must espouse and then deliver on a specific brand promise – so that we can differentiate ourselves – our products and services no longer matter by themselves. What matters in these cases is the experience that those products and services are able to deliver. Thus how they go about achieving their intended outcomes, and everything that happens along the way, are all incredibly, incredibly important. They must be things that deliver on our brand promise and thereby reinforce our brand message, which in turn builds our brand value and allows us over time to capture increasing market shares.

The thing is, the vast majority of businesses and their offerings are – to one degree or another – branded. Those who are truly hungry for market leadership tend to be the ones who most readily recognize this and therefore put the most effort into building their brands. This in turn means they are the most eager to embrace Experience Thinking and to use this approach to design their products and services to deliver on their brand promises.

Reflection

The questions to ask yourself, therefore, are:

  1. “Is our brand as differentiated as it needs to be?”

  2. “Does it have a compelling brand promise that lets us define a unique brand experience?”

  3. “Have we defined specific product and service experiences that are aligned to that brand promise and brand experience?”

  4. “Are we designing our products and services to have the attributes they need to deliver on those experiences?”

  5. “Should we – like perhaps some of our competitors are doing – be using Experience Thinking to design our next offerings?”

If the answers to these questions are “no”, “no”, “no”, “no”, and “yes”, then it’s probably time to get serious about shaking up your design process – time to start applying Experience Thinking. Though it does take more time and effort to do, it tends to pay back greatly in terms of commercial success and ongoing brand building.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Don’t Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

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Don't Forget to Innovate the Customer Experience

Too often we speak about Innovation, Customer Experience, Digital Transformation, Employee Experience and Organizational Change as very distinct and separate things.

But is this the right approach?

Those of you who have read both my first book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire and my second book Charting Change know that the main reason that the second book even exists is because innovation is all about change.

Apple couldn’t bring the iPod, iTunes and the iTunes store to market without inflicting incredible amounts of change upon the organization and building many different new organizational capabilities and hiring many new types of people with many types of expertise new to the organization.

I’ve also written about BIG C and little c change, with BIG C change including transformations of many types (including digital) and little C change including projects and other small initiatives. And yes, every project changes something, so every project is a change initiative. And so yes, project management is in fact a subset of change management, not the typical wrong way ’round that change management is usually made subservient to project management.

Stop it!

Architecting the Organization for Change

For an invention to have any chance of becoming an innovation, the organization must transform, and to do this well we must design corresponding changes in both employee experience and customer experience to accelerate and integrate:

  1. Value Creation
  2. Value Access
  3. Value Translation

See my important article Innovation is All About Value for more background on these three phrases.

Because of the interconnectedness between innovation, change, transformation, customer experience and employee experience we must look at these different specialties holistically and in a coordinated way if we are to maximize our chances of successfully completing the journey from invention to innovation.

Service Design and Journey Mapping have a role to play, as does Human-Centered Design because people are at the heart of innovation and transformation. These tools can help uncover the customer needs and help visualize what the NEW experiences must look like for both employees and customers to maximize the holistic value created and the ability of customers to access that value as effortlessly as possible.

As we work to design the potential innovation as a product or a service or a combination of the two, we must also consciously design the customer experience and employee experience to enhance to possibilities of this invention becoming an innovation. This includes potentially designing OUT touchpoints in current journeys that people may taken as a given, but maybe no longer need to exist if we are truly keeping the customer and their wants/needs at the center of our focus.

As part of your innovation activities, consider creating customer and employee journey maps, printing them poster size and placing them front and center on your innovation wonder wall so that you can ask your innovation team the following questions:

  1. What is different about this customer or employee touchpoint when considering our potential innovation?
  2. How could we design out the need for this customer or employee touchpoint?
  3. With our potential innovation, what customer or employee touchpoints may no longer be necessary?
  4. With our potential innovation, what new customer or employee touchpoints may we need to create?
  5. What organizational and employee knowledge and capabilities are we missing, that we must have, to deliver the necessary and expected customer and employee experiences?

As we explore these questions, they allow us to look beyond the product or service that forms the basis of the potential innovation that we are creating and create more value around it, to make our customers’ and employees’ experiences of our potential innovation better, and to increase our chances of more successfully translating the holistic value for its potential customers.

Customer and employee experiences are not detached and separate from the new products and services forming the basis of your innovation activities.

The change and transformation that accompany innovation are not separate either.

We must look at all of these specialties together and not see them as isolated things, otherwise we will fail.

So keep innovating, but be sure and consider the change and transformation necessary to help you be successful and how you are going to innovate your customer and employee experiences at the same time!

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Going with the Flow

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How Great Ideas Sometimes Come From Following the Natural Flow of Things

Image: James Homans on Unpslash

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas which change the world. Barbed wire is nothing more than a cleverly twisted piece of metal, yet its role in taming the Wild West was much more significant than any cowboys or cavalry. It enabled settlers to graze their herds and property rights to be marked out and defended.

Joe Woodland’s idle scratches in the sand on a Miami beach were the prototype for what became known as the Universal Product Code — and paved the way for bar codes identifying everything from supermarket items to surgical implants.

And a simple metal box transformed the pattern and economics of world trade. Brainchild of Malcolm McLean containerisation changed the way goods were transported internationally, drastically cutting costs and saving time. In 1965 a ship could expect to remain in port being loaded or unloaded for up to a week, with transfer rates for cargo around 1.7 tonnes/hour. By 1970 this had speeded up to 30 tonnes/hour and big shops could enter and leave ports on the same day. Journey times from door to door were cut by over half and the ability to seal containers massively cut losses due to theft and consequently reduced insurance costs.

McLean was a tough entrepreneur who’d already built a business out of trucking. He’d learned the rules of the innovation game the hard way and knew that having a great idea was only the start of a long journey. Realising the value at scale would take a lot of ingenious problem-solving and systems thinking to put the puzzle together. He needed complementary assets — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ — to realise his vision. And he understood the challenge of diffusion — getting others to buy into your idea and enabling adoption through a mixture of demonstration, persuasion and pressure.

But he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; that distinction probably goes to another systems thinker who played the innovation game well throughout his unfortunately short life. And, like McClean, he can take a big share of the credit for transforming the pattern of world trade, this time in the 18th century.

Image: David Dibert on Pexels

James Brindley was born in 1716 and spent his early years learning the hard way about how things work — and how to make them work better. He didn’t have much of a formal education, could barely read or write and worked as an agricultural labourer until he was 17. He used his savings to buy his way into an apprenticeship to a millwright, one Abraham Bennett. Bennett was an engineer who preferred to leave much of the work in his business to others while he relaxed (and drank away) the fruits of their labour. Which offered James an opportunity not only to learn fast but to try out ideas. He’d grown up around mills, (both wind and water driven) and was fascinated by their operations.

He got a chance to put some of his innovative ideas into practice when he was given the task, in 1735 of carrying out emergency repairs to a small silk mill. His work so impressed the mill superintendent that he recommended Brindley to others; it wasn’t long before he’d acquired enough experience and skill from different projects to set up on his own as a millwright. He earned the nickname of ‘the Schemer’ because of his approach which was often unconventional but certainly delivered results.

Photo by Ali Arapoğlu from Pexels

Which is how he came to be associated with the Wedgwood brothers who were busy establishing their ceramics business in nearby Stoke on Trent. They sought him out to help with problems they were having in grinding flint, one of the key ingredients in their pottery. Brindley built a series of mills for them, finding ways to improve efficiency and cut costs, and consolidating his reputation They in turn recommended him to John Heathcote, owner of the large Clifton collieries near Manchester who was struggling with a big problem of flooding in his mines.

Brindley’s solution seemed crazy at first — he proposed drawing in more water! But in fact his ingenious idea was to draw water from the nearby river Irwell, pass it through an underground tunnel nearly a kilometre in length and use it to drive a huge mill wheel which drove a pump. It was strong enough to pump out the mine and efficient since it returned the water to the river. It worked — and established his reputation not just as a skilled engineer but as an imaginative problem-solver and innovator.

No-one could call him a lazy man — he worked incessantly on a wide range of projects. But he also spent a lot of time in bed — sometimes days at a time. This was his thinking space, a way of incubating novel and sometimes crazy ideas.

And water was at the centre of his thinking; he seemed to have an intuitive grasp of how it flowed and how those principles could be applied in a wide variety of situations. As he famously replied to an early enquiry about how he had come up with a solution to a complex hydraulic problem he said ‘…it came natural-like…’

And of course one thing about water is that it requires you to think in systems terms, how things are linked together. Brindley had a gift for seeing the interconnected challenges in realising big schemes like the mine pumping system — and for focusing on solving those to enable the whole system to deliver value.

This approach stood him in good stead as he moved into the field for which we best know him — canals. Canals played a critical role in the early Industrial Revolution; they meant that raw materials could get in to factories and their finished products could find their way to ports and be exported around the world. Britain, as ‘the workshop of the world’ depended on the canals as the veins and arteries that enabled the giant to come to life.

And canals represented just the kind of systems challenge which Brindley was so good at. When the Duke of Bridgwater approached him in 1759 to help create a canal to connect his mines in Worsley to the city of Manchester he began a journey which would eventually see him changing the face of Britain, constructing 365 miles of canals criss-crossing the country and revolutionising productivity.

When the Bridgwater Canal was finished in 1761 it helped cut the price of coal in Manchester by 50% and it fell further over the coming years. He followed this with other major projects; he worked with the Wedgwoods to create the Trent and Mersey canal which linked the Potteries to the big industrial cities and ports, providing a way of climbing (through a total of 35 locks) the country and delivering their fragile wares to a global export market. Whether it was shipping coal, flint or other raw materials into cities or transporting their finished wares out to the great ports like Liverpool, Brindley’s canals connected the country.

Photo by Inge Wallumrød from Pexels

It wasn’t easy; quite apart from the eye-watering costs of construction building the canal posed many challenges. Brindley innovated his way around them, coming up with radical ideas for:

  • using natural contours, working with the grain of the land rather than in straight lines. His canals might have been longer as a result but they were much cheaper to dig since this approach reduced the need for tunnels or expensive cuttings

  • cutting narrower canals, which reduced the water consumption and hence the running costs. Of course to make these work required the design of narrow longer boats — something else which Brindley pioneered and which became the dominant design for the waterways

  • pumping and circulatory systems to ensure efficient water flow into and tough the canal systems — and improving the design and productivity of the equipment involved

  • raising and lowering boats as they traversed the country through a series of watertight locks, some of which survive to this day

  • using puddling clay — a watertight ceramic material which he devised (using knowledge picked up from working with the Wedgwoods in their pottery factories) and which offered a watertight base with which to line the canals and solve the problem of water seepage

  • imagining and realising things like the Barton viaduct, a bridge carrying the Bridgwater canal over river Irwell 12m below
Image: Watercolour of Barton aqueduct by G.F. Yates 1793, public domain

He also developed another innovation as part of his problem-solving for the coal industry. His narrow boats were nicknamed ‘Starvationers’ on account of the wooden braces across the hull which gave them strength. They looked like an emaciated torso but this design meant they were strong enough to haul tons of coal or iron ore. But there was a bottleneck in terms of loading and unloading and so Brindley designed a system of wooden containers for coal which could be filled and transhipped easily. His first boat with 10 containers began work in 1766, predating Malcolm McLean by close to 200 years.

(The concept was elaborated and really brought to the mainstream by James Outram who linked the idea into a system in which horses pulled containers from mines along rails to the canal where they were quickly transhipped. As the railways emerged to replace horse drawn traffic so this ‘intermodal system’ took off)

Water was what made him and indirectly it was the death of him. In 1771 he’d begun work on another visionary scheme, surveying the route of what was to become the Trent and Mersey canal. But he was caught in a heavy thunderstorm and drenched through. He wasn’t able to dry out properly at the inn where he was lodging and by the time he returned home he was severely ill; he died of pneumonia a few days later.

He left a legacy of innovation, both in the 365 miles of canals which he built and in the locks, pumping stations, tunnels and other engineering solutions to the problem of creating a viable water-based transport system.,

And he also offers a good reminder of some key innovation themes involved in bringing large scale ideas to fruition and having an impact at scale. He might have been nicknamed ‘the Schemer’, improvising his way to solving engineering problems, but he also understood things like:

  • the importance of systems thinking and the need for complementary assets — identifying and putting in place the many interlocking pieces of the puzzle

  • the value of prototypes and working models to help persuade and accelerate adoption. Legend has it that when he was presenting his ideas to a sceptical group of Members of Parliament whose approval he needed for the Bridgwater canal route he used a cheese out of which he carved a model of the aqueduct he proposed to build!

  • the power of open innovation, learning from the many different sectors and projects he worked with and integrating knowledge from these different worlds — for example, using his knowledge of ceramics to develop the puddling clay liners for his canals

  • the importance of business models in laying out the architecture through which ideas can create value. He not only understood the literal flow of water, he was also skilled at managing cash flow, acquiring a reputation for being ‘careful with money’ which undoubtedly helped realise some of the huge schemes with which he was involved.

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How to Close the Sickcare AI DI Divide

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How to Close the Sickcare AI DI Divide

GUEST POST from Arlen Meyers

The digital divide describes those having or not having access to broadband, hardware, software and technology support. It’s long been acknowledged that even as the digital industry exploded out of this country, America lived with a “digital divide.” While this is loosely understood as the gap between those who have access to reliable internet service and those who don’t, the true nature and extent of the divide is often under-appreciated. Internet infrastructure is, of course, an essential element of the divide, but infrastructure alone does not necessarily translate into adoption and beneficial use. Local and national institutions, affordability and access, and the digital proficiency of users, all play significant roles — and there are wide variations across the United States along each of these.

There is also a sickcare artificial intelligence (AI) dissemination and implementation (DI) divide. Infrastucture is one of many barriers.

As with most things American, there are the haves and the have nots. Here’s how hospitals are categorized. Generally, the smaller ones lack the resources to implement sickcare AI, particularly rural hospitals which are, increasingly, under stress and closing.

So, how do we close the AI-DI divide? Multisystems solutions involve:

  1. Data interoperability
  2. Federated learning Instead of bring Mohamed to the mountain, bring the mountain to Mohamed
  3. AI as a service
  4. Better data literacy
  5. IT infrastructure access improvement
  6. Making cheaper AI products
  7. Incorporating AI into a digital health whole product solution
  8. Close the doctor-data scientist divide
  9. Democratize data and AI
  10. Create business model competition for data by empowering patient data entrepreneurs
  11. Teach hospital and practice administrators how to make value based AI vendor purchasing decisions
  12. Encourage physician intrapreneurship and avoid the landmines
  13. Use no-code or low-code tools to innovate

We are still in the early stages of realizing the full potential of sickcare artificial intelligence. However, if we don’t close the AI-DI gaps, a large percentage of patients will never realize the benefits.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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AI Has Already Taken Over the World

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AI Has Already Taken Over the World

by Braden Kelley

I don’t know about you, but it’s starting to feel as if machines and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have already taken over the world.

Remember in primary school when everyone tried really hard to impress, or even just to be recognized by, a handful of cool kids?

It’s feeling more and more each day as if the cool kids on the block that we’re most desperate to impress are algorithms and artificial intelligence.

We’re all desperate to get our web pages preferred over others by the algorithms of Google and Bing and are willing to spend real money on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to increase our chances of ranking higher.

Everyone seems super keen to get their social media posts surfaced by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, Tik Tok, and even LinkedIn.

In today’s “everything is eCommerce” world, how your business ranks on Google and Bing increasingly can determine whether you’re in business or out of business.

Algorithms Have Become the New Cool Kids on the Block

According to the “Agencies SEO Services Global Market Report 2021: COVID-19 Impact and Recovery to 2030” report from The Business Research Company:

“The global agencies seo services market is expected to grow from $37.84 billion in 2020 to $40.92 billion in 2021 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.1%. The market is expected to reach $83.7 billion in 2025 at a CAGR of 19.6%.”

Think about that for a bit…

Companies and individuals are forecast to spend $40 Billion trying to impress the alogrithms and artificial intelligence applications of companies like Google and Microsoft in order to get their web sites and web pages featured higher in the search engine rankings.

The same can be true for companies and individuals trying to make a living selling on Amazon, Walmart.com and eBay. The algorithms of these companies determine which sellers get preferred placement and as a result can determine which individuals and companies profit and which will march down a path toward bankruptcy.

And then there is another whole industry and gamesmanship surrounding the world of social media marketing.

According to BEROE the size of the social media marketing market is in excess of $102 Billion.

These are huge numbers that, at least for me, demonstrate that the day that machines and AI take over the world is no longer out there in the future, but is already here.

Machines have become the gatekeepers between you and your customers.

Be afraid, be very afraid.

(insert maniacal laugh here)

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

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Weighing the Effectiveness of a Leader

GUEST POST from Robert B. Tucker

As a college student, I was a volunteer on Joe Biden’s initial race for U.S. Senate. I recalled him saying something like, “If I’m elected, come see me in Washington.” Twenty or so years later I did just that. I put Biden to the test.

It was after a speaking engagement in Washington, D.C. I was about to head to the airport when I spotted the majestic Capitol dome in the distance. I remembered Biden’s promise. I had the cabbie to take me over to the Senate Office Building wherein the Delaware senator’s receptionist dutifully passed along my request.

Moments later a smiling and familiar figure appeared. The senator shook my hand and barely slowed down long enough to usher me to accompany him over to the Senate floor where he needed to cast a vote. We visited on the tram back and forth, and shortly we were back at his office, whereupon he thanked me for my service and disappeared.

Brief though it was, Biden passed my little test. He kept his word. He walked his talk. It was just that simple, yet I never forgot it.

I recall that incident from long ago because right now because it seems that leaders everywhere are being put to the test. Constituents, employees, and everybody else is asking tough questions about the competence and character of leaders.

As an innovation coach and public speaker, I’ve had a 35 year ringside seat to observe leadership in action. Working in 54 countries, and in every state and with businesses and trade groups of every size and industry, I’ve seen examples of great leadership that inspired me no end. I’ve worked with top teams of businesses in Rome, Charlotte, Bangkok and Abu Dabi. I’ve observed leadership in mobile phone companies in Bahrain, staffing companies in Kansas City, energy companies in Kenya, and direct selling companies in Peru. And lately, as we all have, I’ve seen dysfunctional and self-serving leadership at the national level that has disgusted me and made me fearful for future generations.

Never has there been such an urgent need for leadership as right now. Many of the readers of InnovationTrends are CEOs and senior leaders of large organizations. This is my call for you to step up to the plate: your company, your country needs you to lead.

And as leaders, you and I face three distinct challenges going forward:

  1. Can we build trust where trust is lacking?
  2. Can we anticipate change and think ahead of the curve?
  3. Can we execute skillfully and turn vision into reality?

Let’s examine these one-by-one:

The first thing leaders must do is build trust.

From the White House to the schoolhouse to the state house and to businesses and nonprofit organizations large and small, followers are asking those in leadership positions: are you the “real deal” and can I trust you? Do you have my back? And can I trust you to keep me and my family and my community safe? Can you steer and navigate this organization to a better place, or will you stand idly by as it is disrupted by forces you don’t understand, and don’t have a strategy to counteract?

The second thing leaders must do is to anticipate future threats and opportunities.

This week I’m interviewing Rick Sorkin, CEO of Jupiter Intelligence, a climate risk startup with headquarters in Silicon Valley, and whose business booked ten times as many contracts in the first quarter of this year as it did in the prior year. “I think that the pandemic was a bit of a near death experience,” Sorkin told the Washington Post. “Once people got past [it], they were like, ‘Oh, what else is there like this that we’re not worrying about?’” Climate change is at the top of that list.

By using advanced computer modeling, Jupiter forecasts the likelihood of a wildfire disaster, or the threat of a flood engulfing your chemical plant. Jupiter offers a whole new level of insight into what might previously have been considered “unforeseen” risks. Post Covid/Post Jan 6 everyone instinctively realizes we are living in a period of ever-broader “unsustainable” risks. Today’s leaders can no longer kick cans down the road. They must lead, for their anticipation skills are on full display. All leaders need to develop and use better tools and methods to help anticipate threats, but also, as Jupiter is doing, to position, wherever and whenever possible to translate them – using creativity and innovation thinking — into opportunities.

The third thing that leaders need to do is to execute successfully and turn vision into reality.

I once interviewed Warren Bennis, the late leadership guru and former president of the University of Cincinnati. Professor Bennis believed in the adage that great leaders are not born but made, insisting that “the process of becoming a leader is similar, if not identical, to becoming a fully integrated human being,” as he put it in an interview with the New York Times. Both, he said, were grounded in self-discovery.

Yet It was Bennis’s definition of leadership that I recall now, as being particularly appropriate to the times we are living in. Leadership, as Bennis saw it, is “the capacity to translate vision into reality.”

And that vision-to-reality transformation is what we need to study now, to celebrate now, and to strive to get better at. Instead of “just getting by” or muddling through, true leaders develop a vision of where they want to take the organization. They study the trends, they look back to be guided by history, and they inform themselves consciously and consistently as to where today’s trends are headed, and they take risks and make investments, rather than merely “kicking the can down the road” for future leaders to deal with.

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Borrow an Idea from a Different Field

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Borrow an Idea from a Different Field

GUEST POST from Paul Sloane

Sometimes the best way to innovate is to borrow someone else’s idea and apply it in your business. A successful innovation does not have to be an all-new invention. It just has to be something useful which is new to your business. Maybe everyone in Singapore is doing it but you are the first in Holland; maybe every consulting firm does it but yours is the first doctors’ surgery to try it; maybe everyone in IT knows about this but no-one in hairdressing; maybe lots of youngsters communicate this way but you are the first city councillor to do so.

Rob McEwen

Rob McEwen bought a Canadian gold mine which was in decline. Production of gold had been falling. At a computer conference he happened to hear about the Linux operating system and how its success was based on its open source principle – anyone could see any of the code. Thousands of programmers around the world analyse, extend and develop Linux code. He decided to borrow this idea and apply it in the conservative world of gold mining. He published all the data about the mine on the internet and challenged people to predict where to drill for gold. His colleagues thought he was crazy – no-one ever gave away all their mining data. But the internet competition he started, the Goldcorp challenge, was a great success. The winner used sophisticated fractal graphics software to analyse the data and accurately predict where to drill for gold. The output of the mine went up tenfold.

If McEwen had attended a conference about mining he would never have had the trigger of an idea about open source.

Doctors had a problem with hypodermic needles. Patients were afraid of them. Children dreaded them. The pain the needles caused was not intense but it was unpleasant and it dissuaded many people from having important injections. So the doctors asked – who else has this problem? Who else injects into people and has solved this problem. The answer was quickly given. Mosquitoes insert a tiny needle into people and extract blood. They carry the deadly malaria virus. They go about their deadly work without being felt. By studying how the mosquito stings its victims scientists were able to develop a hypodermic needle that patients do not feel.

The scientific study of nature in order to copy its methods is called mimetics. Alexander Graham Bell was a practitioner of mimetics. He copied the workings of the human ear when he invented the telephone. The diaphragm in the ear became the diaphragm in the telephone.

The mobile operator Vodafone uses interesting customer segmentation. Like every other business it segments customers by revenue and margin. But it also segments customers by which ones it can learn the most from. Vodafone identifies the top 20 clients world-wide who are doing the most interesting things with mobile technology. It ensures that senior managers visit these customers and keep abreast of their latest applications and uses. Some of these clients are very small organisations but Vodafone knows that the ideas they can garner here are very valuable. Who are your most innovative clients? Do you monitor and track them. Do you keep them close? Could you borrow some of their great ideas?

The problem you face right now is a problem that someone else has faced and solved. Why not harness their ideas?

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