GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I recently attended a performance of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony by the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall in New York City.  I had never been to Carnegie Hall, and since I had failed to follow the well-known advice of “practice, practice” as a response to “how does one get to Carnegie Hall,” my entry fee to the venue was merely the price of a ticket.

The facility was stunning and the performance was flawless, but I was struck by seeing for myself the graying of the symphony audience. I had read over the years that the typical symphony crowd was getting older and older as the performances failed to attract new devotees, but scanning the room I was struck by how real this problem was, at least in the case of this particular event.  I am middle-aged but I was by far one of the youngest members of the audience.

Although nearly every seat was filled, the symphony clearly needed to address the fact that in a decade many of their subscribers would no longer be able to attend the performances and amazing ensembles, such as the San Francisco Symphony, would play to nearly empty halls.

As a practitioner of innovation, I allowed my mind to wander during the performance to think about ways the symphony could increase its appeal to a broader audience.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Ben Kesling highlights techniques used by symphonies around the country to increase their appeal to a new generation, and some of these techniques provide interesting concepts that students of innovation.

Venue Transformation

Venue Transformation can entail either radically transforming a current location or choosing an entirely new location for an event.  The Chicago Symphony recently held a performance at the trendy and modern Harris Theater at Millennium Park instead of its usual home at the more staid venue of Symphony Hall.  The bar at the Harris Theater served pizza and beer, which was definitely not the traditional wine and cheese fare that one would find at Symphony Hall.  Another Venue Transformation technique involves reconfiguring a traditional concert hall to give it a very non-traditional feel, with the goal, according to Jesse Rosen of the League of American Orchestras, of creating an “ersatz night club complete with drinks and mingling,” which can attract a younger audience.

For the innovation practitioner, the Venue Transformation approach goes beyond the well-known concept of getting colleagues out of a familiar setting to inspire more creative thinking, such as running an innovation workshop outdoors or at an entirely new location, such as on the factory floor or at an inspirational offsite setting.  In many cases time or budget constraints prevent the innovation leader from moving a session to a new location.  For these occasions, the leader should consider following the model of the symphonies and transforming a boring conference room into a more engaging environment.  Although the night club motif may be frowned upon at some corporations, there are other ways that the innovation leader can create a different mindset for a colleague entering the room for an innovation session, from lighting to sound to posters on the walls or even creative attendee attire.

Low Ticket Prices

The innovative pizza- and beer-enhanced performance by the Chicago Symphony at the modern Harris Theater was further enabled by a very affordable $25 ticket price, which included the pizza and beer.  Although the event was not likely a money-maker for the symphony, the low entry fee improved the attractiveness of the performance to a broader audience.  This example has two implications for the innovation practitioner.  First, if we are seeking to increase the attractiveness of one of our sessions, food and drink never hurts.  Second, we should think about affordability in terms of the projects we target as we seek a balanced portfolio of innovation initiatives that include some quick win, low-cost endeavors that are easy and/or fast to implement and can demonstrate results, even if the net dollar impact is relatively small.

“Parties of Note”

The Phoenix Symphony, which is led by a former executive from the video game company LucasArts, has instituted a hyper-local initiative called “Parties of Note” which sends musicians to private homes to perform in intimate settings alongside gourmet dinners.  This concept, derived from the political campaign tactic of holding small-scale fundraisers at the homes of wealthy donors, provides a way for audience members to interact with the symphony on a more personal level.  “Parties of Note” precisely target a small and influential audience.  For the innovation, the parallel could be small sessions with key executives in a firm to drive new thinking and identify new challenges for innovation practitioners to solve.

New Content

Another innovation from the Phoenix Symphony involves the use of a promotional “tie-in,” as demonstrated by an upcoming NASCAR tie-in with Phoenix Raceway’s 50^th anniversary.  This concert will include NASCAR drivers conducting the national anthem as well as car-themed content for the performance.  The tie-in takes advantage of something that is top of mind for many of the participants in an area and links it to another effort.  This notion is a relatively common practice in promotional marketing, but its application to the symphony represents a true innovation.  Other new content-related innovations from the Chicago and Cleveland Symphonies include Disc Jockeys spinning records alongside the symphony as well as the inclusion of “hip guest artists such as banjoist Bela Fleck.”  An innovation practitioner can use a similar approach to find attractive, unintuitive content to bring attendees to an innovation session or could tie-in to another major theme at the company or in the city to draw participants.  An innovation leader could also align innovation work to a larger corporate initiative, such as a cost-cutting or transformation effort.

“Beyond the Score”

Another innovation from the Chicago Symphony is the “Beyond the Score” program which integrates “video, theater and graphic design to better explain compositions.”  In a world of ubiquitous mobile devices, this approach provides the audience with a rich multimedia experience that is more in line with the high amounts of screen time of the younger audience members.  As I was enjoying the San Francisco Symphony at Carnegie Hall last year, this was one of the ideas that crossed my mind as I thought about how a mobile application that followed the music and interspersed interesting information about the symphony and performance could engage the younger audience in a more intense manner.  At the same time, though, I thought about how wonderful it was to surround myself with the experience and absorb the sights and sounds of the symphony without the intrusion of and electronic devices.

For the innovation practitioner, this example may actually operate in reverse from how it works at the symphony.  Innovation for the symphony is integrating electronic devices and multi-media into a previously analog experience.  In an innovation session in most corporations, the opposite is true and perhaps we should thing about how to bring analog experiences into our sessions.  After all, most of the participants in our sessions spend the majority of their days staring at screens all day (laptops, phones, projected presentations), so one way to get their attention would be to make the innovation workshop into a more tactile experience, such as actually building something with one’s hands.  This will exercise different parts of the brain than yet another digital experience and may, in fact, lead them to more creative thinking about how to solve problems or improve the performance of a product.

One 30-year-old attendee to an innovative Chicago Symphony performance stated that he went from being in a position where he couldn’t afford symphony tickets to the point where he admitted to being “hooked for life.”  Praise such as this from colleagues would be music to an innovator’s ears.

Source:

Ben Kesling, “Orchestras Raise Baton to Beer, Pizza and Bach,” Wall Street Journal (December 27, 2013), A6.

image credit: http: carnegiehall.org

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Looking ahead to innovation pathways in 2014, I harken back to a technology that is over 100 years old – radio.  I am thinking about radio because of an experience that I had recently on an airport subway train, though this experience was by no means limited to that one incident.  I looked across the carload of around 20 people and noticed that every single person was staring down at a smartphone device.  “Heads down” should become the new mantra of the 21^st century citizen, as we often find ourselves buried in our devices, staring at their tiny screens.

I do not mean to disparage the power of these devices, as I recognize that today’s smartphones contain the power of the desktop computers of only a few years ago and can connect a person to a nearly infinite amount of information from around the planet.  However, as I looked around this train car of hunched-over passengers, I wondered what a modern Rip Van Winkle, transported from the 1980s to today, might think about such a scene.  Would Rip wonder what authoritarian regime had the power to force its citizens to focus intensively on their devices?  Were the devices a means of controlling the minds and behavior of these individuals?  What would Rip think if he learned that every person on that train was engaging in that neck-straining activity willingly, with no coercion?

I contrast the experience on the train to an afternoon I spent recently working on a project outside my home.  A particularly rainy summer has resulted in a buildup of mildew and dirt on the windowsills and doors on parts of my home.  Since pressure-washing around windows and doors can cause moisture-buildup in cracks and crevices, I decided to do this work by hand with soap and water and a scrub brush.  In this scenario, holding a smartphone device in my hand while I worked was not an option to keep me connected with the world, so I grabbed a waterproof battery-powered transistor radio. The radio sat outside with me all afternoon and provided thought-provoking political discussion throughout the time I was working, as well as news updates every 30 minutes so I could keep up with news from around the world.  I could have grabbed a Bluetooth portable speaker and connected it to my smartphone then streamed a radio station from the web, but there was something tantalizingly simply about grabbing the transistor radio, pressing one button, and connecting with the world.

So as we head into 2014, my innovation thoughts center on how we can take these amazing, ubiquitous smartphone devices and interact with them in a way that does not consume our focus and allows us to accomplish other things.  This makes me think that perhaps Google Glass is more important to our future than even its advocates now contend, or perhaps there is some invention on the horizon that will provide a similar combination of information and interactivity without locking the user into intense focus on a small device.

Alternatively, the future may entail the increased prevalence of what the Economist refers to as the “Mindfulness Movement,” which entails disconnecting from the constant pinging of the virtual world and focusing on meditation.  Likewise, the movement also recommends lessening the emphasis one places on the acquisition of material goods as an indicator of success.  Mindfulness focuses on the development of the self, avoiding overloading of the senses, and works against the invasion of electronic devices into people’s leisure time.

While I do not espouse a complete shutdown of electronic devices, I do think there is value in clearly-defined boundaries where the devices are not omnipresent.  Conversely, there is value in having the information from a device more seamlessly embedded into everyday life so that a person can accomplish other tasks while receiving this information, thus the importance of Google Glass. In my mind, the future lies in better understanding how we strike this balance between pervasiveness and mindfulness, and that is what I will be pondering in 2014.

Source: The Economist, “Schumpeter – The mindfulness business,” (November 16, 2013).

image credit: edudemic.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

As we reach the end of the year, it is time for the annual ritual of the employee performance review in which a Manager reviews an employee’s work accomplishments, providing a grade and guidance for areas of improvement in the upcoming year.

As innovation practitioners, this is also a good time for us to step back and think about how well we performed in our innovation roles in the previous year with an eye towards leveraging lessons learned to improve the program next year.  Although there are myriad ways of measuring innovation activity, the following list provides a starting set of criteria to assess one’s innovation efforts in 2013.

Push/Pull

This is the balance between what an innovation practitioner provides to an organization or client in terms of new ideas to consider (“push”) versus the areas that an organization or client identifies to an innovation practitioner as worthy of investigation (“pull”).  An example of an idea that is “pushed” would be one in which an innovation leader identifies an innovation in a research lab that could be used to help an organization perform better in its daily operations.  Conversely, an idea that is “pulled” would be one in which an organization identifies a pain point and asks an innovation team to spend time researching various solutions to that problem, such as a step in a manufacturing process that is constantly breaking and slowing down overall production efforts.  There is no magic formula for the perfect balance between push and pull for an innovation program.  However, as is the case with many endeavors in the business world, it may be wise to avoid the extremes of either position, as would be the case if the innovation leader was always pushing ideas but not getting any requests from the organization for new problems to solve.

Ideation/Implementation

This is a measurement of the amount of time an implementation team spends brainstorming new ideas versus working on the actual implementation of ideas that were previously identified as promising.  Ideation is often easier than implementation and usually a fun exercise, especially with a motivated team in a brainstorming session.  The output of ideation can be written on a whiteboard in a conference room, whereas implementation requires managing budgets and project teams and results in the creation of an actual product or the application of a process change to a real business environment.  Because implementation tends to be harder than ideation, the natural inclination of the innovation practitioner may be to focus more on the latter than the former, but it is important to be aware of the balance between these areas and tailor them to the demands of the business or organization.  After all, if ideas generated by a team are not getting implemented, the innovation leader may need to rethink the ideation approach to focus on more practical solutions.

Return on Investment (ROI)

This metric can sometimes be a painful one to assess at the end of a year, particularly if the innovation team has not been able to implement an innovation that resulted in improved performance on the part of the business or organization, whether in the form of a new product or service with successful sales results or a cost-reducing idea that improves performance.  The investment is the amount of time and money spent by the innovation team, in the form of salaries of resources fully dedicated to the innovation efforts as well as the time spent by other resources (workshop participants, Subject Matter Experts (SMEs), consultants) in the overall innovation program.  Although some innovation efforts may take multiple years to come to fruition, the innovation leader should be cognizant of the fact that resources are finite and although innovation is a high-profile endeavor for many companies, the bottom line results of the effort must be considered on a regular basis.  This may suggest to an innovation leader the need to maintain a balanced portfolio of projects that will demonstrate results in the short, medium, and long term so there is a constant stream of projects with measurable ROI emanating from the resources invested into the effort.

Quantity/Quality

Many innovation leaders maintain a tracking sheet of their innovation initiatives so they are able to log new ideas and keep tabs on the progression of other initiatives throughout the initiative lifecycle.  One challenge for the innovation leader is avoiding the fallacy that bigger is better in terms of the list of initiatives.  For instance, an innovation team that has generated 100 ideas in a set period of time could be seen as more productive than one that only generated 10 ideas.  However, the innovation practitioner should be wary of focusing on these types of measurements, as the quality of ideas can often trump the quantity.  Nonetheless, there is value in thinking about the quantity of ideas generated, for a team that spends all afternoon in a brainstorming session but only discusses one idea may miss out on a true innovation that would emerge from moving onto other topics.  For the year-end innovation review, one should carefully examine the balance of quality versus quantity of ideas on a tracking sheet and make adjustments as needed in future ideation sessions.

Expansion/Contraction

One of the simplest questions an innovation practitioner can ask as part of his or her year-end review is whether the universe of individuals with whom one is interacting has increased or decreased.  In other words, has the extended innovation team grown (is the innovation practitioner working with more SMEs in more business units or teams), or has the team size stayed the same or declined?  As if the case with any part of a business, growth is typically a good sign and decline is usually a bad sign, so an innovation leader should think about ways to expand his or her involvement with other parts of the organization.  This can provide benefits to the new group in the form of potential innovative solutions to problems and may also help cross-pollinate ideas for the innovation team working to solve other issues.

Friction

This is a corollary to the notion of expansion and contraction to the extent that it measures how often the innovation team is interacting with other individuals, groups, and organizations within and outside the company.  An interesting trend in workplace design focuses on the importance of creating opportunities for employees to “bump” into each other which, presumably, fosters increased communication and exchange of ideas.  This design characteristic pervades the thinking at Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and many other factories of innovation.

According Professor John Sullivan at San Francisco State University, even the lines in the cafeteria at Google are designed to ensure that Google employees talk to colleagues from other groups, known as the “Google bump.”  A recent study Wei Pan from the MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab suggests that innovation that comes from cities because the greater density in cities encourages more interactions between people and this leads to more exchange of ideas.  Serendipitous interactions between individuals can lead to innovative thinking.

As an innovation practitioner, we should strive to increase our interactions at the office with an eye towards making sure that we are exchanging ideas and approaches with a wide array of individuals, even if it means scheduling innovation discussions with brand new groups of people we had not planned to engage in past efforts.  Valuable new ideas can come from these discussions, so in our annual review we should give ourselves a friction score to make sure that we are not falling into predictable patterns of interactions.

The Hamburger Technique

A final concept for our annual review comes from the freelance writer Jennifer Breheny Wallace.  Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Wallace recommends the use of an annual review approach called the “Hamburger Technique” which traces the building of a hamburger from the bottom bun upwards as a means of organizing the feedback for a performance review without making the process overly negative, as is sometimes the case.  Wallace recommends starting with a series of compliments, which represents the “soft bun” at the base of the hamburger. For our innovation self-review, this can consist of focusing on what we did really well in the previous year, such as a very productive set of workshops or an innovation that worked its way through a development lifecycle and became a product in the marketplace.

The next layer for the review is the “big criticism,” which represents the solid meat of the hamburger.  This represents the innovation practitioner’s biggest failure of the year, such as a workshop that failed to deliver on its promises or a set of ideas that never gained traction even though they absorbed a large investment of time and money.  Although in the innovation space we are taught that failure can be a good thing, nonetheless we tend to try to avoid failure when possible.

The next layer for review is the “room to grow” or “lettuce,” which consists of places where the innovation practitioner can improve or apply more effort to drive better results.  These are not major failures but, rather, areas that are on the edge between success and failure that require additional application to move in the right direction.

The final review layer is another set of compliments, the “soft bun,” which allows the innovation practitioner to conclude the innovation review with an additional focus on positive achievements from the year, such as a compliment from a Senior Executive or client about the value obtained from an innovation effort or even a modestly successful implementation of a small process change that drove value to the enterprise.  Any review should conclude with a focus on the positive, which can reinforce those behaviors with an eye towards repeating them in the upcoming year which, after all, is the whole purpose of the reviews in the first place.

Sources:

Jennifer Breheny Wallace, “Give Your Spouse a Performance Review,” Wall Street Journal (December 14, 2013).

https://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/03/13/174195695/serendipitous-interaction-key-to-tech-firms-workplace-design

https://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/ideas/2013/06/why-living-in-a-city-makes-you-more-innovative/

https://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2013/06/secret-why-cities-are-centers-innovation/5819/

image credit: crc-acs.com.au

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

In the never-ending search for new ideas, one strategy for the innovation practitioner is to look for an area of particular weakness for a company or organization, leveraging the assumption that such an area will be ripe for transformational improvement.

Colloquially known as the “soft underbelly,” this could be any area that lacks the armor or defenses that typically protect an entity from outside attack.

Although in some ways it may strike the innovation practitioner as intuitive to seek to apply new thinking to the areas of greatest weakness, some companies or organizations may spend more time applying innovative solutions to situations where they possess attributes of strength, writing off their weaknesses as areas of little opportunity.  For instance, a product line that has a successful and lucrative revenue stream may warrant more attention than a product that has been in decline. Investments naturally will flow to the growth product, with less and less time spent thinking about the product with a shrinking revenue stream. This is entirely logical and predictable behavior on the part of an organization, though it may force that group to overlook a potential area of innovation opportunity.

An interesting historical anecdote from the author Stephen Budiansky provides an alternative view on the concept of focusing on strengths versus weaknesses.  In his book Blackett’s War, Budiansky relates the story of a group of British scientists who applied their knowledge and skills to help the Allies defeat the Axis in the 1940s. 

Wall Street Journal reviewer Marc Levinson heralds these wartime scientists and their lasting innovations by noting that “[c]oncepts such as probability and optimization, honed in studies analyzing the placement of anti-aircraft batteries and the flight patterns of planes on patrol at sea, made their way into the language of business.”  One of the heroes of the war effort was Stephen Blackett, a physicist who spent considerable time analyzing the war in the North Atlantic Ocean against German submarines.  Early in the war, the German U-boats were extracting a particularly heavy toll on Allied shipping.  The problem of finding and destroying a small, single submarine in a vast ocean seemed unsolvable, even though the U-boats spent most of their time on the surface.

Blackett applied a scientist’s logic to the problem by comparing the actual count of submarines sighted by observation planes to a mathematical model of how often, by sheer chance, the observation planes should have been able to spot the enemy vessels.  Blackett noticed that the number of sightings was far lower than it should have been given the number of planes operating over the seas and the number of enemy submarines in action in the area (which was known based on convoy reports or sightings and sinkings), and he then began to ask probing questions as to why this could be the case. Basic probability suggested that the planes were operating in the same area as the submarines, but the latter were not being spotted, which indicated that the submarines were likely detecting the planes and diving before they could be observed.

With this in mind, Blackett began a series of queries to determine the root cause of the issue. The key question turned out to be the color of the spotter aircraft.  These planes had been previously deployed for night bomber duty and thus were painted black.  Against a cloudy sky, the planes stood out and could be easily spotted by the U-boat commanders.  Blackett recommended that the underside of the planes be painted white, and shortly thereafter the rate of U-boat sightings doubled.

One lesson from Blackett’s innovation is the importance of looking at the “soft underbelly” to apply innovation not just in the literal sense (in which Blackett instructed the Royal Air Force to paint the undersides of their planes white) but also in his focus on a simple area of weakness to solve a problem rather than focusing solely on strengths.  For example, Blackett could have devoted his efforts to improving the optical sights of the spotter planes, an area where other scientists certainly could have driven innovation.  Likewise, he could have invested time in using the nascent technology of radar to detect the submarine masts on the surface (indeed this was done later in the war).  Blackett could have tried to solve the problem with more manpower by adding more flight crew members and windows to the planes.

However, Blackett decided that a simple solution could probably explain the lack of performance of his airplanes in spotting U-boats.  This simple solution proved to be one that could be implemented quickly and demonstrated results right away, as opposed to a more prolonged technical solution such as radar or advanced optics.  For the modern innovation practitioner, Blackett’s solution reminds us of the importance of looking at simple solutions in our areas of weakness.  Although it is difficult to justify investing time and money in a declining product, the proper innovation can quickly turn around that product’s performance or may point to insights that can improve even our areas of strength.

Sources: Marc Levinson, “How Scientists Sank the U-Boat,” Wall Street Journal (February 16, 2013). Stephen Budiansky, Blackett’s War (New York: Knopf, 2013).

image credits: barnesandnoble.com; linkedin.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Black Friday has always struck me as an odd moniker for a major event during the typically cheerful holiday season.

In the last few years Black Friday (the huge shopping day after the annual Thursday holiday of the U.S. Thanksgiving Day) has seemingly become even more intensively publicized, with the new phenomena of Gray Thursday (stores opening early on Thanksgiving Day to get a head start of the shopping crush) and Cyber Monday (the surge in online shopping on the Monday after Thanksgiving where people return to their computers) and drive large amounts of traffic to shopping websites in search of bargains.

For the innovation practitioner observing or, indeed, participating in this frenzy of shopping, two aspects of this period are worthy of additional investigation and can provide insights into the art of new thinking.

The first insight is the power of a simple term to influence consumer behavior.  While there are numerous factors that drive the surge in interest in shopping the day after Thanksgiving (such as the fact that many workers have that day off and there are only three to four weeks remaining until the Christmas holiday which means people need to start shopping for gifts), the intensity of devotion to Black Friday shopping suggests that something more than just a calendar attribute is driving shopping behavior.

Conventional wisdom asserts that the term “Black Friday” refers to the fact that in the highly competitive retail arena, the first day that a typical company becomes profitable (in the black, vs in the red), is on the heavy shopping day after the Thanksgiving holiday.  However, in an article on the history of the holiday prepared by the Associated Press reporters Anne D’Innocenzio and Tom Krisher, the actual history of Black Friday is much more complex.

The first reference to Black Friday was related to the stock market panic of 1864, which had been influenced by legislation that tried to drive a reduction in the price of gold.  The next manifestation of the term appeared in 1950 as factory managers noticed significant employee absenteeism on the Friday after Thanksgiving.  A decade later, police in Philadelphia used the term to describe large crowds in retailers on the day after Thanksgiving.  The term began to appear in newspapers in the 1970s as the official start of the holiday shopping season.  The idea that Black Friday aligned to the profit and loss statements of the retailers did not emerge until the 1980s.  In the 2000s, we began to see references to Cyber Monday and in 2012, the term Gray Thursday, whereby retailers open their doors before Black Friday, began to appear.

The insight for the innovator here is to think about the importance of a simple name as a unifying theme for an endeavor.  The innovator should not underestimate the importance of the name of an initiative and the power of that phraseology to drive human behavior.  Black Friday is a particularly powerful concept because of all the information it conveys in a short, simple phrase.  Hearing that term gives one the day of the event and reminds the listener that the day is all about retail consumption, knowing that stores are focusing an intense amount of attention on the success of that day.

When we are brainstorming names for our initiatives, we should consider similarly powerful yet simple terms that can convey a great deal of information in only a couple of words.  While there are caveats to this approach in the form of avoiding names that are too trivial (see my article on Pilgrim Innovation), the innovator should think about how perfectly Black Friday suits the post-Thanksgiving retail activity and try to find something similar for their initiatives.

A second innovative aspect of Black Friday stems from the creative, though somewhat deceptive, approach to pricing adopted by most retailers to enable them to drive significant discounts on Black Friday.  Conventional wisdom suggests that retailers present dramatic discounts on their products for Black Friday and make money through a high volume of low-profit transactions. The reality, according to Suzanne Kapner from the Wall Street Journal, is that retailers carefully work with their suppliers to set manufacturer’s suggested retail prices at a point where they can provide significant discounts yet still make a decent profit on the sale.  For instance, Kapner notes, a sweater that is priced originally at $68 then sold for $39.99 (a 40% discount), still makes a good profit margin for the retailer yet still gives the shopper a feeling of having achieved a hard-won bargain.

In the words of one 44-year-old shopper in New York at Macy’s recently interviewed by Kapner, “I don’t even get excited unless it’s 40% off.”  The big sales of Black Friday, in some ways, can be seen as “manufactured” to the extent that significant adjustments to pricing take place prior to the actual sale day so that the retailer can create the impression of large discounts without having to take a big hit to its bottom line (otherwise Black Friday would be Red Friday).

For the innovation practitioner, we should study the tactics of the major retailers on Black Friday to determine if we can make use of their strategy to help move forward our own initiatives across an enterprise.  For example, if we are trying to convince our colleagues to adapt to a new transformation initiative that will improve the performance of a particular business process, we should think if there are ways that we can make subtle adjustments to various elements of the process prior to implementing the initiative so that performance improvements resulting from the new process are easier to see.  It could be something as simple as increasing the precision of a metric so that changes in that metric are more apparent to observers.

Just as retailers are not trying to deceive their customers in their pricing strategies on Black Friday, the intent of my advice is not to deceive those around us in how we measure the results of our initiatives.  Few of the people interviewed leaving a store on a Black Friday after obtaining a “bargain” seem displeased with the results of their effort.  Likewise, we should think about how we can make those who participate in the roll out of our innovation initiatives “happy customers,” even if this requires some creativity in the way we measure those results, such as focusing on one data element more so than others.  The innovation lesson here is to spend time thinking about the importance of measurements in driving the perception of an initiative’s success.

Sources:

Anne D’Innocenzio and Tom Krisher, “Thursday Shoppers Get a Jump on Black Friday,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution (November 23, 2012), A2.

Suzanne Kapner, “The Dirty Secret of Black Friday ‘Discounts:’ How Retailers Concoct ‘Bargains’ for the Holidays and Beyond,” Wall Street Journal (November 25, 2013).

image credit: blackfridaybradsdeals.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

The phrase “Pilgrim Innovation” could appear in the dictionary as an example of the word “oxymoron,” which is defined as two contradictory terms placed next to each other in a single phrase.  After all, Pilgrims are often seen as relics of a bygone era, known more for their large, shiny belt buckles, funny hats, and quaint ways than for delivering new thinking and ideas.  Yet as many of us take time off this week of Thanksgiving in the United States, a brief investigation of some of the events in the story of how the Pilgrims came to America yields lessons for the modern-day innovation practitioner.

Nearly every student in America can recite the story of how the Pilgrims arrived at the tip of what is now known as Cape Cod on board the three-masted sailing ship known as the Mayflower.  Less is known, however, about the second ship that the Pilgrims originally planned to take on their voyage, the Speedwell.  Facing a long, dangerous voyage across the Atlantic to a largely unknown destination, the average passenger would probably have chosen to go on board the Speedwell, figuring that any ship with “speed” in its name would likely make the 3,000-mile journey in a shorter period of time.

The name Mayflower, on the other hand, invokes thoughts of slowly walking through a field of spring flowers, daisies perhaps, and connotes a softness and delicateness that seems counter to the idea of survival across a brutal ocean passage.  As history instructs us, the Speedwell proved to be unseaworthy and returned to port, with a smaller group of Pilgrims making a successful journey on the Mayflower.

The lesson for the innovation practitioner is to avoid falling into the trap of always trying to name an innovation or transformation initiative after a positive term tied to its potential outcome.  This can apply to any big IT initiative named after a given year, such as “CRM Transformation 2014” or “Customer Master Data Integration 2015.”  Tying the name of a project too closely to its objective, while at first seeming like an obvious thing to do, can sometimes imperil the success of the project because too much focus is placed on that very precise target and not enough on other aspects of the overall project.

I noticed a possible example of this on a recent visit to a hospital room.  In the corner of the room was a large sticker in the outline of a chair and a similarly-colored folding chair.  The program was called the “Share Chair” [I am disguising the actual name so as not to offend its creators] and I discerned the intent of the program to be a means of encouraging Physicians and Nurses to spend more time at the bedside of patients to improve their interactions with patients and give the patient time to ask questions and not feel rushed.

Since sitting on the bed itself is not a good idea because of tubes and germs and various other issues, having a lightweight, portable chair nearby for the staff to use seemed like a great, innovative idea. However, I asked around and couldn’t find any examples of staff using the chair.  Indeed, during my time in the room the Nurses would always stand up during their visits and the Doctor would sit on the corner of the bed if he sat at all.

While my case study only had a sample size of one, my guess would be that the same phenomenon was happening in other rooms and I lamented the fact that somewhere there was an innovation team that came up with a great idea but their solution was not being used in practice.  This led me to wonder whether a different name for the program could have yielded different results.  Was the name chosen by the team, for lack of a better term, too “cute” and did it trivialize the project?  Was there a better way to encourage more staff/patient interactions?  For the innovator, these are items we should consider when we reach the stage where one of our ideas makes that wonderful step from concept to real implementation.

Another innovation lesson from the Pilgrims stems from the composition of the passengers aboard the Mayflower.  Contrary to conventional wisdom, these passengers were not all motivated by a desire for religious freedom.  According to Beth Dunn, the former Director of Technology and Communications for the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, around half were indeed Separatists, while the remaining individuals were either somewhat sympathetic to the Separatist cause or completely disconnected from the cause and brought along as workers with specialized skills, such as soldiers and craftsmen.

For example, one of the eventual leaders of the Pilgrim community, John Alden, was brought along to make and repair barrels.  Myles Standish, a well-known leader of the Plymouth settlement, was originally part of the security detail for the voyage.  The lesson here for innovators is that not everyone engaged in a successful mission needs to be completely bought into the vision that is motivating the leaders of the endeavor.  Some can be brought along for other purposes, and as long as they are generally supportive of the effort, their specific skills can be leveraged to lead to a successful outcome.

Consider, for instance, the case of William Francis Gibbs, the naval architect who designed the S.S. United States, one of the greatest transatlantic passenger liners of the era before jet travel.  Gibbs was messianic in his devotion to the cause of ship design and manufacturing.  From the time he was a little boy, he sketched designs for ships and knew that his life’s ambition was to build the greatest, fastest ships in the world.  Gibbs accomplished this with the creation of the S.S. United States, which won the famous Blue Riband award for setting a speed record in crossing the Atlantic ocean faster than the previous champion, the Cunard Lines Queen Mary.

Despite his obsessive attention to details, Gibbs has made a mistake in his original design for the ship. The twin smokestacks on the S.S. United States were the largest ever installed on a passenger ship, measuring 55 feet tall and 60 feet across at the base.  Gibbs designed a set of soot-deflecting fins at the top of the teardrop-shaped funnels that provided a signature for his design and leveraged some of his past, well-received work as a naval architect.

Prior to construction, Gibbs initiated thorough scale-model testing of nearly every element on the ship, including his beloved fins.  Unfortunately, this setup proved deficient in wind testing, raising the concern that soot and ash from the smokestack would fall on passengers on the upper decks of the ship.  The solution to the problem came from a young Newport News shipyard apprentice, Howard E. Lee, Jr., who recommended to Gibbs that he rotate the fins to where they were horizontal rather than vertical.  Gibbs was skeptical that so simple a solution would work, and he may also have been concerned about changing his signature design, but he reluctantly agreed to allow Lee to test his idea.  The new design worked well and, according to Lee, upon seeing the results Gibbs “grunted and walked away without comment.”

The new horizontal fin design made it into the final blueprints for the ship and can be seen on the ship to this day (though the ship itself is in limbo in a Philadelphia-area port while it awaits its ultimate fate).  We do not know whether shipyard apprentice Howard Lee shared Gibbs’s zeal for creating the greatest ocean liner in the world.  For all we know, that individual was just happy to have a steady job and spent most of his day taking the innovative ideas of others and turning them into parts for ships.  However, his contribution to the S.S. United States proved to be lasting and valuable.

A final example of Pilgrim Innovation is recounted in Nathaniel Philbrick’s Mayflower, winner of the National Book Award for non-fiction.  Philbrick describes a process whereby the ship’s Master Christopher Jones sometimes was faced with such intense seas that he had to engage in a radical maneuver to protect the ship and its passengers even though the move meant that he lost many of the miles he had successfully traversed.  The procedure was known as the “lie ahull” and consisted of furling the sails and securing the helm to the leeward side (downwind) and allowing the wind and seas to push the ship where they pleased.

Philbrick notes that in 1957, a British team sailing a replica of the Mayflower experienced what it must have been like for the crew in the 1600s facing powerful Western gales in the Atlantic.  Near the end of the voyage, in the midst of a powerful storm, the captain of the 1957 version of the Mayflower recognized that the severe motion of the ship under sail was reaching a breaking point so he ordered the crew to engage in the “lie ahull” configuration.  He removed the sails, tied down all items on the deck, and, with hesitation, turned the helm to leeward.  The crew was astonished to find that the ship responded perfectly to the change.  Philbrick describes the scene as follows:

[a]s soon as the ship’s bow swung into the wind, a remarkable change came over the Mayflower II.  Even though she was under bare poles in a howling gale, her slablike topsides functioned as a kind of wooden storm sail, magically steadying the shop’s motion.  Almost perfectly balanced, the Mayflower II sat like a contented duck amid the uproar of the storm.  After being pounded unmercifully by the waves, the ship was finally at peace.

Although modern ship designers are unlikely to model their ships after the Mayflower, it is intriguing to see how the Pilgrims leveraged an innovative ship design to ensure their survival in the rough seas of the Atlantic.  Moreover, the “lie ahull” maneuver also reminds us of the familiar notion that sometimes we have to go backwards in the face of a gale of resistance in order to make progress and succeed in our mission in the long run.

Sources:

https://www.history.com/topics/pilgrims

https://www.history.com/news/5-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-pilgrims

Steven Ujifusa, A Man and His Ship: America’s Greatest Naval Architect and His Quest to Build the S.S. United States (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 239.

Nathaniel Philbrick, Mayflower (New York: Penguin Group, 2006), pp. 31-32.

image credit: needham.k12.ma.us

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

When writing about innovation, we sometimes find ourselves operating solely in the hypothetical realm.  In my previous article Squat Effect Innovation – Full Speed Ahead, I used the examples of the Titanic and the Oasis of the Seas to postulate the benefits from accelerating even harder to take on a challenge rather than following our instincts to slow down or to turn in a different direction.

My challenge to innovation practitioners was to think of scenarios in innovation “increasing our speed can give us more margin for error than would be the case if we slowed down and inched our way towards an objective.”  In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, I noticed a scenario where a major company has achieved an innovative result using the full speed ahead mindset.

With the increasing prevalence of mobile phones and online shopping, the traditional brick-and-mortar retailers have been panicked by the scenario of web-savvy customers browsing in a store to get an appreciation for the look and feel of a particular item then using his or her mobile phone to search the web for a better price and make the ultimate purchase online.

The brick and mortar store gets hit with the fixed costs of maintaining a physical presence (utilities, lease, taxes) and has to pay employees to help the customer review or compare products, only to see the customer walk out the door without making a purchase.  Such a scenario could lead and, in some cases, has led to the demise of some brick and mortar stores.

The initial responses of some retailers included trying to level the playing field with online retailers through political lobbying to remove the sales tax exemption online, as well as working on innovative technical solutions in the store (location awareness) to try to convince an online browsing shopper the benefits of purchasing the item in the store (better returns policy, expert help with setups, etc.).

The electronics retailer Best Buy could be seen as the poster child of showrooming to the extent that it relies heavily on sales of electronic devices.  The company has struggled mightily in recent years but is continuing to fight for its survival.  In the article titled “Fear of ‘Showrooming’ Fades,” Drew FitzGerald notes that Best Buy’s latest strategy is to take on showrooming directly, launching an advertising campaign that even refers to its stores as “the ultimate holiday showroom.”

At its nadir, Best Buy was concerned that its future entailed “becoming little more than a testing ground” for Amazon customers.

Indeed, an April poll by Harris Interactive reported that 40% of shoppers in the U.S. tested a product in a store before making their ultimate purchase online.

To counter this phenomenon, Best Buy CEO Hubert Joly has implemented a strategy that consists of price-matching and customer service improvements to counter the web retailers who had been eroding his business.  As a result of their head-on embrace of showrooming, Best Buy and other retailers may be experiencing what some refer to as “reverse showrooming,” in which customers search for products online then go into a brick and mortar store to make their actual purchase.

In the case of the latter, Target Merchandising Executive Casey Carl comments that “[w]e love showrooming when Target gets to book the sale.”  The increasing application of sales taxes to online orders may also be leveling the playing field for online versus brick and mortar.

Although the sales erosion continues, FitzGerald reports that profits at Best Buy are up in the past year.  The final story of online versus brick and mortar is yet to be written and sales are continuing a migration to the web, but the case of Best Buy in 2013 shows us how innovation (exhibited by the phenomenon of reverse showrooming) can result from a “full speed ahead” strategy.

Sources: Drew FitzGerald, “Fear of ‘Showrooming’ Fades,” Wall Street Journal (November 4, 2013).

image credit: dpha.net

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

Nearly everyone has fond (or not so fond) memories of a stern teacher from his or her years of schooling. In a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, Joanne Lipman reminds us of the value of having a strict teacher using recent findings in academic studies in the fields of music, math, and medicine. Lipman suggests that “strict discipline and unyielding demands” lead to improved performance in education and calls for a return to “old-fashioned education” that leverages concepts such as “the benefits of childhood stress; how praise kills kids’ self-esteem; and why grit is a better predictor of success than SAT scores.” Indeed, the theme of the importance of discipline on child-rearing has been a topic of much conversation in the last few years, as evidenced by the controversy surrounding Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which articulates why a discipline-oriented parenting style can yield great results in terms of childhood development.

Discipline and innovation, however, may not seem to be a logical match. As innovators, we tend to focus less on discipline and more on free-wheeling and creative brainstorming sessions that generate radical breakthroughs and new thinking. However, discipline definitely has a role to play in the innovation process and by examining Lipman’s eight principles of tough teaching, we can provide insights for innovation practitioners that leverage concepts from tough teaching to improve our performance.

Principle 1 – A little pain is good for you.

For this principle, Lipman cites the well-known study by Psychologist K. Anders Ericsson that postulates that becoming an expert in a field requires 10,000 hours of practice. This notion is well-known in the business literature, as it serves as the foundation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling book Outliers. Lipman notes that an often overlooked finding from Ericsson’s work is the observation that experts benefit from having teachers who provide “constructive, even painful, feedback.” Top performers in various fields, Ericsson comments, chose mentors who would push them beyond standard boundaries to help in their drive to succeed. For the innovator, the implications of this principle are twofold. First, an innovator should ensure that he or she identifies a coach who can push the individual to greater heights in his or her career, which could mean not being satisfied with a single great successful innovation but constantly striving to do better and make improvements even on an item that was already a big success. Second, the innovator should adopt the mindset in an innovation workshop that demands excellence from each and every participant, leveraging constructive feedback to drive improved results. Pain, per se, should not be an attribute of an innovation session, but a focus on discipline and excellence should pervade the atmosphere, similar to the difference between a classroom that where controlled learning is taking place versus a chaotic classroom.

Principle 2 – Drill, baby, drill.

Lipman highlights the importance of rote learning and memorization in this principle. She cites a study by William Klemm of Texas A&M University that calls for a return to memorization as a learning tool. Indeed, a 2008 study by the U.S. Department of Education links the lack of math expertise in American students to a lack of “drill and practice” in U.S. schools. The innovation leader should consider investing more time than usual in preparations for a workshop, including memorization of key concepts that are needed for the session, such as facts and figures. This increases the credibility of the session leader and also helps improve the flow of the workshop, as the leader will not have to pause the discussion to look up a particular metric. In today’s digital age with so much information at one’s fingertips, we tend to rely less and less on our own memory, though this comes at the cost of credibility, since any elementary school student with a smartphone could look up the same statistic. Even short sessions can benefit from a great deal of preparation. The famous Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) Talks that are ubiquitous in the innovation field appear as short, simple (often flawless) speeches recorded for playback on YouTube. However, as a recent article in Inc magazine notes, these sessions are the result of months of preparation and planning. A three-minute TED talk requires numerous sessions with intense assistance from TED conference programmers to work on content and presentation style to ensure the speaker will deliver a powerful message in that short period of time.

Principle 3 – Failure is an option.

For this principle, Lipman cites studies of French students and Ohio band students that highlight the benefits of using failure as a motivational tool. Rather than diminishing self-esteem, the studies suggest, failure as a learning mechanism actually improves self-esteem and motivation in the long run. The relevance of failure to innovation is a well-trod path in the innovation literature, as numerous authors have noted that dozens or even hundreds of failures in attempted innovation led the way to eventual success. Perhaps the best example of this would be Edison’s hundreds of prototypes for the light bulb. Innovators may be better than most people at being able to handle failure, but this principle reminds us that failure can definitely be a powerful motivational tool.

Principle 4 – Strict is better than nice.

Lipman cites a 2005 study of the Los Angeles Unified School District as the foundation for the principle that strict teaching is better than nice teaching. She notes that in a five-year study of the best-performing teachers in the worst-performing school districts, the determining factor that differentiated the best from the worst was that the best teachers were those deemed “strict” by their students. The study suggests that the best teachers assumed that “every student in my room is underperforming based on their potential, and it’s my job to do something about it.” For the innovation practitioner leading a session of colleagues or clients, it may be difficult to adopt a strict demeanor, particularly in the case of a paying customer. However, a mindset where the innovator sets a tone of demanding excellence in terms of results from the session could drive improvements in performance on the part of the participants. In particular, the innovator should ensure that a session focused on generating new thinking about a process or product does not degenerate into a complaint session about how the business is operating today. In this scenario, an innovator could harken to the words of one student in the Los Angeles study who said “[W]hen I was in first grade and second grade and third grade, when I cried the teachers coddled me. When I got to Mrs. T’s room, she told me to suck it up and get to work. I think she’s right. I need to work harder.”

Principle 5 – Creativity can be learned

In this case Lipman refers to a study by Robert Weisberg from Temple University. Weisberg’s research challenges the conventional wisdom that traditional education negatively impacts creativity. In other words, rote learning and educational discipline is viewed by some as anathema to new thinking, but Weisberg’s case studies suggest otherwise. Weisberg examined the achievements of Edison, Picasso, and Frank Lloyd Wright and concluded that what appears to outside observers as breakthroughs of sheer genius actually were the result of hard work, incremental steps, and discipline. Picasso’s masterpiece Guernica, rather than being a “fresh and original concept” inspired by the Spanish Civil War, in fact built upon numerous previous works by Picasso as well as those of other artists and Communist Party designs. Weisberg notes that creativity comes from discipline, and that “[y]ou have to immerse yourself in a discipline before you create in that discipline.” An implication of this principle lies in its application to workshop participants who could benefit from spending time engaging in activities focused on new thinking outside of the workshop so that creativity comes more naturally to them in the actual workshop session. Discipline through repeated work in the area of new thinking could help the participants as part of their immersion in a concept before they are expected to produce new insights in an innovation session. Likewise, a structured, disciplined approach to brainstorming in the innovation session itself can help all participants work through the process required to invent something truly innovative.

Principle 6 – Grit trumps talent

For this principle, Lipman highlights the work of Angela Duckworth at the University of Pennsylvania. Duckworth, a 2013 MacArthur Foundation grant recipient, performed research on nearly 3,000 subjects including spelling bee champions, Ivy League students, and U.S. Military Academy (West Point) cadets. Duckworth’s findings suggest that “grit – defined as passion and perseverance for long-term goals – is the best predictor of success” and, counter-intuitively, is “usually unrelated or even negatively correlated with talent.” In other words, hard work can outperform talent. An example of this is vacuum designer James Dyson. Dyson spent 15 years building over 5,000 prototypes before he perfected his eponymous vacuum cleaner. During those 15 years, Dyson noted, “I wanted to give up almost every day.” There is no doubt that Dyson possesses particular talents in the areas of engineering and air flow, but his ultimate success may have more to do with grit than those talents. For the innovator, this serves as a reminder that hard work and dedication to a long-term goal, such as solving a particular business problem or trying to realize the vision of a new product, is more important than expecting oneself to stumble across an instant epiphany that results in a great innovation.

Principle 7 – Praise makes you weak…

One of the anecdotes that Lipman uses to reinforce her arguments is her experience with a particular music teacher whose favorite commentary after a student’s performance was “not bad.” This was more insightful than Lipman originally thought in that it aligns nicely with Carol Dweck’s research at Stanford University on the implications on praise on young students. Dweck observed that a group of 10-year-olds who were “praised for being ‘smart’ became less confident […whereas] kids told they were ‘hard workers’ became more confident and better performers.” The benefits of the initial praise focused on the intelligence of the student proved fleeting because, Dweck observes, “[i]f success meant they were smart, then struggling meant they were not.” For the innovator, this principle suggests that one should be careful with the words used in an ideation session so that the participants can focus on their hard work moreso than on the brilliance of a particular idea. A comment as simple as “that’s brilliant” or “great idea” in response to a participant offering up a new concept could influence the way the other participants think about how they will be involved in the session. If only “brilliant” ideas are rewarded verbally with praise, then the goal of the session becomes finding another brilliant idea as opposed to a more incremental process of small improvements that ultimately lead to a breakthrough. While there is a need for truly brilliant thoughts in innovation workshops, the innovation practitioner should remember that his or her verbal responses to proposed concepts from participants can set the tone for how the workshop proceeds and ultimately influence its success. The innovation workshop leader should also remember that a series of incremental improvements can build on each other to reach the point of a true breakthrough, but that breakthrough may not have been possible without taking the small steps that in and of themselves did not appear to be “brilliant.”

Principle 8 – …while stress makes you strong.

A recurring theme in Lipman’s article is the importance of resilience, and this final principle highlights the value of an individual possessing the quality of resilience in his or her demeanor. Lipman relays findings from separate studies by Mark Seery of the University of Buffalo and Richard Dienstbier of the University of Nebraska that focus on the value of stress in terms of building the resilience of an individual. Seery’s study of undergraduates suggests that those who had previously experienced significant negative events in their lives were better able to handle new incidents of stress introduced in the present. Likewise, Dienstbier’s work notes that “dealing with routine stresses” makes an individual stronger. One example of a routine stress factor that can build toughness and resilience later in life, according to Seery, is having a strict teacher at an early age. As we have seen in the case of Dyson and other innovators who know how to persevere through repeated failures, resilience is a key character trait for successful individuals in the innovation field. While there are multiple ways to develop resiliency as a character trait, one experience that many of us share that can help develop this attribute is the experience of attending classes with strict teachers. The strict teacher not only excels at helping us learn the content of the course more effectively, but also imparts to us other factors, such as resilience, that can benefit us in the long run.

Sources: Joanne Lipman, Tough Teachers Get Results,” Wall Street Journal (September 28, 2013). “Secrets of a Great TED Talk,” Inc (October 2013). Amy Chua, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (New York: Penguin Press, 2011). https://together.mit.edu/dyson_on_failure image credit: upper lip image from bigstock

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

The concept of negative thinking is typically seen as anathema to the field of innovation where we are constantly challenged to remain upbeat while working on new concepts and ideas.  The word innovation itself seems to have exclusively positive connotations, perhaps with the exception of the buggy whip manufacturer facing innovation in the area of transportation.  An innovation workshop that incorporates negative concepts, at first glance, might not seem the best way to drive new thinking.  However, there is value in some of the aspects of negative thinking that warrant consideration by the innovation practitioner.  Indeed, the power of the negative in terms of innovation has been explored by Drew Boyd’s excellent article “Rejection Breeds Creativity” in this journal.

My article expands on Boyd’s concept of creativity driven by rejection and adds three new approaches to innovation that could be enhanced through negative thinking.  The first concept articulates the value of focusing on the worst possible outcome in analysis of competing scenarios, which runs counter to the aphorism that positive thinking always works best.  The second concept is similar to Boyd’s approach and notes that negative feedback is often more valuable than positive feedback.  Finally, the third concept focuses on the rhetorical power of the negative, antithetical phrase in terms of the impact it can have on the reader or listener to emphasize a particular point or serve as a call to action.  The combination of these negative elements can provide the innovation practitioner with enhanced approaches to driving new thinking in an innovation effort.

Focus on the Negative Path

All of us have at some point encountered a person whose positive outlook on life flows into every conversation and interaction.  We often refer to these individuals as “Pollyanna,” after a 1913 novel by Eleanor Porter that recounts the tale of a young orphan who makes a constant effort to be glad no matter what circumstances she encounters.  At the start of an innovation session, we often expect the workshop leader to effuse positivity and inspire the workshop participants with an energetic presentation to set the tone for the meeting.  However, according to Oliver Burkeman, there is value to thinking of alternative approaches to the traditional concept of positive thinking.  In his recent book The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, Burkeman presents several cases where positive thinking may not always lead to the best outcome.  The first scenario entails using the power of the negative to minimize the anxiety about a future outcome.  Burkeman cites the work of the psychotherapist Albert Ellis who “rediscovered a key insight of the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome: that sometimes the best way to address an uncertain future is to focus not on the best-case scenario but on the worst.”  The famous Stoic Seneca taught his followers that if they feared losing their wealth, then they should “set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?'”  Thinking about the worst possible outcome can free a person from anxiety about that outcome, which enables a person to concentrate on other aspects of the outcome, perhaps devoting more energy to examining the positive potential outcomes.

A second scenario cited by Burkeman relates to the importance of goal-setting and driving unceasingly towards achievement of those goals.  Research performed by Christopher Kayes at George Washington University highlights the potential perils of an approach that is fixated on the accomplishment of a single goal at the expense of other alternatives.  Professor Kayes postulates that this “overpursuit” of goals may, in fact, be tied to a fear of uncertainty, with the definitive nature of the single goal making up for the lack of certainty concerning possible outcomes.  Likewise, Saras Saravathy from the University of Virginia expands on this concept to recommend that enterpreneurs embrace uncertainty as a means of expanding the possible universe of outcomes from an endeavor.  Sarasvathy focuses on “effectuation,” which she defines as assessing the capabilities available to an entrepreneur then envisioning the range of possible end points resulting from work efforts leveraging those capabilities.  She also notes that the “affordable loss principle” drives behavior to the extent that successful entrepreneurs focus less on the spectacular rewards from an initiative but, rather, think about the magnitude of the loss of an endeavor is not successful.

For the innovation practitioner, these two ideas can spark creativity in addressing an innovation challenge.  A team working on a new product or service may focus on the best possible outcome for their work effort, which would be customers lined up around the proverbial block to purchase the new offering.  Indeed, the positive energy of an innovation team may be infectious, as positive thoughts beget even more positive thoughts to the point where the participants lose sight of reality.  In this scenario, the negative view could be valuable by having participants think about the worst possible outcome in addition to the best possible outcome.

A good example is cited by Lynn Spigel, a professor at the Northwestern University School of Communications.  Spigel, writing on the evolution of television in terms of its impact on the family as it moved from the family room into the kitchen.  The technology evolved to the point where it became inappropriate for the television to be an inherent part of the dining experience, though not before some innovator rolled out a line of TV stoves, in which a television was embedded in the stove itself.  One can imagine the team working on the concept decades ago swirling in the excitement of the ever-expanding footprint of television and thinking that the next likely frontier would be the kitchen.  A naysayer in the room might have been able to help the team work through this worst case scenario (the complete failure of the TV stove in the marketplace) and redirected their focus to other areas, leveraging the potential failure to make product improvements elsewhere.

Spigel’s research is referenced in Nick Bilton’s “Disruptions” column in the New York Times in the context of the ubiquity of smartphone distractions in today’s day and age, and thinking about what the apogee (or perhaps nadir, depending on one’s perspective) of smartphone disruption could point towards other useful innovations as opposed to a team focusing on creating new distracting smartphone application.  An innovation practitioner should also be wary of the overpursuit of goals in an innovation endeavor which may limit a team’s ability to modify their approach to follow a new thread or pathway that could, in the end, lead to a greater innovation that what the team originally intended to cover.  Sarasvathy’s concept of “effectuation,” with its envisioning of a range of possible end points, is precisely the type of mindset that can help drive ideation efforts.

Negative Feedback

Another theory which asserts the value of the negative is relayed by Heidi Grant Halvorson from the Columbia University Business School.  In a recent Harvard Business Review Blog posting, Halvorson cites research by Stacey Finkelstein and Ayelet Fishbach that highlights the benefits of negative feedback when used for certain types of individuals.  The authors surveyed students in a French language class and found that novice students sought positive feedback from the instructor, whereas expert students preferred negative feedback.  In other words, the novice students wanted the teacher to focus on what the students were doing well (positive feedback), whereas the expert students wanted to receive feedback on what they had done incorrectly (negative feedback).  As Halvorson notes,

“Positive feedback (e.g., Here’s what you did really well….) increases commitment to the work you do, by enhancing both your experience and your confidence. Negative feedback (e.g., Here’s where you went wrong….), on the other hand, is informative — it tells you where you need to spend your effort, and offers insight into how you might improve.  For instance, when you don’t really know what you are doing, positive feedback helps you to stay optimistic and feel more at ease with the challenges you are facing — something novices tend to need. But when you are an expert, and you already more or less know what you are doing, it’s negative feedback that can help you do what it takes to get to the top of your game.”

This leveraging of the negative can help the innovator by ensuring that an innovation discussion does not unnecessarily focus only on the positive aspects of an idea. Typically a brainstorming session would be accumulative from a thought process standpoint, in which participants would present idea after idea that builds upon an initial them and expands it, as opposed to a more criticism-oriented approach in which participants think of the negative aspects of an idea as the discussion is underway. Although there have to be some limitations to negative interjections (for instance, a workshop where every idea is shot down immediately would be a very short session), we ignore the negative at our own peril in ideation activities.  Moreover, by pointing out the weaknesses of an idea or approach, the participants will force the author of that idea or approach to think even harder about how the idea should evolve and may, in the process of that additional thinking, stumble across an even greater innovation.

Rhetorical Use of the Negative

A final use of the negative lies in its strength as a rhetorical tool, which allows the author or speaker to focus the attention of his or her readers or audience on a particular point.  This technique, as Douglas Wilson of Knox College notes, appears prominently in the works of Abraham Lincoln.  According to Wilson, “[t]his is not to say that Lincoln was a naysayer or negative thinker, but rather that he demonstrated an acute understanding of the power of negation in language and was unusually adept at putting that force to use.”  Wilson provides several examples of Lincoln’s use of the concept of negative terms in the form of the antithesis, where the author places two concepts in opposition to each other in the same sentence:

“If slavery is not wrong, […] nothing is wrong.”

“With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed.”

“Without the assistance of that Divine Being, who ever attended him [Washington], I cannot succeed. With that assistance I cannot fail.”

“You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and defend’ it.”

For instance, think of the contrast in power of the positive versus the negative statement.  Instead of saying “[w]ith public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it nothing can succeed,” Lincoln could have said “everything is successful with public support.”  The latter is underwhelming, whereas the former is part of the canon of American history.

Another set of examples from Wilson highlight Lincoln’s use of the negative as a “call to action” on the part of the audience, and these quotes come from Lincoln’s most famous works, the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural:

“We can not dedicate—we can not consecrate—we can not hallow—this ground.”

“The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.”

“[…] that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

“[…] but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully.”

“With malice toward none.”

The power of the negative also holds true in these examples, as we can imagine the lack of effectiveness had Lincoln stated in this Second Inaugural that instead of “[w]ith malice towards none” we should focus on “with kindness towards all.”

Although this linkage between innovation and the concept of the negative is more esoteric, it is nonetheless something that could be useful for the innovation practitioner who pays particular attention to the language he or she uses to communicate with colleagues engaged in an innovation effort.  As Wilson states, Lincoln’s use of the negative allowed him to focus his audience’s attention or a particular idea in a sentence and also served as a call to action on the part of the participants.  Both of these concepts are valuable in ideation work where focus and energy are critical to the success of any endeavor.  Using the negative constructs like Lincoln does in our written and verbal communication to our workshop participants could help them focus on a particular topic of importance.  If nothing else, the creative use of language may inspire the participants to think in new pathways after staring at poorly-written email traffic all day.  As a further reminder of the continued power of the negative, note the recent use of the phraseology by President Obama in his statement on intervention in Syria:

“We cannot raise our children in a world where we will not follow through on the things we say, the accords we sign, the values that define us.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollyanna

Nick Bilton, “Fraying at Tethers of Our Phones,” New York Times (September 2, 2013)

Oliver Burkeman, “The Power of Negative Thinking,” The Wall Street Journal (December 7, 2012)

Douglas L. Wilson, “The Power of the Negative,” The Wall Street Journal (January 16, 2013)

Heidi Grant Halvorson, “Sometimes Negative Feedback is Best,” Harvard Business Review Blog Network (January 28, 2013)

https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/31/statement-president-syria

image credit: secrets2success.com

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GUEST POST from Scott Bowden

I recently wrote about my appreciation of travel writing (Innovation in Lost Japan).  One of my favorite ways to pass time converges in the form of the literary tales of the flaneur.

The French term, which means a person who strolls about, was popularized by Charles Baudelaire in the 19^th century, around the time when Baron Haussman was undertaking his dramatic transformation of the city of Paris into the urban work of art that enraptures tourists from around the world. In Baudelaire’s words, the flaneur is a “gentleman stroller of city streets” who functions like a “botanist of the sidewalk.” A flaneur is more than a tourist to the extent that the flaneur is deeply absorbing the essence of city as he or she moves through it, like a botanist moving through a field of plants.

There are few activities that strike me as more enjoyable than spending hours walking the streets of a great city or town and absorbing the views and experiences along the way. Some of my best, most creative thinking occurs during these peripatetic wanderings, and I always relish the chance to travel to a great city, such as New York, because of the chance it offers for inspirational strolls. Although there are many competing theories as to what happens from a neurological standpoint during a stroll that leads to creative thinking, my guess is that the combination of sensory immersion (the sights and sounds and speed of the city) enables the brain to focus even more intensively on a thought process than might happen in a quiet room with blank walls.

As much fun as I have as a flaneur, I also enjoy reading books about flaneurs, and some well-known modern writers of this genre include Paul Theroux , Patrick Leigh Fermor, Tim Parks, and Ryszard Kapuscinski. As innovators we are, in a sense, flaneurs of our companies, organizations, or clients to the extent that we work our way through their environments making subtle observations as we immerse ourselves in their operations.  The sections below contain observations by some of these great authors of the genre that are relevant for those of us pursuing innovation.

“When some people travel they merely contemplate what is before their eyes. When I travel, I contemplate the processes of mutability.”

This quote, provided by Paul Theroux, originates from the Taoist philosopher Lieh Tzu, and highlights an important element of the mindset of the flaneur. Travel is about more than observing what is immediately in front of one’s eyes but, more critically, noticing how things around the traveler are mutable, or changing. This is particularly interesting when observing the remnants of an ancient civilization juxtaposed with a modern society, as one would see in the temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia. For the innovator, one should pay attention to what aspects of a company or organization are in the process of changing, as those areas provide two potential advantages for the innovator. First, an area undergoing change may be a good candidate for accelerated change to drive further innovation. Conversely, an area that is not undergoing change (and is thus stagnant), may be ripe for an exploration by an innovator.

“Reading and restlessness – dissatisfaction at home, a sourness at being indoors, and a notion that the real world was elsewhere – made me a traveler. If the Internet were everything it is cracked up to be, we would all stay home and be brilliantly witty and insightful. Yet with so much contradictory information available, there is more reason to travel than ever before; to verify, to smell, to touch, to taste, to hear, and sometimes – importantly – to suffer the effects of this curiosity.”

This quote, also from Theroux, highlights the restlessness that drives the flaneur to explore distant places. For the innovator, there is a danger to staying indoors which, in the context of today’s workplace, could mean within a cubicle farm on a corporate campus. Real innovation and new thinking likely exists elsewhere, and Theroux’s comment about the Internet is particularly insightful, as many of us may be tempted to believe that new ideas can come from the infinite variety of information available at our fingertips (other than, of course, the great content on InnovationExcellence.com). In Theroux’s mind, it is precisely the abundance of information available to us electronically that increases the value of physical travel and observation. Several years ago I led a team that designed a CRM call center application for a client and we were able to situate our development team onsite at one of the call centers that would be using the product, which proved tremendously valuable in terms of helping drive home the concept that what we were doing needed to improve the jobs of the employees in the center working next to us.

“I have always felt that the value of a travel narrative, especially one that detours down back roads, is that it becomes a record of the details of how people lived at a particular time and place: how they spoke, what they said, what they ate, how they behaved. The Soviet Union I saw and wrote about in the 1960s doesn’t exist anymore, nor does the South America I saw in the 1970s, nor the China I traveled through in the 1980s. The way of life on many Pacific islands has changed since I paddled around them in 1990, and I was witnessing on this trip, the Africa of 2001 had undergone significant alterations – a few improvements, many degradations. To console myself, I think: Maybe the incidental details in these narratives will someday be useful for historians.  Preserving the texture of life in a chronicle of travel could help inform the future, just as the diaries of foreign travelers like Smollett or Montaigne helped us understand old Europe.”

This notion of the historical aspect of the flaneur narrative appears in Theroux’s recent narrative of a trip to South Africa, Angola, and Namibia. A travel writer captures a snapshot of a place in time that can be useful for future analysis. For the innovator, the focus on documenting the proceedings of a workshop session tends to revolve around capturing new ideas to pursue and discarding the other content. However, as is the case with Theroux’s writing, all of the observations from the workshop may be useful to the innovator at a later date, particularly if the innovator is sifting through past observations to search for new ideas.

“Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European’s first glimpse of smoking.  Tea arrived in England from Holland in about 1657, and Samuel Pepys drank his first cup of tea on September 25, 1660, so he wrote in his diary. The use of the individual fork at a meal dates from the mid-sixteenth century. Until then, all Europeans ate with their hands from a common trencher. […] Around 1609, and English traveler – one Thomas Coryate, who ate with his hands – saw diners in Italy using forks and ridiculed them.”

The above examples cited in Theroux’s book come from the French historian Fernand Braudel and speak to the power of human observation and the rapidity with which a concept can spread across a population. As an innovator, one should be mindful that even the simplest observations can lead to revolutionary transformation.

“This argument for the importance of trivial observation is obviously self-justifying, but if you’re alone on the road, you need to be bucked up somehow, and even if the observations are illusions, they are illusions necessary to your existence.  And if you aren’t vitalized by fantasies – here I am in this old car speeding through the bush, here I am among tribal people engrossed in a ritual – the experience would be demoralizing.  But the implied vanity bothered me, because being a fantasist in travel is simply self-regarding, and much is lost in translation.”

Theroux’s travels across the planet over several decades strike some of us as more strenuous than we would choose for our own voyages.  Indeed, the French root for the English word “travel” is “travailler,” which means to work or struggle, as travel in anything other than modern times would tend to be a difficult prospect. As such, Theroux notes that the traveler needs to be “bucked up” periodically with the notion that his or her “trivial” observations are more valuable than at first glance. Like the traveler, the innovator needs to be bucked up periodically because the search for new thinking can be so challenging, especially when a reservoir of new ideas seems to run dry.  In these scenarios, the innovator needs to maintain a focus on the notion that simple observations can lead to great revelations, though it is not always immediately apparent which observation will lead to a new finding.

“I am looking for something to write about, because that’s the nature of this travel, and perhaps of most travel: to see something new – a stimulus; to satisfy curiosity – a pleasure; to follow an itinerary – a narrative. But behind it all, and especially fueling the fantasy, is the need for the traveler to be at large in an exotic setting, to be far away, to act out a narrative of discovery and risk, to mimic the modes of the old travelers, to find similarities and differences.”

Theroux is focused here on two pre-eminent themes in travel literature, the value of risk as part of the discovery process and the benefits from following in the paths of previous explorers as a way to identify new discoveries. In the case of the former, risk has always been tied to extreme traveling and discoveries. In the case of the latter, some very interesting work has been done by authors such as Ryszard Kapuscinski and Justin Marozzi in retracing the footsteps of great travelers of the past. For the innovation practitioner, risk is definitely part of the process of driving new thinking, as more conservative thoughts may not lead to the type of transformation needed by an organization. Following in the path of a previous great innovator may be a counter-intuitive way to derive new insights into a particular product or service. Replicating the pathways that led to the initial discovery may lead the innovator to other creative thoughts or inspiration.

“My ideal traveler is the person who goes the old, laborious way into the unknown, and it is this belief that lies behind my travel, and drives me.  I want to see things as they are, to see myself as I am.”

This final quote from Theroux focuses on the self-reflective nature of travel and the realization that in exploring the people and places far from home, we learn more about ourselves than we do about the foreign land. Perhaps our work as innovators is ultimately self-reflective as well, as we are looking inside ourselves to find our sources of inspiration. The output from our sessions reflects what we ultimately believe because we subconsciously may drive the conversation to a point that is familiar to us. In the end, by working on new ideas we may ultimately be revealing much about ourselves in our innovation work.

Sources: Paul Theroux, The Last Train to Zona Verde (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) Jerry Saltz, “Modern Machinery,” New York Magazine (September 7, 2008) Tim Parks, Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2013). Ryszard Kapuscinski, Travels with Herodotus (New York: Vintage, 2008), Justin Marozzi, The Way of Herodotus: Travels with the Man Who Invented History (New York: Da Capo Press, 2008) image credit: man strolling image from bigstock

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