Category Archives: Innovation

Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

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Finding Innovation in the Humble Garbage Can

GUEST POST from Howard Tiersky

Uber has taught us that even the most commonplace products and services are ripe with innovation. They’ve re-invented the taxi experience, and many people would agree that, given a choice, they’d never go back to the old way.
Today, I want to give a shout out to another company, one that’s doing amazing things with garbage cans: simplehuman.

Simplehuman, founded in 2000 by Frank Yang, is a great case study in terms of product innovation, as well as business model. It had one simple mission: make a better trash can. For the last year, I’ve had a simplyhuman garbage can in my kitchen, so I can attest. It is a better trash can.

Before we switched to simplehuman, this is the kind of trash can we had in the kitchen:

And this is the simplehuman can that’s in my kitchen today:

Two features of this product make it a real game-changer. The lesser of these was the rim around the top that completely hides the edges of the plastic bag that peek over the edge most cans. I didn’t realize how ugly this was until it was gone. (insert sigh of relief here)

But the real hero is the built-in garbage bag dispenser. As you can see from the image below (pulled directly from simplehuman’s website), a dispenser for new garbage bags is built right into the body of the can, saving me from having to walk across the room to get a new bag from the box under the kitchen sink when I need a replacement. Yes, this is a seemingly small inconvenience, but once it’s removed, it seems a silly waste of effort that you ever had to walk across the room in the first place.

While they may not be solving world hunger, these two improvements are enough for me to never want to go back.

Simplehuman: Our new stainless steel rectangular step can features an innovative ‘liner pocket’ that stores and dispenses liners from inside the can for a faster liner change.

But from a business perspective, here’s where it gets interesting. In order to have garbage bags that fit both the dispenser and perfectly around the rim (so that no “spillover” bag is showing,) I need to use their custom-fitted bags. These bags are sized specifically for this can and come in little boxes perfectly sized to fit the built-in dispenser.

So where does one get these magical bags? Well, when you buy the can, there’s an insert that directs you to download simplehuman’s app. In the app, you can “manage your supplies,” by ordering garbage bags or, even better, setting up a subscription, which is what I did.

What do these garbage bags cost? A 100-count box of simplehuman garbage bags is about $25. That doesn’t break the bank, but as it turns out, it’s about twice what Hefty and Glad bags cost. Besides that, the garbage can itself is about $100, compared with less than half of that for one of their less innovative competitor’s stainless steel kitchen garbage cans. Again, not outrageous, but still a substantial premium. So what’s innovation worth to simplehuman? About double. And it’s worth it to me to pay it to solve problems, even if I never realized there were problems until simplehuman’s solution brought them to my attention.

Coming up with these types of innovations for your business starts with finding painpoints. What is your customer’s equivalent of having to walk across the room to get a garbage bag from under the sink? It doesn’t have to be pain that drives them crazy. Solving just a small irritation can turn out to be a highly appreciated innovation. And what about aesthetic gaps in your products that nobody focuses on, but would be obvious once gone (the way Steve Jobs showed us how ugly PCs were by creating the iMac)?

Finding these types of unmet points of pain can be achieved through ethnography and other research techniques that create customer empathy. Techniques like these can generate profound insights with relatively minimal effort, and at FROM, we utilize them on nearly every project. The majority of the time, the most winning features of the new digital products we create come from solving problems generated by these insights. The ideas may not come from the customers (in fact, they probably won’t) but the pain insights do. Once you have those, it can open up new doors, and allow your team to come up with many new solutions.

Additionally, innovation is often not just about the product, but also the business model. Achieving simplehuman’s innovation required custom-fit garbage bags. I’d imagine that, at one point before launching this product, simplehuman realized it would be difficult to get every grocery store in America to carry these bags, especially before their product achieved critical mass. That logistical problem could have killed the whole concept. But instead of working within the existing ecosystem, where can-sellers have to align to a few non-tailored garbage bag sizes, they shifted their business model to app-based subscription. This allowed them not only to deliver the innovation, but also to double the price of their bags (probably without customers even noticing, since their bags aren’t sold side-by-side with mainstream brands), and to realize 100% of the revenue via direct sales, rather than splitting with a retailer and distributor.

So I say Bravo!, simplehuman. Great innovation, great business, and thanks for making my life a little bit better — I’m happy to pay you more for it. Now imagine what I’d be willing to pay if you could figure out how to get the can to take the full garbage bag outside!

This article originally appeared on the Howard Tiersky blog
Image Credits: Pixabay

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What is Your Purpose?

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What is Your Purpose?

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Purpose.  Goal.  Mission.  You hear these words a lot this time of year.  Not because it’s the start of the annual business planning cycle but because it’s graduation season. 

Across the country, commencement speakers and wise family members espouse the importance of having a purpose to guide and sustain graduates as they set out on their next adventures.

All the talk of purpose can feel overwhelming, especially as you listen to graduates’ wide-eyed optimism about how they will change the world while stewing in an existential crisis that makes you wonder if you even have a purpose.

You do.

And part of that purpose is finding and creating purpose.

What is “Purpose?’

Purpose hasn’t reached buzzword status, but it’s close, so let’s start with a definition, or three, courtesy of The Britannica Dictionary:

  1. the reason why something is done or used: the aim or intention of something – The purpose of innovation is to create value
  2. the feeling of being determined to do or achieve something – The team worked with purpose
  3. the aim or goal of a person: what a person is trying to do, become, etc. – He knew from a young age that her sole purpose in life was to be an orthodontist

Three different definitions of purpose.  Three questions that it’s part of your purpose to ask.

“What’s THE purpose?”

Innovation is all about creating value.  Sometimes, to create value, you need to do new things.  Sometimes, you need to stop doing things.  It’s hard to tell the difference if you don’t ask.

That’s why innovative leaders are curious.  You aren’t afraid to ask, “What’s the purpose of this product/process/meeting/decision/(fill in the blank).”  You want to know “why something is done or used,” and they know that the best way to figure that out is by asking.

You ask this question at least once a day.  When you ask it, you’re genuinely curious about the answer.  After all, we’ve all experienced people and cultures that weaponize questions – “Johnny, is that where the scissors go?” or “Why did you think that was a good idea?” – and you reassure people that you’re asking a genuine question, even if they should know that by your tone.

“What’s OUR purpose?”

Innovation is hard.  You live in ambiguity and uncertainty.  You fail (learn) more often than you succeed.  You are told “No” and “Stop” more than “Yes,” “Keep going,” and “Thank You.”

Innovators are courageous.  You do the hard work of innovation because you are “determined to do or achieve something.” 

You also know that sustaining courage and purpose requires a team. 

You aren’t fooled by the myth of the lone genius. After all, Thomas Edison worked with as many as 200 people in his West Orange lab. Heck, even Steve Jobs needed Sir Jony Ive (and a few hundred other people) to bring his vision of “1,000 songs in your pocket” to life.

“What’s MY purpose?”

Innovation takes a long time.  Change happens gradually, then suddenly.  We chose to preserve what we have, rather than take a risk to get more.

Innovators are committed.  You are patient for change, steadfast in the face of resistance, and optimistic when others are afraid because of your “aim or goal…what [you are] trying to do, become, etc.” 

Even if you can’t articulate it in a grand statement or simple, pithy soundbite, you have a purpose.  As Viktor Frankl wrote, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”

Three Purposes.  Three questions

Even if you lack the wide-eyed optimism of a new graduate and feel like you spend most days just muddling through life, because you are here, you have a purpose.  So tell me:

  1. When was the last time you were curious and asked, “What’s the purpose of (artifact of the status quo)?”
  2. When was the last time you were courageous and used your feeling of determination to inspire others to join your purpose, overcome obstacles, and get something done?
  3. When was the last time you had to dig deep, rediscover your purpose, and reinforce your commitment so that you could bear and overcome the “how?”

Image credit: Dall-E via Microsoft Bing

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

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Your Strategy Must Reach Beyond Markets to Ecosystems

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

In the 1960s and 70s, Route 128 outside of Boston was the center of technology, but by the 1990s Silicon Valley had taken over and never looked back. As AnnaLee Saxenian explained in Regional Advantage, the key difference was that while Route 128 was a collection of value chains, Silicon Valley built an ecosystem.

Clearly, ecosystems are even more important today than they were back then. In fact, a study by Accenture Strategy a few years ago found that ecosystems are a “cornerstone” of future growth and that 60% of executives surveyed viewed ecosystems as a way to disrupt their industry. A similar number saw them as key to increasing revenue.

The problem is that competing in an ecosystem environment is vastly different than a traditional value chain strategy. While a value chain is driven by efficiencies, an ecosystem is driven by connections in a network. So we need to do more than adapt our strategy and tactics, we need to learn how to play a whole new game. The first step is to learn the rules.

First, Start Early

One of the key aspects of ecosystems is that they don’t seem all that important at first. By the time it becomes clear that a change is underway, it is often too late to adapt. The demise of Boston’s technology companies is a great example of how that can happen. Dominant firms such as DEC, Data General and Wang Laboratories found themselves irrelevant so quickly that they never recovered.

Network scientists call this an ‘instantaneous phase transition’ and it happens because connections tend to form slowly. They start as isolated clusters that, even taken in sum, don’t seem to amount to much. However, when those clusters connect, a cascade ensues and what once seemed inconsequential suddenly becomes predominant.

That’s why it’s so important to become active in an ecosystem before those clusters connect, when things are moving relatively slowly, everybody wants to talk to you and the price of admission is still fairly cheap. Once an ecosystem begins to thrive, things move much faster and costs for entry raise exponentially.

Consider the automobile industry, which is now spending billions to set up research centers in Silicon Valley. Just think of how much cheaper — and more effective — it would have been for those companies to have started 20 or 30 years ago.

Not Just Spinning Out, But Spinning In

A typical strategy for an enterprise looking to leverage an ecosystem is to spin out a division to focus on activities that are relevant to it. These spinoffs tend to have a lot more in common with the ecosystem firms than the parent company and therefore are much more able to connect. However, because links to the parent company become more tenuous over time, benefits are limited.

A potentially more successful strategy is to spin ecosystem firms in. For example, the National Labs have set up programs like Cyclotron Road, Chain Reaction and Innovation Crossroads that invite entrepreneurial firms to come work at the labs, make use of the scientific facilities and be mentored by top scientists.

In the private sector, corporate venture capital operations, as well as incubators and accelerators, can be a great way to connect with small entrepreneurial companies early in the ecosystem lifecycle. Beyond the actual investments made, these programs give you the opportunity to connect with hundreds of small firms, some of which can become important partners, suppliers and customers later on.

What’s crucial is that you are not seen as an interloper, but a true source of value, whether that value is in actual monetary investment, access to facilities and expertise or connection to points of market access. What may be insignificant to your company may be incredibly valuable to a small, entrepreneurial firm.

Maintaining Open Nodes

One of Saxenian’s most interesting findings in Regional Advantage was how differently the Boston technology firms treated outsiders compared to the Silicon Valley companies. The Boston firms were vertically integrated and sought to keep everything in-house. The Silicon Valley companies, on the other hand, thrived on connection.

For example, in Silicon Valley if you left your employer to start a company of your own, you were still considered part of the family. Many new entrepreneurs became suppliers or customers to their former employers and still socialized actively with their former colleagues. In Boston, if you left your firm you were treated as a pariah.

When technology began to shift in the 80s and 90s, the Boston firms had little, if any, connection to the new ecosystems that were evolving. In Silicon Valley, however, connections to former employees acted as an antenna network, providing early market intelligence that helped those companies adapt.

So while it is necessary to reach out to evolving ecosystems, it is just as important to ensure that there are also paths for small entrepreneurial firms to engage within your enterprise. Ecosystems thrive on personal connections. Those may not show up on a strategic plan or a balance sheet, but they are just as important as any other asset.

The New Competitive Advantage

Ever since Harvard professor Michael Porter published his seminal book, Competitive Strategy in 1980, strategists have sought advantage through driving efficiencies in order to maximize bargaining power against customers, suppliers, substitute goods and new market entrants. By doing so, they could achieve higher margins and invest in greater efficiencies, creating a virtuous cycle.

Yet today things move much too fast for that kind of chess game. To compete in a networked world, you must constantly widen and deepen connections. Instead of always looking to maximize bargaining power, you need to look for opportunities to co-create with customers and suppliers, to integrate your products and services with potential substitutes and form partnerships with new market entrants.

Power no longer resides at the top of value chains, but rather at the center of networks and collaboration has become the new competitive advantage. Value is no longer merely a target for extraction, but an asset for connection. You need to be seen to be adding value to the ecosystem in order to get value out.

The truth is that we can no longer manage for stability, we must manage for disruption. We can’t predict the future, but we can connect to it, nurture it and profit from it. Yet to do so requires far more than a simple shift in strategy and tactics. It requires a fundamental change in mindset.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Pixabay

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Unlocking Innovation Through Prototyping

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GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

A prototype moves us from “That’s not possible.” to “Hey, watch this!”

A prototype moves us from “We don’t do it that way.” to “Well, we do now.”

A prototype moves us from “That’s impossible.” to “As it turns out, it was only almost impossible.”

A prototype turns naysayers into enemies and profits.

A prototype moves us from an argument to a new product development project.

A prototype turns analysis-paralysis into progress.

A prototype turns a skeptical VP into a vicious advocate.

A prototype turns a pet project into top-line growth.

A prototype turns disbelievers into originators of the idea.

A prototype can turn a Digital Strategy into customer value.

A prototype can turn an uncomfortable Board of Directors meeting into a pizza party.

A prototype can save a CEO’s ass.

A prototype can be too early, but mostly they’re too late.

If the wheels fall off your first prototype, you’re doing it right.

If your prototype doesn’t dismantle the Status-Quo, you built the wrong prototype.

A good prototype violates your business model.

A prototype doesn’t care if you see it for what it is because it knows everyone else will.

A prototype turns “I don’t believe you.” into “You don’t have to.”

When you’re told “Don’t make that prototype.” you’re onto something.

A prototype eats not-invented-here for breakfast.

A prototype can overpower the staunchest critic, even the VP flavor.

A prototype moves us from “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” to “Oh, yes I do.”

If the wheels fall off your second prototype, keep going.

A prototype is objective evidence you’re trying to make a difference.

You can argue with a prototype, but you’ll lose.

If there’s a mismatch between the theory and the prototype, believe the prototype.

A prototype doesn’t have to do everything, but it must do one important thing for the first time.

A prototype must be real, but it doesn’t have to be really real.

If your prototype obsoletes your best product, congratulations.

A prototype turns political posturing into reluctant compliance and profits.

A prototype turns “What the hell are you talking about?” into “This.”

A good prototype bestows privilege on the prototype creator.

A prototype can beat a CEO in an arm-wrestling match.

A prototype doesn’t care if you like it. It only cares about creating customer value.

If there’s an argument between a well-stated theory and a well-functioning prototype, it’s pretty clear which camp will refine their theory to line up with what they just saw with their own eyes.

A prototype knows it has every right to tell the critics to “Kiss my ass.” but it knows it doesn’t have to.

You can argue with a prototype, but shouldn’t.

A prototype changes thinking without asking for consent.

Image credit: misterinnovation.com

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Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat

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Organizational Debt Syndrome Poses a Threat

GUEST POST from Stefan Lindegaard

Organizations face numerous challenges as they grow and evolve. One of the most significant challenges is the Organizational Debt Syndrome, a phenomenon that results from accumulated compromises and shortcuts taken in people, culture, and leadership practices over time.

Just as financial – and technical – debt accumulates and becomes a burden, organizational debt accumulates and creates difficulties for the organization, such as reduced agility, slower delivery, decreased competitiveness, decreased employee morale, and increased resistance to change.

Organizational Debt Syndrome is a particular concern for scale-up companies, given the rapid pace of growth they experience and the changes they face both internally and externally. This syndrome can become a vicious cycle, as the organization’s inability to address the debt leads to further compromise and a worsening of the situation. However, even large, more established organizations and their teams need to address this issue to stay, or become, more agile.

The ability to adapt to change, manage transformation, and drive innovation is essential for organizations to thrive and succeed in today’s fast-paced business environment. If left unaddressed, the Organizational Debt Syndrome can limit an organization’s ability to adapt to changing market conditions, make it less competitive, and ultimately lead to its downfall.

Signs of Organizational Debt Syndrome

Organizational debt can be identified by several signs that indicate the organization is struggling to be agile, efficient, and competitive.

Some of the signs of organizational debt include:

  1. Decreased agility: When a company is struggling with organizational debt, it can become less agile and less able to respond quickly to changes in the market or new opportunities. This can result in missed opportunities for growth and increased competition.
  2. Slowed delivery: Projects that once took only a few weeks to complete can start taking several months or even years. This can lead to a backlog of work that is never completed, which can further reduce efficiency and competitiveness.
  3. Reduced competitiveness: Companies that are suffering from organizational debt often fall behind their competitors in terms of innovation, product development, and market share. This can be due to a lack of investment in research and development, a lack of focus on innovation, or a lack of support for new ideas.
  4. Decreased employee morale: When a company is struggling with organizational debt, it can also lead to decreased employee morale. This can result in disengaged employees who are unenthusiastic about their work and may be more likely to leave the company.
  5. Increased resistance to change: The culture of a company suffering from organizational debt can become resistant to new ideas and changes, making it difficult for the company to adapt to new market conditions. This can result in missed opportunities for growth and increased competition.

Leaders can spot these issues by regularly monitoring the company’s performance, gathering feedback from employees, and conducting regular audits of processes and systems.

Applying Metrics and KPI’s for Organizational Debt Syndrome

Here are some of the metrics that leaders can use to track the health of their organization and identify signs of organizational debt syndrome. These metrics provide insight into key areas such as delivery times, market share, sales and revenue, employee morale, company culture, competitiveness, and adaptability based on three categories of performance, behavioral and innovation metrics:

Performance metrics:

  • Delivery times: Leaders should track how long it takes for projects to be completed, as this can indicate a decrease in efficiency.
  • Market share: By monitoring their company’s market share, leaders can see if their organization is falling behind competitors.
  • Sales and revenue: Regularly monitoring sales and revenue can help leaders see if the organization is losing ground in the market.
  • Employee turnover: High rates of employee turnover can indicate low morale and engagement among employees.
  • Profit margins: Tracking the organization’s profit margins can give leaders insight into its financial health.
  • Productivity: Monitoring employee productivity can give leaders an understanding of how effectively the organization is utilizing its resources.
  • Operational costs: Keeping an eye on operational costs, including overhead expenses and supply chain expenses, can help leaders identify areas where the organization may be overspending.

Behavioral metrics:

  • Employee feedback: Leaders should gather feedback from employees on a regular basis. This can help them understand how engaged employees are with their work and the company culture.
  • Meeting dynamics: Observing the dynamics of meetings and interactions between employees can give leaders a sense of the company culture and whether it is resistant to change.
  • Employee satisfaction: Measuring employee satisfaction through regular surveys can help leaders understand the level of morale and engagement among employees.
  • Communication patterns: Tracking the frequency and effectiveness of communication within the organization can give leaders an understanding of the organization’s culture and dynamics.
  • Collaboration: Measuring the level of collaboration between departments and teams can give leaders insight into the organization’s ability to work together effectively.

Innovation metrics:

  • Customer satisfaction with new products: Feedback from customers on their satisfaction with new products and services
  • Employee engagement in innovation: Measure of employee engagement and involvement in the innovation process
  • Adoption of new technologies: Monitoring the organization’s adoption of new technologies can give leaders an understanding of its ability to adapt to new trends and advancements in its industry.
  • Number of new ideas generated: Tracking the number of new ideas generated by employees can give leaders insight into the organization’s ability to innovate.

If leadership teams regularly monitor the various metrics, they achieve valuable insights into the state of their organization and this helps them identify signs of organizational debt syndrome.

It is important to note that metrics should be used as a tool, not as the sole indicator of success or failure, as it’s important to consider the context and complexity of organizational dynamics. By taking an holistic approach like this, leaders can work to prevent and mitigate the negative impact of organizational debt syndrome.

Addressing Organizational Debt Syndrome

To prevent and address the Organizational Debt Syndrome, leaders and their teams must take a proactive approach, which includes steps such as:

  1. Awareness: Leaders must first be aware of the concept of Organizational Debt Syndrome and its potential impact on the organization.
  2. Assessment: Leaders must regularly assess the organization’s performance and gather feedback from employees and stakeholders to identify any signs of organizational debt.
  3. Root cause analysis: Once the issues have been identified, leaders must conduct a root cause analysis to understand the underlying causes and drivers of organizational debt.
  4. Prioritization: Leaders must prioritize the most pressing issues and determine which ones to address first based on their impact on the organization.
  5. Action plan: Leaders must develop a comprehensive action plan to address the root causes of organizational debt, which may include revising processes, restructuring teams, and implementing new systems and technologies.
  6. Implementation: The action plan must be implemented effectively, with clear goals, timelines, and metrics for measuring progress.
  7. Continuous improvement: Leaders must continuously monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of the action plan and make adjustments as needed to ensure the organization remains agile and competitive.

At the early stages of addressing the Organizational Debt Syndrome, reflection is key for the leadership team. Everyone is super busy these days and there is a tendency to focus on short term issues related to growth and “just” managing the day-to-day business rather than shaping the future and taking steps to do the right things for the long run.

So, it’s understandable that leaders will not dive into action immediately but they must start to reflect on this and develop a plan for addressing this.

Organizational Debt Syndrome is a real challenge for organizations as they grow, evolve and transform. By recognizing the signs of this syndrome and taking a proactive approach to addressing its root causes, leaders can help their organizations overcome the negative impacts of organizational debt and become more stable, sustainable, and successful.

It’s definitely not easy but it is doable and it starts with reflection and acknowledgement of the issues at hand.

Image Credit: Pixabay, Stefan Lindegaard

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Creating Value from Nothing

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Creating Value from Nothing

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Doing nothing fuels creativity and innovation, but that fuel is wasted if you don’t put it to use. Idleness clears the mind, allowing fresh ideas to emerge, but those ideas must be acted upon to create value.

Why is doing something with that fuel so difficult?

Don’t blame the status quo.

The moment we get thrown back into the topsy-turvy, deadline-driven, politics-navigating, schedule-juggling humdrum of everyday life, we slide back into old habits and routines.  The status quo is a well-known foe, so it’s tempting to blame it for our lack of action. 

But it’s not stopping us from taking the first step.

We’re stopping ourselves.

Blame one (or more) of these.

Last week, I stumbled upon this image from the Near Future Laboratory, based on a theory from psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s book Flow:

There’s a lot going on here, but four things jumped out at me:

  • When we don’t have the skills needed to do something challenging, we feel anxiety
  • When we don’t feel challenged because our skills exceed the task, we feel boredom
  • When we don’t feel challenged and we don’t have the skills, we feel apathy
  • When we have the skills and feel challenged, we are in flow

Four different states.  Only one of them is positive.

I don’t love those odds.

Yet we live them every day.

Every day, in every activity and interaction, we dance in and through these stages.  Anxiety when given a new project and doubt that we have what it takes. Boredom when asked to explain something for the 82nd time to a new colleague and nostalgia for when people stayed in jobs longer or spent time figuring things out for themselves.  Sometimes, we get lucky and find ourselves in a Flow State, where our skills perfectly match the challenge, and we lose track of space and time as we explore and create. Sometimes, we are mired in apathy.

Round and round we go. 

The same is true when we have a creative or innovative idea. We have creative thoughts, but the challenge seems too great, so we get nervous, doubt our abilities, and never speak up. We have an innovative idea, but we don’t think management will understand, let alone approve it, so we keep it to ourselves.

Anxiety.  Boredom.  Apathy.

One (or more) of these tells you that your creative thoughts are crazy and your innovative ideas are wild.  They tell you that none of them are ready to be presented to your boss with a multi-million-dollar funding request.  In fact, none of them should be shared with anyone, lest they think you, not your idea, is crazy.

Then overcome them

I’m not going to tell you not to feel anxiety, boredom, or apathy. I feel all three of those every day.

I am telling you not to get stuck there.

Yes, all the things anxiety, boredom, and apathy tell you about your crazy thoughts and innovative ideas may be true. AND it may also be true that there’s a spark of genius in your crazy thoughts and truly disruptive thinking in your innovative ideas. But you won’t know if you don’t act:

  • When you feel anxious, ask a friend, mentor, or trusted colleague if the challenge is as big as it seems or if you have the skills to take it on.
  • When you feel bored, find a new challenge
  • When you feel apathetic, change everything

Your thoughts and ideas are valuable.  Without them, nothing changes, and nothing gets better.

You have the fuel.  Now, need to be brave.

We need you to act.

Image credit: Pexels

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How to Pursue a Grand Innovation Challenge

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How to Pursue a Grand Innovation Challenge

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

All too often, innovation is confused with agility. We’re told to “adapt or die” and encouraged to “move fast and break things.” But the most important innovations take time. Einstein spent ten years on special relativity and then another ten on general relativity. To solve tough, fundamental problems, we have to be able to commit for the long haul.

As John F. Kennedy put it in his moonshot speech, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” Every organization should pursue grand challenges for the same reason.

Make no mistake. Innovation needs exploration. If you don’t explore, you won’t discover. If you don’t discover you won’t invent and if you don’t invent you will be disrupted. It’s just a matter of time. Unfortunately, exploration can’t be optimized or iterated. That’s why grand challenges don’t favor the quick and agile, but the patient and the determined.

1. Don’t Bet The Company

Most grand challenges aren’t like the original moonshot, which was, in large part, the result of the space race with the Soviets that began with the Sputnik launch in 1957. That was a no-holds-barred effort that consumed the efforts of the nation, because it was widely seen as a fundamental national security issue that represented a clear and present danger.

For most organizations, those type of “bet-the-company” efforts are to be avoided. You don’t want to bet your company if you can avoid it, for the simple reason that if you lose you are unlikely to survive. Most successful grand challenges don’t involve a material investment. They are designed to be sustainable.

“Grand challenges are not about the amount of money you throw at the problem, Bernard Meyerson, IBM’s Chief Innovation Officer, told me. “To run a successful grand challenge program, failure should not be a material risk to the company, but success will have a monumental impact. That’s what makes grand challenges an asymmetric opportunity.”

Take, for example Google’s X division. While the company doesn’t release its budget, it appeared to cost the company about $3.5 billion in 2018, which is a small fraction of its $23 billion in annual profits at the time. At the same time, just one project, Waymo, may be worth $70 billion (2018). In a similar vein, the $3.8 billion invested in the Human Genome Project generated nearly $800 billion of economic activity as of 2011.

So the first rule of grand challenges is not to bet the company. They are, in fact, what you do to avoid having to bet the company later on.

2. Identify A Fundamental Problem

Every innovation starts out with a specific problem to be solved. The iPod, for example, was Steve Jobs’s way of solving the problem of having “a thousand songs in my pocket.” More generally, technology companies strive to deliver better performance and user experience, drug companies aim to cure disease and retail companies look for better ways to drive transactions. Typically, firms evaluate investment based on metrics rooted in past assumptions

Grand challenges are different because they are focused on solving fundamental problems that will change assumptions about what’s possible. For example, IBM’s Jeopardy Grand Challenge had no clear business application, but transformed artificial intelligence from an obscure field to a major business. Later, Google’s AlphaGo made a similar accomplishment with self-learning. Both have led to business opportunities that were not clear at the time.

Grand challenges are not just for technology companies either. MD Anderson Cancer Center has set up a series of Moonshots, each of which is designed to have far reaching effects. 100Kin10, an education nonprofit, has identified a set of grand challenges it has tasked its network with solving.

Talia Milgrom-Elcott, Executive Director of 100Kin10, told me she uses the 5 Whys as a technique to identify grand challenges. Start with a common problem, keep asking why it keeps occurring and you will eventually get to the root problem. By focusing your efforts on solving that, you can make a fundamental impact of wide-ranging consequence.

3. Commit To A Long Term Effort

Grand challenges aren’t like normal problems. They don’t conform to timelines and can’t effectively be quantified. You can’t justify a grand challenge on the basis of return on investment, because fundamental problems are too pervasive and ingrained to surrender themselves to any conventional form of analysis.

Consider The Cancer Genome Atlas, which eventually sequenced and published over 10,000 tumor genomes When Jean Claude Zenklusen first came up with the idea in 2005, it was highly controversial, because although it wasn’t particularly expensive, it would still take resources away from more conventional research.

Today, however, the project is considered to be a runaway success, which has transformed the field, greatly expanding knowledge and substantially lowering costs to perform genetic research. It has also influenced efforts in other fields, such as the Materials Genome Initiative. None of this would have been possible without commitment to a long-term effort.

And that’s what makes grand challenges so different. They are not business as usual and not immediately relevant to present concerns. They are explorations that expand conventional boundaries, so cannot be understood within them.

An Insurance Policy Against A Future You Can’t Yet See

Typically, we analyze a business by extrapolating current trends and making adjustments for things that we think will be different. So, for example, if we expect the market to pick up, we may invest in more capacity to profit from greater demand. On the other hand, if we expect a softer market, we’d probably start trimming costs to preserve margins.

The problem with this type of analysis is that the future tends to surprise us. Technology changes, customer preferences shift and competitors make unexpected moves. Nobody, no matter how diligent or smart, gets every call right. That’s why every business model fails sooner or later, it’s just a matter of time.

It’s also what makes pursuing grand challenges is so important. They are basically an insurance policy against a future we can’t yet see. By investing sustainably in solving fundamental problems, we can create new businesses to replace the ones that will inevitably falter. Google doesn’t invest in self-driving cars to improve its search business, it invests because it knows that the profits from search won’t last forever.

The problem is that there is a fundamental tradeoff between innovation and optimization, so few organizations have the discipline to invest in exploration today for a uncertain payoff tomorrow. That’s why so few businesses last.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Unsplash

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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

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Your Ability to Innovate Determined By Your Ability to Pause

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Many of my coaching clients have recently shared their struggles with feeling tired, emotionally overwhelmed, and cognitively overloaded and are close to burnout.  They attribute these issues to the pervasive and addictive nature of technology, exacerbated by the pandemic and divisive global conflicts, accelerating change and the rise of AI and hybrid work. As a result, many have retreated and frozen into a state of habitual, reactive ‘busyness.’ This affects their overall emotional, physical, and mental health and wellness. It also inhibits their ability to focus, create, invent and innovate and restricts their optimism, hope, and positivity about their future in an unstable and uncertain world.

The Coaching Opportunity

Coaching creates a unique opportunity to partner with people to develop their pause-power to identify the transformative actions to reverse this pervasive phenomenon to flourish in a world of unknowns.

A coaching session usually serves as a first step towards cultivating the pause-power needed to stop, observe, reflect and take valuable time out to rest, replenish, re-energize and reboot. This allows people to courageously notice, attune to, and express their true feelings and thoughts, to disrupt, dispute and deviate them to develop the pause-power required to heal and provide relief, hope and optimism for a better future.

Everyone must cultivate intentional pause-power to empower them to observe and understand their inner and outer worlds. This practice helps them remove distractions, stop multitasking, and break free from the ‘busyness’ that depletes their cognitive, emotional, and visceral resources, putting them in the driver’s seat of their mental and emotional well-being.

Self-reflection and reflective practice become potent tools, enabling people to move away from reactivity and short-term focus and towards taking the transformative actions to adapt, create, invent, and innovate. 

Hitting Your Pause Button

Being adaptive, creative, inventive and innovative involves consciously taking your hands off the controls and encouraging yourself and others to notice and disrupt your habitual and addictive ‘busyness’ (time scarcity + task focus).

This awareness is the first step towards reclaiming your focus and attention so that you can engage with and interpret the modern world rather than try to control it or withdraw from it.

Being willing to take a break and hit the ‘pause button’ stops your continuous cycle of doing. It focuses your attention on breaking limiting beliefs or unresourceful patterns and provides a support structure for applying rigorous perception practices to our daily lives.

Using pause-power to create a place, as recently described by Otto Scharmer from the Presencing Institute:

 “Between action and non-action, there is a place. A portal into the unknown. But what are we each called to contribute to the vision of the emerging future? Perhaps these times are simply doorways into the heart of the storm, a necessary journey through the cycles of time required to create change”.

What Does Pause-Power Involve?

A pause is created when you suspend activity, a time of temporary disengagement when you no longer move towards any goal. It can occur amid almost any activity and can last for an instant by taking a deep breath to get grounded, for minutes to become mindful or to take a rest, for hours to enjoy a well-deserved break, or for years to experience life in a different culture or place.

Intentionally pausing enables you to take time between your range of habitual, largely unconscious reactive responses; it helps our brain’s executive function utilize the valuable ‘empty spaces’ between stimulus and response and between different ideas. It creates a space open to options and choices for being, thinking and acting differently.

Doing this allows you to notice and disrupt unresourceful and habitual auto ‘stimulus-response’ default patterns, which usually occur when things go wrong, you make a mistake and fail, or you dive into blaming, shaming or avoiding others as part of our naturally wired defence mechanisms.

Radical Acceptance

Learning to pause is one of the critical steps in innovation because it helps you initiate a practice of radical acceptance. This requires embracing uncertainty, or ‘what is’ truly happening in the present moment, relationship, or situation, by accepting things just as they are. 

“During the moments of a pause, we become conscious of how the feeling that something is missing or wrong keeps us leaning into the future, on our way somewhere else. This gives us a fundamental choice in how we respond: We can continue our futile attempts at managing our experience or meet our vulnerability with the wisdom of Radical Acceptance”.

By being willing to dive into an ‘empty space’ from an emergent process, you can unleash possibilities, opportunities, options, and choices towards identifying the transformative actions that create your desired future.  

People who can artfully and skillfully facilitate creative conversations that funnel pause power and co-create valuable ‘empty spaces’ to occur can generate our imagination and curiosity to manifest glorious moments of insights required to emerge creative ideas.  

Pausing also enables you to observe, pay attention, notice, and regulate how your overall nervous system impacts and manages your brain’s functions. This is key to being practical, resourceful, healthy, and productive in the face of volatility, complexity, uncertainty, and accelerating change in our hyper-connected world.  

It also needs rest to do this. By applying our pause-power and giving ourselves some rest, we offer our bodies, hearts, and minds a chance to recharge, keep moving, and work towards taking the transformative actions required to build better workplaces and flourishing futures.

A Valuable Toolkit and Habit

This skill is valuable for everyone to reflect upon, cultivate and master. It is initiated by intentionally stopping by hitting an invisible cognitive ‘pause button’ to observe, pay attention, notice your inner experience, and see yourself as the cause of it.

Developing pause power involves six simple vital steps and questions:

1.Retreat from reacting to the situation – by stepping back into the present moment or time to notice, be with, allow, accept (radical acceptance), and acknowledge ‘what is’ going on internally and externally, and be willing to name it with detachment and discernment.

What is going on for me right now – how am I feeling about it?

2. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

3. Step up and out to disrupt yourself and create an opening, doorway, threshold, or empty space – to allow something new to emerge.

What can I learn from this situation?

4. Be willing to introduce and explore options and choices that allow you to deviate and refocus your attention on what really matters – taking a rest, having a holiday, completing a project, being a better person, getting a new job, or getting a promotion.

What are some of my options for change?

5. Be inquisitive, curious and open to reimagining, reinventing, and pivoting – an intention, mindset, behaviour, task, goal, or business focus to re-plenish, re-energize, re-engage and re-boot to mobilize yourself.   

How might I feel, think or act differently to achieve my outcome?

6. Step out into the system’s edges – by being calm, hopeful and optimistic, to identify the transformative actions required to move towards and exploring new creative, inventive and innovative solutions for providing value in ways people appreciate and cherish.

What will I do next?

Engaging in a Looking Lab

As many of our ImagineNation community members know, I am currently writing a book on ‘Being Innovative.’ There is a whole chapter on developing pause power to help people engage what Christian Madsbjerg calls in his latest book “Look: How to Pay Attention in a Distracted World” (Riverhead Books) – a Looking Lab, to:

“Get away from your screens, turn off your notifications, go out into the wilds of reality, and look around. Let go of all filters—clichés, conventions, colour corrections, whatever they may be. Try to pay attention to the simple act of seeing.”

He reveals that “if we choose to look for them, there are invisible worlds all around us ready to reveal their magic. The seemingly mundane or average can appear extraordinary, but only if we take the time to notice and see it”.

This is a vital part of our remarkable human capacity to transform through the slow, patient act of observing, attending, noticing, replenishing, re-energizing, re-engaging, and re-booting to take the transformative actions that will help you make the world a better place and achieve your 21st-century growth and success differently.

Please find out more about our work at ImagineNation™.

Please find out about our collective learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, it is a collaborative, intimate, and profoundly personalised innovation coaching and learning program supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customised as a bespoke corporate learning program.

It is a blended and transformational change and learning program that will give you a deep understanding of the language, principles, and applications of an ecosystem focus, human-centric approach, and emergent structure (Theory U) to innovation, and upskill people and teams and develop their future fitness, within your unique innovation context. Please find out more about our products and tools.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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Artificial Intelligence is a No-Brainer

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Why innovation management needs co-intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is a No-Brainer

GUEST POST from John Bessant

Long fuse, big bang. A great descriptor which Andrew Hargadon uses to describe the way some major innovations arrive and have impact. For a long time they exist but we hardly notice them, they are confined to limited application, there are constraints on what the technology can do and so on. But suddenly, almost as if by magic they move center stage and seem to have impact everywhere we look.

Which is pretty much the story we now face with the wonderful world of AI. While there is plenty of debate about labels — artificial intelligence, machine learning, different models and approaches — the result is the same. Everywhere we look there is AI — and it’s already having an impact.

More than that; the pace of innovation within the world of AI is breath-taking, even by today’s rapid product cycle standards. We’ve become used to seeing major shifts in things like mobile phones, change happening on a cycle measured in months. But AI announcements of a breakthrough nature seem to happen with weekly frequency.

That’s also reflected in the extent of use — from the ‘early days’ (only last year!) of hearing about Chat GPT and other models we’ve now reached a situation where estimates suggest that millions of people are experimenting with them. Chat GPT has grown from a handful of people to over 200 million in less than a year; it added its first million subscribers within five days of launch! Similar figures show massive and rapid take -up of competing products like Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini, etc. It’s pretty clear that there’s a high-paced ‘arms race’ going on and it’s drawing in all the big players.

This rapid rate of adoption is being led by an even faster proliferation on the supply side, with many new players entering the market , especially in niche fields. As with the apps market there’s a huge number of players jumping on the bandwagon, and significant growth in the open source availability of models. And many models now allow for users to create their own custom versions — mini-GPTs’ and ‘Co-pilots’ which they can deploy for highly specific needs.

Not surprisingly estimates suggest that the growth potential in the market for AI technologies is vast, amounting to around 200 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 and expected to grow to over 1.8 trillion U.S. dollars by 2030.

Growth in Artificial Intelligence

There’s another important aspect to this growth. As Ethan Mollick suggests in his excellent book ‘Co-intelligence’, everything that we see AI doing today is the product of a far-from-perfect version of the technology; in very short time, given the rate of growth so far, we can expect much more power, integration and multi-modality.

The all-singing, dancing and doing pretty much anything else version of AI we can imagine isn’t far off. Speculation about when AGI — artificial general intelligence — will arrive is still just that — speculative — but the direction of travel is clear.

Not that the impact is seen as entirely positive. Whilst there have been impressive breakthroughs, using AI to help understand and innovate in fields as diverse as healthcare , distribution and education these are matched by growing concern about, for example, privacy and data security, deep-fake abuse and significant employment effects.

With its demonstrable potential for undertaking a wide range of tasks AI certainly poses a threat to the quality and quantity of a wide range of jobs — and at the limit could eliminate them entirely. And where earlier generations of technological automation impacted simple manual operations or basic tasks AI has the capacity to undertake many complex operations — often doing so faster and more effectively than humans.

AI models like Chat GPT can now routinely pass difficult exams for law or medical school, they can interpret complex data sets and spot patterns better than their human counterparts and they can quickly combine and analyze complex data to arrive at decisions which may often be better quality than those made by even experienced practitioners. Not surprisingly the policy discussion around this potential impact has proliferated at a similarly fast rate, echoing growing public concern about the darker side of AI.

But is it inevitable going to be a case of replacement, with human beings shunted to the side-lines? No-one is sure and it is still early days. We’ve had technological revolutions before — think back fifty years to when we first felt the early shock waves of what was to become the ‘microelectronics revolution’. Newspaper headlines and media programs with provocative titles like ‘Now the chips are down’ prompted frenzied discussion and policy planning for a future world staffed by robots and automated to the point where most activity would be undertaken by automated systems, overseen by one man and a dog. The role of the dog being to act as security guard, the role of the man being confined to feeding the dog.

Automation Man and Dog

This didn’t materialize; as many commentators pointed out at the time and as history has shown there were shifts and job changes but there was also compensating creation of new roles and tasks for which new skills were needed. Change yes — but not always in the negative direction and with growing potential for improving the content and quality of remaining and new jobs.

So if history is any guide then there are some grounds for optimism. Certainly we should be exploring and anticipating and particularly trying to match skills and capacity building to likely future needs.

Not least in the area of innovation management. What impact is AI having — and what might the future hold? It’s certainly implicated in a major shift right across the innovation space in terms of its application. If we take a simple ‘innovation compass’ to map these developments we can find plenty of examples:

Exploring Innovation Space

Innovation in terms of what we offer the world — our products and services — here AI already has a strong presence in everything from toys through intelligent and interactive services on our phones through to advanced weapon systems

And it’s the same story if we look at process innovation — changes in the ways we create and deliver whatever it is we offer. AI is embedded in automated and self-optimizing control systems for a huge range of tasks from mining, through manufacturing and out to service delivery.

Position innovation is another dimension where we innovate in opening up new or under-served markets, and changing the stories we tell to existing ones. AI has been a key enabler here, helping spot emerging trends, providing detailed market analysis and underpinning so many of the platform businesses which effectively handle the connection between multi-sided markets. Think Amazon, Uber, Alibaba or AirBnB and imagine them without the support of AI.

And innovation is possible through rethinking the whole approach to what we do, coming up with new business models. Rethinking the underlying value and how it might be delivered — think Spotify, Netflix and many others replacing the way we consume and enjoy our entertainment. Once again AI step forward as a key enabler.

AI is already a 360 degree solution looking for problems to attach to. Importantly this isn’t just in the commercial world; the power of AI is also being harnessed to enable social innovation in many different ways.

But perhaps the real question is not about AI-enabled innovations but one of how it affects innovators — and the organizations employing them? By now we know that innovation isn’t some magical force that strikes blindly in the light bulb moment. It’s a process which can be organized and managed so that we are able to repeat the trick. And after over 100 years of research and documenting hard-won experience we know the kind of things we need to put in place — how to manage innovation. It’s reached the point where we can codify it into an international standard — ISO 56001- and use this as a template to check out the ways in which we build and operate our innovation management systems.

So how will AI affect this — and, more to the point, how is it already doing so? Let’s take our helicopter and look down on where and how AI playing a role in the key areas of innovation management systems.

Typically the ‘front end’ of innovation involves various kinds of search activity, picking up strong and weak signals about needs and opportunities for change. And this kind of exploration and forecasting is something which AI has already shown itself to be very good at — whether in the search for new protein forms or the generation of ideas for consumer products.

Frank Piller’s research team published an excellent piece last year describing their exploration of this aspect of innovation. They looked at the potential which AI offered and tested their predictions out by tasking Chat GPT with a number of prompts based on the needs of a fictitious outdoor activities company. They had it monitoring and picking up on trends, scraping online communities for early warning signals about new consumer themes and, crucially, actually doing idea generation to come up with new product concepts. Their results mimic many other studies which suggest that AI is very good at this — in fact, as Mollick reports, it often does the job better than humans.

Of course finding opportunities is only the start of the innovation process; a key next stage is some kind of strategic selection. Out of all the possibilities of what we could do, what are we going to do and why? Limited resources mean we have to make choices — and the evidence is that AI is pretty helpful here too. It can explore and compare alternatives, make better bets and build more viable business models to take emerging value propositions forward. (At least in the test case where it competed against MBA students…!)

Innovation Process John Bessant

And then we are in the world of implementation, the long and winding road to converting our value proposition into something which will actually work and be wanted. Today’s agile innovation involves a cycle of testing, trial and error learning, gradually pivoting and homing in on what works and building from that. And once again AI is good at this — not least because it’s at the heart of how it does what it does. There’s a clue in the label — machine learning is all about deploying different learning and improvement strategies. AI can carry out fast experiments and focus in, it can simulate markets and bring to bear many of the adoption influences as probabilistic variables which it can work with.

Of course launching a successful version of a value proposition converted to a viable solution is still only half the innovation journey. To have impact we need to scale — but here again AI is likely to change the game. Much of the scaling journey involves understanding and configuring your solution to match the high variability across populations and accelerate diffusion. We know a lot about what influences this (not least thanks to the extensive work of Everett Rogers) and AI has particular capabilities in making sense of the preferences and predilections of populations through studying big datasets. It’s record in persuasion in fields like election campaigning suggests it has the capacity to enhance our ability to influence the innovation adoption decision process.

Scaling also involves complementary assets — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ which we need to have impact at scale. We need to assemble value networks, ecosystems of co-operating stakeholders — but to do this we need to be able to make connections. Specifically finding potential partners, forming relationships and getting the whole system to perform with emergent properties, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

And here too AI has an growing track record in enabling recombinant innovation, cross-linking, connecting and making sense of patterns, even if we humans can’t always see them.

So far, so disturbing — at least if you are a practicing innovation manager looking over your shoulder at the AI competition rapidly catching up. But what about the bigger picture, the idea of developing and executing an innovation strategy? Here our concern is with the long-term, managing the process of accumulating competencies and capabilities to create long term competitiveness in volatile and unpredictable markets?

It involves being able to imagine and explore different options and make decisions based on the best use of resources and the likely fit with a future world. Which is, once again, the kind of thing which AI has shown itself to be good at. It’s moved a long way from playing chess and winning by brute calculating force. Now it can beat world champions at complex games of strategy like Go and win poker tournaments, bluffing with the best of them to sweep the pot.

Artificial Intelligence Poker Player

So what are we left with? In many ways it takes us right back to basics. We’ve survived as a species on the back of our imaginations — we’re not big or fast, or able to fly, but we are able to think. And our creativity has helped us devise and share tools and techniques, to innovate our way out of trouble. Importantly we’ve learned to do this collectively — shared creativity is a key part of the puzzle.

We’ve seen this throughout history; the recent response to the Covid-19 pandemic provides yet another illustration. In the face of crisis we can work together and innovate radically. It’s something we see in the humanitarian innovation world and in many other crisis contexts. Innovation benefits from more minds on the job.

So one way forward is not to wring our hands and say that the game is over and we should step back and let the AI take over. Rather it points towards us finding ways of working with it — as Mollick’s book title suggests, learning to treat it as a ‘co-intelligence’. Different, certainly but often in in complementary ways. Diversity has always mattered in innovation teams — so maybe by recruiting AI to our team we amplify that effect. There’s enough to do in meeting the challenge of managing innovation against a background of uncertainty; it makes sense to take advantage of all the help we can get.

AI may seem to point to a direction in which our role becomes superfluous — the ‘no-brain needed’ option. But we’re also seeing real possibilities for it to become an effective partner in the process.

And subscribe to my (free) newsletter here

You can find my podcast here and my videos here

And if you’d like to learn with me take a look at my online course here

Image credits: Dall-E via Microsoft CoPilot, John Bessant

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Do Nothing More Often

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Do Nothing More Often

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“What do you plan to do on vacation?” my friend asked.

“Nothing…”

Long silence

“…And it will be amazing.”

We live in a world that confuses activity with achievement so I should not have been surprised that the idea of deliberately doing nothing stunned my friend into silence.

After all, when people say, “I wish I had nothing to do” they usually mean “I wish I could choose what I do with my time.” And, when they do have the opportunity to choose, very few choose to do nothing.

Why does the idea of doing nothing make us so uncomfortable?

To put it bluntly, busy-ness is a status symbol.

In their paper, “Conspicuous Consumption of Time: When Busyness and Lack of Leisure Time Become a Status Symbol,” professors Silvia Bellezza (Columbia Business School), Neeru Paharia (Georgetown University), and Anat Keinan (Harvard University), wrote that people’s desire to be perceived as time-starved is

“driven by the perceptions that a busy person possesses desired human capital characteristics (competence, ambition) and is scarce and in demand on the job market.”

We didn’t always believe this.

For most of human history, we’ve had a pretty balanced view of the need for both work and leisure. Aristotle argued that virtue was obtainable through contemplation, not through endless activity. Most major religions call for a day of rest and reflection. Even 19th-century moral debates, as recorded by historian EO Thompson, recognized the value of hard work AND the importance of rest.

So what happened?

While it’s easy to say that we have to work more because of the demands of our jobs, the data says otherwise. In fact, according to a working paper by Jonathan Gershuny, a time-expert based on the UK, actual time spent at work has not increased since the 1960s.

The actual reason may be that we want to work more. According to economist Robert Frank, those who identify as workaholics believe that:

“building wealth…is a creative process, and the closest thing they have to fun.”

We choose to spend time working because Work — “the job itself, the psychic benefits of accumulating money, the pursuit of status, and the ability to afford the many expensive enrichments of an upper-class lifestyle” according to an article in The Atlantic — is what we find most fulfilling.

It’s not that I like working, I just don’t like wasting time.

We tend to equate doing nothing with laziness, apathy, a poor work ethic, and a host of other personality flaws and social ills. But what if that’s not true.

What if, in the process of doing nothing, we are as productive as when we do something?

Science is increasingly showing this to be the case.

Multiple fMRI studies have revealed the existence of the default mode network (DMN), a large-scale brain network that is most active when we’re day-dreaming. Researchers at the University of Southern California argue that

“downtime is, in fact, essential to mental processes that affirm our identities, develop our understanding of human behavior and instill an internal code of ethics — processes that depend on the DMN.”

The results of harnessing the power of your DMN are immense:

More creativity. The research discussed in Scientific American suggests that DMN is more active in creative people. For example, according to Psychology Today:

  • The most recorded song of all time, “Yesterday” by The Beatles, was ‘heard’ by Paul McCartney as he was waking up one morning. The melody was fully formed in his mind, and he went straight to the piano in his bedroom to find the chords to go with it, and later found words to fit the melody.
  • Mozart described how his musical ideas ‘flow best and most abundantly.’ when he was alone ‘traveling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep… Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.’
  • Tchaikovsky described how the idea for a composition usually came ‘suddenly and unexpectedly… It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and leaves, and finally blossoms.’

More productivity. According to an essay in The New York Times, “Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.”

Less burnout. Regardless of how many hours you work, consider this: researchers have found that it takes 25 minutes to recover from a phone call or an e-mail. On average, we are interrupted every 11 minutes which means that we can never catch up, we’re always behind.

That feeling of always being behind leads to burn-out which the World Health Organization officially recognized as a medical condition defined as a “syndrome conceptualized as resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and manifests with the following symptoms:

  • Feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion
  • Increased mental distance from one’s job, or feelings of negativism or cynicism related to one’s job
  • Reduced professional efficacy

Doing nothing, quieting our minds and not focusing on any particular task, can actually help reset our bodies systems, quieting the release of stress chemicals, slowing our heart rates, and improving our mental and physical energy

Better health. Multiple studies indicate that idleness “produces many health benefits including, but not limited to, reduced heart rate, better digestion, improvements in mood, and a boost in overall emotional well-being — which, of course, affects everything on a biochemical and physiological level, thereby serving as a major deciding factor on whether or not we fall ill, and/or remain ill. Mental downtime also replenishes glucose and oxygen levels in the brain, and allows our brains to process and file things, which leaves us feeling more rested and clear-headed, promotes a stronger sense of self-confidence, and…more willing to we trust change.”

Fine, you convinced me. How can I do nothing?

There are the usual suspects — vacations, meditation, and physical exercise — but, if you’re anything like me, the thought of even finding 5 minutes to listen to a meditation app is so overwhelming that I never even start.

An easier place to start, in my experience, is in intentionally working nothing into the moments that are already “free.” Here are three of my favorite ways to work a bit of nothing into my day.

Make the Snooze button work for you. When my alarm goes off, I instinctively hit the Snooze button because, I claim, it is my first and possibly only victory of the day. It’s also a great way to get 9 minutes of thoughtful quiet nothingness in which I can take a few deep breaths, scan my body for any aches and pains, and make sure that I’m calm and my mind is quiet when I get out of bed.

Stare out the window. I always place my computer next to a window so that I can stare out the window for a few minutes throughout the day and people think I’m thinking deep thoughts. Which I am. Subconsciously. Lest anyone accuse me of being lazy or unproductive while I watch the clouds roll by, I simply point them to research that shows “that individuals who took five to ten minute breaks from work to do nothing a few times a day displayed an approximately 50% increase in their ability to think clearly and creatively, thus rendering their work far more productive.

Bring the beach to you. Research from a variety of places, from the UK Census to The Journal of Coastal Zone Management, indicate that our brains and bodies benefit from time at the beach. But, if you can’t go to the beach, there are lots of ways to bring the beach to you. Perhaps the simplest is to bring more blue into your environment. Most people associate blue with feelings of calm and peace and a study published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science found that the color blue can boost creativity. Even putting a picture of a beach (or your own personal happy place) on your desk or computer screen can trigger your brain to slow down, relax, and possibly trigger your DMN.

With so many benefits, isn’t it time you started doing more nothing?

Image credit: Pexels

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