Category Archives: Innovation

Challenging the Assumption of the Status Quo

(A Lesson Learned from Yogurt)

Challenging the Assumption of the Status Quo

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In September 2006, I moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, on a temporary assignment with BCG. As one does when arriving somewhere for an extended period, I went to the grocery store to stock my kitchen.

Since the grocery store was on the ground floor of my building, I bought enough food for a few breakfasts and dinners, made note of the other offerings for future trips, and learned through painful public embarrassment that one must purchase grocery bags (and those bags are nowhere near the checkout lane).

The following day, yogurt was on the menu, and I grabbed the first of the three options I had bought the previous day – a small container of strawberry yogurt.

My heart sank when I peeled off the top.

Instead of super healthy, organic, natural (I’m in Scandinavia, for crying out loud!) yogurt, the stuff in my cup was a rather suspicious beige with dark brown flecks.

Stifling my instinct to dry heave, I chucked the cup into the garbage, along with the five other cups in the clearly spoiled pack, and pulled Brand #2 out of the refrigerator. Surely, this strawberry yogurt would be safe to eat.

But it, too, was beige. A lighter beiger and without the disturbing brown flecks. But still beige.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. Admittedly, the grocery store was more of a glorified convenience store, but c’mon, how hard is it to keep track of Sell By dates?

Into the garbage, it went. Out of the refrigerator came Brand #3 (Yes, I take a portfolio approach to innovation AND food purchases)

Closing my eyes and saying a quick prayer to both the grocery and yogurt gods, I peeled open the yogurt. Not beige but a slight hint of pink, just enough to reassure me that it contained strawberries and hadn’t curdled but not so much that I suspected an American-amount of food coloring.

Later that day…

At lunch, my new colleagues asked how I was settling in. I regaled them with my “bumbling American experiencing culture shock in a country where she looks (and is initially treated like) a local” stories.

As we gathered up our dishes and returned to the kitchen, I commented that I was surprised that my local grocery would keep expired products on the shelf. When they echoed my surprise, I told them about the spoiled yogurt and that 2 of the three brands I purchased were bad.

Based on the glances they exchanged, I knew I had another story to add to an already uncomfortably full book.

It turns out that. The “good” yogurt I ate that morning was from the lowest quality brand, one that no self-respecting Dane would consider eating but that is sold to unsuspecting foreigners (Hi, that’s me). The “bad” yogurt was from respected all-natural brands. All yogurt, they explained, falls somewhere in the spectrum from white to beige or even tan. That’s why they print the flavor name and a picture of the fruit on the label.

How often do we make the same mistake?

How often do we reject something because it’s not what we expect to see? Because it’s not what we’re used to?

Maybe not often when it comes to yogurt, but what about other more important things, like:

Trends
Technologies
Ideas
Business Models
Startups
People

And what happens when we don’t have people willing to point out that we’re no longer in a place where our status quo applies?

Image credit: Pixabay

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Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation

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Why More Women Are Needed in Innovation

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

Every once in a while I get a comment from an audience member after a keynote speech or from someone who read my book, Mapping Innovation, about why so few women are included. Embarrassed, I try to explain that, as in many male dominated fields, women are woefully underrepresented in science and technology.

This has nothing to do with innate ability. In fact, you don’t have to look far to find women at the very apex of innovation, such as Jennifer Doudna, who pioneered CRISPR or Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who received the Breakthrough Prize for her discovery of pulsars a few years ago. In earlier days, women like Grace Hopper and Marie Curie made outsized impacts.

The preponderance of evidence shows that women can vastly improve innovation efforts, but are often shunted aside. In fact, throughout history, men have taken credit for discoveries that were actually achieved by women. So, while giving women a larger role in innovation would be just and fair, even more importantly it would improve performance.

The Power Of Diversity

Over the past few decades there have been many efforts to increase diversity in organizations. Unfortunately, all too often these are seen more as a matter of political correctness than serious management initiatives. After all, so the thinking goes, why not just pick the best man for the job?

The truth is that there is abundant scientific evidence that diversity improves performance. For example, researchers at the University of Michigan found that diverse groups can solve problems better than a more homogenous team of greater objective ability. Another study that simulated markets showed that ethnic diversity deflated asset bubbles.

While the studies noted above merely simulate diversity in a controlled setting there is also evidence from the real world that diversity produces better outcomes. A McKinsey report that covered 366 public companies in a variety of countries and industries found that those which were more ethnically and gender diverse performed significantly better than others.

The problem is that when you narrow the backgrounds, experiences and outlooks of the people on your team, you are limiting the number of solution spaces that can be explored. At best, you will come up with fewer ideas and at worst, you run the risk of creating an echo chamber where inherent biases are normalized and groupthink sets in.

How Women Improve Performance

While increasing diversity in general increases performance, there is also evidence that women specifically have a major impact. In fact, in one wide ranging study, in which researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon sought to identify a general intelligence score for teams, they not only found that teams that included women got better results, but that the higher the proportion of women was, the better the teams did.

At first, the finding seems peculiar, but when you dig deeper it begins to make more sense. The study also found that in the high performing teams members rated well on a test of social sensitivity and took turns when speaking. Perhaps not surprisingly, women do better on these parameters than men do.

Social sensitivity tests ask respondents to infer someone’s emotional state by looking at a picture and women tend score higher than men. As for taking turns in conversation, there’s a reason why we call it “mansplaining” and not “womansplaining.” Women usually are better listeners.

The findings of the study are consistent with something I’ve noticed in my innovation research. The best innovators are nothing like the mercurial, aggressive stereotype, but tend to be quiet geniuses. Often they aren’t the kinds of people that are immediately impressive, but those who listen to others and generously share insights.

Changing The Social Dynamic

One of the reasons that women often get overlooked, besides good old fashioned sexism, is that that there are vast misconceptions about what makes someone a good innovator. All too often, we imagine the best innovators to be like Steve Jobs—brash, aggressive and domineering—when actually just the opposite is true.

Make no mistake, great innovators are great collaborators. That’s why the research finds that successful teams score high in social sensitivity, take turns talking and listening to each other rather, rather than competing to dominate the conversation. It is never any one idea that solves a difficult problem, but how ideas are combined to arrive at an optimal solution.

So while it is true that these skills are more common in women, men have the capacity to develop them as well. In fact, probably the best way for men to learn them is to have more exposure to women in the workplace. Being exposed to a more collaborative working style can only help.

So besides the moral and just aspects of getting more women into innovation related fields and giving them better access to good, high paying jobs, there is also a practical element as well. Women make teams more productive.

Building The Next Generation

Social researchers have found evidence that that the main reason that women are less likely to go into STEM fields has more to do with cultural biases than it does with any innate ability. For example, boys are more encouraged to play with building toys during childhood and develop spatial skills early on, while girls can build the same skills with the same training.

Cultural bias also plays a role in the amount of encouragement young students get. STEM subjects can be challenging, and studies have found that boys often receive more support than girls because of educators’ belief in their innate talent. That’s probably why even girls who have high aptitude for math and science are less likely to choose a STEM major than boys of even lesser ability.

Yet cultural biases can evolve over time and there are a number of programs designed to change attitudes about women and innovation. For example Girls Who Code provides training and encouragement for young women and UNESCO’s TeachHer initiative is designed to provide better educational opportunities.

Perhaps most of all, initiatives like these can create role models and peer support. When young women see people like the Jennifer Doudna, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and the star physicist Lisa Randall achieve great things in STEM fields, they’ll be more likely to choose a similar path. With more women innovating, we’ll all be better off.

— Article courtesy of the Digital Tonto blog and previously appeared on Inc.com
— Image credits: Dall-E via Bing

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Innovation is Effectal

Technical, Market and Emotional Risks

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Technical, Market and Emotional Risks

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

Technical risk – Will it work?
Market risk – Will they buy it?
Emotional risk – Will people laugh at your crazy idea?

Technical risk – Test it in the lab.
Market risk – Test it with the customer.
Emotional risk – Try it with a friend.

Technical risk – Define the right test.
Market risk – Define the right customer.
Emotional risk – Define the right friend.

Technical risk – Define the minimum acceptable performance criteria.
Market risk – Define the minimum acceptable response from the customer.
Emotional risk – Define the minimum acceptable criticism from your friend.

Technical risk – Can you manufacture it?
Market risk – Can you sell it?
Emotional risk – Can you act on your crazy idea?

Technical risk – How sure are you that you can manufacture it?
Market risk – How sure are you that you can sell it?
Emotional risk – How sure are you that you can act on your crazy idea?

Technical risk – When the VP says it can’t be manufactured, what do you do?
Market risk – When the VP says it can’t be sold, what do you do?
Emotional risk – When the VP says your idea is too crazy, what do you do?

Technical risk – When you knew the technical risk was too high, what did you do?
Market risk – When you knew the market risk was too high, what did you do?
Emotional risk – When you knew someone’s emotional risk was going to be too high, what did you do?

Technical risk – Can you teach others to reduce technical risk? How about increasing it?
Market risk – Can you teach others to reduce market risk? How about increasing it?
Emotional risk – Can you teach others to reduce emotional risk? How about increasing it?

Technical risk – What does it look like when technical risk is too low? And the consequences?
Market risk – What does it look like when market risk is too low? And the consequences?
Emotional risk – What does it look like when emotional risk is too low? And the consequences?

We are most aware of technical risk and spend most of our time trying to reduce it. We have the mindset and toolset to reduce it. We know how to do it. But we were not taught to recognize when technical risk is too low. And if we do recognize it’s too low, we don’t know how to articulate the negative consequences. With all this said, market risk is far more dangerous.

We’re unfamiliar with the toolset and mindset to reduce market risk. Where we can change the design, run the test, and reduce technical risk, market risk is not like that. It’s difficult to understand what drives the customers’ buying decision and it’s difficult to directly (and quickly) change their buying decision. In short, it’s difficult to know what to change so they make a different buying decision. And if they don’t buy, you don’t sell. And that’s a big problem. With that said, emotional risk is far more debilitating.

When a culture creates high emotional risk, people keep their best ideas to themselves. They don’t want to be laughed at or ridiculed, so their best ideas don’t see the light of day. The result is a collection of wonderful ideas known only to the underground Trust Network. A culture that creates high emotional risk has insufficient technical and market risk because everyone is afraid of the consequences of doing something new and different. The result – the company with high emotional risk follows the same old script and does what it did last time. And this works well, right up until it doesn’t.

Here’s a three-pronged approach that may help.

Continue to reduce technical risk.
Learn to reduce market risk early in a project.
And behave in a way that reduces emotional risk so you’ll have the opportunity to reduce technical and market risk.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Thinking Differently About Leadership and Innovation

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Thinking Differently About Leadership and Innovation

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

We live in a world, with less stability, certainty, simplicity, and predictability, where regional conflicts, societal divisions, and civil unrest have increased globally. Simultaneously, technological-induced disruptive innovations and the climate crisis impact every aspect of our daily lives. This means that we live in an age of overwhelm and a world of unknowns, requiring us all to know how to uncover and eliminate our individual and collective blind spots, to be adaptive and innovative. By thinking and acting differently about leadership and innovation, we can all grow, survive, and thrive within it.

This a moment in time that calls for leaders to boldly and courageously, step up, shift out of any myopic, reactive, cost, and short-term focus, and develop their leadership consciousness. By taking personal responsibility, and being accountable for owning and shifting their interior state or inner being, to eliminate flaws, maximize core strengths, and build confidence, capacity, and competence to adapt, innovate, and grow through disruption.

To refocus on developing future-fit systemic and innovative solutions, that add real value in ways that serve and sustain people, profit, and the planet, differently.

Leadership is in crisis

We are experiencing a global leadership crisis.

Many leaders, in the corporate sector, and national and international institutions have become increasingly reactive. In ways that are passively or aggressively defensive, egotistic, and often self-serving. By vacillating between political correctness, denial, justification, and avoidance – and between attacking, shaming, and blaming groups, individuals, and nations for the current state of social unrest, political chaos, cultural divisions, and regional and religious conflicts.

Hitting a pause button

The missing key element is the leadership consciousness required in taking the time to pause, retreat (step back), reflect, and explore the deep causes, current implications, and nature of challenging, complex, and systemic problems.

Leaders are obliged to step out of their habitual comfort zones and boost their ability to bravely make sense of what is going on – and develop the foresight skills to risk mitigate and identify the most intelligent actions that will deliver high-value and high-impact outcomes that serve people, profits, and the planet.

To uncover the repetitive mindsets and behaviors that keep on producing results that no one wants, by bravely exposing and eliminating their leadership blind spots.

Leadership blind spots

We know that most of the innovative solutions to the complex challenges we face already exist.

To unleash these desirable, value-adding, and innovative solutions, we need to empower, enable, and equip leaders to bravely and safely expose and eliminate their largely, unconscious and unknown leadership blind spots. These exist in our individual and collective leadership, they also exist in our everyday team and social interactions.

Because most leaders are smart and know what to do, and how to do it, identifying and eliminating any leadership blind spots will enable them to do it better.

Yet, despite, in many cases, years of leadership training they are at risk of being perpetually reactive, unfocused, overcome with “busyness” and addicted to the tasks involved in “getting stuff” (usually the urgent “small stuff” and not always the “important stuff”) the done.

As defined by Dr. Karen Blakeley in “Leadership Blind Spots and What to Do about Them,” a blind spot is “a regular tendency to repress, distort, dismiss or fail to notice information, views or ideas in a particular area that results in an individual failing to learn, change or grow in response to changes in that area.”

Source of leadership blind spots

The majority of leaders are mostly blind to the Source from which they operate. This is often because many do not have the self-awareness and emotional intelligence to manage and self-regulate any of their unconscious un-resourceful emotional states, mindsets, and behaviors.

Leadership Consciousness

“An ordered distinction between self and environment, simple wakefulness, one’s sense of self-hood or soul explored by “looking within”; being a metaphorical “stream” of contents, or being a mental state, mental event or mental process of the brain”.

Igniting the brain

Leadership blind spots are typically contained in our neurology and can be exposed and eliminated by:

Paying attention to their three core neurological levels and being intentional in cultivating their leadership consciousness.

When engaged in a coaching partnership, a leader can learn how to shift, self-regulate, and self-manage at all three levels to effectively eliminate their flaws, and learn how to think and act differently in delivering successful transformation and change initiatives.

Power of Coaching Intervention

A coach is an external disruptor who seeks to bring out the best in a leader, tap into and maximize their potential, and adds value by facilitating deep, insight-based learning processes, that shifts mindsets and result in sustainable behavior change.

Coaching helps smart people be and think beyond who they are being and beyond what they are thinking now. In ways that can empower, enable, and equip leaders to adapt, innovate, and grow, cultivate their imagination and creativity, to think and act differently in an unstable world.

This enables them to develop and implement systemic and innovative solutions in a timely way and at scale.

Noticing, disrupting, disputing, and deviating

Coaches partner with leaders to enable them to notice, disrupt, dispute, and deviate by accessing and harnessing resourceful emotional states, and mindsets. Coaches safely explore the “boxes”, thinking, or the “stories” a leader may have been unconsciously living within, and constricted by.

Because we can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it in the first instance.

Especially in a 21st-century world where developing leadership consciousness enables us to adapt, innovate, and grow by:

Reducing our brain’s ability to hijack us when doing its best to constantly keep us safe from danger,
Letting go of old pervasive Industrial Age mental models and perspectives, especially around cost and efficiency,
Relearning new future-fit ways of being, thinking, and acting differently.

And increases our ability to be agile, centered, and focused in thinking faster in the Disruption Age, where technology is accelerating faster than our human brains are.

Upskilling our brains!

A coaching partnership will create a safe and collective holding space to help leaders deep dive into the unknown develop strategies and develop their leadership consciousness in ways that:

Opens their minds, ignites their imagination, curiosity, and creativity, shifts their perspective, makes sense of things develops a whole systems perspective, and think differently,
Opens their hearts to become connected with self, others, systems, and with Source, and be empathic and compassionate,
Opens their will to let go of the need for control, and allows them to deal with paradox and the new to emerge, which can be designed, iterated, and pivoted, in ways that enable them to act differently, in designing and implementing systemic and innovative solutions.

Closing leadership blind spots to adapt, innovate and grow

A coach empowers, enables, and equips a leader’s capacity, confidence, and competence, to identify and close their leadership blind spots, be in charge of their minds, and think and act differently, to adapt, innovate, and grow in times of great uncertainty.

To convincingly work with, and flow with both their peoples overwhelm, and with the constraints in the external environment by:

Developing an awareness of their neurological RIGIDITY which exists within their emotional, cognitive, and visceral states, in turn, impacts their ability to mobilise, focus, and engage their efforts.

When a leader has a blind spot in this area, they may demonstrate rigidity, or functional fixedness, resulting in an inability to mobilise, they will be withdrawn, reactive, and become overly passive or even aggressive. Because they are unconsciously at the effect of the “mental blocks” resulting from unacknowledged fears and anxiety.

Developing their neurological PLASTICITY and flexibility to be able to attend to, regulate, and focus their thoughts, and feelings, and be grounded, mindful, present, and intentional in taking intelligent actions.

When a leader has a blind spot in this area, they will not be able to access their brain’s ability to change, reorganize, or grow new neural networks, learn, adapt, and become resilient. They will not develop the agility required to shift mindsets or behaviours, or even learn the new skills that will equip them to be future-fit and deliver the results they seek.

Generating the critical and creative thinking, problem sensing, and solving skills required to improve their leadership consciousness and GENERATE their crucial elastic thinking and human skills required to see, think differently in solving complex and wicked problems, be future-fit, and lead others to thrive.

When a leader has a blind spot in this area, they will take a conventional and linear approach to decision-making problem-solving, and team development. They will safely stay stuck in what they know, even though what they did in the past may not have worked.

Adding value to the quality of peoples’ lives

If we keep on trying to solve the problem with the same thinking (and neurological state) that created it, we will continue to reproduce the results no one wants.

We will not be able to shift beyond what we think now, nor will we connect, export, and, discover the crucial new horizons we need to emerge to develop and implement the systemic and innovative solutions, in a timely way and at scale, that the world needs right now!

Imagine if leaders truly and deeply committed to cultivating their leadership consciousness, and make the time and space to eliminate their blind spots, how peaceful and harmonious the world could become!

If leaders could learn how to think and act differently, focus on adding value to the quality of people’s lives in ways they appreciate and cherish, and contribute to the common good, to serve all of humanity, how people, profit, and the planet could flourish.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Find out about our collective, learning products and tools, including The Coach for Innovators, Leaders, and Teams Certified Program, presented by Janet Sernack, is a collaborative, intimate, and deeply personalized innovation coaching and learning program, supported by a global group of peers over 9-weeks, and can be customized as a bespoke corporate learning and coaching program for leadership and team development and change and culture transformation initiatives.

Image Credit: Pexels

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Surprising Secrets and Customer Research Revelations

First, a confession

I find Elmo deeply annoying. I grew up watching Sesame Street, and I still get an astounding amount of joy watching Big Bird, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Cookie Monster, Bert and Ernie, Grover, and Oscar the Grouch (especially when Oscar channels his inner Taylor Swift).

Elmo moved to Sesame Street in 1985, and it hasn’t been the same since. He’s designed to reflect the mental, emotional, and intellectual capabilities of a 3.5-year-old, and, in that aspect, his creators were wildly successful. I fully acknowledge that Elmo plays a vital role in the mission of Sesame Street and that people of all ages love Elmo. But Elmo makes my ears bleed, and I will never be ok with the fact that Elmo refers to himself in the third person.

This is why my recommendation to channel your inner Elmo is shocking and extremely serious.

Next, an explanation

On Monday, Elmo posted on X (yes, the minimum age limit is 13, but his mom and dad help him run the account, so it’s apparently okay), “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”

180 million views, 120,000 likes, and 13,000 comments later, it was clear that no one was okay.

And lest you think this was Gen Z trauma dumping on their ol’ pal Elmo, Dionne Warwick, T-Pain, and Today Show anchor Craig Melvin responded with their struggles. Comments ranged from, “Mondays are hard” to “Elmo I’m gonna be real I am at my f—ing limit,’ to “Elmo each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror. one that was previously unfathomable in nature. our inevitable doom which once accelerated in years, or months, now accelerates in hours, even minutes. however I did have a good grapefruit earlier, thank you for asking.”

Wow. Thank goodness for that grapefruit.

There are a lot of theories about why Elmo’s post touched a nerve – it’s January and we’re tired, it’s easier to share our struggles online than in person, or we still enjoy “that wholesome and sincere bond from childhood that makes us want to share.”

I’m sure all those are true, and I think it’s something more, something we can all learn and do.

Now, the secret

Elmo may be a red, hairy, 3.5-year-old muppet. Still, he nailed the behaviors required to get people to open up and share their inner worlds – the very thoughts, beliefs, and motivations that enable others to create and offer impactful and innovative solutions.

Here’s what Elmo did (and you should, too):

Show that you’re genuinely curious: Elmo didn’t open with the standard “How are you?” that if answered with anything other than the socially acceptable “Fine,” results in awkward silence and inner panic. Elmo opened by declaring his intent – checking in – and then asked a question. Because of that, we understood his motivation was genuine, and he wanted an honest answer.
Ask open-ended questions: Elmo didn’t ask a closed question that can be answered with yes or no. He asked a question that allowed people to share as much or as little as they wanted and that could act as a springboard to a deeper conversation.
Listen silently and without judgment: Elmo didn’t follow up his original tweet with options like “Are you doing ok, or not ok, or are you happy, or sad, or mad, or…” Elmo asked a question and then listened (read the responses) without jumping back into the conversation or firing off follow-up questions.
Acknowledge and thank the person sharing: On Tuesday, Elmo responded but not by skipping off to the next scheduled post. He acknowledged the response by opening with, “Wow! Elmo is glad he asked!” He didn’t share his opinion or immediately ask another question. Instead, he thanked people for sharing, acknowledged that he heard their responses, and was grateful.
Do something with what was shared: Even if you do #4, it’s tempting to move on to the next question. Don’t. Elmo didn’t. Instead, he wrote that he “learned that it is important to ask a friend how they are doing.” He also wrote that he “will check in again soon, friends! Elmo loves you.” You don’t have to profess your love but do respond with what you learned and what it makes you wonder.

People can’t tell you what to create because they don’t know what you know. But they can tell you the problems they have. If you’re willing to listen (just don’t talk about yourself in the third person, you’re not a muppet).

Image credit: Dall-E via Bing

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4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

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4 Ways to Create Something Truly Original

GUEST POST from Greg Satell

I study innovators for a living. Every year, I interview dozens of men and women who’ve achieved remarkable things. For my own part, I publish about a hundred articles a year and my second book, Cascades, has sold well since coming out five years ago. While my achievements pale in comparison to many of those I interview, many believe my work to be original.

The most destructive myth about creativity is that there are innate traits that allow some people to be creative, while others, who lack these, cannot. The truth is that in decades of research on creativity, nobody has been able to identify any such traits. In my experience, great innovators come in all shapes and sizes.

Still, despite the diversity of original innovators themselves, there are some common principles in how they approach their work and these are things that anyone can apply. That doesn’t mean everyone can be world famous, but the evidence clearly shows that anyone can be creative and, even if it’s not a major breakthrough, make some contribution to the world.

1. Explore

In 2006, Jennifer Doudna got a call from a colleague at the University of California at Berkeley, Jillian Banfield, who she knew only by reputation. Banfield’s area of research interest, obscure bacteria living in extreme conditions, was only tangentially related to Doudna’s work, studying the biochemistry of RNA and other cell structures.

The purpose of the call was to interest Doudna in studying an emerging phenomenon that was recently discovered in microbiology, a strange sequence of DNA found in bacteria. The function of the sequences were not yet clear, but some early evidence suggested that they might be involved in some kind of immune function, helping bacteria to defend themselves against viruses.

Intrigued, Doudna began to research the sequences, called CRISPR, in her own lab and, in 2012, discovered that they could be used as a powerful new tool for editing genes. Today, CRISPR is creating a revolution in genomics, completely redefining what was considered to be possible in just a few short years.

Many have observed the role of serendipity in innovation, such as in Alexander Fleming’s chance discovery of penicillin. Yet in every case, once you look a little deeper, you find that even the most unexpected discoveries were the product of intense exploration. Like Fleming and penicillin, Doudna wasn’t looking for a gene editing technology, but she was investigating a wide number of phenomena that were previously unexplained.

The first step for innovation is exploration. All who wander are not lost.

2. Combine

I’m a relentless fact checker. Over the years, I’ve found that even if you’ve done significant research, reading papers and interviewing experts, it’s amazingly easy to get things wildly wrong. I’ve also found that fact checking can lead you to new information you didn’t know existed. So before I publish anything of significance, I always make sure to reach out to someone who can correct my foolishness before it becomes public.

That’s why when I was finishing up Cascades, I reached out to Duncan Watts to look over two chapters on the science of networks, a field which he helped pioneer. As usual, Duncan was gracious and helpful, and pointed me towards a paper of his that I might want to include. He did so somewhat apologetically, not wanting to push his work on me, but observed that since I had largely based both chapters on his work already, it was probably okay.

This was entirely true. Much of the first half of my book is based on Duncan’s ideas. What’s more, much of the second half of the book is based on insights from my friend Srdja Popović , who trains activists around the world to create revolutionary movements. There are a number of others as well, all of who shared their wisdom with me.

None of this, of course, was at all original, but the combination is. In fact, the key insight of the book is that Duncan’s mathematical models and the on-the-ground tactics of Srdja and others are intensely related. They can inform each other in ways that both men, who are mostly unfamiliar with each other’s work, had not addressed and, I believe, are important.

3. Refine

I first got interested in Duncan’s work in 2006. I was running a large digital business at the time and, with social networks becoming a powerful force online, I thought that learning some basic concepts of network science would be useful. Much to my surprise, I found that the ideas had a powerful resonance in an unexpected area.

Two years earlier, I had found myself in the middle of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. What struck me at the time was how nobody seemed to have the first idea what was happening or why — not the journalists I worked with everyday, or the political and business leaders I would meet with regularly, nobody.

So I was excited to find, in Duncan’s work, a mathematical explanation for many of the seemingly inexplicable things that I had seen and experienced first-hand. Yet still, I had only a faint sense of what I was on to. Sure, there were obvious connections and possibilities, but I had no real framework to make the insights actionable.

That was 12 years ago (and 15 since the Orange Revolution began) and I’ve been working to refine those initial ideas ever since. Over that period, there has been no shortage of blind allies and wrong turns. Nevertheless, I kept at it and continued to learn. It took over a decade before I was able to pull everything together into something worth publishing.

4. Validate

The connection between Duncan and Srdja’s work wasn’t completely out of the blue. In fact, Duncan had made a short reference to Otpor, the movement which Srdja had helped lead, and its overthrow of Serbian dictator Slobodan Milošević in his book, Six Degrees. Yet there was no guarantee that the significance went any further than that.

So I began to widen my search. I looked at social movements throughout history to see if similar patterns held or whether the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and similar events in Serbia were anomalies. I struck up a working friendship with Srdja, read his book, Blueprint for Revolution and pored through the training materials on his organization’s website.

Yet to be truly useful, I needed to see if the same concepts could be applied more broadly. So I also researched and spoke to a number of leaders in other fields, such as corporate executives and people who led movements to transform heathcare, education and other things. Anywhere I could find anyone that created transformational change, I sought them out to find how they were able to succeed where so many others failed.

What I found was that while there were vast difference among changemakers, they had all eventually arrived at similar principles that made them successful, which I could validate. It took me nearly 15 years, but the journey that began with that initial connection between two vastly different sets of ideas eventually became something that I could consider to be coherent and useful.

In that way, my experience reflects many of the innovators of vastly greater accomplishment that I research and study. Truly original work doesn’t emerge fully formed from a brainstorm or sudden epiphany. It’s long years that follow, combining, refining and validating that makes the difference between an errant idea and something useful.

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

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The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

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The Top 10 Irish Innovators Who Shaped the World

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

Ireland, a land of rolling green hills, ancient castles, and lyrical poetry, has also been home to some of the world’s most brilliant minds. From groundbreaking inventions to revolutionary discoveries, Irish innovators have left an indelible mark on history. Let’s raise a pint of Guinness and celebrate the top 10 Irish visionaries who changed the game.

1. Arthur Guinness: The Brewmaster Extraordinaire

Arthur Guinness, the man behind the iconic stout, didn’t just create a beer; he crafted a legacy. In 1759, he signed a 9,000-year lease for the St. James’s Gate Brewery in Dublin. His confidence in his product paid off—Guinness is now the best-selling alcoholic drink of all time, with sales exceeding $2.6 billion. To Arthur, Sláinte!

2. John Joly: The Color Visionary

John Joly, hailing from Hollywood, County Offaly, changed the way we see the world. His invention of color photography in 1894 transformed art, science, and our everyday lives. From a single plate, he captured the vibrancy of our surroundings, proving that Ireland’s genius extended beyond its green landscapes.

3. Lord Kelvin Thomson: The Trans-Atlantic Connector

In 1865, Lord Kelvin Thomson helped lay the Atlantic Telegraph Cable, connecting Newfoundland to Valentia in County Kerry. His work revolutionized global communication, enabling trans-Atlantic calls and shaping the future of connectivity. And let’s not forget his contribution to thermodynamics—the Kelvin Scale.

4. Vincent Barry: The Accidental Leprosy Cure

Vincent Barry, while researching Ireland’s tuberculosis problem, stumbled upon a cure for leprosy. Talk about a lucky mistake! His accidental discovery changed lives and exemplified the serendipity of scientific progress.

5. Louis Brennan: Guiding Torpedoes to Victory

Louis Brennan invented the guided torpedo in 1877. His creation, a self-propelled torpedo with gyroscopic control, revolutionized naval warfare. Brennan’s legacy lives on in modern missile technology.

6. Francis Rynd: Healing with the Hypodermic Syringe

In 1844, Francis Rynd introduced the hypodermic syringe, a medical marvel that transformed pain management and drug delivery. His invention remains a cornerstone of modern medicine.

7. Rev. Nicholas Callan: Electrifying the World

Rev. Nicholas Callan invented the induction coil in 1836, paving the way for electrical innovation. His work laid the foundation for telegraphy, telephony, and countless other applications.

8. Sir James Martin: Ejector Seats for Safety

In 1946, Sir James Martin designed the first aircraft ejector seat, saving countless lives. His invention ensured that pilots could escape from damaged planes, making aviation safer for all.

9. Arthur Leared: Listening to the Heartbeat

Arthur Leared created the binaural stethoscope in 1851, allowing doctors to hear internal sounds more clearly. His invention became a vital tool for diagnosing heart conditions.

10. Leo Dean Jansen MD: Pioneering Innovations

Leo Dean Jansen MD, though not as well-known, deserves recognition. His contributions span various fields, from medicine to technology. His legacy reminds us that innovation knows no boundaries.

So, next time you raise your glass of Guinness, remember that Ireland’s spirit of invention flows as freely as its famous stout. Sláinte to these remarkable Irish innovators!

Bottom line: Futurology is not fortune telling. Futurists use a scientific approach to create their deliverables, but a methodology and tools like those in FutureHacking™ can empower anyone to engage in futurology themselves.

Image credit: Bing Dall-E

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Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

How Agility Enables Innovation

Agile Innovation Management (Part Two)

GUEST POST from Diana Porumboiu

In the previous article on agile innovation we covered the main concepts around agile, business agility and its role as a driver for innovation. Now, let’s see how to actually leverage agility to innovate and how other companies have succeeded in this area.

Agility is an enabler for innovation. The pace of innovation, while not easy to achieve, has become the ultimate competitive advantage as we all need to adapt quickly to evolving environments, the digital age and increasing pressing needs.

The reality is that agile thinking is changing the world whether we decide to adopt it or not.

Those who succeed at this are ahead of the game. McKinsey research suggests that agility is a critical factor for organizational success.

The Organizational Health Index (OHI) assesses various aspects of organizational health, including agility, and examines how these factors correlate with business success. An increased organizational health is linked with more resilient, adaptive, and high-performing organizations that can better navigate complexity, drive innovation, and achieve strategic goals.

What’s more, agile organizations are best at balancing both speed and stability, and these are also the companies that rank highest in the organizational health index.

McKinsey Ability — Source: McKinsey&Company

The research goes even deeper and identifies a series of management practices that differentiate the most from the least agile companies.

As you can see, there’s more to business agility than meets the eye and a few sprints just won’t cut it.

However, if we look at the agile principles, there are several ways in which they can enable innovation:

They bring an empirical process control approach, which emphasizes transparency, evaluation, and adaptation.
They enable experimentation and learning as teams are encouraged to test hypotheses, validate assumptions, and learn from both successes and failures. This experimental mindset is essential for innovation.
They are about adaptive planning processes that allow teams to adjust their priorities, strategies, and product roadmaps based on emerging opportunities and threats.
They emphasize customer-centricity. By focusing on delivering value to customers through continuous delivery and customer feedback loops, you make sure your innovations meet real market demands and solve genuine problems.
They encourage cross-functional collaboration and self-organizing teams, bringing together diverse perspectives and expertise.

To get a better idea of how this looks in practice, we’ll take the example of ING Bank.

ING Bank

ING is a global financial institution originally from the Netherlands and a good example to illustrate how agile can be introduced organization-wide, the right way.

ING wanted to become agile for the right reasons. The shift to agility wasn’t about working faster or growing more—it was about being flexible and adaptable. Even though things were going well financially in 2015, ING noticed that customer behavior was changing due to trends in other industries, not just in banking. So, they knew they had to change too.

ING Bank embraced several key principles of agility, drawing inspiration from the practices of tech companies to align with their objectives and operations:

Cross-Functional Teams: ING structured its IT and commercial departments into agile squads, mirroring the approach seen at Tesla. This integration fosters cross-functionality and collaboration, with teams physically situated together within the same premises.

Agile at ING Bank - McKinsey — source: McKinsey & Company

Rapid Decision-Making and Experimentation: Without bottlenecks created by middle management, ING facilitates swift decision-making and continuous experimentation. This agile approach enables the organization to constantly refine and test customer offerings without bureaucratic delays.
Enhanced Collaboration and Transparency: Recognizing the importance of collaboration, ING implemented structural changes to break down silos. Clear delineation of roles, responsibilities, and governance structures fosters improved cooperation across teams and departments.
Accelerated Delivery: Instead of their usual annual product launches, ING adopted a more agile release cycle, rolling out software updates every two weeks. This agile delivery model allows the organization to respond promptly to market demands and customer feedback, ensuring rapid innovation and adaptation.

The first step in achieving this agile transformation was to develop a clear strategy and vision. They started small and rolled out the new structures and way of working across the entire headquarters in eight to nine months.

Last, but not least, they invested significant energy and leadership time in fostering a culture of ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, which are foundational elements of an agile culture.

As Bart Schlatmann from ING points out, agility is a means to an end, not the end goal itself; it is the pathway to achieving innovation.

Drawing from these examples and research from other organizations, we can summarize the five tenets of agile organizations:

Purpose-Driven Mindset: Shift from a focus on capturing value to co-creating value with stakeholders, embodying a shared vision across the organization.
Empowered Network of Teams: Transition from top-down direction to self-organizing teams with clear responsibility and authority, fostering engagement, innovative thinking, and collaboration.
Rapid Learning Cycles: Embrace uncertainty and continuous improvement through iterative decision-making and experimentation, prioritizing quick adaptation over rigid planning.
Innovation Culture: Cultivate ownership, empowerment, and customer-centricity, enabling employees to drive organizational success.
Integrated Technology Enablement: View technology as integral to unlocking value and enabling responsiveness to business and stakeholder needs, leveraging advanced tools for seamless integration and rapid innovation.

Actionable Steps to Drive Innovation through Business Agility

We can’t wrap things up without going through some of the key steps that should not be missed in an agile transformation journey.

Constancy of purpose

You might have heard of Edwards Deming and even used his PDCA cycle in your continuous improvement work. He is well known for his legacy in the field of quality management, particularly for his contributions to the improvement of production processes in Japan after World War II. To some degree, his work is also seen as one of the main inspirations for the agile movement.

Among his work, we can also find the “14 Points for Management,” where Deming outlines how essential it is to have a clear and unwavering commitment to a long-term vision or mission.

He called it constancy of purpose. You can also call it your North Star. Regardless of the words you choose, it’s important to set your goals and align all activities, processes, and resources towards achieving them. How to do this?

Communicate the Purpose: Regularly communicate the organization’s purpose, mission and goals as well as how agility contributes to achieving them.
Define Goals: Clearly define objectives and goals that align with the organization’s purpose. These goals should support the overall mission and vision.
Empower Teams: Trust by default and enable teams to make decisions, take ownership of their ideas and work. Provide them with the autonomy and resources they need to innovate and deliver value.
Measure Progress: Measure progress towards your goals, but also establish metrics that can measure your ability to be responsive. Regularly review and assess how agile practices are contributing to the overall mission.
Adapt and Iterate: Embrace continuous improvement processes that align with your internal structures and needs. Encourage teams to experiment, learn, and iterate on their approaches.

Agile leadership

Adopt the ABC of leadership which drives innovation and makes the shift from “vertical ideology of control” to “horizontal ideology of enablement”.

Linda Hill, renowned professor at Harvard Business School, specializing in leadership and innovation makes a great point about the roles a leader should take if they want to drive innovation and agility.

Over time leadership evolved from a purely strategic role, to providing a vision that guides people in the same direction. More recently, research showed that a visionary leader is not enough. You need leaders that can also shape the culture and capabilities needed for people to co-create the future. This requires a different approach to leadership.

Research has identified that in order to lead an organization that innovates at scale with speed, you need leaders that fill in three different functions:

the Architect – to build the culture and capabilities necessary to collaborate, experiment and work.
the Bridger – to create the bridge between the outside and the inside of the organization by bringing together skills and tools to innovate at speed.
the Catalyst – to accelerate co-creation through the entire ecosystem.

Here is Hill’s short summary on the ABC of leadership:

Another top voice is Steve Denning who has been an advocate of agile and agile management for years. He makes some great points about the agile mindset which requires a new way of running organizations.

For an organization to be truly agile, the so called industrial-era management needs to be replaced with digital-age management which is strongly driven by an agile mindset.

The traditional management style makes it hard for agile to work because the old command-and-control approach goes against the agile principles. The top-down approach is riddled with bureaucracy which obstructs visibility to the customer and the realities at the lower levels of the organization.

Some of the most successful and innovative organizations, like Apple, Google, and Microsoft understood this early on and shifted their focus to delivering customer value first, one of the agile principles. This required a change in mindset but also in the corporate culture, which is no easy undertaking.

To make this transition, Denning talks about five major shifts that companies need to make:

From profit-focused to customer-focused goals.
From direct reporting to self-organizing teams where management’s role is not to check on employees, but to enable them to do their work by removing obstacles.
From bureaucracy, rules, and reports to work coordinated by Agile methods and customer feedback.
Prioritize transparency and continuous improvement over predictability.
Encourage horizontal communication rather than top-down directives.

While they are straightforward and make sense for most of us, these changes are maybe the hardest to make, especially for established organizations that are not used to challenging the status quo.

These big undertakings are what make agile possible at scale. But even if you’re not there yet, you can still apply the agile principles at a smaller scale to enable innovation.

Minimize complexity

Complexity is the enemy of agility. People in companies both large and small try to come up with the perfect solution, that often doesn’t exist in the first place, and only end up having solved the wrong problem.

On the other hand, if you were to simply move ahead quickly with something that creates real value and solves at least some of the problems, you’ll see which of your assumptions and concerns are real, and which aren’t. You’ll also see which problems you can work around, and which ones you simply must address directly.

This obviously eliminates a lot of uncertainty and reduces the complexity associated with solving the problem, which again helps you focus your innovation efforts on what matters – creating real value.

The bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take an agile and modular approach.

Thus, the bigger and more complex the problem, the more important it is to take this agile and modular approach that focuses on the speed of making tangible progress.

Conclusion

As we explained in our complete guide to innovation management, there is no single perfect way of managing innovation. Different companies have different approaches for innovation management.

However, the common thread of successful organizations are structures and processes that mitigate the somehow chaotic nature of innovation management.

In these two articles we explored agile as a method to enable innovation and improve its management for sustained success. We don’t believe in quick fixes or miracle solutions. That’s why we made the case of agile as a mindset that should permeate every aspect of the organization.

Article originally published in full format on viima.com/blog

Image credit: Unsplash, McKinsey

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The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

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The Remarkable Power of Negative Feedback

GUEST POST from Dennis Stauffer

The most effective innovators—entrepreneurs, scientists, new product developers, and advocates of social change—are adept at seeking feedback. But not just any feedback. They look for a particular type of feedback that may surprise you. They actively seek negative feedback, feedback that tells them when they’re wrong.

That probably sounds counterintuitive. Who goes around wanting to fail? The whole field of positive psychology has convinced many of us that to be successful, we need confidence and plenty of positive reinforcement. There’s some truth to that. Entrepreneurs understandably want their businesses to be successful. Scientists don’t win many awards for failed theories.

But deficits matter. One crucial flaw can torpedo the best of ideas. In the real world there are always many things that can go wrong. Figuring out what those shortcomings are can save you a lot of time and wasted effort. Negative feedback tells you when the strategy you’ve chosen isn’t working, so you can adjust, either by overcoming some obstacle, or adopting a different strategy.

Seeking only positive feedback predisposes you to confirmation bias, when you tend to see what you expect, or hope will happen. It feels good, but it may not be telling you what you most need to know, to be at your best. Savvy investors—and my own research—have found that those innovators and entrepreneurs who most actively seek negative feedback, create by far the greatest value.

Almost any feedback is better than none. You need feedback to get a clear take on the realities you face, so you can respond effectively. But only seeking positive feedback ultimately fosters false-confidence and insecurities. It’s always looking for validation and simply wanting to be right.

Negative feedback can be humbling, but you can build confidence in your ability to respond to setbacks and failures, rather than pretending they aren’t there. Accomplished innovators can handle the bad news because they’ve done it many times before. When you’re trying to bring change, it comes with the territory—and it’s always an opportunity to practice being creative and resourceful.

The next time you face some challenge, hoping for success is understandable, but the best way to make sure that success is real is to look for indications that what you’re doing isn’t working.

That’s the fastest way to make sure it is working.

View this post as a video here:

Image Credit: Pixabay

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