Tag Archives: change leadership

Good Intentions Pave the Way to Innovation Hell

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and nowhere is that more true than in innovation.

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

That’s one of the insights I took away from InnoLead’s Q1 report on corporate innovation priorities. The report is an eye-opening look at the impact of AI on corporate innovation as experienced by corporate entrepreneurs themselves. But before deep diving into that topic, the report’s authors shared intriguing data about member companies’ innovation structure, leadership engagement, organizational connections, and results. Nestled amongst the charts were several that, when taken together, got my Spidey senses tingling.

61.0% of innovation teams are “directly under a high-visibility leader with a broad company focus.”

This is great because innovation needs senior leaders’ support and active engagement to survive, let alone survive for long enough to produce meaningful results. Add this to the fact that 45% of senior leadership teams frequently discuss the “progress and value of the innovation program,” and all signs point to innovation as a strategic priority.

But (you knew there was a but, didn’t you)…

If “broad company focus” means “no P&L responsibility,” we have a problem. In every for-profit company I’ve worked for and with, people with P&L responsibility have greater power, influence, and access to resources than people without a P&L. This division may not feel fair, but it makes sense – the people who bring in profit and revenue will always be more influential than people who represent “cost centers.”

You can see the impact of P&L owners who are, understandably, focused entirely on delivering short-term results throughout the report – 75% of companies have shifted their focus more towards near-term priorities, and 61% shifted their innovation portfolio away from Horizon 3 (also known as radical, breakthrough, or disruptive innovation).

As for all those discussions, it’d be great if they focused on walking the talk of innovation. But suppose it’s only innovation platitudes or, worse, questioning innovation’s ROI. That doesn’t bode well for the “high-visibility leader with broad company focus,” the innovation team, or the company’s culture.

71.2% of innovation teams’ customers or business partners are unaware of the team’s existence, don’t engage, or engage only occasionally.

Welcome to Innovation Island! Where the cool people work on cool things in cool offices while all you drones slave away doing the same thing you’ve always done and making the money that pays for the cool people to do cool things in their cool offices.

I’m sure this isn’t the message the innovation team intends to send, but it’s the one received by most organizations.

When arguing for Innovation Island, managers often point to the organizational antibodies likely to swarm and kill H3/radical/breakthrough innovation and even some H2/adjacent innovations. They’re right, and those innovations must be “protected.” But not every innovation needs protection. H2 and certainly H1 innovations, where most portfolios are now, should be shared with the core business because the core business will eventually run them.

The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that innovation teams don’t seem to be reaching out to others in the organization. Like the P&L owners they report to, people in the core business are busy running the business and generating revenue. Very few have the time or energy to seek out the innovation team to discuss and explore innovation. Companies that want to build a culture of innovation need to turn their innovators into evangelists, not residents of an island connected to the mainland by a single drawbridge.

23.4% of innovation teams are considered outsiders or actively undermined by other functions and business units.

This may not sound bad, but add to it the 55.0% that are “somewhat integrated with occasional collaboration” with other departments and business units, and you may be tempted to believe that Innovation Island would be wise to invest in a surface-to-air missile defense system.

Sadly, this perception of the innovation team as “The Others” isn’t surprising when considering that the most important tactic for building a relationship between innovation and the functions or business units is already having strong relationships and interpersonal trust (75.3% of respondents). The least effective (4.7% of respondents) is “writing down shared objectives and expectations.” So, no, the email you sent is not enough to win friends and influence people.

Bottom line

Well-intended companies appoint a senior executive to lead the innovation team because they’ve been told that doing so is powerful proof that innovation is a strategic priority. They hire outsiders to inject new thinking into the organization because they know that “what got you here won’t get you there.” They cordon the team and their work off from the rest of the organization because they read that separation is essential to preserving innovation’s disruptive nature.

But if the senior executive doesn’t have the organizational power and influence that comes with P&L ownership, the team doesn’t have strong personal relationships with others in the business, and other functions and business units don’t know the team exists or how to interact with it, innovation will go nowhere.

But that’s better than where it could go.

Image credit: Unsplash

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Challenging the Assumption of the Status Quo

Leave a reply

(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

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Thinking Differently About Leadership and Innovation

1 Reply

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

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

1 Reply

Implementing Successful Transformation Initiatives for 2024

GUEST POST from Janet Sernack

Transformation and change initiatives are usually designed as strategic interventions, intending to advance an organization’s growth, deliver increased shareholder value, build competitive advantage, or improve speed and agility to respond to fast-changing industries. These initiatives typically focus on improving efficiency, and productivity, resolving IT legacy and technological issues, encouraging innovation, or developing high-performance organizational cultures. Yet, according to research conducted over fifteen years by McKinsey & Co., shared in a recent article “Losing from day one: Why even successful transformations fall short” – Organizations have realized only 67 percent of the maximum financial benefits that their transformations could have achieved. By contrast, respondents at all other companies say they captured an average of only 37 percent of the potential benefit, and it’s all due to a lack of human skills, and their inability to adapt, innovate, and thrive in a decade of disruption.

Differences between success and failure

The survey results confirm that “there are no shortcuts to successful transformation and change initiatives. The main differentiator between success and failure was not whether an organization followed a specific subset of actions but rather how many actions it took throughout an organizational transformation’s life cycle” and actions taken by the people involved.

Capacity, confidence, and competence – human skills

What stands out is that thirty-five percent of the value lost occurs in the implementation phase, which involves the unproductive actions taken by the people involved.

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) supports this in a recent article “How to Create a Transformation That Lasts” – “Transformations are inherently difficult, filled with compressed deadlines and limited resources. Executing them typically requires big changes in processes, product offerings, governance, structure, the operating model itself, and human behavior.”

Reinforcing the need for organizations to invest in developing the deep human skills that embed transformation disciplines into business-as-usual structures, processes, and systems, and help shift the culture. Which depends on enhancing people’s capacity, confidence, and competence to implement the “annual business-planning processes and review cycles, from executive-level weekly briefings and monthly or quarterly reviews to individual performance dialogue” that delivers and embeds the desired changes, especially the cultural enablers.

Complex and difficult to navigate – key challenges

As a result of the impact of our VUCA/BANI world, coupled with the global pandemic, current global instability, and geopolitics, many people have had their focus stolen, and are still experiencing dissonance cognitively, emotionally, and viscerally.

This impacts their ability to take intelligent actions and the range of symptoms includes emotional overwhelm, cognitive overload, and change fatigue.

It seems that many people lack the capacity, confidence, and competence, to underpin their balance, well-being, and resilience, which resources their ability and GRIT to engage fully in transformation and change initiatives.

The new normal – restoring our humanity

At ImagineNation™ for the past four years, in our coaching and mentoring practice, we have spent more than 1000 hours partnering with leaders and managers around the world to support them in recovering and re-emerging from a range of uncomfortable, disabling, and disempowering feelings.

Some of these unresourceful states include loneliness, disconnection, a lack of belonging, and varying degrees of burnout, and have caused them to withdraw and, in some cases, even resist returning to the office, or to work generally.

It appears that this is the new normal we all have to deal with, knowing there is no playbook, to take us there because it involves restoring the essence of our humanity and deepening our human skills.

Taking a whole-person approach – develop human skills

By embracing a whole-person approach, in all transformation and change initiatives, that focuses on building people’s capacity, confidence, and competence, and that cultivates their well-being and resilience to:

Engage, empower, and enable them to collaborate in setting the targets, business plans, implementation, and follow-up necessary to ensure a successful transformation and change initiative.
Safely partner with them through their discomfort, anxiety, fear, and reactive responses.
Learn resourceful emotional states, traits, mindsets, behaviors, and human skills to embody, enact and execute the desired changes strategically and systemically.

By then slowing down, to pause, retreat and reflect, and choose to operate systemically and holistically, and cultivate the “deliberate calm” required to operate at the three different human levels outlined in the illustration below:

The Neurological Level – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to comprehend, connect to, and work with. Because people lack the focus, intention, and skills to help people collapse any unconscious RIGIDITY existing in their emotional, cognitive, and visceral states, which means they may be frozen, distracted, withdrawn, or aggressive as a result of their fears and anxiety.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by accepting “what is”:

Paying attention and being present with whatever people are experiencing neurologically by attending, allowing, accepting, naming, and acknowledging whatever is going on for them, and by supporting and enabling them to rest, revitalize and recover in their unique way.
Operating from an open mind and an open heart and by being empathic and compassionate, in line with their fragility and vulnerability, being kind, appreciative, and considerate of their individual needs.
Being intentional in enabling them to become grounded, mindful conscious, and truly connected to what is really going on for them, and rebuild their positivity, optimism, and hope for the future.
Creating a collective holding space or container that gives them permission, safety, and trust to pull them towards the benefits and rewards of not knowing, unlearning, and being open to relearning new mental models.
Evoking new and multiple perspectives that will help them navigate uncertainty and complexity.

The Emotional Cognition Levels – which most transformation and change initiatives fail to take into account because people need to develop their PLASTICITY and flexibility in regulating and focusing their thoughts, feelings, and actions to adapt and be agile in a world of unknowns, and deliver the outcomes and results they want to have.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by supporting them to open their hearts and minds:

Igniting their curiosity, imagination, and playfulness, introducing novel ideas, and allowing play and improvisation into their thinking processes, to allow time out to mind wander and wonder into new and unexplored territories.
Exposing, disrupting, and re-framing negative beliefs, ruminations, overthinking and catastrophizing patterns, imposter syndromes, fears of failure, and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness.
Evoking mindset shifts, embracing positivity and an optimistic focus on what might be a future possibility and opportunity.
Being empathic, compassionate, and appreciative, and engaging in self-care activities and well-being practices.

The Generative Level – which most transformation and change initiatives ignore, because they fail to develop the critical and creative thinking, and problem sensing and solving skills that are required to GENERATE the crucial elastic thinking and human skills that result in change, and innovation.

You can build your capacity, confidence, and competence to operate at this level by:

Creating a safe space to help people reason and make sense of the things occurring within, around, and outside of them.
Cultivating their emotional and cognitive agility, creative, critical, and associative thinking skills to challenge the status quo and think differently.
Developing behavioral flexibility to collaborate, being inclusive to maximize differences and diversity, and safe experimentation to close their knowing-doing gaps.
Taking small bets, giving people permission and safety to fail fast to learn quickly, be courageous, be both strategic and systemic in taking smart risks and intelligent actions.

Reigniting our humanity – unlocking human potential

At the end of the day, we all know that we can’t solve the problem with the same thinking that created it. Yet, so many of us keep on trying to do that, by unconsciously defaulting into a business-as-usual linear thinking process when involved in setting up and implementing a transformation or change initiative.

Ai can only take us so far, because the defining trait of our species, is our human creativity, which is at the heart of all creative problem-solving endeavors, where innovation can be the engine of change, transformation, and growth, no matter what the context. According to Fei-Fei Li, Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, and co-director of AI4All, a non-profit organization promoting diversity and inclusion in the field of AI.

“There’s nothing artificial about AI. It’s inspired by people, created by people, and most importantly it has an impact on people”.

Develop the human skills

When we have the capacity, confidence, and competence to reignite our humanity, we will unlock human potential, and stop producing results no one wants. By developing human skills that enable people to adapt, be resilient, agile, creative, and innovate, they will grow through disruption in ways that add value to the quality of people’s lives, that are appreciated and cherished, we can truly serve people, deliver profits and perhaps save the planet.

Find out more about our work at ImagineNation™

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

AI as an Innovation Tool – How to Work with a Deeply Flawed Genius!

1 Reply

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

For those of us working in the innovation and change field, it is hard to overstate the value and importance of AI. It opens doors, that were, for me at least, barely imaginable 10 years ago. And for someone who views analogy, crossing expertise boundaries, and the reapplication of ideas across domains as central to innovation, it’s hard to imagine a more useful tool.

But it is still a tool. And as with any tool, leaning it’s limitations, and how to use it skillfully is key. I make the analogy to an automobile. We don’t need to know everything about how it works, and we certainly don’t need to understand how to build it. But we do need to know what it can, and cannot do. We also need to learn how to drive it, and the better our driving skills, the more we get out of it.

AI, the Idiot Savant? An issue with current AI is that it is both intelligent and stupid at the same time (see Yejin Chois excellent TED talk that is attached). It has phenomenal ‘data intelligence’, but can also fail on even simple logic puzzles. Part of the problem is that AI lacks ‘common sense’ or the implicit framework that filters a great deal of human decision making and behavior. Chois calls this the ‘dark matter’ common sense of decision-making. I think of it as the framework of knowledge, morality, biases and common sense that we accumulate over time, and that is foundational to the unconscious ‘System 1’ elements that influence many, if not most of our decisions. But whatever we call it, it’s an important, but sometimes invisible and unintuitive part of human information processing that is can be missing from AI output.

Of course, AI is far from being unique in having limitations in the quality of its output. Any information source we use is subject to errors. We all know not to believe everything we read on the internet. That makes Google searches useful, but also potentially flawed. Even consulting with human experts has pitfalls. Not all experts agree, and even to most eminent expert can be subject to biases, or just good old fashioned human error. But most of us have learned to be appropriately skeptical of these sources of information. We routinely cross-reference, challenge data, seek second opinions and do not simply ‘parrot’ the data they provide.

But increasingly with AI, I’ve seen a tendency to treat its output with perhaps too much respect. The reasons for this are multi-faceted, but very human. Part of it may be the potential for generative AI to provide answers in an apparently definitive form. Part may simply be awe of its capabilities, and to confuse breadth of knowledge with accuracy. Another element is the ability it gives us to quickly penetrate areas where we may have little domain knowledge or background. As I’ve already mentioned, this is fantastic for those of us who value exploring new domains and analogies. But it comes with inherent challenges, as the further we step away from our own expertise, the easier it is for us to miss even basic mistakes.

As for AI’s limitations, Chois provides some sobering examples. It can pass a bar exam, but can fail abysmally on even simple logic problems. For example, it suggests building a bridge over broken glass and nails is likely to cause punctures! It has even suggested increasing the efficiency of paperclip manufacture by using humans as raw materials. Of course, these negative examples are somewhat cherry picked to make a point, but they do show how poor some AI answers can be, and how they can be low in common sense. Of course, when the errors are this obvious, we should automatically filter them out with our own common sense. But the challenge comes when we are dealing in areas where we have little experience, and AI delivers superficially plausible but flawed answers.

Why is this a weak spot for AI? At the root of this is that implicit knowledge is rarely articulated in the data AI scrapes. For example, a recipe will often say ‘remove the pot from the heat’, but rarely says ‘remove the pot from heat and don’t stick your fingers in the flames’. We’re supposed to know that already. Because it is ‘obvious’, and processed quickly, unconsciously and often automatically by our brains, it is rarely explicitly articulated. AI, however, cannot learn what is not said. And so because we don’t tend to state the obvious, it can make it challenging for an AI to learn it. It learns to take the pot off of the heat, but not the more obvious insight, which is to avoid getting burned when we do so.

This is obviously a known problem, and several strategies are employed to help address it. These include manually adding crafted examples and direct human input into AI’s training. But this level of human curation creates other potential risks. The minute humans start deciding what content should and should not be incorporated, or highlighted into AI training, the risk of transferring specific human biases to that AI increase. It also creates the potential for competing AI’s with different ‘viewpoints’, depending upon differences in both human input and the choices around what data-sets are scraped. There is a ‘nature’ component to the development of AI capability, but also a nurture influence. This is of course analogous the influence that parents, teachers and peers have on the values and biases of children as they develop their own frameworks.

But most humans are exposed to at least some diversity in the influences that shape their decision frameworks. Parents, peers and teachers provide generational variety, and the gradual and layered process that builds the human implicit decision framework help us to evolve a supporting network of contextual insight. It’s obvious imperfect, and the current culture wars are testament to some profound differences in end result. But to a large extent, we evolve similar, if not identical common sense frameworks. With AI, the narrower group contributing to curated ‘education’ increases the risk of both intentional and unintentional bias, and of ‘divergent intelligence’.

What Can We do? The most important thing is to be skeptical about AI output. Just because it sounds plausible, don’t assume it is. Just as we’d not take the first answer on a Google search as absolute truth, don’t do the same with AI. Ask it for references, and check them (early iterations were known to make up plausible looking but nonsense references). And of course, the more important the output is to us, the more important it is to check it. As I said at the beginning, it can be tempting to take verbatim output from AI, especially if it sounds plausible, or fits our theory or worldview. But always challenge the illusion of omnipotence that AI creates. It’s probably correct, but especially if its providing an important or surprising insight, double check it.

The Sci-Fi Monster! The concept of a childish super intelligence has been explored by more than one Science Fiction writer. But in many ways that is what we are dealing with in the case of AI. It’s informational ‘IQ’ is greater than the contextual or common sense ‘IQ’ , making it a different type of intelligence to those we are used to. And because so much of the human input side is proprietary and complex, it’s difficult to determine whether bias or misinformation is included in its output, and if so, how much? I’m sure these are solvable challenges. But some bias is probably unavoidable the moment any human intervention or selection invades choice of training materials or their interpretation. And as we see an increase in copyright law suits and settlements associated with AI, it becomes increasingly plausible that narrowing of sources will result in different AI’s with different ‘experiences’, and hence potentially different answers to questions.

AI is an incredible gift, but like the three wishes in Aladdin’s lamp, use it wisely and carefully. A little bit of skepticism, and some human validation is a good idea. Something that can pass the bar, but that lacks common sense is powerful, it could even get elected, but don’t automatically trust everything it says!

Image credits: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

Continuous Improvement vs. Incremental Innovation

Leave a reply

Are They the Same?

Continuous Improvement vs. Incremental Innovation

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Isn’t continuous improvement the same as incremental innovation? After all, both focus on doing what you do better, faster, or cheaper.”

Ooof, I have a love-hate relationship with questions like this one.

I hate them because, in the moment, they feel like a gut punch. The answer feels obvious to me – no, they are entirely different things – but I struggle to explain myself clearly and simply.

I love them because, once the frustration and embarrassment of being unable to offer a clear and simple answer passes, they become a clear sign that I don’t understand something well enough or that *gasp* my “obvious” answer may be wrong.

So, is Continuous Improvement the same as Incremental Innovation?

No. They’re different.

But the difference is subtle, so let’s use an analogy to tease it apart.

Imagine learning to ride a bike. When you first learn, success is staying upright, moving forward, and stopping before you crash into something. With time and practice, you get better. You move faster, stop more quickly, and move with greater precision and agility.

That’s continuous improvement. You’re using the same solution but using it better.

Now, imagine that you’ve mastered your neighborhood’s bike paths and streets and want to do more. You want to go faster, so add a motor to your bike. You want to ride through the neighboring forest, so you change to off-road tires. You want a smoother feel on your long rides, so you switch to a carbon fiber frame.

That’s incremental innovation. You changed an aspect of the solution so that it performs better.

It all comes down to the definition of innovation – something different (or new) that creates value.

Both continuous improvement and incremental innovation create value.

The former does it by improving what exists. The latter does it by changing (making different) what exists.

Got it. They are entirely different things.

Sort of.

Think of them as a Venn diagram – they’re different but similar.

There is evidence that a culture committed to quality and continuous improvement can lead to a culture of innovation because “Both approaches are focused in meeting customer needs, and since CI encourages small but constant changes in current products, processes and working methods its use can lead firms to become innovative by taking these small changes as an approach to innovation, more specifically, incremental innovation.”

Thanks, nerd. But does this matter where I work, which is in the real world?

Yes.

Continuous Improvement and Incremental Innovation are different things and, as a result, require different resource levels, timelines, and expectations for ROI.

You should expect everyone in your organization to engage in continuous innovation (CI) because (1) using CI helps the organizations change adoption and risk taking by evaluating and implementing solutions to current needs” and (2) the problem-solving tools used in CI uncover “opportunities for finding new ideas that could become incremental innovations.”

You should designate specific people and teams to work on incremental people because (1) what “better” looks like is less certain, (2) doing something different or new increases risk, and (3) more time and resources are required to learn your way to the more successful outcome.

What do you think?

How do you answer the question at the start of this post?

How do you demonstrate your answer?

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

Las Vegas Formula One

Leave a reply

Successful Innovation, Learning Experience or Total Disaster?

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

In Las Vegas, we are now clearing up after the Formula 1 Grand Prix on the Strip. This extremely complex event required a great deal of executional innovation, and one that I think as innovators, we can learn quite a lot from.

It was certainly a bumpy ride, both for the multi-million dollar Ferrari that hit an errant drain cover during practice, but also with respect to broader preparation, logistics, pricing and projections of consumer behavior. Despite this, race itself was exciting and largely issue free, and even won over some of the most skeptical drivers. In terms of Kahneman’s peak-end effects, there were both memorable lows, but also a triumphant end result. So did this ultimately amount to success?

Success?: For now, I think it very much depends upon your perspective and who you talk to. Perhaps it’s a sign of the times, but in Las Vegas, the race was extremely polarizing, with often heated debates between pro- and anti- F1-ers that were often as competitive as the race.

The reality is that it will be months, or more likely years before the dust settles, and we know the answer. And I strongly suspect that even then, those who are for and against it will all likely be able to claim support for their point of view. One insight I think innovators can take from this is that success can be quite subjective in of itself, and greatly depends upon what factors you measure, what period of time you measure over, and often your ingoing biases. And the bigger and more complex the innovation, often the harder it is to define and measure success.

Compromise Effects: When you launch a new product, it is often simpler and cheaper to measure its success narrowly in terms of specific dollar contribution to your business. But this often misses its holistic impact. Premium products can elevate an entire category or brand, while poorly executed innovations can do the opposite. For example, the compromise effect from Behavioral Economics suggests that a premium addition to a brand line up can shift the ‘Good, Better, Best’ spectrum of a category upwards. This can boost dollar sales across a line up, even if the new premium product itself has only moderate sales. For example, the addition of high priced wines to a menu can often increase the average dollars per bottle spent by diners, even if the expensive wine itself doesn’t sell. The expensive wines shift the ‘safe middle’ of the consideration set upwards, and thus increase revenue, and hopefully profit.

Money, Scope and Intangibles: In the case of F1, how far can and should we cast the net when trying to measure success? Can we look just at the bottom line? Did this specific weekend bring in more than the same weekend the previous year in sports betting, rooms and entertainment? Did that difference exceed the investments?

Or is that too narrow? What about the $$ impact on the weeks surrounding the event? We know that some people stayed away because of the construction and congestion in the lead up to the race. That should probably be added into, or subtracted from the equation.

And then there’s the ‘who won and who lost question’? The benefits and losses were certainly not homogeneous across stakeholders. The big casinos benefited disproportionately in comparison to the smaller restaurants that lost business due to construction, some to a degree that almost rivaled Covid. Gig workers also fared differently. I have friends who gained business from the event, and friends who lost. Many Uber drivers simply gave up and stopped working. But those who stayed, or the high-end limo drivers likely had bumper weekends. Entertainers working shows that were disrupted by F1 lost out, but the plethora of special events that came with F1 also provided a major uptick in business for many performers and entertainers.

There is also substantial public investment to consider. Somewhat bizarrely, the contribution of public funds was not agreed prior to the race, and the public-private cost sharing of tens of millions is still being negotiated. But even facing that moving target, did increased (or decreased) tax income before, during and after the race offset those still to be determined costs?

Intangibles: And then there’s the intangibles. While Vegas is not exactly an unknown entity, F1 certainly upped its exposure, or in marketing terms, it’s mental availability. It brought Vegas into the news, but was that in a positive or negative light? Or is all publicity good publicity in this context? News coverage was mixed, with a lot of negative focus on the logistic issues, but also global coverage of what was generally regarded as an exciting race. And of course, that media coverage also by definition marketed other businesses, including the spectacular Sphere.

Logistics: Traffic has been a nightmare with many who work on the strip facing unprecedented delays in their commutes for many weeks, with many commutes going from minutes to hours. This reached a point where casinos were raffling substantial prizes, including a Tesla, just to persuade people to not call in sick. Longer term, it’s hard to determine the impact on employee morale and retention, but its hard to imagine that it will be zero, and that brings costs of its own that go well beyond a raffled Tesla

Measuring Success? In conclusion, this was a huge operation, and its impact by definition is going to be multidimensional. The outcome was, not surprisingly, a mixed bag. It could have been a lot better, or a lot worse. And even as the dust settles, it’s likely that different groups will be able to cherry pick data to support their current opinions and biases.

Innovation Insights: So what are some of the more generalized innovation insights we can draw?

(a) Innovation is rarely a one and done process. We rarely get it right first time, and the bigger and more complex an innovation is, the more we usually have to learn. F1 is the poster child for this, and the organization is going to have an enormous amount of data to plough through. The value of this will greatly depend on F1’s internal innovation culture. Is it a learning organization? In a situation like this, where billions of dollars, and careers are on the line, will it be open or defensive? Great innovation organizations mostly put defensiveness aside, actively learn from mistakes, and adopt Devils Advocate approaches to learn from hard earned data. But culture is deeply embedded, and difficult to change, so much depends on the current culture of the organizations involved.

(b) Going Fast versus Going Slow: This project moved very, very quickly. Turning a city like Las Vegas from scratch into a top of the line race track in less than a year was a massive challenge. The upside is that if you go fast, you learn fast. And the complexity of the task meant much of the insight could pragmatically only be achieved ‘on the ground’. But conversely, better scenario planning might have helped anticipate some of the biggest issues, especially around traffic disruption, loss of business to smaller organizations, commuting issues and community outreach. And things like not finalizing public-private contracts prior to execution will likely end up prolonging the agony. Whatever our innovation is, big or small, hitting that sweet spot between winging it and over-thinking is key.

(c) Understanding Real Consumer Behavior. The casinos got pricing horribly wrong. When the race was announced, hotel prices and race packages for the F1 weekend went through the roof. But in the final run up to the race, prices for both rooms and the race itself plummeted. One news article reported a hotel room on the strip as low as $18! Tickets for the race that the previous month had cost $1600 had dropped to $800 or less on race day. Visitors who had earlier paid top dollar for rooms were reported to be cancelling and rebooking, while those locked into rates were frustrated. There is even a major lawsuit in progress around a cancelled practice. I don’t know any details around how pricing was researched, and predicting the market for a new product or innovation is always a challenge. In addition, the bigger the innovation, the more challenging the prediction game is, as there are less relevant anchors for consumers or the business to work from. But I think the generalizable lesson for all innovators is to be humble. Assume you don’t know, that your models are approximate, do as much research as you can in contexts that are a close to realistic as possible, don’t squeeze margins based on unrealistic expectations for the accuracy of business models, and build as much agility into innovation launches as possible. Easier said than done I know, but one of the most consistent reasons for new product failure is over confidence in understanding real consumer response when the rubber hits the road (pun intended), and how it can differ from articulated consumer response derived in unrealistic contexts. Focus groups and on-line surveys can be quite misleading when it comes down to the reality of handing over hard cash, opportunity cost, or how we value ur precious time short versus long-term term.

Conclusion: Full disclosure, I’ve personally gone through the full spectrum with Formula One in Vegas. I loved the idea when it was announced, but 6 months of construction, disruption, and the prospect of another two months of tear down have severely dented my enthusiasm. Ultimately I went from coveting tickets to avoiding the event altogether. People I know range from ecstatic to furious, and everything in between. Did I mention it was polarizing?

The reality is that this is an ongoing innovation process. There is a 3-year contract with options to extend to 10 years. How successful it ultimately is will likely be very dependent upon how good a learning and innovation culture Formula One and its partners are, or can become. It’s a steep and expensive learning curve, and how it moves forward is going to be interesting if nothing else. And being Vegas, we have both CES and the Super Bowl to distract us in the next few months, before we start preparing again for next year.

Image credits: Pexels

Sign up here to join 17,000+ leaders getting Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to their inbox every week.

LEGO Knows Why Companies Don’t Innovate

1 Reply

LEGO Knows Why Companies Don't Innovate

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“Lego’s Latest Effort to Avoid Oil-Based Plastic Hits Brick Wall” – WSJ

“Lego axes plans to make bricks from recycled bottles” – BBC

“Lego ditches oil-free brick in sustainability setback” – The Financial Times

Recently, LEGO found itself doing the Walk of Atonement (see video below) after announcing to The Financial Times that it was scrapping plans to make bricks from recycled bottles, and media outlets from The Wall Street Journal to Fast Company to WIRED were more than happy to play the Shame Nun.

And it wasn’t just media outlets ringing the Shame Bell:

“In the future, they should not make these kinds of announcements (prototype made from recyclable plastic) until they actually do it,” Judith Enck, President of Beyond Plastics
“They are not going to survive as an organization if they don’t find a solution,” Paolo Taticchi, corporate sustainability expert at University College London.
“Lego undoubtedly had good intentions, but if you’re going to to (sic) announce a major environmental initiative like this—one that affects the core of your company—good intentions aren’t enough. And in this instance, it can even undermine progress.” Jesus Diaz, creative director, screenwriter, and producer at The Magic Sauce, writing forFast Company

As a LEGO lover, I am not unbiased, but WOW, the amount of hypocritical, self-righteous judgment is astounding! All these publications and pundits espouse the need for innovation, yet when a company falls even the tiniest bit short of aspirations, it’s just SHAME (clang) SHAME (clang) SHAME.

A LEGO Atlantis 8073 Manta Warrior (i.e., tiny) bit of context

In 1946, LEGO founder Ole Kirk Christiansen purchased Denmark’s first plastic injection molding machine. Today, 95% of the company’s 4,400 different bricks are made using acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), a plastic that requires 4.4 pounds of oil to produce 2.2 pounds of brick. Admittedly, it’s not a great ratio, and it gets worse. The material isn’t biodegradable or easily recyclable, so when the 3% of bricks not handed down to the next generation end up in a landfill, they’ll break down into highly polluting microplastics.

With this context, it’s easy to understand why LEGO’s 2018 announcement that it will move to all non-plastic or recycled materials by 2030 and reduce its carbon emissions by 37% (from 2019’s 1.2 million tons) by 2032 was such big news.

Three years later, in 2021, LEGO announced that its prototype bricks made from polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles offered a promising alternative to its oil-based plastic bricks.

But last Monday, after two years of testing, the company shared that what was promising as a prototype isn’t possible at scale because the process required to produce PET-based bricks actually increases carbon emissions.

SHAME!

A LEGO Art World Map (i.e. massive) amount of praise for LEGO

LEGO is doing everything that innovation theorists, consultants, and practitioners recommend:

Setting a clear vision and measurable goals so that people know what the priorities are (reduce carbon emissions), why they’re important (“playing our part in building a sustainable future and creating a better world for our children to inherit”), and the magnitude of change required
Defining what is on and off the table in terms of innovation, specifically that they are not willing to compromise the quality, durability, or “clutch power” of bricks to improve sustainability
Developing a portfolio of bets that includes new materials for products and packaging, new services to keep bricks out of landfills and in kids’ hands, new building and production processes, and active partnerships with suppliers to reduce their climate footprint
Prototyping and learning before committing to scale because what is possible at a prototype level is different than what’s possible at pilot, which is different from what’s possible at scale.
Focusing on the big picture and the long-term by not going for the near-term myopic win of declaring “we’re making bricks from more sustainable materials” and instead deciding “not to progress” with something that, when taken as a whole process, moves the company further away from its 2032 goal.

Just one minifig’s opinion

If we want companies to innovate (and we do), shaming them for falling short of perfection is the absolute wrong way to do it.

Is it disappointing that something that seemed promising didn’t work out? Of course. But it’s just one of many avenues and experiments being pursued. This project ended, but the pursuit of the goal hasn’t.

Is 2 years a long time to figure out that you can’t scale a prototype and still meet your goals? Maybe. But, then again, it took P&G 10 years to figure out how to develop and scale a perforation that improved one-handed toilet paper tearing.

Should LEGO have kept all its efforts and success a secret until everything was perfect and ready to launch? Absolutely not. Sharing its goals and priorities, experiments and results, learnings and decisions shows employees, partners, and other companies what it means to innovate and lead.

Is LEGO perfect? No.

Is it trying to be better? Yes.

Isn’t that what we want?

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

The Comforter Cold War of 2006

Leave a reply

(or How Assumptions Stifle Innovation)

The Comforter Cold War of 2006

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

In the room were two single beds, each with a fluffy white comforter folded neatly on top.

“Yeah, this is not gonna work.”

I had just entered my one-bedroom corporate apartment in Copenhagen, and while everything else was pleasantly light and spacious, there was no way I would spend the next six months sleeping in a single bed.

So, I set down my suitcases and immediately pushed the two beds together, using the two nightstands to secure them. The two comforters would work since there was just one of me, and I made a mental note to request a king-sized comforter from the desk when I left for work in the morning.

Thus began the great Comforter Cold War of 2006/2007.

Every few days, I would request a king-sized comforter for my jerry-rigged king-sized bed. I would return to find one queen-sized comforter. The luxury of a larger comforter would diminish the disappointment of not getting an appropriately sized one, and I would bask in the warmth of fully covered sleep. For one night. The next day, I would return to my room only to find that the two single comforters had returned.

This went on for nine months.

I shared this story of passive-aggressive housekeeping at my going away party with my colleagues. Midway through the story, I noticed the absolutely baffled looks on their faces.

“What?”

“Why did you want one comforter?”

“Because I have one bed. A comforter should cover the bed.”

“Why? A bed doesn’t need a comforter. A person does. You just need a comforter to cover you.”

[extended silence while we try to process each other’s points]

“So, does that mean that in Denmark, if a couple sleeps together, they each have their own comforter?”

“Yes, of course! Why would we share? Each person has their own temperature preferences, and there’s no worry about someone stealing your covers.”

My mind. Was. Blown.

This made so much sense. A comforter covers a person, so the 1:1 ratio of comforter to people is far more logical than a 1:1 ratio of comforter to bed (and often a 1:2 ratio of comforter to people). Seriously, how many relationships would be saved by simply having separate comforters?

Yet, for nine months, it made more sense to me to battle for a comforter size that apparently doesn’t exist in the country without ever asking why I couldn’t get what I was so clearly and reasonably (in my mind) requesting.

I assumed the apartment building didn’t have king-sized comforters or only enough for the actual king-sized beds. I assumed housekeeping was on automatic pilot, not realizing they were replacing a queen-sized comforter with two single ones. I assumed that communication amongst the staff was poor, so my request wasn’t being shared. I assumed a lot.

But I never assumed that I was wrong and that the root of the problem was a cultural difference so deeply ingrained and subtle that it never occurred to anyone to question it.

Question your assumptions.

Assumptions are a shortcut to understanding our world. Based on culture, experiences, and even stereotypes, we make assumptions about what came before, who we’re interacting with, what’s happening now, and what will happen next.

Most of the time, we’re right (or at least more right than wrong), so we keep making assumptions. It’s also why, when our assumptions are wrong, we tend to question everything but our assumptions.

And that kills innovation because it limits our curiosity and imagination, our perception of what’s possible, and our willingness to engage with and learn from others.

We all cling to assumptions that lead to Cold Wars.

What’s yours?

Image Credit: Pixabay

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.

What Einstein Got Wrong

Leave a reply

Defining Design

What Einstein Got Wrong - Defining Design

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

“If you can’t explain something simply, you don’t understand it well enough.”Albert Einstein (supposedly)

This is one of my favorite quotes because it’s an absolute gut punch. You think you know something, probably because you’ve been saying and doing it for years. Then someone comes along and asks you to explain it, and suddenly, you’re just standing there, mouth agape, gesturing, hoping that this wacky game of charades produces an answer.

This happened to me last Monday.

While preparing to teach a course titled “Design Innovation Lab,” I thought it would be a good idea to define “design” and “innovation.” I already had a slide with the definition of “innovation” – something new that creates value – but when I had to make one for “design,” my stomach sank.

My first definition was “pretty pictures,” which is both wrong and slightly demeaning because designers do that and so much more. My second definition, I know it when I see it, was worse.

So, I Googled the definition.

Then I asked ChatGPT.

Then I asked some designer friends.

No one had a simple definition of Design.

As the clock ticked closer to 6:00 pm, I defaulted to a definition from the International Council of Design:

“Design is a discipline of study and practice focused on the interaction between a person – a “user” – and the man-made environment, taking into account aesthetic, functional, contextual, cultural, and societal considerations. As a formalized discipline, design is a modern construct.”

Before unveiling this definition to a classroom full of degreed designers pursuing their Master’s in Design, I asked them to define “design.”

It went as well as all my previous attempts. Lots of thoughts and ideas. Lots of “it’s this but not that.” Lots of debate about whether it needs to have a purpose for it to be distinct from art.

Absolutely no simple explanations or punchy definitions.

So, when I unveiled the definition from the very official-sounding International Council of Design, we all just stared at it.

“Yes, but it’s not quite right.”

“It is all those things, but it’s more than just those things.”

“I guess it is a ‘modern construct’ when you think of it as a job, but we’ve done it forever.”

As we squinted and puzzled, what was missing slowly dawned on us.

There was nothing human in this definition. There was no mention of feelings or empathy, life or nature, connection or community, aspirations or dreams.

In this definition, designers consider multiple aspects of an unnatural environment in creating something to be used. Designers are simply the step before mass production begins.

Who wants to do that?

Who wants to be a stop, however necessary, on a conveyor belt of sameness?

Yet that’s what we become when we strip the humanness out of our work.

Humans are messy, emotional, unpredictable, irrational, challenging, and infuriating.

We’re also interesting, creative, imaginative, hopeful, kind, curious, hard-working, and resilient.

When we try to strip away human messiness to create MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) target markets and customer personas, we strip away the human we’re creating for.

When we ignore unpredictable and irrational feedback on our ideas, we ignore the creative and imaginative answers that could improve our ideas.

When we give up on a challenge because it’s more difficult than expected and doesn’t produce immediate results, we give up hope, resiliency, and the opportunity to improve things.

I still don’t have a simple definition of design, but I know that one that doesn’t acknowledge all the aspects of a human beyond just being a “user” isn’t correct.

Even if you explain something simply, you may not understand it well enough.

Image Credit: Misterinnovation.com

Sign up here to get Human-Centered Change & Innovation Weekly delivered to your inbox every week.