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Inspiring Innovation

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How a fifty year old concert still has a lot to teach us about innovation

Inspiring Innovation

GUEST POST from John Bessant

24th January, 1975. Fifty years ago and a concert that shouldn’t have happened. Forget the Taylor Swift ‘Eras’ level of organization; this was a small performance in a relatively small concert hall in Cologne, Germany. The performer was tired after the long (600km) drive from Switzerland where he’d played his previous concert only a couple of days earlier. His energy level was low plus he had back pain from a nagging problem which sitting for hours in the old Renault 4 belonging to his record producer hadn’t helped. He was committed to the evening because it was a recording session; his company wanted a live concert and this seemed a good option.

The venue was impressive; the old Cologne Opera House, site of some of the greatest concerts in musical history going back centuries. But this time something had gone badly wrong with the planning — at least as far as the piano on which he was to play was concerned. On a stage normally associated with the finest instruments — Steinways, Bechsteins, Bosendorfers and the like — there had been a mix-up.

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The instrument which had been requested was a Bosendorfer 290 Imperial but unfortunately the backstage staff had misinterpreted this and instead wheeled out a much smaller Bosendorfer baby grand, one normally only used for backstage warm ups. This wasn’t in the best of condition; its sound was tinny and thin in the upper registers and weak in the bass, the pedals didn’t work properly and the machine was badly in need of tuning.

The organizers desperately tried to secure a replacement instrument but were told that even if one could be found transporting it across town in the middle of the rainstorm which had started outside would risk damaging it. Instead a piano tuner set to work to try and minimize the problems of the smaller instrument with several heroic hours of attention.

Not surprisingly our performer’s first reaction on arriving and discovering this was to climb back in his car and drive away. There are limits, especially when what you really want is a long soak and perhaps a couple of painkillers washed down with a cheering drink. But Vera Brandes, the 18 year old woman who had organized the concert pleaded with him; she’d put everything she could into the event and managed to sell it out. But her would-be career as an impresario might be cut short before she started if he didn’t perform; the audience faced disappointment, she faced ruin if the concert didn’t happen. As she put it ’ ….if you don’t play tonight I’m going to be truly f***ed!…’ Dramatic perhaps but it touched a nerve and he agreed to go back into the hall and see whether they could salvage anything.

The concert was scheduled as a late night event, beginning after an earlier opera performance had finished. With the piano tuner working away even as he warmed up his hands the young pianist tried to get his mind in gear. The performance was to be in his signature style — a series of improvisations. So his mind needed to be able to rise above the challenges and somehow create space for, well, creating. At 11.30pm — with a loyal audience of 1300 people in their seats and patiently waiting for the auditorium bell to ring to signal the start of the show. He took his cue from this, echoing the bell’s notes as the first bars of his improvisation.

And so began a performance which has become a legend — and, thanks to the fact that it doubled as a recording session, one which was captured for others to enjoy. It still entrances fifty years later. The Köln Concert is arguably Keith Jarrett’s most famous work and probably the one which best demonstrates his enormous talent for improvisation. Despite — or perhaps because of — the conditions being so unfavorable he spun a web of genius, soaring from one rippling idea to the next with hardly a pause in between. His first piece lasted 26 minutes; after the briefest of pauses he began the second which went on for 48 minutes.

At the end of the show there was silence followed by rapturous applause. Something magical had happened and is still remembered, fifty years and four million copies on. Winner of multiple awards it is still the best-selling solo piano album of all time.

And it has a lot to offer as an object lesson in the art of innovation. First it’s useful to remind ourselves that innovation isn’t always about having plenty of resources. In these straitened times there’s a lot of concern that this will drive out innovation but, as Jarrett demonstrated, sometimes creativity loves constraints. From the most unpropitious of circumstances he was able to create something radically different.

Music Innovation

The old phrase ‘if life gives you lemons, make lemonade’ has often been used to describe the entrepreneurial skill of effectuation — and that was certainly a characteristic of this concert. Faced with the challenges imposed by the instrument he used various techniques like rolling left-hand figures to augment the weak bass while he concentrated his playing in the middle of the keyboard.

He was forced to jump the tracks and follow a different line to the ‘normal’ — getting out of the box. He isn’t alone; we have many examples where crisis and constraint have been powerful agents in forcing new directions. Think of the revolution in manufacturing which the ‘lean thinking’ movement brought about, one which spread to services and then the public sector. It was an approach born on the heavily constrained factory floors of post-war Japan. Faced with shortages of expensive raw materials, a lack of equipment, money and skilled labor they were forced to find new ways of working. And they evolved a suite of process innovations which changed the world.

Or our more recent experience with Covid-19 where the crisis conditions forced new approaches and forged new ways of solving the problems posed by the pandemic, not least in protective equipment and vaccine development.

This is, sadly, the kind of context in which humanitarian agencies operate all the time, trying to mitigate suffering and improve conditions under severe constraints. Importantly solutions developed in this space not only represent impressive examples of ‘frugal’ innovation but often signpost new trajectories for wider application. Developing the capabilities for working in crisis conditions as the norm builds powerful entrepreneurial capabilities which can be redeployed in other situations. Just as cold water swimming is now associated with wider health benefits so the shock of having to work under different conditions may be an important strategic aid.

Interestingly there is growing research interest in the idea of ‘forced crisis’ as a source of creativity. Artists have tried to force their work in new directions by introducing constraints. Record producer Brian Eno is famous for his use of a deck of cards — his ‘oblique strategies’ — which effectively randomizes roles and behaviors in a recording studio, forcing just the kind of crisis which confronted Keith Jarrett. And the results are similar; some great work by artists like David Bowie or U2 owes a lot to this technique. Lars von Trier, the film director, used a similar approach in his film appropriately titled ‘The five obstructions’ which documents the challenges he posed fellow film maker Jurgen Leth in order to try and force new creative pathways.

There’s more than a little of another skill we associate with entrepreneurs — bricolage. The ability to make something out of what is available, not wishing for what isn’t. And creatively combining it to make something new. Once again we have plenty of reference points. For example:

Dr Willem Kolff, the ‘father of dialysis’, was a Dutch physician who constructed the first dialyzer in 1943 in the occupied city of Groningen. Because materials were so scarce during the war, Kolff had to improvise and this resulted in the first dialyzer being made from sausage skins, orange juice cans, and old washing machine parts.

GE’s simple ECG machine (the MAC 400) was originally developed for use in rural India but has become widely successful in other markets because of its simplicity and low cost. It was developed in 18 months for a 60% lower product cost yet offers most of the key functions needed by healthcare professionals. It cost $800, instead of $2,000 for a conventional ECG machine, and reduced the cost of an ECG to just $1 (50 rupees) per patient. Newer versions have reduced this further to just 10 rupees per scan.

A key part this ‘frugal’ approach was the re-use of ideas and technology developed elsewhere, combined with adapting off-the-shelf parts. For example, the machine’s printer is an adaptation of one used in bus terminal kiosks across India.

A third aspect of the concert is important; taking risks and learning by doing. Prototyping on the fly. Jarrett’s style is classic improvisation, picking an idea and then running with it. In stand-up comedy and theater workshop improvisation it’s the ‘yes and…’ moment, not pausing to critique but rather trying stuff out to see where it might take you, moving on when it isn’t working. But where it does seem to resonate building on that, climbing inside, refining and developing.

We’d call it ‘pivoting’ in today’s agile innovation speak — but it’s the essence of Jarrett’s approach. It’s the opposite of planned music or playing the notes as written; this is emergence, using sensitivity, feedback, amplification of weak signals and half-sensed hints of the direction to go in.

Another theme illuminated by the concert experience it that of re-framing. Crisis as a word comes originally from the Greek where it means ‘turning point’. In Chinese the concept is represented by two characters place3d next to each other, one meaning ‘threat’ and the other ‘opportunity’. In other words a crisis poses a problem but also invites new perspectives which can create opportunity from it.

Only Jarrett knows what caused him to decide to play the concert — contractual commitments, the fact that the equipment was already set up? Or loyalty to his friend and chauffeur Manfred Eicher of ECM records? Or the desperate pleas of young Vera Brandes? Or perhaps the intrinsic challenge of somehow pulling off the impossible?

Whatever it was the decision forced a re-framing of the disaster to an opportunity. And, as the evening progressed the crowd sensed that they were experiencing something very different and special, watching a new creative pathway being forged.

Collaborative Innovation

But it’s not just the ability to re-frame, nor the courage to risk and experiment which is behind the success of that evening. For Keith Jarrett it wasn’t just crisis forcing his hand — or rather hands — dancing across the key board. He was able to explore and experiment because of an underlying technical capability, the result of years of practice and a honing of the capabilities which allowed him to improvise. He had to deploy them in new ways, to reconfigure for a particularly challenging circumstance but he was able to built on well-rehearsed behavioral routines.

In an organizational context this matches closely to what David Teece and colleagues call ‘dynamic capability’, something they described as the ‘…..ability to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external resources/competences to address and shape rapidly changing business environments….’. It’s not a reflex response or a plug ‘n’ play solution to new circumstances but instead a learned and rehearsed set of behavioral routines.

So if you’re looking for a new source of innovation inspiration away from the gadgetry of CES or the juggernaut of AI then maybe you could do a lot worse than have a listen (or listen again) to the Köln concert. Fifty years on it’s still got a lot to offer.

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Cover versions, Sequels, Taylor Swift and Innovation

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Taylor Swift and Innovation

GUEST POST from Pete Foley

An inherent contradiction in almost any new innovation is that it needs to be both new, but also somewhat familiar.  If it doesn’t offer anything new, there is little motivation for consumers to risk abandoning existing habits or preferences to try it.  But if it is not at least anchored in familiarity, then we ask consumers to put a lot of effort into understanding it, in addition to any opportunity cost from what they give up for trying something new.  Innovation is difficult, and a lot of innovations fail, at least in part because of this fundamental contradiction. 

Transformative Performance:  Of course, innovations can be successful, which means we do navigate this challenge.  But how? One way is to deliver something with such transformative benefits that people are willing to push themselves over the hump of learning something new. Huge benefits also create their own ‘gravity’, often spreading via world of mouth via media, social media, and even old-fashioned human-to-human conversations. This avoids the need for brute force mass marketing spend that can create the illusion of familiarity, but with a hefty price tag that is typically beyond smaller companies

Familiarity: The second option is to leverage what people already know in such a way that the ‘adoption hump’ becomes relatively insignificant, because new users intuitively know what the innovation is and how to use it.

Wow!  The best innovations do both.  CHATgpt Generative AI is a contemporary example, where transformative performance has created an enormous amount of word of mouth, but the interface is so intuitive there is little barrier to adoption, at least superficially. 

Of course, using it skillfully is another thing altogether, but I think there is an insight there too.  It’s OK to have an ongoing learning curve after initial adoption, but initial engagement needs to be relatively simple.  The gaming industry are masters of this.    

Little Wows!  CHATgpt is brilliant innovation.  But realistically, few of us are gong to create something quite that extraordinary.  So how do we manage to create more modest wows that still drive trial, engagement and ultimately repeat business?

Science, Art and Analogy:  As a believer that a lot of interesting things happen at the interface between science and art, and that analogy is a great tool, I think we cam learn a little about solving this by taking insight from the arts.  In this case, music and movies. For example, popular music routinely plunders the familiar, and repackages it as new via cover versions.  I often do the same myself!   Movies do something similar, either with the cycle of remakes of classic movies, or with sequels that often closely follow the narrative structure of the original.  

But this highlights some of the challenges in solving this dichotomy.  It’s rare for a remake, cover version, or sequel to do better than the original.  But a few do, so what is their secret?  What works, and what doesn’t? 

  1. Distance from the original.  Some of the best movie remakes completely reframe the original in ways that maintain a largely implicit familiarity, but do so without inviting direct comparisons of alignable differences to the original. For example, West Side Story is a brilliant retelling of Romeo and Juliet, Bridget Jones Diary reframes Pride and Prejudice, She’s All That is a retelling of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, while The Lion King retools Hamlet, etc.  I’m not suggesting that nobody sees these connections, but many don’t, and even if they do, the context is sufficiently different to avoid constant comparisons throughout the experience.  And of course, in most of these cases, the originals are not contemporary, so there is temporal as well as conceptual distance between original and remake.   Similarly with cover versions, Hendrix and the Byrds both completely and very successfully reframed Dylan (All Along the Watchtower and Mr. Tambourine Man).  Sinead O’Connor achieved similar success with Prince’s “Nothing Compares 2 U”.  For those of you with less grey in their hairl, last summers cover of Tracy Chapman’s ‘Fast Car’ by Luke Combs shows that covers can still do this. 

2.  Something New.   A different way to fail is to tap familiarity, but without adding anything sufficiently new or interesting.  All too often covers, sequels and remakes are simply weaker copies of the original.  I’m sure that anyone reading this can come up with their own examples of a disappointing remake or sequel.   Footloose, Annie, Psycho, Tom Cruise’s the Mummy or Karate Kid are all candidates for me.  As for sequels, again, I’m sure you can all name a respectable list of your own wasted 2 hours, with Highlander 2 and Jaws the Revenge being my personal cures for insomnia.   And even if we include novelty, it cannot be too predictable either.  It needs to at least be a little surprising.   For example, the gender reversal of the remake of Overboard has a point of difference in comparison to the Goldie Hawn original, but its not exactly staggeringly novel or surprising.  It’s a lot like a joke, if you can see it coming, it’s not going too create a wow.    

3.  Don’t Get De-Selected.  Learning from the two previous approaches can help us to create sufficient separation from past experience to engage and hopefully delight potential consumers.  But it’s important to not get carried away, and become un-tethered from familiarity.  For example, I personally enjoy a lot of jazz, but despite their often extraordinary skill, jazz musicians don’t fill many arenas.  That’s in part because jazz asks the listener to invest a lot of cognitive bandwidth and time to develop an ‘ear’, or musical expertise in order to appreciate it. It often moves a long way from the familiar original, and adds lot of new into the equation.  As a result, it is a somewhat niche musical form.  Pop music generally doesn’t require the same skill or engagement, and successful artists like Taylor Swift understand that.   And when it comes to innovation, most of us want to be mainstream, not niche. This is compounded because consumers today face a bewildering array of options, and a huge amount of information.  One way our brains have evolved to deal with complexity is to quickly ignore or ‘de-select’ things that don’t appear relevant to our goals. A lot of the time, we do this unconsciously.  Faced with more information than we can process, we quickly narrow our choices down to a consideration set that is ‘right-sized’ for us to make a decision.   From an innovation perspective, if our innovations are too ‘jazzy’, they risk being de-selected by a majority on consumers before they can be fully appreciated, or even consciously noticed.     

There’s no precise right or wrong strategy in this context. It’s possible to deliver successful innovations by tapping and balancing these approaches in many different ways.   But there are certainly good and bad executions, and I personally find it helpful to use these kinds of analogy when evaluating an innovation.   Are we too jazzy? Do we have separation from incumbents that is meaningful for consumers, and not just ourselves? And the latter is a real challenge for experts. When we are deeply engaged in a category, it’s all too easy to get lost in the magic of our own creations.  We see differences more clearly than consumers. It’s easy for us to become overly excited by relatively small changes that excite us, but that lack sufficient newness and separation from existing products for consumers who are nowhere near as engaged in our category as we are.  But it’s also easy to create ‘jazz’ for similar reasons, by forgetting that real world consumers are typically far less interested in our products than we are, and so miss the brilliance of our ‘performance’, or perhaps don’t ‘get it’ at all. 

For me, it is useful to simply ask myself whether I’m a Godfather II or a Highlander II, a Taylor Swift or a Dupree Bolton, or even Larry Coryell.  And there’s the rub.  As a musician, I’d rather be Larry, but as a record company exec, I’d far rather have Taylor Swift on my label. 

Image credits: Wikimedia Commons

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are November’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A Quantum Computing Primer — by Greg Satell
  2. Disagreements Can Be a Good Thing — by Mike Shipulski
  3. What’s Your Mindset — by Dennis Stauffer
  4. We Are Killing Innovation in America — by Greg Satell
  5. Two Kinds of Possible — by Dennis Stauffer
  6. Eddie Van Halen, Simultaneous Innovation and the AI Regulation Conundrum — by Pete Foley
  7. Five Secrets to Being a Great Team Player — by David Burkus
  8. Be Clear on What You Want — by Mike Shipulski
  9. Overcoming Your Assumptions — by Dennis Stauffer
  10. Four Things All Leaders Must Know About Digital Transformation — by Greg Satell

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in October that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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






Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of October 2023Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are October’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. A New Innovation Sphere — by Pete Foley
  2. Thinking Like a Futurist — by Ayelet Baron
  3. Crossing the Possibility Space — by Dennis Stauffer
  4. Twelve Digital Disruptions of Your Sales Cycle — by Geoffrey A. Moore
  5. How to Fix Corporate Transformation Failure — by Greg Satell
  6. The Biggest Customer Service Opportunity — by Shep Hyken
  7. Do You Prize Novelty or Certainty? — by Mike Shipulski
  8. What Pundits Always Get Wrong About the Future — by Greg Satell
  9. The Biggest Challenge for Innovation is Organizational Inertia — by Stefan Lindegaard
  10. What Company Do You See in the Mirror? — by Mike Shipulski

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in September that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last three years:

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






Stringing Together an Innovation Story

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How convergence and creative collisions fuel invention

Stringing Together an Innovation Story

GUEST POST from John Bessant

It was the Covid lockdown that did it. Got me into compulsive listening. As my physical world contracted so I spent more and more time taking voyages inside my head, carried along by music. These days the choice of vessels in my harbor is impressive; I can embark on a whole series of different journeys depending on my mood — jazz, classical, soft folky reminiscence or driving angry rock. But whatever the journey there’s a pretty good chance a guitar will feature somewhere in the mix.

(Confession; I’m a guitar player, have been since I was twelve years old and managed to persuade my parents to let me trade the trumpet I was learning as part of the school orchestra for a six string I’d seen in a shop window).

Even allowing for my bias and your many different musical tastes, you’d probably agree that taking the guitar out of our aural landscape would leave it a poorer place

And it would certainly be a commercially poorer one as well — the market for guitars is booming. It’s currently worth around half a billion dollars and is estimated to grow steadily. Covid-19 was an important sales agent, nudging millions of people to try and fulfill their dreams of converting air guitar playing to the real thing. Fender, one of the biggest names in the industry, had the best sales of its 80 year history during 2020 while James Curleigh, CEO of market leader Gibson, commented that during that year “we literally couldn’t deliver enough. Everything we were making, we could sell!”

But how did the guitar get here? And what role did innovation play in the process?

It’s an instrument with a long history — in fact if you take the idea of stretching strings across some kind of frame and letting the vibrations conjure sounds then we’re back at least three thousand years. There’s a stone carving of a Hittite musician entertaining at a Babylonian party in the Ancient Orient Museum in Istanbul and what he’s playing looks suspiciously close to being a guitar. It clearly didn’t take long for others to catch on the concept of the ‘chordophone’ (to give the technical term for a device which generates sound in this fashion). The Greeks and Romans had their harps and lyres, the Egyptians adding the lute, originally developed in Mesopotamia. And the Moors of north Africa have the oudh, an instrument with a lute-like body and a long neck, probably based on a dried gourd and later fashioned of wood. As it journeyed across to Spain it morphed into what we’d recognize today, a multi-stringed wooden necked device. Encyclopaedia Britannica has the origins of the Spanish guitar as something emerging in the 16th century, deriving from the guitarra latina, a late-medieval instrument with a waisted body and four strings.

Along with the lute, mandolin and other derivatives of the plucked instrument variety it became a widely-played instrument over the next four hundred years. Its popularity came partly from its versatility — it could sit center stage in an orchestral concerto but it could also accompany a lone balladeer or form the centerpiece of a fiery flamenco stomp. And partly from its portability — it was the ideal traveling instrument for the itinerant musician. You could find it in taverns and town squares, concert halls and at court and it spread far and wide, migrating from Europe with the early settlers to the emerging New World.

From the innovation point of view the guitar followed a classic pattern — plenty of experimentation with materials, number of strings, neck length and a host of other parameters in search of the right balance of sound and functionality. And then the emergence of a ‘dominant design’, the configuration which set the pattern, laid down the roadway along which the development of the instrument would travel in an extended period of continuous improvement. Most sources agree it was the Spanish guitar builder Antonio Torres Jurado who did this in 1850 with his invention of the fan-braced design. Bracing the hollow body with struts of wood meant it didn’t keep collapsing in on itself because of the tension in the strings and you could build a big enough body to give you the balance of tone, projection and volume which players required.

But by the end of the 19th century the guitar had come up against an increasingly frustrating limit. It wasn’t loud enough. You could have the sweetest, most lyrical tone but if you were trying to make yourself heard amongst the dance bands which emerged as the twentieth century dawned you had a problem. Innovation, of course, thrives on these conditions and a whole new breed of entrepreneurs began experimenting to try to make louder guitar. They explored many routes — making the whole instrument bigger (but more cumbersome), changing materials (like the steel guitars pioneered by the National company), and playing around with alternative sound amplification principles (like the resonator cone, a kind of dustbin-lid built into the guitar top which vibrates like a speaker and replaces the simple sound hole of the guitar).

This last was particularly embraced by the Dopraya Brothers, Slovakian immigrants to the USA who set up the Dobro company and gave their name to the guitar variant whose haunting sound instantly conjures the wide prairie landscape with its rolling tumbleweed in a thousand films.

Plenty of innovation — but no real breakthrough, nothing radical enough to bring a step change in performance. Until entrepreneurs began to borrow ideas from different industries and to import alternative technologies. As Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones expertly explained in a BBC interview looking at the history of the electric guitar, ‘all they did was put a phone in it….’ Then, after a trademark raspy guffaw, he added “But it was the right phone at the right time!”

Electronics in the early twentieth century had already given us the telephone, the radio and the gramophone and it had become clear that converting sound waves into electrical impulses and then reversing the process offered opportunities for amplifying instruments like the guitar. Patents from around 1910 reinforce Richards’ analysis; people were putting telephone transmitters inside violins and banjos. By the 1920s hobbyists used the (by then widely available) carbon button microphones from telephones, attaching them to the bridge of their instruments. Unfortunately these had a weak signal and as you increased the sensitivity to try to make it louder the microphone picked up other sounds and generated the unpleasant squeal of feedback.

The breakthrough came in 1931 when George Beauchamp designed a one piece instrument, cast in metal and resembling more a frying pan rather than a guitar. Harry Watson of the National Company takes the credit for having built the design which qualifies as the world’s first electric guitar. The key innovation was the use of a device to convert the instrument’s vibrations into electrical signals which could then be amplified — an arrangement of coils of wire wrapped around a metal core and designed to ‘pick up’ the signal. The concept of the pickup belongs to Watson’s friend Arnold Rickenbacker; the idea worked and in 1932 the two of them formed the Rickenbacker company and in 1937 they were awarded a patent.

That breakthrough fired the starting pistol for another innovation race with established manufacturers rushing to bring imitations to market and entrepreneurs looking to exploit the new possibilities in new (and hopefully better) designs. There was plenty of innovation space to play in. Not least dealing with the main limitation of the frying pan idea which was that it was a lap steel guitar, designed to be played horizontally with the instrument resting on the knees. Whilst the ‘Hawaiian sound’ associated with such an instrument was popular it had its limits; Rickenbacker quickly came up with their ‘electro-Spanish model B’ which was designed to be played upright with a strap — the instrument we know and love today.

Some sought to move the new idea to scale through celebrity endorsement. The Gibson company was one of the biggest players in the rapidly-growing musical instrument industry; they launched their Electro-Spanish 150 with the backing of the celebrated jazz guitarist Charlie Christian and a price tag of $150 trying to create a Model T Ford machine.

There was plenty of pent-up demand in the market; with the expansion of the dance band era musicians needed to play louder. But the limits of the design were still there — even if you replaced the sound hole with f-holes or did away with it altogether you still had the problem of sound waves bouncing around inside a hollow-bodied instrument and generating unwanted feedback.

Enter a user innovator, one Les Paul. Already a guitar player with a big following on the country and western circuit he was also a tinkerer. And in 1940 he came up with a solution to the feedback problem — why not dispense with the hollow body altogether and make the guitar solid? He built the Log — a wooden post with a pickup attached along which he stretched the strings. Recognising that he might have trouble pitching his new design he disguised it by gluing two halves of an old Epiphone guitar to the wooden post to give it the familiar guitar shape. This was simply a cosmetic addition to reduce the shock factor; in terms of the sound it made no contribution whatever.

In classic user innovator style he wasn’t particularly interested in producing and marketing the device himself — he had plenty to do as a performer. So he took it to the Gibson company, reasoning that with their history they might be interested in a radical innovation like this. Gibson had built their success on (and took their name from) the ideas of an eccentric mandolin maker who revolutionised the design of that instrument in 1910, doing away with the round bellied Neapolitan model and replacing it with the flat-backed variety. Unfortunately (for them as it later turned out) their response was decidedly lukewarm and so Les shelved his project.

Innovation is often like a soup; market needs and enabling technologies being stirred together by various entrepreneurs and coming slowly to the boil. As it reaches the right temperature so a breakthrough idea bubbles to the surface in two or three places simultaneously. So it wasn’t entirely surprising that in another part of the country someone else was playing with a similar idea to Les Paul.

This one was taking shape in the workshop of Paul Bigsby, an engineer with a passion for two things, country music and motorcycles. He shared this with a friend, Merle Travis, another successful country singer who talked about his ideas for improving the guitar he played — making it easier to tune, capturing the sustain which he could get from a steel-bodied guitar but without the feedback. Bigsby built guitars as a sideline to his motorcycle business and was able to bring Travis’s ideas to life; together they developed their own version of a solid bodied electric guitar.

And meanwhile in another part of the galaxy, or at least further up the road in California another player was about to join the game. Leo Fender wasn’t a guitar player — his instrument was the saxophone. He was an accountant by training though his passion was electronics — he’d spent his childhood disassembling and rebuilding radios and enjoyed exploring the growing potential of the new technology. While working as a book-keeper in Anaheim he was contracted by a local band leader to build a public address (PA) system; it was a success and he was asked to build six more.

That nudged the entrepreneur in him; in 1938 along with his wife he opened a radio repair shop with a borrowed $600 — “Fender Radio Service”. He quickly built up a business repairing and servicing the amplifiers and occasionally guitars for the many roadhouse bands coming through. This was a valuable apprenticeship; through the many projects he worked on he developed a deep understanding of the typical problems and how to improvise solutions to fix them quickly. He was continuously prototyping and experimenting with new ideas and implementing those ideas in the next project which came through his door.

He wasn’t alone; in particular he shared ideas with another enthusiast — Doc Kaufman — who was a lap steel guitar player, with a day job working for the Rickenbacker company. The two of them played around with ideas and eventually launched their company, K&F, to build lap steel guitars; in 1944 they patented their version incorporating Fender’s own design for a pickup; Kaufman left in 1946 and Leo renamed the company Fender Manufacturing. He worked on their ideas further, coming up with a thin solid body electric guitar which would be easy to tune, wasn’t too heavy and crucially didn’t feedback in the way the hollow bodied machines did. Pretty much the specification which Merle Travis had brought to Paul Bigsby.

In 1950 he launched it as the Fender Esquire and then, having added a second pickup, renamed it the Broadcaster in 1951. The threat of a lawsuit from the rival Gretsch company forced him to change the name and so the guitar became known as the Telecaster. The new wave was about to break.

Fender’s skills weren’t just in electronics; he was a pretty good listener too. He picked up on plenty of feedback from customers in his service business and so instead of improving on the Telecaster for his next product he set about designing a new machine incorporating many of their ideas. This led to a guitar which built of the strengths of the Telecaster but which added innovations in pickups — 3 instead of 2, giving the player plenty of control via a 5-way switch. The result was the Stratocaster, launched in 1954 and about to change the world of music.

Its success owed a lot to timing; the growth of Rock ’n’ Roll changed the format of dance bands towards the smaller trios and quartets and the sound and capability of the machine lent itself perfectly to the loud driving style. (Fender also had a hand in changing the shape of the ‘back line’ of the band, displacing the double bass with his solid-bodied Precision bass, introduced quietly alongside the Telecaster in 1951).

The Stratocaster appeared in Buddy Holly’s hands on the cover of his 1957 album and around the world musicians began taking notice. In the UK Hank Marvin, lead guitarist in Cliff Richard’s backing band The Shadows, was one of the first to own one and their success with a strong of instrumental hits firmly established the new sound. Not least in the ears of a generation of youngsters who aspired to own one and make their own music; as one of them, Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour said, ‘(the Stratocaster) is about as perfect as a guitar gets’. In the hands of another, one James Marshall Hendrix, the machine was pushed to its limits — not least through exploiting the very feedback which Leo Fender, Paul Bigsby and Arnold Rickenbacker had worked so hard to try and reduce!

The response from the other guitar manufacturers was once again one of copy and develop, rapid imitation and improvement. Gibson were quick to pick up on the new trend but had a long hard slog up the learning curve to reach the point where they could master the new tricks of building solid bodied guitars with complex pickups. In 1955 they launched their new guitar and went looking for another celebrity to help them promote their new product. They recruited one of the top performing acts of the time, Mary Ford and her partner — Les Paul. The man who they remembered as ‘the guy with the broomstick with the pickups on it’, and whose ideas they had turned down a decade earlier. They made slight amends by naming the guitar after him — and alongside the Stratocaster it is still one the most sought after models and has been widely imitated around the world — not least because of the exposure given it by a rising blues guitarist, Eric Clapton.

The rest is (recent) history. The market for both professionals and increasingly amateur musicians grew and with it a rising tide of innovation. Variations on the basic dominant design established by Leo Fender, Les Paul, Merle Travis and others proliferated with different shapes, different materials, extensive improvements around the electrics and so on. Bringing us to today’s world where — unless the person in the next apartment is at the early stages of trying to master thrash metal riffs — those innovations have helped create the soundscape into which we can escape, whether as players or listeners.

You can find my podcast here and my videos here

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

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2022

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of November 2022Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are November’s ten most popular innovation posts:

  1. Human-Centered Design and Innovation — by Braden Kelley

  2. Four Ways to Overcome Resistance to Change — by Greg Satell

  3. What to Do When You Don’t Know What to Do — by Mike Shipulski

  4. 5 Simple Steps for Launching Game-Changing New Products — by Teresa Spangler

  5. Why Small Teams Kick Ass — by Mike Shipulski

  6. Crabby Innovation Opportunity — by Braden Kelley

  7. Music Can Make You a More Effective Leader — by Shep Hyken

  8. Lobsters and the Wisdom of Ignoring Your Customers — by Robyn Bolton

  9. Asking the Wrong Questions Gets You the Wrong Answers — by Greg Satell

  10. Brewing a Better Customer Experience — by Braden Kelley

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in October that continue to resonate with people:

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last two years:

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Music Can Make You a More Effective Leader

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Music Can Make You a More Effective Leader

GUEST POST from Shep Hyken

You don’t have to be a rock star with an album that makes millions to say, “Music changed my life.” You can be the leader of an organization, searching for a way to overcome an obstacle or challenge plaguing you—potentially for years.

The key to resolving an ongoing leadership challenge could lie in the music you’re listening to. Listening to the right music can actually shift the way you think, help you overcome obstacles and make you a better leader.

Suppose you’re feeling frustrated with your team, wondering why they’re not as motivated or engaged as you are, why they aren’t handling customers the way you would like, why you can’t fully delegate or something else. In that case, you’re probably asking, “How can I get them to change?”

But that may not be the right question. What if you asked instead, “What can I change in myself?” What if the thing you need to change is your internal environment, not your external one?

This is the tough question that The Leader’s Playlist, the book debut by Harvard lawyer turned CEO coach Susan Drumm, invites leaders to ask themselves.

I had the chance to interview Drumm for an episode of Amazing Business Radio. In the interview, she talked about game-changing ways leaders can become more effective. Specifically, she shared a powerful, practical tool for shifting unconscious perspectives and behaviors that may create a poor leadership outcome. That tool is music.

According to Drumm, music is a “brain hack for shifting ineffective leadership patterns.” From her decades of coaching top executives, including billionaire CEOs and high-profile political figures, Drumm knows that when someone is struggling as a leader, especially if they’re feeling strong emotions such as burnout, frustration, imposter syndrome, etc., it’s often because there’s an internal ‘playlist’ on repeat that is shaping how they view their circumstances—not outside pressures.

Drumm says, “This playlist of thoughts is keeping them stuck. It’s become that soft background music they may be unable to hear, but it’s there, hijacking their emotional state.”

The internal playlist is typically rooted in childhood “wounds.” Drumm highlights common “playlist titles” she encounters in the executives and leaders she coaches, including, but not limited to:

  1. I am all alone
  2. I am not good enough
  3. I am trapped and confined

These subconscious messages are deeply embedded in the leader’s psyche, and it’s a challenge for most leaders to simply think or decide their way out of their playlist.

During my interview, I asked Drumm if playing music can dramatically change a mood. She quickly answered, “Yes,” so I shared a short story about a favorite song I listen to in the morning when I need a little boost to get me going. The song is Perfect Day by Hoku. It is the upbeat song that was played in the opening of ‘Legally Blonde’. The lyrics don’t match with my work ethic (Sun’s up/It’s a little after twelve/Make breakfast for myself/Leave the work for someone else), but the energy, lightheartedness and overall meaning make it a great song—at least for me.

Music can alter your mood, clear your head and change how you think over time. Drumm’s book outlines a strategy for using music to tap into your subconscious. Change the way you feel, and you shift your thought patterns. Her goal is to help leaders create a playlist that reflects the life they want to lead, understand how their current playlists came to be and learn how the power of music can unlock a leader’s true potential.

So, if you’re struggling to lead your team effectively, check for an internal playlist playing in the background, and then create a literal playlist to help rewire those beliefs. As Drumm says: your personal evolution sparks your leadership evolution!

This article originally appeared on Forbes

Image Credit: Shep Hyken

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Harnessing the Dragons of your Imagination for Innovation

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Harnessing the Dragons of your Imagination for Innovation

The harder I try not to think of myself as an artist, the stronger I’m pulled back to the idea that even if my art is a little different than traditional drawing, painting, photography, music, dance and other traditional arts, that it is still art.

Today’s article was inspired by a Lex Fridman podcast interview with the lead singer of Imagine Dragons – Dan Reynolds.

Dan is a Mormon, a musician, one of nine children, a father, and a surprisingly humble and astute person. All of these things are relevant because who we are as a person is the result of every facet of ourselves today, and in our upbringing. Our art comes from our experience and our empathetic connections to the experiences of others. While Dan is a musician, he is also an artist, and artists can and should learn from all different types of artists.

At the heart of every kind of art is truth, but more about that later.

“After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.” — Aldous Huxley

In this article I will highlight what I took away from the interview and some of the great music they Lex and Dan discussed, but feel free to jump in and watch the conversation at any point:

The most important takeaways from the interview are these:

  1. People have really good bullshit detectors
  2. You must authentically feel something, and your audience must feel it too
  3. Having a source of honest feedback is critical to progressing your art

Let’s now look at each of these and relate them from music to innovation:

1. People have really good bullshit detectors

In the interview Dan contrasts their success with two different records “Bet My Life” and “Believer” – which both did well – but “Believer” out-streamed “Bet My Life” by 10x.

Here is “Bet My Life” from YouTube with its 160 Million views on YouTube:

And “Believer” with its 2.2 Billion views on YouTube:

Okay, maybe that’s a bit more than 10x, but Dan when asked about what went wrong with “Bet My Life” he admitted that they produced the song themselves and that they took what was originally a stripped-down song and over-produced it – costing the song some of its authenticity in the process.

If we cross over to innovation on this topic, in the past I’ve written that Veracity is Required for Innovation Success.

Yes, innovation is an art.

Here are some key thoughts from this article on the importance of truth to innovation:

“Fail to identify a solution with real innovation veracity and you are likely to miss potential elements of optimal value creation, you will likely struggle to make its value accessible, and there is a greater likelihood that you will fail to properly translate the value of the solution for your customers.

So, taken another way, the search for innovation success is a search for truth. You must therefore unlock the inner truths of your intended customers (think unmet needs or jobs-to-be-done), you must search in areas that your intended customers will feel are true for your brand, and areas that feel true to employees given the company’s mission and values. When your pursuit of innovation centers around truth and when you commit to a focused effort to increase your innovation capability – and to pursue Innovation Excellence – then and only then do you have your best chance at innovation success.”

2. You must authentically feel something, and your audience must feel it too

In innovation we often talk about how it takes 100+ ideas to find 10 projects worth investing time and money in, and from those 10 projects – if you’re lucky – you might have one show promise as a potential innovation.

In the Lex Fridman interview Dan Reynolds revealed that he writes about 100 songs a year and from those perhaps 10 might get recorded. Dan started as a drummer, and while voice is often as seen as the melody of a song, his vocals are in part driven by a percussion mindset. For innovation we like to speak about bringing different mindsets and perspectives to increase the chances of finding something meaningful.

Speaking of feeling and authenticity, Dan tells a story in the interview about how they were working on an album with famous record producer Rick Rubin and listened to a song that Dan believed in, but after hearing it he told Dan “I don’t believe you.”

The path to adoption is through belief…

Some of the songs they listened to in regard to ‘feeling it’, included Harry Nilsson’s “Without You”:

Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son”:

And Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle”:

Identifying whether you are transmitting authentic feelings or not is very difficult. We’ve already spoken about the importance of veracity, and if we build on that using something I wrote about in my article That’s Innovation with Two V’s, leveraging information from the movie A Good American, about how the following three components can help you identify signals and drive the transformation of DATA into INTELLIGENCE (or innovation veracity in our context):

  1. Volume – in order to derive meaningful conclusions you need a lot of data inputs, in this case, lots of idea fragments (ideas come later)
  2. Variety – multiple perspectives are necessary to avoid blind spots and increase the potential for connecting idea fragments
  3. Velocity – volume by itself is not enough, momentum is important too. You have to keep Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire

3. Having a source of honest feedback is critical to progressing your art

Making art that resonates with others is incredibly different. It is easy to get lost in our own perspective.

“If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” – African Proverb

It is incredibly important as an artist, as an innovator, that you find a group of trusted voices to allow you to accelerate the development of your art – or your innovation. Science experienced an incredible acceleration in the private clubs of London in the 1600’s, impressionist art experienced an amazing acceleration in the south of France in the 1800’s – because of the rapid exchange of ideas and feedback.

For Dan Reynolds, one of those trusted voices is his father, he also has one of his brothers as the band’s manager, another brother as their lawyer, and brings in external voices to help with the production of their records – people like Rick Rubin.

Listening to your trusted external voices can help you see where you’re falling short. There is a great quote in the interview above regarding Dan’s realization around the sometimes-uncomfortable role of a famous person in society.

“By not saying anything, I was saying everything.” – Dan Reynolds
(re: LGBTQ issues at the time)

It is only from being open to receiving feedback that we can learn anything. And when it comes to art, when it comes to Optimizing Innovation Resonance:

To achieve and maintain innovation resonance, you must nurture a commitment to learning fast, both during the innovation development process and after the launch of a potential innovation. You must maintain a laser focus on how you are creating value, helping people access that value, and translating that value for people so they can understand how your potential innovation may fit into their lives. So, do you have processes in place as part of your innovation methodology for measuring and evolving solutions in place to help you get to innovation resonance?

And to help reduce the tyranny of the innovation hero and to encourage innovation collaboration, I created the Nine Innovation Roles:

  1. Revolutionary
  2. Conscript
  3. Connector
  4. Artist
  5. Customer Champion
  6. Troubleshooter
  7. Judge
  8. Magic Maker
  9. Evangelist

… to make a place for everyone in innovation.

Conclusion

There is a reason this blog is called Human-Centered Change & Innovation. The reason is that when it comes to change, innovation and transformation, the people side of all three is everything.

To be successful, you must consider “the other.”

You must engage with “the other.”

You must understand “the other.”

This requires empathy, this requires veracity, and when you bring empathy and veracity together, you have a chance at achieving resonance.

All types of art and innovation require empathy, veracity, and resonance for success.

I hope you’ve enjoyed the interview, the music, and the conversation.

I hope all of this will help you slay your dragons, imagine a future where you are connecting more fully with your audience, and creating something amazing.

Keep innovating!

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Confessions of a Business Artist

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Confessions of a Business Artist

I am an artist.

There, I’ve said it. This statement may confuse some people who know me, and come as a shock to others.

Braden, what do you mean you’re an artist? You’ve got an MBA from London Business School, you’ve led change programs for global organizations, helped companies build their innovation capabilities and cultures, are an expert in digital transformation, and you can’t even draw a straight line without a ruler. What makes you think you’re an artist?

Well, okay, that may all be true, but there are lots of different kinds of artists. I may not be a painter, a sculptor, a musician, an illustrator, or even a singer, but I am an artist, a business artist.

What is a business artist you ask?

A business artist sees through complexity to what matters most. A business artist loves working with PowerPoint and telling stories, often through keynote speeches and training facilitation, or through writing. A business artist loves to share, often doing so for the greater good, sometimes to their own financial detriment, in an effort to accelerate the knowledge, learning, and creating new capabilities in others. A business artist is a builder, often creating new businesses, new web sites, and new thinking. A business artist is comfortable stepping into a number of different business contexts and bringing a different energy and a different approach to creating solutions to complex requirements. Part of the reason a business artist can do this is because a business artist values their intuitive skills just as much as they value their intellectual skills, and may also consciously invest in getting in touch with higher levels of intuitive capabilities, enabling them to excel in roles that involve a great deal of what might be termed ‘organizational psychology’.

A business artist often appears to be a jack of all trades, sometimes bordering on what was portrayed in the television show The Pretender, and can be an incredibly powerful addition to any team tackling a big challenge, but a business artist’s incredible ability to contribute to the success of an organization is often discounted by the traditional recruiting processes of most human resource organizations because of its emphasis on skill matching and experience, skewing hiring in favor of someone with a lot of experience at being mediocre at a certain skillset over someone with limited experience but greater capability. A business artist often appears to be ahead of the curve, often to their own detriment, arriving too early to the party by grasping where organizations need to go before the rest of the organization is willing to accept the new reality. This is a real problem for business artists.

Now is the time for a change. Given human’s increasing access to knowledge, and the shorter time now required to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills required to perform a task, people who are comfortable with complexity, ambiguity, and capable of learning quickly are incredibly valuable to organizations as continual change becomes the new normal. Because experience is increasingly detrimental to success instead of a long-lived asset, given the accelerating pace of innovation and change, we need business artists now more than ever.

So how do we create more business artists?

Unfortunately our public schools are far too focused on indoctrination than education, on repetition over discovery. Our educational system specializes in creating trivia masters and kids that hate school, instead of building a new generation of creative problem solvers that love to learn and explore new approaches instead of defending status conferred based on mastery of current truths (which may be tomorrow’s fallacies). We are far too obsessed with STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) when we should be focused on STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Art and Music). Music is creative math after all. My daughter’s school has a limited music program and NO ART. How is this possible?

To create more business artists we need to shift our focus towards art, creative problem solving and demonstrated learning, and away from memorization, metrics, and repetition. Can we do this?

Can we create an environment where the status quo is seen not as a source of power through current mastery and instead towards a system where improvements to the status quo are seen as the new source of power?

Organizations that want to survive will do so. Countries that want to stay at the top of the economic pyramid will do so. So what kind of country do you want to live in? What kind of company do you want to be part of?

Do you have the courage to join me as a business artist or to help create a new generation of them?

Image credit: blogs.nd.edu

This article originally appeared on Linkedin


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Where Does Value Come From?

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Stikkee 50 Dollar T-shirt

Where does value come from?

What makes people willing to pay $50 for a t-shirt that’s just like the one that ten other people are wearing in the club?

What makes people pay a premium for Apple products with features introduced by other companies months or years before?

If you are truly trying to be innovative, instead of creative or inventive, you MUST understand how your prospective customers assign value for the new solution you are about to introduce. This may require lots of customer interviews, ethnography, forced choices, and other upfront research, but it’s worth it, because if you don’t build your potential innovation on a new, unique insight then it has no chance of succeeding in the marketplace. And as I’ve said before, to achieve innovation you have to focus not just on creating value in the product or service itself, but all three sources of value:

  • Value Creation
  • Value Translation
  • Value Access

So, let’s get back to the $50 t-shirt…

Here in Seattle we are proud of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, who became a chart topping rap music music act by choosing not to follow the traditional way of making it in the music business so they could not only maintain their creative freedom, but also to make more money. Their mega-hit “Thrift Shop” pokes fun at fashionistas and has helped to make thrift shopping cool instead of embarrassing. Thank you to their combination of skills, they’ve been able to do a lot of the hard work themselves to promote their music, including making this video:

By remaining independent, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis are free to collaborate with whomever they want, when they want, and with sponsors who add value in specific ways consistent with the current project they are working on, instead of a record company extracting a rent from all the artist’s activities (whether they are adding value or not). Here is one such project they undertook with another local artist, Fences, and sponsorship from a company headquartered here locally – T-Mobile USA. It’s a great song and a pretty cool video if you haven’t heard or seen it before:

I for one am grateful that Macklemore and Ryan Lewis didn’t sign a record deal, and record executives have candidly admitted that they would have totally ruined the act by forcing them to change to be more “marketable.” The success of Macklemore and Ryan Lewis (and others) serve to highlight the disruption in the music industry value chain that continues to occur, creating discontinuities that artists like Macklemore and Ryan Lewis can take advantage of. This is of course as long as they have the digital and social skills to get the word out and help their music spread.

Is there disruption happening in your industry’s value chain?

How can you take advantage of the discontinuities?

Please note the following licensing terms for Stikkee Situations cartoons:

1. BLOGS – Link back to https://bradenkelley.com/category/stikkees/ and you can embed them for free
2. PRESENTATIONS, please send $25 to me on PayPal by clicking the button 3. NEWSLETTERS & WEB SITES, please send me $50 on PayPal by clicking the button
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