Design_at_the_edge

Serious play in protected play spaces produces innovative behaviour

Inverted Cheerleader Pyramid
Originally uploaded by jurvetson

The new production of knowledge is a prerequisite for innovative behaviour (described in the book The Knowledge-Creating Company: How Japanese Companies Create the Dynamics of Innovation ) so any tools and processes that help should be grasped  by innovation teams everywhere.

We can connect Edgar Schein theories, Donald Schon's Reflection in action to Serious Play and Gaming using iterative capital as a resource for exploring, learning and change.
I referred to protected play space as a means to reduce learning anxiety in this post. In Serious Play Michael Schrage talks of shared space:

"Conversations don’t have memories; only their participants do. ... In most conversations, people take turns exchanging information, not sharing it. In most conversations, the absence of memory means a useful phrase or expression can be distorted or lost. ... It takes shared space to create understandings. Conversation is vital, but it isn’t enough." 

The shared space can be a tangible representation of an idea- for instance a sketch, simulation, digital model, physical prototype, etc. Successful innovation demands more than a good strategic plan; it requires creative improvisation. Much of the "serious play" that leads to breakthrough innovations is increasingly linked to experiments with models, prototypes, and simulations. As digital technology makes prototyping more cost-effective, serious play will soon lie at the heart of all innovation strategies, influencing how businesses define themselves and their markets.

One digital technology that has a place in behaviour change in shared space must include is a generalised simulation tool called Gaming.

Motherbrain writes of Gaming as learning here

"The practice and production of game design enables a type of reflection in action that supports good learning. This approach has been mirrored over the years in the development of products like Mindstorms and open-source tools and programming languages like Logo, Squeak, Scratch, and Alice designed to teach procedural thinking, problem solving, and logic, by learning to program. Seymour Papert and Michel Resnick pioneered thinking about how the acquisition of a programming language empowers a person to model knowledge and to see the world as a system of interconnected parts. Gamestar Mechanic shares in this approach not by teaching the language of programming but the language of game design........ If you buy Raph Koster's argument in his book, A Theory of Fun, you'll agree that the reason why we play games is because games teach us patterns in low stakes situations that we can then apply to real world situations as necessary.

This sounds like the Kolb learning cycle, but we are, in fact, invoking a different learning cycle where we are in an unstable environment, where reflecting on what we know to make sense of things is only an insufficient part of the story. Today organizations are faced with accelerating rates of scientific and technological change, which combine with global media and communication to ensure that fashions, ideas, products and services spread like wildfire. Whilst there is no substitute for business competence, efficiency and cost control, businesses also has to deliver “value” to the consumers. That is something that consumers, existing or new, will find desirable.

To deliver to such demanding consumers innovations that matter to them requires building new knowledge from emerging patterns of consumer insights, societal trends, individuals' behaviours that together with emerging and improving technologies challenge the best of us. Collaborative teams that behave in a common cause use their total knowledge deconstructed and reconstructed in interesting ways ensure that timely solutions to emergent problems are more easly managed. Such edge behaviours need different frameworks to give form to such possibility. The Design Journey is a process that enables individuals to work across disciplinary and organisational boundaries to form a collaborative team supporting them as they embark on an uncertain journey across the competitive landscape

Re-Thinking how their project connects with the overall business objectives;

Deciding the project Strategy and way forward.

Discovering motivating Insights that enable the team to generate a collaboratively create a vision for the project outcome.

Re-Energising the team, its clients and the consumers by

Demonstrating valid Prototypes and then deploying viable products and services that are highly valued by the consumers who experience them.

To allow new combinatorial knowledge to emerge we must have process that embraces four principles, known as the 4 S's:

Space

To expand our thinking leading across a broader range of opportunities.

Simplicity

To reduce unnecessary complexity and to focus on delivering excellent consumer experiences

Self-confidence 

to believe in our insights and to lead the market

Speed

of decision making and of time to market

Embarking on the Design Journey means that individuals acknowledge that as individuals thay don't have the answers but, by building a shared vision and then combining, challenging, reflecting and recombining their total knowledge they will create something wonderful that will excite the consumer and all those whose task it is to deliver on that vision. We need to be aware that we don't hold the solution and only by collaboratively designing will we have the opportunity to create it. Emergent consumer needs and experiences can, if the leadership allows, result in more radical experiences that are truly valuable to them and profitable for the organisation.

Remember that when we open a health spa it was intended to refresh our product line! This would be truly emergent thinking, beyond Kolb- setting our radicals free!

Left picture uploaded by sunshinecity 

Right picture uploaded by joka2000 

Both used with thanks under CC.

Do you need more 'MORE'?

  Do you need more 'MORE'? 
  Originally uploaded by Gaetan Lee

So we didn't get the response we expected when we asked for more resources to do this new 'stuff' which we are sure will change things for the better round here!
"I know we resolved to get more resource to do new things but it didn't work out".
Shoulders droop.. 2008 is going to be as boring as 2007.
"But hang on! Last weekend I found this book at a second-hand bookstall. It is called Competing for the Future by Gary Hamel,  C. K. Prahalad in 1996."
Chapter 7 talks of Strategy as Leverage. In particular it talks on page 175 of 5 ways of Resource Leverage:

 

"Resource leverage can be achieved in five fundamental ways: by more effectively concentrating resources on key strategic goals, by more efficiently accumulating resources, by complementing resources of one type with those of another to create higher-order value, by conserving resources wherever possible, and by rapidly recovering resources, minimising the time between expenditure and payback."

I once had the pleasure of leading a Design and Technology Group whose mission was to bridge the qulity divide between aesthetic intent in the Design House and the implementation in our Suppliers. We needed to do more with less so we resolved to tackle the resource leverage by proposing a strategic thrust as a hypothesis.

 

Hypothesis: We need to learn how to be masters at effectively concentrating our resources on key goals, more efficiently accumulating key resources, complementing our resource type with other types of resource to create greater value, conserving resources wherever possible, rapidly recovering resources by reducing time between expending resource and seeing payback.
We will achieve this by: Identifying our key internal and external 'customers' who we interface/interact with on project teams

Concentrating Resources
 

Converging: (preventing divergence from goals over time)

We will make sure our work-plans are aligned with the strategic thrusts of our key customers.

Watch out for customers who align their point of view in ways that poses the least threat to continued funding of their individual bits of the business.

Focusing: ( preventing dilution of resources at a particular point in time)

A rule of thumb is that no team member can attend to more than two improvement goals at a time.

Make sure each “initiative” carries on as a layer of advantage for the next one to build on.

Remember focus is not about exclusivity but predetermines the trade-offs we have to make that each member has to make when allocating their time and resources.

Accumulating Resources
 

Mining-extracting and sharing: We will sit down with participants after each project event and ask our them what they have learned from the situation and making sure that we share our learning too. We can then all learn from the experience. Also we can ask leading questions like “Honda and Apple both develop less new models and products than their competitors yet they improve much faster. How do we do this? How do we forget faster? So that we can make room for new ideas.

Borrowing: How can we use the resources of other groups (including those outside our organisation) to help us in getting things done? We can maximise our group learning by making sure we mine the activity whenever the opportunity arises. Raise their curiosity so that they want to participate. 

Complementing Resources
 

Blending: Practice the art of blending different skills to multiply the value of each (e.g. Rapid prototyping combined with the feasibility workshop is more powerful than each alone). Remember blending is powerful in cross functional opportunities.

 

Balancing: Make sure we acquire the art of taking ownership of resources that multiply the value of a team’s unique resources (ownership means being able to manage the resource effectively rather than at arms length).
(e.g. a discussion about deciding> discovering>describing> defining>demonstrating>deploying...  

 

How do we do a good (no great!) job at direction and discover without access to the right competences... Connecting it all together in a seamless way will be incredibly effective.

Conserving Resources
 

Recycling:

The more often we use a skill or competence is reused the greater the resource leverage ... As we increase the technology enablers how do we do this... Worth thinking it through in design phase.

Co-opting: Finding a common “enemy”, goal, threat that enables another group to work collectively to deliver something we both couldn’t have done as separate groups. This can lead to some unusual alliances!

Protecting:

Protecting is about not sacrificing resource on efforts that have odds stacked against us. We know we have considerably less resource than we can deploy on projects. The opportunity is to pick those that give the business the best opportunity to succeed and us the best opportunity to collaboratively learn. We need to only play where the Judo style of using the strength of others plus our neat techniques leads to maximum benefit for us. Another way is to look at this as
Targeting: 
The goal here is to focus on the things that give greatest value to our customer at least cost (expenditure of effort, etc.) to ourselves!

 

Recovering Resources
Speed is the key here. Can we iterate faster so that we can get more decisions made faster rather than go more slowly to suit other people's cycle times. We need to work on making ourselves more attractive to make this work!

It is amazing how much resource can be 'discovered'. In order to keep accessing it we need to maximise our value to the business!

 

Making the most of innovation resolutions

  Direction/Self-Portrait 
  Originally uploaded by Wetsun

Another New Year with a great deal to ponder... the economic outlook is challenging. Two shops in my local town of Knutsford have shut their doors for the last time and we are only into week 2! "Marks and Sparks" were a bit of a damp squid as they announced their 3rd quarter results today...

However, Robert Peston said (here) there were still reasons for hope at M&S despite latest results.

"Marks hasn't yet resorted to the kind of savage price-discounting we are seeing from its rivals. So it has ammunition in reserve".

Peston also commented on the dire market conditions and how M&S might weather it.

Sir Stuart Rose the CEO, replied that M&S were obsessive about product whether fantastic new products in the pipeline, obsessive about service and are investing in retail stores.. which will enable them to weather the storm.

Jeffrey Phillips has blogged his Innovation Resolutions list reproduced below

1. Our innovation team will ensure our work is aligned with and supported by the senior management team.
2. We resolve to take bigger risks and disrupt at least one product or market this year
3. We'll incorporate innovation as a regular component of our strategy and treat it as a standard operating procedure, rather than something we "bolt on" to existing operations
4. In 2008, we'll move from purely product innovation to seek opportunities for innovation in processes, services, business models and other intangible solutions
5. As our innovation capability improves, we'll seek ideas and inputs from our business partners and customers on a regular basis
6. We will implement a more consistent, sustainable innovation approach across our organization
7. Innovation will take on a customer focus. We'll eliminate technology led innovation and seek instead unmet or undermet customer wants and needs
8. We'll spend more time understanding trends and looking over the horizon to ascertain what's happening so we can respond more effectively or alter the course of what happens
9. We'll provide the necessary resources for innovation to flourish. After all, if innovation is so important, then we should provide the people and dollars necessary for it to work effectively
10. We'll stop worrying about making it perfect and just do something radical.

I'd done recently looking at barriers, needs and exemplars of innovative teams and institutions summarised as

If we map one on the other my feeling is that to a first approximation resolution:
1 is about lack of clear strategic direction and stronger links between innovation and strategy
2 is about better handling of risk (more risk taking); lack of tools to manage and mitigate risk
3 is about stronger links between innovation and strategy
4 is about lack of clear strategic direction, better measurement of what is going on and poor visibility of success and failure indicators
5 is about lack of ideas and access to potential products
6 is about better processes for innovation work
7 is about lack of commercialisation process and methods to manage and mitigate risk
8 is about lack of clear strategic direction
9 is about limited spare capacity and resources to reassign
10 is about lack of entrepreneurial skills

The exemplars in the list are Insight, especially about our consumers, clients, customers and users, internally and externally. Strategic direction is about knowing what we want to be known for internally as a group and externally as an institution. A True Team Approach is about genuinely collaborative behaviour that can be regarded as the activity of an every day team, not an every meeting team. The exploitation of a Disciplined design process ensures that the benefits from the above are maximised.

So how do we get started?

Well, the answer is, depending on your position in the organisation, start anywhere and everywhere... which sounds like a recipe for chaos.. but then innovation and change are a rather chaotic activity.

One place to start is with an innovation framework.. at its simplest this is asking "What is our strategy?" and how does each project we are undertaking contribute to achieving it? And by each project I mean each and every one! The personnel database that Human Resources are looking for? the restroom redecoration? the new product development activity? etc, etc.

Or we could start by surveying our overall capabilities and skill levels. If we have new product development activities getting under way then we can look at ways of using a better innovation process around a team approach, better matching assigned resources to the project goal. If as expected resources are tight and may get tighter then we need to understand how we might release resources by better ways of working.

What is clear though is that we need to look for high leverage opportunities that will maximise impact. Doing stuff that has little perceived benefit is a recipe for losing rather than gaining momentum!

So back to resolution : what does the word mean: The visual thesaurus  reveals this

The word has many connotations ... if we mouse over the map we will find

or

Our leadership team will get people's attention if they resolve to change behaviour "the way we do things round here is no longer enough to survive and thrive..."

"And we are embarking on a challenging journey so we need to discuss and agree on what and how we are going to change."

and a key question for all leaders and managers is

"How do we make the most of the talents, skills, competencies, tools, and techniques of our little band of people?"

I will come back to this question shortly.....

Picture uploaded on by Francois Schnell. Used with thanks under CC.

 

Opportunity for strong robust growth 2008

  7042_image(3968) 
  Originally uploaded by IC Pod

I was an academic in the recession that hit the UK in the late 1970's.
One summer I did some research on Design Process and Analysis with a sponsored student from an engineering company that made hydraulic pumps and valves for everything from taps in a home central heating to industrial steam raising plant. They had a highly skilled but compact factory workforce and highly professional design and engineering teams. They had invested heavily in automated manufacture and so were a relatively lean operation. Orders were thin, so ,what did they do? innovate. Even then they realised that India would become the heart of iron and steel casting and finishing industry so they started to prepare for that day.

So in that recession they made some key strategic decisions:

To move simple casting and finishing work to India (e.g. domestic tap assemblies and central heating pumps and valves:-

To invest in a new range of superior industrial pumps and valves incorporating the latest material, machining, manufacturing and fluid dynamics knowledge;

to simplify designs so that manufacture was more straightforward ( and one day when India's manufacturing quality had developed to the necessary level- move production there- joint venture business model);

to retain and improve the skills and competences of their staff to handle the interactions and pressures of collaborative working across internal and external interfaces. This implies the acquisition of new and different tools and technologies.

It strikes me that as resources get scarcer driven by economic imperatives the same approach will pay dividends, wherever we are starting from. But if you are a control freak this approach (involving letting go), will drive you mad.. if you are a process freak then this period is going to be great fun!

So let us start by adopting a radical approach to equity release.. where the capital we  want to  exploit is iterative capital... the process way is to go looking for M>W>D. Releasing budget committed against time for a project so that it can be used in other more effective ways, remembering Michael Schrage's words in Hyperinnovation:

 

“Networked Iterative Capital is like networked financial capital: its velocity and impact increase as it hurtles towards opportunity.”

It is this effect that multiplies the advantages that come from adopting and exploiting M>W>D.We could start by noting the interactions that are needed to move the project forward at any given point vs. the way we decide now... do we do them together or in series.. and which takes longer. If we are a team distributed in time and space (i.e globally distributed) what tools allow us to be (virtually) in the same space interacting creatively and decisively?

Picture uploaded on by harald_kirr. Used with thanks under CC.

logo ono: the long tale of iteration

  logo ono 
  Originally uploaded by IC Pod

To deliver effective experiences to a mass audience we really have to consider both the validity of a concept and the viability of the demonstrated prototypes derived from the initial insight.

IN the IHT Alice Rawsthorn has written in

 

iPhone's magic touch becomes design's gold standard for 2007

 

"As for the design debacle of 2007, what else could it be but the London 2012 Olympic Games logo? Like the iPhone, it's the only serious contender in its category, but for all the wrong reasons."

I wonder whether the initial concept sketches were shown to ordinary people early in the process or whether the unveiling was the first time. The key to innovative behaviour is to iterate fast and often, with the right people, to ensure feedback initially for understanding of the challenge and later for confirmation that we have interpreted the feedback sensibly. in other words to ask to questions:

Initially: Is this a valid idea? Do I get positive responses? How does the reaction vary across a range of ideas made tangible?

and later, much later: Can we sell enough? Can we make money from this?

I remember seeing a concept model for new packaging that just did not feel right, but it had a beautiful profile. The designer strongly defended the concept and the marketer, the project leader, accepted his defence. We built another model dropped in on a tea-break of a consumer panel down the corridor  and asked them to assess the model. "Its all wrong," they said. "But it is a pretty shape." we said. "Pretty useless." was the reply. We changed the design to another ergonomically acceptable shape, still embodying the aesthetic and it was a success.

Remember Michael Schrage's pithy definitions:

 

"Innovation isn't what innovators do....it's what customers and clients adopt." , and secondly
 

"Innovation = Reaction to the Prototype."

So the sooner people are exposed to tangible examples of the ideas, concepts and prototypes the sooner we can understand the emergent value of our offering. In other words rapid iteration of a concept based on the best knowledge we have at that point in time is better than pursuing perfection as we understand it and taking a long time to get there. There are three quotes to bear in mind:

Michelangelo said:
"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it."

The Red Queen to Alice, in Alice in Wonderland,  

“It takes all the running you can do to stay in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that.”

Samuel Becket observed
 

No matter; try again; fail again, fail better

Picture uploaded on by Daquella manera. Used with thanks under CC.

Derailed- by overrunning line work

  derailed 
  Originally uploaded by Hot Rod Homepage

My youngest daughter and her husband had the usual holiday pleasure of an overcrowded and slow train journey.. instead of 2h10m direct they suffered 4 hours and 2 changes; one was late and so the 4 hours became 4h30! On the way back it was only one change including a walk between stations made the elapsed time 6h 30.
Other commuters had a big shock when the rail work overran by several days actually 3 ..a week turns into 10 days... The Daily Telegraph article British tax-payers deserve better railways

talks of

"Network Rail blamed the delays on a shortage of engineers. This should not have been a shock. Why didn't it hire a full team before starting the work? The answer, it seems, is that there aren't enough to go round.

Brian Clementson, a visiting professor at Newcastle University's NewRail, a railway research centre, says that the industry is simply running out of quality engineers and other specialists. "With the decline of British manufacturing, we are at risk of losing our basic skills."

Add to that Labour's dumbed-down education system, in which subjects requiring a high level of numeracy (such as electrical engineering) are sneered at as "elitist", and it won't be long before the bulk of our railways' maintenance schemes will be dependent on immigrant workers."

which reminded me of that I had written

 I remember being told that development timescales were determined by the experiences and collaborative skills of the team. The formula was:

 1. If the team had never ever tackled this sort of project then Actual Time (AT) = Estimated Time x pi x pi, approx = 10 times ET
2. if the team leader has done a similar project but the team hasn't
then AT= ET x pi, approx 3 times ET
3. If all the team have worked together on a similar project then
AT= ET x pi/2, approx 40% greater than estimate.

It seems that British Rail drop into the second category; if they had declared this time then no doubt there would have been protests from the train operating companies. I often thought splitting the track from the trains into two companies seemed weird. Then we do see a similar effect in IT where IT services are outsorced from a company and so the pace of development slows and home computing becomes more powerful and innovative than company activities. It also reflects the efficiency vs. effectiveness of innovation funnels and stage-gate processes, that also deliver efficient management but not effective output.
So in 2008 we need to think process leadership in a big way; also insight/foresight, technology mastery and people networking management.