"Change... we don't like it, we fear it, but we can't stop it from coming. We either adapt to change or we get left behind. And it hurts to grow, anybody who tells you it doesn't is lying. But here's the truth: the more things change, the more they stay the same. And sometimes, oh, sometimes change is good. Oh, sometimes, change is... everything."
It is amazing how many big initiatives in organisations large and small come to nothing. Change seems to be harder than we think; we may know change is inevitable and still do nothing about it, or we may deny it all together; but some how it still happens to us. People like Donald Schon and Edgar Schein pioneered thinking about how change happens and people like Peter Senge, Tudor Rickards, etc. have carried on the studies. They demonstrate that change is a complex activity with individual, group and organisational dynamics playing key roles in what is achieved and how it is achieved. My own experiences have led me to conclude that without good and consistent leadership from the top and space for the 'followers ' to play with 'new tools for doing change' individuals often find it hard to understand and identify with the vision, work out what activities are needed to start moving towards the vision, and to find resources to devote to doing those activities... and checking that the results align with the direction we should be moving in.... and then keep doing them. Schein proposed a change model that embraced three stages: unfreezing ->changing ->refreezing; commenting that:
"As most change theories tend to focus on the middle stage only and they cannot account for the inability to produce change in the first place or the inability to maintain the changes that have already been achieved."
I will write about the three stages and link them here [unfreezing -> changing -> refreezing] shortly.
Born out of a pressing need to help innovation project teams work together as an everyday collaborative rather than as an every meeting group. I explored the creation of Design Space here: A tool to help create winning products,and services (the explanation below is aimed at products). Design Space enables the exploration and development of ideas, defining what makes a great concept and driving the project towards launch. it will underpin existing innovation frameworks helping to generate information required for gate meetings, sponsors and others on the extended team.
Design Space is one of the four main tools of Design@The Edge; Design Pyramid is a tool that drives the exploration resulting from asking "What should we be creating?"
Design Space facilitates the search for answers to the questions "How do we deliver it (the What)?" giving help to individuals on the team wrestling with their own personal dilemma... "What questions should I be asking?" ...reminding them that
"There are no foolish questions and no man becomes a fool until he has stopped asking questions." - Saul Steinberg,
also...
“If you understand something only one way, then you don’t understand it at all.” - Marvin Minsky.
Initially, questioning should be focused on developing a better understanding of the complexity of the project, and identifying the relationship between all the different elements, along with finding out whether there are any areas that have yet to be explored. For example we might explore these questions:
What must the product do- what makes a good idea? What are the information gaps that could prevent us from achieving success- what would we like to know? What are the associated risks for the project - what could go wrong? What actions need to take place - what do we need to do know?
We then need to ask
Where do I look for the opportunities and constraints?
Identifying opportunities and constraints requires all the team members to share what they know and discover what they don't know. Opportunities reside within the business and its partners, both existing and potential. Through understanding the needs and wants (articulated or not) of the person who is buying and using the product we can find 'enabling' areas that we might work on.
Opportunity areas are:- Consumer needs Who will buy the product? Why will they buy it? What do they need/want? Brand What must the product bring to the brand? What can it borrow from the brand? How can this product help deliver the brand strategy? Technology What opportunities and constraints does technology bring? Business and strategic fit what are the financial goals? What level of risk is acceptable?
Constraints are the factors that can narrow our opportunity search, if we are too focused on the conflicting areas as we produce and get our product in front of potential buyers. "It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all." Edward do Bono.
It is exploring the tensions between the opportunities and constraints that brings the team together, turning individual knowledge into team knowledge, and leading to great ideas.
Constraint areas are:-
Customers/channels/countries How does the product get to market? Competitors What are the strengths and weaknesses of competing brands and products? What challenges could they make to our claims? What patents do they own? Supply Chain How flexible is existing equipment? What are the opportunities/constraints of new equipment? what role do suppliers and partners play? Environmental, external and regulatory What social, economic and political trends might impact this product? What legislation is relevant? What are the environmental consequences?
The beauty of playing (seriously) in Design Space is that it unleashes the creative potential of the players, and if we take Steve Jobs contention that
" Creativity is just connecting things. You ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. "That's because they were able to connect experiences they've had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they've had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.
"Unfortunately, that's too rare a commodity. A lot of people haven't had very diverse experiences, so they don't have enough dots to connect and they wind up with very linear solutions."
By getting 'everybody' in the same place at the same time we are assembling diverse experiences in the space and using appropriate tools and techniques making sure we have plenty of dots to connect.
In an interview (The Daily Telegraph Personal view: Science is key to how we add value and create wealth 24 May 2006) chief executive of Rolls-Royce Sir John Rose said, “There are only three ways of creating wealth. You dig it up, grow it, or convert it to add value, anything else is merely moving it about. In a high-wage economy you must focus on high converted-value activities. To achieve high converted value you need good education and differentiating skills.”
The German chairman of an iconic marque tells Sean O'Grady why he's looking pleased. (The Independent, Motoring p. 6, 25th July 2006.) 'However he is perturbed about events closer to home: "I'm not going to criticise the Government,” said Dr Franz-Josef Paefgen, chairman and CEO of Bentley Motors, “but overall, the attitude in this country to having everything moving into services is not the right approach…. Maybe a good idea is to move over into segments where you need more skilled people making more sophisticated products. We have no problem cost-wise or in finding the right people to do that.“ Strange, isn't it, that a German business man cares more about the state of manufacturing than our own Government.'
When we look at the convulsions in the financial markets it is fascinating to see the UK government is having to put much resource into unsticking the markets, especially for house mortgages, enabling them to start moving it about again; unfortunately the banks are slow to react positively as reported here.
Maybe Messrs Rose and Paefgen have a point, especially when we read that the gross value added in manufacturing at £42,100 is around £8,000 higher than the GVA of the service sector. Not that manufacturing sector has not got a service element that is crucial to its success. Seems like we need to dig it up, grow it, or convert it to add value, but also be great at moving it about. After all, as we noted above, the building industry is stalled at the moment due to the freezing of finance available for personal mortgages. So digging, growing, or converting things needs a financial lubricant to keep things going, just not too much or everything can get out of sync!
Sir George Cox once said that British enterprise seems to have adopted the mantra
"Can’t Innovate. Don’t Innovate. Go Nowhere!"
Yet we are being exhorted to "Innovate or die!" The problem with just creating new products and services without real thought to how they connect with both our consumers and our business is that we can end up being successful in the former without making a success of the latter, which may hand the proposition to a rival or even a new entrant. As I have stated elsewhere
"Brands are made in the mind. Products are made in the factory. Design connects the two."
I was unaware of it at the time but Janice Kirkpatrick delivered a thoughtful lecture entitled
"Innovate or deteriorate. Design or die.The Role Of Design In Innovating For Business Success."
In it Kirkpatrick asks
"Why is it, that while the
future looks so tempting, many businesses continue to live in the past
rather than embracing the future? Why can’t they recognise that the
world has changed? Instead they prefer to rearrange the furniture or
stand still and gather dust. Are unable to face the uncertainty of
innovation and become paralysed, doing nothing at all?
Perhaps
these businesses have inherited a cynicism about new ideas. New ideas
are often presented as mere ‘entertaining diversions’ from tried and
tested ways of doing things. But the excuse that “we've always done it
this way because it works” is no longer an option. What works today may
not be good enough to work tomorrow. Digital modelling, rapid
prototyping and a host of new tools for accelerating the research and
development process mean that new rivals appear from left-field and make
your company obsolete overnight.
Other businesses maintain a
superstitious attitude to innovation. They regard creativity as
dangerous, unquantifiable ‘magic’ and creative people as unpredictable
‘artists’; reckless, irresponsible individuals who over-excite
employees and ‘rock the boat’ by asking uncomfortable questions with
unfamiliar, unsettling answers. It should take comfort from the
knowledge that creativity is nothing new, it’s been around since the
beginning of civilisation. Even ‘design’ as we know it, first appeared
in the 1830s. There’s no excuse for being suspicious of a tried and
tested process that's been professionally practised for over 170 years."
Packaging system design was moving from being a merely functional component of the product to a consumer tangible expression of the total product. We were faced with taking people on a journey- a design journey where some people had been part of the way, some thought they had been part of the way and those that hadn't thought about making a journey, let alone setting out on one!
Karim Rashid viewing the challenge from his perspective wrote to me
“Remember, we live in a world where beauty is finally appreciated again and innovation, technology, are shifting our social life. A bottle is no longer a just a stylized bottle but an artistic instrument for engaging brand, a philosophy, and an experience, in our new global lifestyle.”
Picture uploaded
by gmarcos1. Used with thanks under CC.
We created a tool to facilitate people's arrival at a common starting
position and an understanding of their role with respect to the other
team members;in addition the role of the project and the expectation of
its contribution to the organisational strategy and goals. It enables
team to co-construct a vision of a winning product or service, driven
by the motivating insight. It is called a Design Journey.
Understanding and at the very least coping with the dynamics of change has never been so important. Edgar Schein developed Kurt Lewin's change model into a useful framework for understanding, leading and facilitating change. I posted here about Lewin's change model: Unfreezing>Changing>Refreezing. I also posted an overview of the dynamics of the model, and promised to return to the topic. The first step is the Unfreezing process by which we recognise the need for and are motivated to change.
Unfreezing is in fact three sub-processes- Disconfirmation, Survival Anxiety and Creation of Psychological Safety
Disconfirmation: A dissatisfaction or frustration with the status quo. But that dissatisfaction does not mean something will happen. Frustration can rumble on at a low level as the Confirming data maybe enough to cause dissatisfaction but still be insufficient to drive change. We can deal with low level indications of disconfirmation by:
ignoring it
denying its validity
blaming others
dismissing it as irrelevant
Picture uploaded
by Kate_A. Used with thanks under CC.
However our recognition that 'something is up' and our behaviour in response to it can also lead to Learning Anxiety; having to recognise that we are not doing our best, admitting we don't know what action to take and fearing loss of face, of effectiveness, of our self esteem and identity. Weighing up the situation means that we feel that adapting poorly to the situation and failing to meet our creative potentially is more desirable than the risk of acting differently and an attendant risk of failure and loss of self esteem.
( we can see all of these behaviours being played out in the ongoing 'Global Warming' debate or in our politician's slow awakening and action on the abolition of the 10p tax band- some debate here).
Picture uploaded
by Kate_A. Used with thanks under CC.
Alternatively the data and information, whilst not confirming our hopes and desires, is of sufficient weight for us accept it as valid and connected to something we care about, raising our Survival Anxiety to levels where 'analysis-paralysis' begins to set in together with a desire for a safe haven where we have time reflect and decide what to do. The creation of sufficient Psychological Safety is key to successful change. Without the right level of Psychological Safety, Survival Anxiety will not unlock change.
So, how do we create sufficient Psychological Safety to enable change to take place?
I was fascinated to hear of Simon Berry's idea (What about Coca Cola using their
distribution channels (which are amazing in developing countries) to
distribute rehydration salts? Maybe by dedicating one compartment in
every 10 crates as 'the life saving' compartment?) to help the children of Africa by tapping into the competences and capabilities of the Coca Cola Corp'n! In Funky Business for ever we learn that we should leverage competence to do innovative things.. so Simon has and with the momentum of BBC's iPM blog the idea is gathering energy! What a great piece of thinking! and singing! Coke are responding to the idea...slowly although the BBC are helping! we too can help by joining in and upping the pressure to move! What a great idea.. after all Coke must be mallaeble!?
"Vision Without Action...Is Just a Dream. Action Without Vision...Just Passes the Time. But, Vision and Action...Can Change the World." Joel Barker
Why didn't Philips' Visions of the Future turn into winning products? They created a VoF website in 1995 and a book. The original site is long gone but their is a trace here. I downloaded some of the illustrations.. the red and black models shown above and combined with emotive experience pictures... as shown in the book :
I mounted the resulting picture, without explanation.. as people came into the office (door always open) they would ask "What is it" and I would say it is an evocative fragrance device... when you activate it there is a waft of your favourite perfume and it plays a little movie clip of a moment that you associate with the fragrance." "Can we do it?" would be a common response. "Not yet I said, " but we will be able to soon!"
After a year or two we could see how to do it and we built a model that reflected our own market sector, showing what was possible.
The extract below comes from original website reproduced in Social Trends and Product Opportunities: Philips Vision of the Future Project (link)
These multimedia products are designed to be given as special presents. They
have a small screen, a loudspeaker and a scent compartment. Emotional Containers
come in various versions to allow people to choose the one they feel would be
most appropriate to give. The products are made of rich materials and are meant
to last and be cherished by the recipient. Emotion Containers offer a more sensory way of giving. They are attractive on
two levels: as objects in their own right, and as carriers of messages of
special significance. The future could be that you're watching an old movie
'Casablanca' and you remember your best friend with whom you went to see the
movie many times. Instead of calling him up and leaving him a message, you send
him 30 seconds of your favourite scene from the movie.
To turn these experiential stories into products means co-creating a vision with all the people who can actively or passively affect the direction and outcome of the project, and then generating ideas and planning actions that will deliver the vision as a product, service or combination of both.
“Dream your dreams, for your goals are merely your dreams, propelled by your determination and guided by your network.” From Masters of Networkingby Ivan R. Misner & Don Morgan
If we have a reductive funnel or stage-gate innovation framework then our idea will more often than not be seen as too radical, and anyway the project lists for this year have been selected... try again at the end of the year. No wonder we give up or go elsewhere, or just inspire someone elsewhere to make it real. Certainly I saw this happen with ideas that were regarded as a "bit too far" which is often equivalent to "NIH". Also people feel threatened by transforming ideas... after all they might actually transform! So I guess maybe that involving the business groups in blue-sky thinking can be fun for a while but we then go back to our day-job and forget what we have learned. Is this what happened then... in Philips? in my own organisation?
We were in the throes of embedding an inn ovation funnel into the business whilst also adopting EQFM as an overall business approach; our focus was on getting fewer projects out into the marketplace rather than crowding our funnel. So being more transforming in our project choice was not so high on the agenda. As the emphasis switched our leadership team created these models, incremental funnel on left and a transforming whirlwind on the right:
which we characterised as:
So moving to designing and developing transforming products and services meant another transformation. The organisation tried one or two projects in-house for which we did some of the packaging and realised we needed to almost ignore the funnel structures we were currently building.. ok for efficient delivery of our necessary incremental activity... lousy for more radical ideas. As we were looking at transforming ideas that played to our strengths... top-right quadrant of this matrix we needed to collaborate outside of the system.. this leads to a paradox as there are two well known definitions of collaborate:
1. To work together, especially in a joint intellectual effort
2. To cooperate treasonably, as with an enemy occupation force in one's country
Any "shadow" team will try to live the first but their work colleagues may perceive the second. Rituals is an example of a venture that started as a "shadow" collaboration. This led to the setting up of a venture organisation to fund more radical ideas. MiLife is one example of a ventured idea and is a result of Unilever's 21st century mission: to add Vitality to life. As the site states:
Our mission is to add Vitality to life. We meet everyday needs for
nutrition, hygiene and personal care with brands that help people look
good, feel good and get more out of life.
So how does this help Philips...What is their equivalent of Vitality... the vital signs of which were emerging from VoF. Maybe like Unilever who tried a Path to Growth strategy in the first years of this century... top down doesn't work. Although my (design process and technology) group were used to transformative behaviour we were the exception to the rule (what rule? The one that says keep your head down and the senior management wwill move on and the initiative will whither.). I would guess Philips at this time had a similar challenge. There is a gap between transformative thinking in the design services and transformative behaviour in business groups that they are attempting to bridge.. but it does mean change.. which is hard; after all Mercedes did not take the SMART car fully into the organisation until it was launched with a new form of value chain put together by SWATCH...
["Don't you understand the meaning of collaboration?"
Picture uploaded by Carolyn Coles. Used with thanks under CC.]
so there were patterns of success before they were fully on board with the concept.... Change isn't easily as it is a cultural thing... which takes time and sustained, focused effort... hard to maintain radical behaviour and do incremental innovations simultaneously.
Strategically designing is change... We mused over the Business Excellence model and how design fitted in... it led to this......and a roadmap.
About ten years ago the roller ball underarm deodorant underwent a revolution with the introduction of the "big ball". Which turned out to be a step forward in ease of use for the consumer (better fit to armpit). In order to get the last dregs out of the container we consumers needed to balance the container on its cap.. which is pretty challenging when there is a domed top. As the pack design evolved to improve usability the asymmetrical design made it impossible to balance the domed cap.... a flat on the top of the cap enabled this to be done more easily. As the cost of oil-based plastics has escalated the challenge of a brand innovation team is to contain that packaging cost as well as meeting or exceeding consumer wants. The new design has made the pack usable from start to finish. Also the cap weight has reduced from approx 13 gm to 7 gm... and the pack has a lower weight too. So the What has remained the same or improved (think Design Pyramid and Design Experience)... and the How has enabled the improvement for stakeholders (think Design Space). Are there moments of doubt? well yes. The unscrewing of the cap takes half a turn versus the original 1.5 turns... there is an affective difference in the feel and kinaesthetics which may have a negative appeal.. or it may not matter as it is in the so-what category. And the development story... could be true but is my interpretation!
3 generations of deodorant pack design.
Asymmetry creeps in!
Flat cap to the rescue!
Well rounded caps don't work when you invert the pack.
Total design thinking addresses many aspects of the pack along the value chain.
Reducing pack size by eliminating the threaded collar and moving it to the roller ball housing.
The pack height reduces due to elimination of a duplicate ring of plastic....
and also by reducing diameter we get two wins for plastic use.. which helps reduce environmental burden as well as cost reduction.
How do we make information tangible in the right way? To whom do we reveal it in order to elicit the right response? What do we mean by the right response? The answers are important - they illuminate the experience in two ways- their response helps us understand what they are actually seeking; they test whether we have reflected and responded to them in the right way. Making ideas and information tangible... creating artefacts that elicit a response at the early stage of a project can promote dialogue... and are known as prototypes but prototypes with a purpose. Paul MacCready, a pioneer in human and solar powered transportation, in conversation with Michael Schrage for his book Serious Play, put it like this:
“When you're inventing something new,” says MacCready, “...prototypes are a way of letting you think out loud. You want the right people to think out loud with you. The first prototypes usually don't answer your questions. But they are very good at starting the conversations that answer your questions."
But why Ideas worth a glance? Thinking about prototypes (analogue/digital/physical models) that I have been involved with over the years, their longevity has varied from 2 minutes to two years, depending on the response they provoked in the people 'handling' them. A valuable or charismatic prototype will attract much more attention, increasing the likelihood of pertinent observation and increasingly valuable conversation. Blackbeltjones talks of information in a slightly different context in Glanceable<----> Pored-Over, but he does highlight the different uses of information. He said "Two images .....made me think that the best interaction and information design is stuff that can be glanced-at or pored-over but unfortunately, most commercial interaction design falls between these two stools, in the ‘don’t make me think’ category."
If we think of the outcome of a 'product' experience as the "what" experience; and the iterative experiences around the sketches, models, prototypes, etc. as the 'how', we can rethink the types and value that these forms of iterative capital catalyse in the interactions of the project team. In the Design Fast Actionschool of rapid iteration, prototypes may be constructed primarily to elicit a response (glanced-at) or provoke conversation (pored-over) and may involve different but maybe overlapping sets of people; the actual quality of prototype will signal what sort of responses are expected; for instance a sketch has a different intent to a rendered CAD model. Without a wide range of prototype forms we can unwittingly restrict the scope of conversation and the creation of new knowledge. The output will therefore be of lower quality than it could have been, i.e. the product or service falls short of its potential. This is such a waste of scarce capability.
In a conversation with Michael Schrage, I talked of how we exploited our rapid modelling, visualisation and prototyping resources (our iterative capital). He reminded me of what he had said about iterative capital:
“Networked Iterative Capital is like networked financial capital: its velocity and impact increase as it hurtles towards opportunity.”
Our role as innovation leaders and design managers must be to maximise opportunity of any change project undertaken and shake off the view that our organisations are not only not opportunistic but are risk averse too and so
Today's Independent has an article Has the Conran era come to an end? which opens: For 50 years, Sir Terence Conran has been changing the British lifestyle, dragging us out of post-war austerity and into a world of good food and good design. Now, as he sells off his restaurant empire, Andy McSmith asks if his time has gone
The name of Sir Terence Conran is so evocative of smart restaurants and stylish shops selling modernist goods to discerning customers that it seems odd that his long, fabulous career – now apparently coming to an end – began in the years of austerity and ration books. Even those who are aware that Sir Terence has been influencing public taste for a very long time think of him as a product of the Swinging Sixties, an innovator and tycoon who brought style and taste within the price range of the average office worker. His restaurants, now up for sale, are commonly thought to be the means by which he reinvented himself after being prised out of the business of running fashionable high street shops. ..... "Going out to a restaurant is not just about eating," his former collaborator, the design guru Stephen Bayley, said yesterday. "It's about people, and atmosphere. The very best restaurants capture that. People go to a restaurant as an experience in interior design. Terence gave them that. .... Although he was never a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, he had done well out of the business atmosphere she had helped create, and his fall from grace as a high street retailer coincided with her political demise. Always better at generating new ideas than keeping old ones going, he lost control of the company he had built up, and he retreated to an office in Butlers Wharf, on a stretch of the south bank of the Thames that he had helped to renovate. From there, he decided to go back to the restaurant business, hoping to make the diners who used his restaurants feel that they were members of a club, united by good taste, just like those young couples who patronised Habitat in the Sixties.
"In Habitat, he came across a formula for furnishings that exactly fitted the needs of that generation, who were the first people who did not inherit furniture but had had a university education and had good jobs," Stephen Bayley said.
"There is a famous story that when he took over British Home Stores, he exclaimed – 'What is that awful pink nightie? Get it out of here!' – and they had to say 'Actually, Sir Terence, that is our best-selling line'."
But the end of the Conran era, he suggested, has been a long time coming. Many thought it was over when the great innovator's flirtation with the City turned sour in the late 1980s, and he lost control of the "darling" he had created in the 1960s.
"He used the same architectural formula when he opened his restaurants but they didn't quite have the sort of match with the customers.
"Terence's taste is educated, middle class and Chelsea. It only really coincided with a small percentage of the population. His restaurants were populated by people Terence didn't know existed. In the end, they became the sort of mediocrity he was trying to escape, and I sort of wish he had retreated some time ago. In a certain sense, the news that he is pulling out has been a long time coming, but it is elegiac. He has been a major figure in British cultural life for 52 years." Which sort of connects with Nick Carr and his essay Z-curves!? which talks of life cycles of technology and adoption..... and that connects with Pine and Gilmore's Experience Economy:
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