"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.
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?
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.
I was in the Manchester Waterstones bookshop last night and flicked through the monograph on Naoto Fukasawa. There was a piece, I believe, by Masato Sasaki: Affordance and design: Product design from the core of awareness which included this description of Affordance: A key concept in ecological psychology JJ Gibson coined the noun from the verb "to afford" to describe the property of things at large in providing organisms with perceived or latent potentials - "meaning", "values" or what Gibson called "action possibilities" - thus casting the otherwise passive environment in an active determinant role ( e.g. a chair is said to possess an affordance for sitting) 2 points of note: Affordance is not a stimulus that provokes a reaction or reflex (a chair does not compel a person to sit. Affordance is objectively measurable and not affected by ones ability to recognise those possibilities (a chair affords the possibility of sitting regardless of a person's mood or state of health). (first Published in Kokokuninyo monthly no 293 June 05 p.86). One of my first blogs was about this topic and I return to explore it further... The Thinking Allowed broadcast I mentioned here talked of the challenge of increasing personal skills in the context of an environment that enabled or inhibited natural creative interactions between people. Richard Sennett talked of laboratories, studios, workshops, ateliers as potential environments for more effective exchange of thoughts leading to interesting connections and the creation of new and hopefully useful knowledge.
So are cubicles affording more effective conversations?
picture uploaded on by webg33k. Used with thanks under CC.
or do we need a different form that affords a different interaction?
It really comes down to what you are trying to achieve... and a mixture of places is perhaps what we need to achieve... because
“Thoughts exchanged between me and another
are not the same in one room or another.” [from an essay Light and Space in “Louis I. Kahn”]
maybe the "wet, dry and damp spaces" that Rich Gold described... as long as they are spaces that possess an affordance for creative conversation... for creative activity... what we might call 'design spaces' filled with opportunity for the prepared mind.
Naoto Fukasawa senses what is the world around him possesses in the way of affordances but they may not be obvious to other people... on a 'cool' mobile phone he said
Picture uploaded
by xeeliz. Used with thanks under CC.
"My inspiration was not the Ferrari. It was the potato."
Creative people often use unrelated objects to seed their creative behaviour... IDEO talk of the inspiration of a Dove soap bar for the design of the Microsoft 2-button Mouse discussed here. A final thought from Michael Schrage in his book Serious Play ...
'Virtually any technology that is going to have a significant impact over the next five to 10 years has already been around for about 10 years,' Bill Buxton said. So our challenge must be: how do we stumble across them?
The Christmas edition of The Economist in 'Face value' writes about the accidental innovator Evan Williams; extracts below
"AT SOME point in the decade after he moved from the farm in Nebraska where he grew up to the innovation hub that is the San Francisco Bay Area, Evan Williams accidentally stumbled upon three insights.......
"So, having already had two accidental successes—one called Blogger, the other Twitter—Mr Williams is now trying to make accidents a regular occurrence for his company, called Obvious............
So Mr Williams started Obvious, determined to go back to good accidental stumbling. One of its side projects—Mr Williams loves side projects so much that his main projects seem to exist mainly as placeholders—was something called Twitter. If blogs were difficult to explain in 1999, Twitters are well nigh impossible. You might call them micro-blogs or nano-blogs, as Twitter lets users write only 140 characters at a time, albeit from any device, or using an instant message or text message. Twitter imposes another restraint: each post must be an answer to the same question: What are you doing?
.....All of this has made Twitter the third “next big thing” in Silicon Valley in 2007—after the iPhone, Apple's innovative new mobile handset, and Facebook, a social-networking site. The proof is that copycats have sprung up, that Google has bought one of them and that Facebook has made its “status” updates, in effect, internal Twitters. (Facebook also works with Twitter itself.) Exactly how to make money from Twitter remains an open question......He would like to make Twitter as mainstream as Blogger. But what he really wants is to make stumbling on accidents into a culture, habit, process or speciality. That is why he has spun the 12 people working on Twitter out of Obvious ......
The irony of trying to plan accidents, and orchestrate their frequent occurrence, is not lost on Mr Williams. So he tries mental tricks. One is to ask “what can we take away to create something new?” A decade ago, you could have started with Yahoo! and taken away all the clutter around the search box to get Google. When he took Blogger and took away everything except one 140-character line, he had Twitter. Radical constraints, he believes, can lead to breakthroughs in simplicity and entirely new things."
Depending on your point of view we too could have had the idea for Twitter if we blogged a lot and used SMS a great deal and saw that a lot of the traffic is about 'What are you doing?"' Our iPhone could then 'twit' at us.
The Economist September 2003 Technology Quarterly introduction refers to Carl Franklin (Why Innovation Fails) and Jacob Goldenberg and David Mazursky (Creativity in Product Innovation) and writes of how to Expect the unexpected citing the highest innovation success rate as Random event spotting (92.9% successes), whilst referring to several techniques including Evan Williams mental tricks referred to above.
Twitter is interesting as it has proved to be a valid idea (some consumers like it) whilst its overall success is not proven yet as it has not demonstrated viability ( will it make money-directly or indirectly- for its producers?). Winning products and services are a balancing act between validity and viability; risk taking is allowing valid ideas to travel long enough to confirm, or otherwise, the viability of the tangible outcome of that original energising insight or idea. Many established organisations would have killed Twitter by now, but look at the odds of success in Designs on innovation.
The challenge for successful actions energised by the discovery of consumer insights that become winning innovation is not to look around us but to travel in unfamiliar territory, to look from different points of view, reflect on what we observe and recognise in other words as William Gibson put it
Picture uploaded by david.alliet . Used with thanks under CC.
"The future is already here. It's just unevenly distributed."
He finds small groups of people doing revolutionary things and then imagines what it would be like if everybody was doing those things.
So our 2008 challenge is going the location of what is unevenly distributed, and on reflection knowing we have been there!
Picture uploaded by Joe Shlabotnik . Used with thanks under CC.
I have discussed the benefits of Design Space thinking in several posts and have talked about the need for eight people from disciplines corresponding with the eight faces of the octagon. In a way the seeds for Design Space thinking were sewn by the events touched on in the discussion of Geoffrey Wilde's obituary here. The obituary hints a the Rolls-Royce culture of engineering excellence and the need to have the right individuals in place striving and succeeding to make a difference. When I worked at R-R the culture meant that I had an allegiance to the company, my department and my project(s). But they were on a par. This meant that a project in need would get extra resource by an informal discussion between managers, allowing staff to be co-opted onto ventures that needed to be done. I widened my knowledge considerably under the tutelage of the various managers that I was co-opted to work for and realised early the power of dream teams. This ability to crack tough problems was built on the ease with which people networked and shared information across borders. As projects get tougher, in today's business environment, knowing who to involve, knowing how to involve and orchestration of the dialogue that results is key to fast, excellent products that win, in the marketplace.
In order to understand the behaviour of components in the Rolls-Royce turbine programmes referred to in Geoff Wilde obit. it was most important to understand what the goals were (improving the RB211 hp turbine life by at least 100%) and increasing the turbine entry temperature on the demonstrator units by some 250 degrees K. The two targets were interrelated. In order to dramatically improve creep life we had to change the turbine materials from Nimonics that could be extrusion formed to MAR M materials that had to be cast. The change of material on the RB211 had not achieved the expected life improvement and the high temperatures on the demonstrator reduced the cast blade life to less than that required to collect the experimental data. My 5 years of apprentice training had taken me into a new department every 5 or ten weeks. Fortunately, because I had taken an interest in aero-engine history as well as a desire to understand today's engines, so I got introductions to the people who, in a small or large way, had shaped the company. This meant that I could go off and talk to people all over the company to expose the clues and possible reasons for problems we encountered... this particular clue turned out to be in a buff folder of "private" material testing results generated from sections of material taken from real components, not test bars. A peer mwtallurgist had been interested in doing tests on sections from real "things". It turned out that there was a geometric effect that considerably reduced creep life; although this affected both extruded and cast components, and therefore had not been circulated "because the results are similar and older aircraft (e.g. Boeing 707) in service with extruded extruded designs had adequate life". But it turned out that because ductility of materials was an order less in cast blades they could not redistribute strains through the geometry without failure, so although extruded designs was only slightly effected but cast ones had a dramatically reduced life. So a fast track programme of improved cooling technology and design was initiated, together with a manufacturing technology programme to introduce crystal structures that nearly eliminated the geometry effects ensued. Within a short space of time solutions to the problem were proposed and shown to be solved, first on the demonstrator then on the real engines.
So if we look at the social implications of this process of improvement we can see it is based on the ability of people to carry out curiosity driven experiments to investigate "What if we...?" and then connect the knowledge with other knowledge residing in people's heads around the business. It is the conversations around pieces of paper, test-pieces, components, test results, etc, that started to reveal the "truth" and more artefacts created as a result that enabled solutions to be found. Hugh Macleod's doodle sums it up
What cultural characteristics do we detect that will help innovation to flourish?
As a service to other parts of the company we should understand clearly what the objectives of our clients (airlines, driven by their passenger needs, and obectives laid out contractual agreements), say the engineer in charge of an engine project. Then we need to understand the interactions of all the parties involved and orchestrate the discovery of new knowledge and of relevant (and irrelevant knowledge).
Here are some thoughts about the difference between the pursuit of excellence and the search for perfection in discovering artefacts, both as developers of new offers and as customers. I wrote recently about Geoffrey Wilde, Rolls-Royce engineer responsible for far-reaching innovations in the design of aero-engines, who influenced my personal career development. I remember, after he had proposed the brilliant concept of the three-shaft engine, he showed me something like 13 other 3-shaft layouts that the configuration that became the RB211 in the Lockheed Tristar was chosen from. The calculations showed that many of the concepts were, on paper, much superior to the one chosen. But, when the technological uncertaintities were factored in the likelihood of getting the engine to work in a reasonable timescale and cost far exceeded the potential benefits. In fact it is only now, 40 years later, that some of the principles are being seriously suggested for the Taranis programme extension into greener technologies, known as EFE- environmentally friendly engine.
So why the asymptotic bridge? Well all those years ago in the Stress Office was a poster of a suspension bridge that swept across a bay and almost touched down on the other bank; it was an analogy to the calculation methodologies, we were using that enabled us to calculate stress distributions, were accurate enough mathematical models to approach the correct values of stress at given points within the structure being analysed, but not on the surface. By massively increasing calculation time we could get closer to the surface but never to it! So we always had to extrapolate. We therefore checked our assumptions using physical photoelastic models that we also model mathematically, but as the plastic material exhibited different physical properties to metal we introduced other assumptions. The pursuit of the right answer (=perfection) could become a never ending game of chasing one's tail as we might introduce unknown pertubations from the "truth" that ensured we would get the wrong answer (according to Middleton's Law); the timescale becomes protracted and people get fed up of waiting and make their own arrangements.. such as buying elsewhere! Not a very satisfactory conclusion, in fact it can be extremely de-motivating for the team of developers.
Looking at it from the customer's point of view Barry Schwartz has also talked of the frustration of the pursuit of the perfect choice, enabled by the incredible range of "stuff" we have to choose from. For instance there are an average of 17,000 goods on offer in the average British supermarket.
Infinite choice is paralyzing, Schwartz argues, and exhausting to the human psyche. It leads us to set unreasonably high expectations, question our choices before we even make them and blame our failures entirely on ourselves. His relatable examples, from consumer products (jeans, TVs, salad dressings) to lifestyle choices (where to live, what job to take, who and when to marry), underscore this central point: Too much choice undermines happiness. Here is video of his TEDtalk.
A key slide is the plot of subjective state versus number of choices
Schwartz talks of two basic types of potential consumer:
The Maximisers: People whose aim in life is to get the best. How do you know if you got the best? You actually need to look at every possibility by making an exhaustive search. There is virtually no area where maximizing makes sense. And if they keep looking after they have chosen they can really make themselves feel uncertain!
The Satisficers: Who believe that selecting a “good enough” option (instead of maximizing) helps cut through the problem of choice. o they do a good sweep through what is on offer, go through the options and when they get to one that from their point of view "does the job" they stop searching.
The key for innovators and developers is to focus on what their target consumer is trying to get done and then make sure they provide the simplest feature set that provides the requisite affordance(s).
Reading the article "Apple's iPhone comes with a ring of overconfidence" in today's Sunday Times, especially the rivals section shows that none of them deliver perfectly on everything they could do but the iPhone seems to deliver "the simple life. It ends with the author, Tony Dunmore writing
"Nine months after first playing with the iPhone, I’m still entirely smitten. I’m willing to forgive its failings and I’m not alone – Apple claims the iPhone customer satisfaction rating is higher than with any previous product.
But there is a serious threat, and it doesn’t come from Nokia, Samsung or Sony Ericsson – it’s from Apple itself. By launching the iPod Touch MP3 player with wi-fi, which although not a mobile does feature the same magical user interface and web browsing functions as the iPhone and does not require you to switch to a hefty phone contract, Apple may have unwittingly cannibalised its own market."
which may not necessarily be true because it might be that some of us want a swiss army knife whilst others of us want a set of simple tools so the market may segment and Apple pick up a fair share in both. So when we develop new products we need to really understand our potential users and provide what they are looking for in the simplest package for each bundle of "jobs to be done"
The tagging of nuggets of digital data and the rise of tools to turn nuggets into informative arrays of stimulation has enhanced the capability of teams that play and interact with those nuggets. We discussed conceptually possible configurations of data and information and how the rate of entry into Design Space can itself be informative. So waht ways can we play with all this "stuff"? The rise of Flickr and that class of web software points the way to a possible path.
Consider a collection of visual data around the faces of Design Space. If we are in the early stages of the innovation project we may be wading through consumer data. One way of stimulating creative interactions is to bring up the data like wallpaper, gather round it and start interacting. As a prototype we might look round for what is available and see if we can do a "Wizard of Oz". There is a Flickr complementor called oSkope which enables us to progress down that "yellow brick road", So suppose we want to be stimulated by the experience that Nike and Apple have designed, let us search with tags Nike, iPod, Runner
We might try to write a narrative round the pictures to tease out any interesting perspectives.
Later in the process we might wish to look at the consumer face, so first we bring up a broad view of the information we have ammassed
We see a cluster of interesting information, so we zoom in on that
One picture captures our attention so we zoom in to interrogate the source
Which we can access here
Having collected some more knowledge around are target consumers we can resume exploring
Now we can discuss how useful the software has been and how we can incorporate the benefits into the bigger picture.
In February, 2001 I presented at Daratech 2001 Conference, in the Boston Park Plaza Hotel,about the interaction of Design Processes and Technologies for packaging design in a global company. I was amused to find the hotel had been built with a large exhibition/ conference hall and nearby special rooms where sales executives could not only sleep but present their wares to prospective clients and customers. The successful ones would see their products being widely adopted; the less successful would rethink their approach, positioning or even their product itself in varying degrees of desperation!
I drew on the Everett Rogers theories of Innovation Diffusion, adapted it to reflect my own experiences of choosing, using and exploiting design technologies -also described here.
The S curve above illustrates my experience of how a new design technology is adopted bearing in mind the complexities of innovation at the intersection of business,technology and organisational culture. Someone will spot an emerging technology... in an article, presentation or over a beer at a conference... and will begin to talk about it in the office. The reception maybe frosty or lukewarm, but in an innovative group this will be interpreted as "I haven't got my story engaging enough to hold their attention yet." ( I know the theories say you should suspend judgement, never criticise, etc. but as we are mainly human it is better to be able to live with the paradox of story development (as a colleague put it when referring to a key report he was writing " After it returns for its thirteenth rewrite the reviewer's positive comments are a bit hard to take!").
So how do we start gaining committment? By playing.. perhaps getting the technology vendor to show you what sort of play can take place. This is almost being at the inflection point illustrated in Technology Trails to Discover. The activity will begin to draw other people in... within the group and, perhaps, within the client groups as well. This can lead to an agreement to use on a real project to tease out the benefits. Often this can be done by using the new technology in parallel to the current, so that the client feels happy that project exposure to risk is minimised.
Successful completion of this activity will create a great story and a great demonstration that can be used to energise the roll out of the technology on all key projects....and then on to the next technology!
This diagram, from my Daratech2001 presentation traced the history of Design Technology adoption so:
During the presentation I realised that we could add another line representing the locus of points on the S curves where integrating and growing was proceeding apace so I drew it like this (by the way MIT means Make Ideas Tangible):
What intrigued me was the slow down in the rate of increasing effectiveness on the right of the diagram which must mean there was a slowdown in the cultural response to the options and opportunities presented by the technology. If you look at the bottom (time) scale then it is also apparent that we are moving from individual cultural responses to the group repsonses and then a greater population of the project people... as it turns out there are increasing numbers of individual interdisciplinary, cross-functional, cross-organisational inter-relationships to cope with as we move left to right.
We are addressing the issues of moving minds of individuals to that of groups to that of organisations; analogous the moving from Sarnoff's Law through Metcalfe's to Reed's; pushing out stuff, sharing stuff, facilitating the co-creation of stuff. No wonder things were slowing down.
During this period innovation teams being drawn from functions and organisations, that were geographically dispersed, in order to co-create stuff rather than have it passed on and be tempted to value add (complicatedness approach). Tools that help the facilitation and rapid creativity when the group is together and facilitates the reinforcement of strategic vision and action whilst apart, counteracting strategy and attention decay were in short supply. Much experimentation was going on to try to understand the dynamics of these teams and how emerging technologies cold be deployed by the process facilitators to enable dramatic improvements in innovation quality.
The latest so-called Web 2.0 technologies should enable us to build significant communities that can co-create new things. Lotus Notes was a step along the road; Groove moved into a web-world and brought benefits. MySpace and FaceBook democratised social networking. It is to be hoped that the architecture of FaceBook may point us in the right direction to build significant creative behaviour in a dispersed network, but truly dynamic teams do not spontaneously arise from membership of, say, FaceBook. The social networks that arise in that environment is akin to "going down the pub or club" where you have fleeting social engagement with a large number of people and a better relationship with a few people of like interests (birds of a feather). What we are looking for are tools that will support a dynamic design processing network of disparate people who may not have chosen to be on the project but will be energised to contribute fully to it by sharing a powerful vision of the outcome... more a sort of SpaceBook application. To sum it up we are looking for technologies that enable the innovation project groups to become Dream Teams by quickly showing these observable characteristics
A strong platform of understanding
A shared vision
A creative climate
Ownership of ideas
Resilience to setbacks
Network activation
Learning from experience
Technologies that support these activities are not simple social networking applications, neither are they heavyweight enterprise systems nor are they simple, but they will exhibit simplicity. Simplicity is not the opposite of complexity, but of complicatedness. Simple building blocks can be assembled to address the challenges of complexity; innovation and design are, in fact, complex adaptive systems.... so the last thing we want is complicatedness (is that another name for bureaucracy?).
Kevin Roberts introduced me through his blog to the simplicity of visualising lyrics here
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