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Received Wisdom

April 30, 2012 By 1 Comment

Why do we blindly accept wide-spread theories and their widely employed practices as valid, assuming that they are well-substantiated?  I marvel at the amount of received wisdom that:

  • as it turns out, is the result of either an inspired or crazy (or crazily inspired or inspirationally crazy) person’s obsession, and
  • despite the fact that it has been disproved, has not be discarded.

And so apparently does Jonah Lehrer, a writer for The New Yorker, whose two articles, although separated by several months and covering vastly different subject matter, sound similar themes.  Cases in point:  brainstorming and casino design.

 Brainstorming

  1. large groups
  2. gobs of ideas
  3. non-judgmental environment (there are “no bad ideas”)

Apparently the central tenets of brainstorming, considered essential for generating truly breakthrough insights, were soundly debunked almost as soon as brainstorming was popularized, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from adhering to these principles or the practice.  In fact, consultancies have been founded on them, embracing them with near religious fervor.

I have to admit that the “no bad idea” rule really appealed to me as a young consultant facilitating group discussions.  It was a relatively non-confrontational way to put a lid on people who were more enthusiastic about tearing down ideas than building them up while opening up space for those who were willing to take a risk and put an idea on the table.  And the sheer quantity of ideas that were scrawled on white boards or on sticky notes that plastered the walls gave participants evidence of accomplishment as they left the working session and I benefitted from the halo effect, looking like a great consultant.

Brainstorming is the brainchild of John Osborn, a sort of Cro-Magnon mad man of advertising (the “O” of BBDO, the advertising colossus).  Osborn popularized his approach to creativity in one of several books that spread the word about his brainstorming methodology back in the 1940s.  Not long thereafter (1958) brainstorming theory was subjected to research at Yale University and that was only the beginning of “…[d]ecades of research [that] have consistently shown brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”

It also appears that when people are encouraged to challenge each other’s ideas, groups generate more ideas.  Criticism introduces an alternative perspective that stimulates truly creative associations.  “…[T]he power of dissent is the power of surprise.” When a train of thought is derailed, it wakes people up to new possibilities.  And, it seems as if more people are just not better when it comes to group creativity.  But neither are too few.  Mix in the evidence that too much familiarity appears to be just as bad as too little shared history and it seems as if the moderate middle ground provides provide the best mix of trust and friction for groups to generate something truly new that has a good chance of commercial success.

Having thoroughly described how brainstorming has been debunked, if not dislodged, we turn to casino design.

 Casino Design

The Friedman International Standards of Casino Design:

  • Principle 1: A Physically Segmented Casino beats a Completely Open Barn
  • Principle 2: Gambling Equipment Immediately Inside Casino Entrances Beats Vacant Entrance Landings and Empty Lobbies
  • Principle 3: Short Lines of Sight Beat Extensive Visible Depth
  • Principle 4: The Maze Layout Beats Long, Wide, Straight Passageways and Aisles
  • Principle 5: A Compact and Congested Gambling-Equipment Layout Beats a Vacant and Spacious Floor Layout
  • Principle 6: An Organized Gambling-Equipment Layout With Focal Points of Interest Beats a Floor Layout That Lacks a Sense of Organization
  • Principle 7: Segregated Sit-Down Facilities
  • Principle 8: Low Ceilings Beat High Ceilings
  • Principle 9: Gambling Equipment As the Décor Beats Impressive and Memorable Decorations
  • Principle 10: Standard Décor Beats Interior Casino Themes
  • Principle 11: Pathways Emphasizing the Gambling Equipment Beat the Yellow Brick Road
  • Principle 12: Perception Beats Reality
  • Principle 13: Multiple Interior Settings and Gambling Ambiances Beat a Single Atmosphere Throughout

Who is Friedman and how did he arrive at these principles?  A former gambling addict who became a student of the environments in which he had lost so much money, Bill Friedman went on to manage a few casinos and teach some of the first university courses in casino management.  Distilling what made him tick when he gambled and what he observed about other gamblers into solid granite principles, Friedman exerted huge influence and his rules dominated casino design for an amazing run of almost 30 years.

But then, Roger Thomas, a commercial interior designer, went to work for Steve Wynn, and his design principles, sumptuously expressed at The Bellagio, were diametrically opposed to Friedman’s.  Spending upwards of $1.6 billion on lavish interior design from the casino floor to the guest rooms to the iconic fountain show (see below), Thomas violated all 13 principles.  The result was a property where the guests spent four times as much per room as the average property in Las Vegas.  Research into gambling behavior followed and, lo and behold, it turns out that people spend more money when they feel they are winners (a feeling that is reinforced by a luxurious, relaxing environment).  Even people who don’t gamble are softened up by the environment and are more likely to give it a go.

Nonetheless, in 2001, the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno published Designing Casinos to Dominate the Competition: The Friedman International Standards of Casino Design which expounds upon the 13 essential principles that have long reigned over casino design.

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So, if brainstorming and casino design have been so thoroughly trashed, why are they still being practiced as faithfully as if they had not?  How far back do you have to step to detach sufficiently from any given frame of reference to gain enough perspective to become aware that you are holding beliefs which have been absorbed without due diligence?  Perhaps it’s a matter of having enough time and encouragement to undertake this sort of exercise and in today’s hyper-driven work world, action is prized over reflection which seems like a distraction from the business at hand.

We’ve all had experiences at the individual level when facts could not alter a decision-maker’s strong conviction, even if it was based on faulty assumptions.  But, what is striking about these two examples is that the convictions are held at a macro level and perhaps that is what makes them much harder to dispel.  The utter complexity and momentum of large systems makes it challenging to slow them down.  Until that is, they collapse under their own weight

If system collapse prompts reflection, then perhaps it’s not surprising that in some corners of the fast-paced, dog-eat-dog world of high finance which recently suffered a near total system collapse, just this imperative to confront beliefs is underway.  A body of knowledge is being constructed about the criticality of developing well-defined and explicit investment beliefs at the group level as a key driver of investment performance over the long run.  To me, the fact that finance-types with all their discomfort for the touchy-feely are coming to terms with the limitations of models that are used without ongoing and serious debate about the beliefs that underpin them is a glimmer of hope in an otherwise lemming-like scenario.

This set of observations is closely related to an earlier blog post about how sometimes innovation is based on recovering truths that have been forgotten or discarded and then recovered.  I labeled it “recursive innovation.”   Recursive innovation and what might be called “frame-breaking innovation” share the elusive requirement to adopt a non-mainstream perspective and see where it leads.  But, it’s pretty lonely to break from the pack.

If I had known then what I know now, when my mother asked me whether I would jump off a bridge if my friends did, I would clearly have answered “yes.”  (Rather than try exceedingly hard to justify whatever behavior I had engaged in that crossed some line.)  When practices are ingrained and wide-spread, when they are the received wisdom of an industry, it is nearly impossible to dislodge them.  Even when the facts and results argue against them.  Unless and until, of course, things fall apart.

Sources:

Filed Under: Change, Decision-making

As Clear as Mud

March 27, 2012 By Leave a Comment

As an undergraduate at Duke University, I majored in religion.  I felt somewhat out of place being a Jewish kid at a university with a Methodist Divinity School, but I ended up taking classes at the Div School in such subjects as Biblical Hebrew and Comparative Literature.  Not surprisingly, I had more than my fair share of conversations about God (or as I more respectfully used to spell it back then, G-d).  They were the standard stuff of “What is God?” A compelling question at 18 because I, like many others, had not really thought much beyond what had been presented to me in my decade of religious education (in my case, Hebrew School*).  Many of these conversations were explorations into shared beliefs and while they were fervent and impassioned, they skimmed the surface.  We probed each other’s beliefs about God or the Bible and were reassured as long as we both said the same thing, content to leave it at that.

However, at some point, it dawned on me that my Bible (the Jewish one) and their Bible (the Christian one) were not at all the same despite sharing one book, and that my God (the vengeful Jewish one who was more powerful than a pantheon) and their God (the benevolent Christian one who was the answer) were only related by blood.  I began to see that when someone asked me if I believed in God or the Bible and we both said “yes,” it didn’t really mean that we agreed on much of anything.  Recently, I have had several experiences which reminded me of this essential insight that I learned so long ago.

During a typical conversation about innovation, the buzzwords fly – collaboration, engagement, stage-gate, transparency, fuzzy front end, etc.  And when the conversation is between two or more people who are in the innovation field, it’s taken for granted that we mean the same thing when we use these terms.  However, a few hours after a recent conversation with a successful innovation executive, I was caught short by the realization that what he meant and what I meant by transparency were not even remotely the same thing.

I had been blabbing away about how one of the great things about using an idea management platform, in addition to how easy it is for everyone in the organization to collaborate, is the degree of transparency that it introduces into the process.  I had received enthusiastic head nodding while I was making this remark and was not paying close attention to his response at the time.  As the conversation floated back to me, I actually heard it for the first time.  He had agreed with me that it was essential for executives to have visibility into the organization at all levels and across all business units – a view from the top.  This was not at all what I meant by transparency.  From my point of view, the kind of transparency that engages everyone in the organization and lays the foundation for energetic collaboration gives everyone visibility into everything – a view from anywhere.

I was shocked that I had not noticed this radical disconnect in the course of the conversation.  Instead I had been lulled into complacency by the comforting faux-solidarity that was assumed when talking to a fellow innovation practitioner.  The shock was heightened because it was so similar to another disconnect that had occurred in the course of completing a large project whose success relied heavily on collaboration across a large company.  As the team charged with governance on that project had thought through the best way to deploy an idea management platform, they had struggled with how much control they needed to impose on the process.   They favored more control because in their view, to put it bluntly, employees could not be trusted to behave any better than kids in high school.  Of course, they didn’t put it this way.  They had lots of other more dignified ways of talking about why they needed to review submitted ideas before they were published or keep the criteria for making decisions within the team or not make themselves as individuals accessible to employees.  In other words, they had lots of reasons why the process could only be somewhat transparent.  And I had to find lots of dignified ways to express why I thought the project would be more successful if the process was radically transparent.

But, if I could have put it bluntly, I’d have said that treating people like grown-ups (warts and all – which I’ll explain in a bit) is essential when asking them to collaborate and contribute their best ideas about how to promote the long term health of an organization.  If you just want employees to do their jobs, you can treat them respectfully, but you don’t have to.  You can justify treating them like high school students by pointing to the “warts and all” of most grown-ups at work – we don’t always do our best, we only do what we’re paid to do and sometimes, grudgingly, will do a bit more, we like to complain more than we like to solve problems, we’re quick to point out what’s wrong and not particularly interested in thinking hard about making things better.  The list goes on.   It’s pretty damn near impossible to ask people who behave like this to think hard about the long term health of an organization and come up with ideas that do something about it.  After all, that’s the job of the executives.  The problem is that the executives on their own can’t foster the long term health of an organization unless the majority of people who work in the organization actively participate in the process.

So, what does it take to get employees to participate?  I’ve already made the claim that it’s essential to treat people like grown-ups.  So, what do I mean?  I believe you need to let go of the rationale that the “warts and all” disqualifies people from being treated like grown-ups.  Just because we still act like kids, doesn’t mean we aren’t grown-up.  I think that what truly separates grown-ups from kids is this: Grown-ups are accountable and responsible for their decisions and actions, so they expect to understand the situation in which decisions are made and actions are taken – even if it is not fully under their control.  They expect transparency.

What’s in it for leadership?  Engaging employees in the process of building a sustainable enterprise is the goal of strategy.  Most organizations go part of the way towards executing strategy.  They “cascade” strategic goals down through the organization.  Fair enough (although we all know the familiar joke about what flows downstream in most organizations and it isn’t strategic objectives).  But this is still planning – it aligns the plans, but it doesn’t necessarily align what people actually do or inspire them to do something different.  In fact, most of the time, it encourages them to do what they’re already doing, but better, faster, cheaper, less risky.  All good stuff, but focused on dragging the past into the present and the future in some leaner, meaner fashion.  Rarely is even 10-20% of that activity un-tethered to the past and experimental.  Infusing transparency – the view from anywhere – into collaboration completes the circuit that begins with a cascade of strategic objectives down through the organization, connecting goals with ideas for not only optimizing but also innovating and then translates those ideas into actions and behaviors which can trigger a virtuous cycle of renewal and growth.

Transparency is a big, overarching construct that is fundamental to innovation within the enterprise.  Technology has enabled large organizations to be radically transparent, something that was not possible all that long ago.  But, there’s a gulf between kind of transparency that is critical for successful innovation and the kind of transparency that most executives are accustomed to.  Going forward, I plan to be clearer when I talk about transparency to describe it as a view from anywhere that engages people as grown-ups, warts and all, in the process of promoting the long term health of their organizations.  Up until now, I’m afraid that I’ve only been as clear as mud.

 

*Why we called our Jewish education Hebrew School is a mystery to me.  We were not Hebrews or focused solely on learning about the Hebrews.

Special thanks to Nick Vitalari for encouraging me to complete this post.

Filed Under: Collaboration, Decision-making, Innovation

Expert Failure

February 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Institutional inability to tolerate failure and mistakes is cited as one of the major impediments to innovation. Most organizational activity is directed at existing operations where people deal primarily with “knowns” and, I would even argue, knowable surprises. As a result, failure and mistakes are pushed to the edges of daily organizational life. In stark contrast, innovation ventures into the unknown where failure sits squarely in the center of things. Avoiding it is impossible. Yet, it seems we are built with a bias against failure.  We are literally wired to avoid it, making innovation that much harder to achieve. How do we find a way to work against the grain of our true natures and stop trying to wish failure and mistakes away?

Perhaps we can start by reconsidering some of our sacred cows – like the belief that experts do not fail.  This seems important to me as innovation itself becomes the domain of experts and we look to them in the same way that we look to other experts – as people with knowledge that prevents them from failing at the thing they are expert at doing. Experts are supposed to be able to size up situations, define outcomes, consider alternatives, and take action to achieve goals while avoiding mistakes. Being an expert requires a large amount of confidence.  But confidence doesn’t always deliver the goods.

In the past few years, there’s been a wave of articles and books exploring the gross fallibility of human judgment, especially expert judgment. There are many reasons why we make lousy decisions and most of them have to do with the crazy extent to which we strive to see patterns in random events. Our drive to make meaning creates a bias toward coherence. The easier it is to believe a story, the more confident we are that it is true. The more that those offering an opinion are credentialed and have long impressive resumes, even if there is no statistical basis that judgment yields a better result than random guesses, we  believe in that expert’s opinion. We derive comfort from the illusion of skill.

Daniel Kahneman, one of the leading theorists on the psychology of judgment and behavioral economics, suggests that a confident expert might make a better decision when at least two criteria are met:

  • The environment in which the judgment is made is sufficiently regular to enable predictions from the available evidence.
  • Professionals have adequate opportunity to learn the cues and the regularities of the situation.

The domain of innovation fails on both counts. So, how can we get comfortable with the fact that even our experts are going to make mistakes?  And what can an expert do to incorporate mistake-making into the ongoing process of developing expertise?

An article by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker explored the topic of expert failure in the medical profession. Gawande is looking at expert failure at the tiny mistake end of the failure continuum as he examines the medical profession’s bias against coaching and its preference for teaching.  But even tiny mistakes can combine in unanticipated ways to create colossal failures.

Surgical mastery requires familiarity and judgment and is among what Gawande calls late-peaking careers which deal with complexities of people or nature and are tolerant of less than ideal physical stamina. Late-peaking careers stand in contrast to early-peaking careers – most sports or athletic endeavors, certain of the arts (dance), and mathematics (where it appears people peak early because they are unburdened by the weight of their own theories). Whether late- or early-peaking, experts in any field reach a performance plateau. This is where coaching comes in.

Coaches “observe, judge, and guide.”  They don’t have to be good at what it is they are coaching.  Pro sports coaching is based on the premise that it is virtually impossible to achieve and maintain peak performance on one’s own.  I believe that it is easier to coach people in early-peaking careers precisely because we are comfortable with the idea of younger people benefiting from the knowledge of older people. Another bias that makes coaching the late-peaking career expert more difficult comes from the difference between expertise that is conferred through formal academic education and that which is conferred through other sorting methods (such as sports competitions).  Traditional pedagogy is based on the concept of graduating and not requiring further instruction in a particular area.  For experts in many fields, expertise means not needing to be coached.  That doesn’t mean that experts do not need to keep up in their fields, but they are assumed to have the skills needed to do this on their own.

“The sort of coaching that fosters effective innovation and judgment, not merely the replication of technique, may not be so easy to cultivate.  Yet modern society increasingly depends on ordinary people taking responsibility for extraordinary things….With a diploma, a few [people] will achieve sustained mastery; with a good coach, many could….[Coaching] may prove essential to the success in modern society.”

But, experts getting coached face big problems. When Gawande, a surgeon himself, brought a coach into the operating theatre, it did not reassure his patients.  In fact, it made them nervous.  It made them doubt his skill.  The coach in the operating theatre meant that Gawande might make a mistake, he wasn’t perfect.  Our expectations about perfection, even in the face of what we know is complexity, are not realistic.  We don’t want to believe that our surgeons can fail, even though we sign consent forms that acknowledge this fact.  Intellectually we can accept that there are many variables which are impossible to predict or control.  But emotionally, we are shocked when an expert fails.  We expect experts to succeed.  All the time.

If we must accept mistakes and failure and acknowledge that even experts will encounter them when they operate in highly complex systems, then gaining a better understanding of mistakes and failure despite our wiring to not dwell too much on them seems like a good place to start.  Next up on the blog: a theory of mistakes that might help us learn to love them.

Sources:

  • “Personal Best,” Atul Gawande, The New Yorker, October 3, 2011
  • “The Surety of Fools,” Daniel Kahneman, The New York Times Magazine, October 23, 2011

 

 

Filed Under: Decision-making, Innovation

Collaboration is Powerful Medicine

January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

True collaboration involves a team in which authority relationships are flat rather than hierarchical.  For this reason, true collaboration cannot take place without every team member having open access to all information.  Otherwise, the relationship is not flat. True collaboration also requires belief that the shared information is accurate and complete.  True collaboration requires trust. While these requirements may seem obvious, they are not easy to meet for most organizations that seek to increase collaboration among employees and other stakeholders. So why go to the trouble?  Because, it seems that true collaboration is as powerful as taking the right medicine when it comes to improving outcomes.

OpenNotes, a collaborative research project that invites patients to view and ultimately contribute to writing their medical records, is trying to determine whether collaborative interaction (between the patient and healthcare provider) with the information in individual health records can create “knowledge-medicine” that positively impacts actual health.

The theory being tested is that collaboration – merging divergent perspectives among parties interested in achieving a mutual goal, interacting in a flat relationship with open access to complete information – will yield actionable knowledge held with high conviction. Based on this high conviction knowledge, behaviors (decisions and actions) and outcomes will be positively affected. That is, what I am labeling “true collaboration” can produce a health impact similar to medicine.

The transition to electronic health records which will hold legible, accessible content has the power to change the perception of who rightfully owns the information. Although individuals technically own their medical records, gaining access to them has been challenging at best. A doctor’s handwritten notes scrawled in the standard joke of indecipherable physician scribble sets up a barrier of privacy that feels as if it goes in the opposite direction – as if the notes belong to the physician rather than the patient. When medical information is stored and accessed in the same way as financial information, it will level the playing field, creating the expectation that this information rightfully belongs to the individual and is being shared with the healthcare provider. In the OpenNotes experiment, the combination of the patient’s ability to access information directly, removing the healthcare provider as a gatekeeper, coupled with the ability of the entire health team and the patient to review the information together builds trust that the information is accurate and complete, and flattens the authority hierarchy, creating the conditions for true collaboration.

The emphasis of the OpenNotes project is on improving patient outcomes by changing patient behavior.  But there are tantalizing hints that it will also transform the healthcare providers’ practices as well.  One physician is quoted as saying: “’It might be better to say the patient is ’20 percent over ideal body weight’ rather than ‘a jovial obese man came into my clinic,’….” because using the term obese risks alienating the patient.  But changing how physicians document what they observe subtly alters the very act of observing.  It forces the physician to view healthcare as a process that involves human beings (both patients and healthcare providers) who need to be engaged in ways that will actually alter behaviors over time.  The patient needs more specificity to understand what is required (reducing weight by 20 percent) and the physician needs to consider how best to motivate productive behavior change.

An article on placebo research (see below) suggests why viewing healthcare as a human-centered process is necessary:

There has always been a distinction between disease and illness.  Disease is a biological condition that we have historically treated with drugs, surgery, and other technological solutions.  Illness, on the other hand, defines the context of a medical encounter, including the relationship between doctor and patient…[It] is essential to consider both the science and art of medicine – to think about diseases as illnesses, and not to rely solely on short-term, high-tech solutions.

Of course, the OpenNotes endeavor is fraught with concerns:

Will physicians’ notes change if they know patients are reading them? [I think so, but the question is, will they change for the better?]  Will patients withhold information they don’t want to see recorded? [The classic "knowledge is power" problem.]  Will they be more likely to seek a second or third opinion?” [Driving up costs at a time when this is precisely the opposite of what is needed.]

In addition to improving health outcomes, true collaboration needs to do it along classical economic improvement dimensions – better, faster, cheaper, less risky.  At present, whether it can achieve improved health outcomes faster, cheaper and with less risk remains unclear. But, the OpenNotes project sounds a hopeful note – with a nod towards not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good – stating that this collaboration is “…designed to help more people than it hurts, but… medicines are never perfect.” The reason to sit up and take notice of initiatives like OpenNotes is that the power of true collaboration to change behaviors and alter outcomes extends well beyond the boundaries of individual health to the health of all of the organizational systems on which our livelihoods depend.

 

Sources:

  • “Project Puts Records in the Patient’s Hands,” Roni Caryn Rabin, The New York Times, Tuesday, January 10, 2012 page D6.
  • “The Power of Nothing, Michael Specter,” The New Yorker, December 12, 2011.

 

Addendum:

The article on placebo research was fascinating in its own right.  Below is a brief snippet of what intrigued me:

The Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter is a Harvard-sponsored institute that is studying the role of placebos in clinical practice.  And what, at the end of the day, is a placebo but trust in the information about a medical intervention that alters patients’ perceptions and, in some cases the biochemistry, of illness?  Placebos are mind-boggling to contemplate, because many times they represent false knowledge.  Patients believe that a medical intervention (a pill, injection, salve, a procedure) is designed to alleviate some discomforting aspect of their condition.  This belief in or expectation of a particular outcome triggers the body to contribute to the anticipated outcome.  For example, on being told that they are receiving high doses of morphine (when in fact they are receiving saline) some patients experience pain relief.   The belief that they are receiving morphine triggers their bodies to produce endorphins (the body’s natural opiates).  But even without deception, it seems that placebos provide a benefit.   Recent research involves disclosure to the patient that the therapeutic treatment is a placebo along with what is known about the benefits of placebos.  This research demonstrates that even when patients know that they are receiving a placebo, many derive a positive health benefit.

 

Filed Under: Change, Collaboration

Back to the Future

December 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Sometimes I’m hard pressed to understand why I read what I do.  What is it that actually interests me about some stories?  Then, after a while, I see that it isn’t the content per se  but rather the narrative which keeps me engaged and draws me along.  Of the handful of narratives that mesmerize me, the recursive innovation narrative (or back to future story) stands out.

In this narrative, innovation comes about by rediscovering something that has been lost along the way.  Typically, the loss occurs because popular or commercial interest becomes caught up with an idea that, in the long run, is either revealed or proven to be false.  Or one idea has become so widespread that it crowds out another idea that is equally, if not more, important.  The innovation lies in reclaiming or reasserting the thing that was once known but became lost in the process.

Here are two stories of recursive innovation:

Running Redux

Humans are born runners.  The combination of an ability to cool ourselves through perspiration (rather than panting as other animals do) and the “springiness” of our legs allowed humans to outlast their prey when it came to running.  So, why is it that close to 80% of all contemporary runners suffer injuries each year despite specially engineered running shoes, running surfaces, and training regimes?  And why is it that in some cultures which lack all of these advantages, people we would consider elderly can run 100-mile races as a matter of course?

Christopher McDougall believes “…we don’t need smarter shoes, we need smarter feet”   He has resurrected an exercise routine that rewires the brain and the body to run the way that nature intended – the 100-Up Exercise.  An undeniably simple routine, the 100-Up (see the YouTube video) is a three-minute exercise that upends modern running dogma.  It isn’t about the shoes, the surface, the intensive training – it’s about rediscovering the way that humans were born to run.

So when and where did it go wrong?  Apparently, not so long ago and also apparently, the commercial shoe industry in the U.S. played a major role in leading runners astray.  In the 1970s and 80s, runners became obsessed with the notion that the proper running shoe was the key to great running because the biggest problem with running was heel-strike impact.  The first inkling that the shoe solution to heel-strike impact might be wrong came when researchers began to observe barefoot runners.  What they noticed was that barefoot runners did not land on their heels, but rather, on the balls of their feet.   This was not a shoe-problem, but a form problem.  However, ingrained notions of running are difficult to dislodge and even though barefoot running has taken off, it is still shoe- rather than form-focused for the most part.  The biggest evidence of shoe-bias is the invention of those strange looking glove-like shoes.  You can shell out the bucks for Vibram Five-Fingers, but if you are still running heel first, you are highly likely to injure yourself.  According to those who practice the new method informed by 100-Up, you can run with the shoes you already have because it’s not the shoes, it’s the way you run that matters.

Apples Lost and Found

The apple as a healthy snack is a relatively new invention.  Apples have been around a long time (from a human civilization perspective), but up to the Civil War period they were primarily used as either feedstock for animals or an alternative to water in the form of hard cider for humans because apples were not particularly tasty to eat.  Prohibition was especially bad for apples (hard cider was alcoholic), and it was during this period that they got a PR makeover with an adage promoting their health (“An apple a day keeps the doctor away”) and an agricultural focus on propagating better tasting varieties. Before industrial scale refrigeration, most people enjoyed local apples and there are a multitude of types associated with particular geographies.

Some Fun Apples (Esopus Spitzenberg and Yellow Newton Pippin):

However, with the advent of refrigerated rail cars, apples could be transported over long distances.  Refrigeration and the rise of the national grocery chain combined to promote the apple attributes of durability, long shelf life and aesthetic appeal.  As a result, the plethora of apple species dwindled to three – McIntosh, Red Delicious and Golden Delicious — and apples as a local treat gave way to the national grocery produce staple.  Apple breeding increasingly focused on making sure apples looked rather than tasted good.  We all know how delicious apples can look and how disappointing they can taste.  That shiny, beautiful outside masking a mushy, mealy, flavorless inside.  This is how it came to be that Americans now consume about half the amount of apples as their European counterparts.

The sorry state of affairs persisted for some time until a confluence of events turned the tide to favor a tasty apple with great texture and crunch.  In the 1970s, several new apple varieties – so called “super apples” – were imported from outside the U.S. and began to be cultivated here.   At the same time, price controls were imposed to help the U.S. deal with stagflation, but produce was exempt from this constraint creating an opening for these new apples.   Americans got a taste of delicious, but less than perfectly formed apples and loved them. Once again, the apple as a flavorful, nutritious food found in many varieties was back on the scene and apple consumption began to increase.

Recursive Innovation

The article from which my much abbreviated apple mini-history is derived goes on to describe the equally fascinating business model of patenting and controlling the production of apple varieties.  But what struck me as I read about apples past and present was how much it reminded me of the story about running.   The themes in both stories are the same. In the push to scale an innovation, to achieve industrial capacity, a critical artisanal element was lost, left by the wayside because its importance was not understood.  This element would turn out to be a sustainability factor which had to be rediscovered in order to breathe life back into the innovation.

I am not suggesting that the sustainability factor is always apparent.  Clearly if people knew what it was they would not so casually allow it to be jettisoned in favor of other elements which might turn out to be helpful for a time, but ultimately outlive their usefulness.   Yet this challenge – knowing what to discard and what to retain – remains a key challenge of innovation.

As we come to the close of the year, this question – what to hold onto and what to let go of as we move ahead – has particular resonance, both organizationally and individually.  Much of the world is  captivated by the idea of sustainability whose light and fluffy exterior is characterized by “doing well by doing good” and whose dark underbelly is the stuff of self-preservation.   What I like most about sustainability as a screen for what should be retained or discarded is its strategic urgency.  Strategic – doing well by doing good.  Urgency – self-preservation.  I’ve been told and have experienced it to be true in my own life that what gets done is whatever is threatened by a burning platform (regrets to the “what gets measured, gets done” crowd – burning platform trumps measurement).   As we move into the new year and look for new ways to separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff, one possibility might be found in the recursive innovation narrative and its North Star of sustainability.

Sources:

  • “The Once and Future Way to Run,” Christopher McDougall, The New York Times Magazine, November 6, 2011
  • “Crunch,” John Seabrook, The New Yorker, November 21, 2011
Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Strategy, Sustainability

The Collaboration Cure

November 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Recently, a series of articles have appeared in which collaboration is offered up as the cure for what ails us – as a species, as a country, and as organizations. 

  • Collaboration (in the form of trade or exchange) is a form of cultural evolution – when practiced, ideas have sex.  
  • Our better than average position as a collaboration hub could be what keeps the US in its top economic position. 
  • Collaboration is the key to long term organizational health.

Matt Ridley, speaking at TED and blogging for Frog Design by way of FAST Company, provocatively states that ideas having sex is the bedrock of innovation.  (I say that ideas having sex = collaboration.)  Ridley argues that human beings in our capacity for trade or exchange beyond our tribe or clan are distinct from every other living creature on the face of the earth.  Other living creatures have cultures and pass on traditions, but these traditions remain within the tribe or clan.  Only human beings trade objects and ideas with those who live outside the boundaries of the tribe or clan.   This capacity to embed ideas in other cultures is analogous to the formation of genomes during sexual reproduction.  During procreation it gives rise to incredible diversity and vitality in the species, during trade or exchange the same occurs in human civilization.

Fast forward thousands of years and we have evolved to the point where everyone works for everyone else because no one knows enough about anything to make it on his or her own.  Ridley cites the pencil and the computer mouse as cases in point – very different technologies, but even in the mid 1800’s when something like the modern pencil came to be, no one person or company possessed sufficient knowledge to make a pencil.  Graphite had to be mined, trees had to be felled, machines had to be fabricated to shape the pencil and insert grooves for the lead.  The computer mouse is infinitely more complicated, involving industries spanning oil & gas, chemicals, electronics, and consumer retail.  As with the pencil, no one person or company knows how to make a computer mouse.   Radical collaboration (many ideas having lots of sex) has pushed innovation beyond the capacity of the human brain by uniting millions of human brains in a complex web of connections that is constantly evolving.  For Ridley, the computing cloud, with its limitless potential to connect all human brains will boost our innovation capacity even further by providing a totally accessible collaboration platform, freed from constraints of time, place, and (almost) cost.

Modulating downward from the computing cloud to the US economy, David Brooks in his New York Times editorial column, The Crossroads Nation, makes essentially the same point as Ridley that innovation will be the economic driver of success in the future.  But Brooks is more focused on the infrastructure of collaboration than on the act of collaboration itself.  For Brooks, America’s economic identity in the future might lie in the very openness and diversity that permeates our culture making us the ideal “hub” nation.  He quotes an essay by Anne-Marie Slaughter – “In a networked world, the issue is no longer relative power, but centrality in an increasingly dense global web.”   Collaboration flourishes in places that are free, but fair, where people can come together with relative ease to connect with ideas and resources.   Brooks wants America to invest in connections to cement our potential position as “the crossroads nation.”   If collaboration is the bedrock of innovation, then to be the “go-to” place/space for innovation means nurturing the United State’s potential to provide the infrastructure and cultural openness that create a vibrant collaboration hub.

Finally, an interview with Martha Samuelson, president and CEO of the Analysis Group, a consulting firm, speaks to what collaboration actually looks like on a day-to-day basis in a company.  Ridley and Brooks get you thinking, but Samuelson addresses the nitty gritty – how do you make it happen?  What encourages people to collaborate once the tools are in place?   To foster cooperation, the Analysis Group operates as one P&L even though they have 10 offices and multiple practice areas.  “We have a trust-based system for setting partner compensation, and it’s based on a belief that we’re in a long game together.”  Samuelson goes on to state that sometimes they get the compensation a little wrong in the short term, but “[t]he people who have stayed and thrived have been people for whom this collaboration issue is so important that they’re willing to leave some money on the table over it.” They are not a precision shop when it comes to getting it exactly right about compensation (which Samuelson notes is ironic since they are economists).   The Analysis Group gets greater accountability from individuals by measuring at the group level than it would if it measured at the level of the individual – current “best practice” in most performance management systems.  For people to pull together, to collaborate, they have to be in it together and being in it together means compromise and getting it approximately right (which means it is slightly wrong).  In practice, getting ideas to have sex is a messy, nearly right sort of thing that relies on goodwill and trust which take time to establish and can be extinguished in an instant. 

Collaboration is essential for innovation – at the level of the species, the country, and the organization.  Ridley believes we have what it takes as a species.  Brooks implores political leaders to embrace the moment and invest in a future in which the US is the collaboration hub par excellence.  Samuelson knows that for her organization, collaboration is so critical to success that even economists are willing to live with imprecise measurement.  Collaboration requires freedom to think and act, incentive to move beyond the boundaries of what is known and safe, an infrastructure to support exchange, a willingness to embrace messiness and uncertainty, and a very long view.   Does your organization have what it takes to innovate? 

Sources:

Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation

Counterinsurgency and Organizational Transformation

September 15, 2010 By Leave a Comment

What can be learned from counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan about transformation in large organizations?   After reading “A Civic War” in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I’ve concluded that the answer is “a lot.”

Let’s agree that organizational transformation refers to a wide-ranging overhaul of both structure and process and typically strives to embed a new or substantially recharged cultural norm(s) in the transformed organization’s DNA.   As a result, transformations invariably inspire resistance which comes in many different flavors.   There are those who put their heads down and wait for it to blow over; those who agree in public, but share their “concerns” in private; those who find fault with what is proposed and suggest that caution dictates more study.  And these are but a sampling of what might be otherwise called “insurgents.”   

Counterinsurgency doctrine proposes that insurgents emerge in response to transformation because the legitimacy of the current governing structure is questionable.  As a result, “’the primary objective of any counterinsurgent is to foster the development of effective governance by a legitimate government.’”   Most organizational transformations occur under the leadership of a new CEO who typically has installed many new executives (or has sometimes cleaned house completely).   For this reason, the legitimacy of the governing structure is questionable.  After all, it is new and can offer no proof that what is being proposed will succeed.

But, according to counterinsurgency doctrine, the most effective tactics for dealing with insurgents are frequently galling to those with power to command and control because “’the more force used, the less effective it is.’”  While you can give people their marching orders and even compel them to march, the more that these tactics are used, the more likely it is that the transformation will fail.  Successful counterinsurgency seeks to transfer the power to get things done to those who operate at the local level, building legitimacy at the top from the bottom-up.  The transfer of power is a process, carefully monitored and crafted with powerful incentives, but when the goal is a self-sustaining system, power to adapt and adjust must be distributed throughout the system.  

To whom is the power transferred?  In Afghanistan, it is going to people who are viewed as key local leaders, those willing to defy the Taliban (which can be thought of as the existing order).  In my mind, this is a step that most large organizations fail to take.  Much time and effort is spent insuring that key leaders at the top are in place, but much less time and effort is spent at the local level to insure that the same is true.   Key leader engagement at the local level strikes me as a significant contribution to successful transformation.  

Large organizations expend tremendous effort grooming people to lead at the top, but very few focus on how people lead at the bottom which may be why many transformations fail to take hold.  Without strong leadership at the bottom, the local level, that has the power to adapt and adjust, it simply takes too long for guidance to filter down from the top.  In the interim, things fall apart, reverting back to old habits.  Counterinsurgency doctrine seems to suggest that for a governing structure to be legitimate, it must be supported by governance that reinforces the interdependence and ability to act of those at the top, the middle and the bottom.

Source:  “A Civic War,” James Traub, The New York Times Magazine, June 20, 2010

Filed Under: Decision-making, Leadership, Strategy

Frameworks: Evolution’s way of solving problems

August 16, 2010 By Leave a Comment

During one four-year period early in my career, I had the privilege of working with a leader in the then nascent field of family business consulting.  Barbara Hollander was among those pioneering the application of family systems theory (in her case, Bowen Theory) to business dynamics as a way of helping family-owned business leaders better plan for and manage growth – especially transitions from one generation to the next.   Barbara taught me that having a framework is useful because it brings messy and seemingly chaotic situations into focus.  Frameworks provide boundaries and a point-of-view for understanding the gestalt of a situation (what is important, how things fit together or are related, etc.)   

For a much longer stretch of my career, I’ve been surrounded by consultants who are essentially applied mathematicians – people who use mathematical models to approximate the way the world works in an attempt to make recommendations about which actions should be taken today that are most likely to achieve desired outcomes in the future.  These models are also frameworks, but unlike the kind of frameworks that Barbara Hollander applied successfully to family business systems, many of these models have failed.  They have proven themselves to be too narrowly construed and brittle to accommodate extreme events and their unforseen consequences in an increasingly inter-connected world.  As a result, some of these applied mathematicians are expanding their frameworks to blend human judgment with output from mathematical models – a marriage of mathematics and social sciences that to-date has produced behavioral economics and will undoubtedly have more offspring.

At the same time, psychologists, neuroscientists, and artificial intelligence technologists are uncovering astonishing new insights about frameworks.  Human beings appear to be hard-wired with a built-in problem-solving framework that starts as a survival mechanism and blossoms into a highly nuanced point of view as we develop.  “One lesson from the study of artificial intelligence (and from cognitive science more generally) is that an empty head learns nothing: a system that is capable of rapidly absorbing information needs to have some prewired understanding of what to pay attention to and what generalizations to make.  Babies might start off smart, then, because it enables them to get smarter.”(1)   So, frameworks appear to be literally encoded in our DNA and are an essential element in acquiring insights that help us solve problems.     

Frameworks are even more important when a group needs to problem-solve.  When we talk about “getting everyone on the same page,” we are talking about formulating or using a common framework to give us at least a partial understanding of the problem.  A common framework does the same thing for a group that it does for babies – it makes us collectively smart enough to use all of the attributes that  individuals and groups apply to solving really difficult problems.  Andrew McAfee’s latest blog describes these attributes in a post about how individuals and groups have achieved superior results developing solutions to the extremely complex problem of protein folding (a topic beyond the scope of this blog post – see McAfee’s blog to get a reference to the paper in Nature on protein folding that he is discussing).   

Attributes that make human beings good at solving complex problems:

  • Spatial reasoning or seeing solutions (is this the DNA of frameworks?)
  • Intuition or hunches that are the result of experience
  • Adaptivity or the ability to change our approach
  • Language which biases us towards collaboration – an effective way to build and share knowledge
  • Self-organization, a kind of group adaptivity that uses each person’s capabilities to collectively solve problems 
  • Competition, a motivating desire to win or be recognized in some way spurs us on

As the problems we face become increasingly complex, we appear to be well-suited as a species to solving them.  Our DNA-encoded frameworks hard-wire us for ”smartness” and we possess a strong set of complex problem-solving attributes.   In addition, we seem to be evolving our ability to invent frameworks in ways that blend soft judgment  and hard data to achieve closer approximations of the true problems at hand.  With this more “true” picture of the problem, we have a much better chance of zeroing in on a more effective solution.

(1)     “The Moral Life of Babies,” Paul Bloom, The New York Times Magazine, May 9 , 2010

Filed Under: Collaboration, Decision-making

Leadership in the Age of Influence

August 2, 2010 By 1 Comment

Influence.  Control.  The line has been drawn in the sand.  There are some who say that the battle has already been won or lost, depending on your point of view.   However, few would dispute that a battle is underway.  Twitter, Facebook, YouTube:  Are they the three Furies of Social Networking sent to torment those who still believe that what it means to be in charge, in control, has not changed irrevocably?

In an article(1) describing how social networking is changing the face of diplomacy in the State Department,  Hillary Clinton’s position is described as weighing in on the side of the benefits being greater than the risks of engaging in experiments that test the value of “…breaking through..by having people who are doing the work of our government be human beings, be personalized, be relatable.”   The article showcases two relatively young members of the State Department who share not only information about their work, but also about their personal lives via Twitter, and who encourage others to engage with them to share information about the political goings on in their parts of the world.  Compared with the tightly controlled environment in which most State Department communication takes place, this is the Wild West. 

Supposedly, before the explosion of social networking, information and people could be controlled.  Information leaks could be kept to a manageable minimum and if they did occur, broad dissemination could be contained.  Now, the argument goes, that kind of control is gone.  Proof point du jour:  WikiLeaks recently scored a major coup with the publication of tens of thousands of pages of intelligence reports that have been dubbed the Afghan War Diary (http://wardiary.wikileaks.org/) detailing the bleak state of US Army efforts in that beleaguered country from 2004-2010.  While not top secret, the information is secret and its release has prompted investigations and news coverage. The information has generated global debate which has doubled and redoubled the information that is available on the topic, an information spiral that has achieved a self-sustaining momentum, spinning out of control. 

These developments in the public domain are affecting what goes on inside organizations.  It is no longer acceptable, productive, or even possible to rely exclusively on control as a means of eliciting desired behaviors among employees.   As someone who is interested in the confluence of knowledge management, radical collaboration, and innovation within organizational systems, the tension between control and influence seems to be stirring the pot when these three domains intersect (or collide).   As information becomes harder to control, it seems that people are harder to control as well.  Those who are charged with stewardship of an organization’s brand may understand that they are no longer in control when it comes to consumers or customers, but they are now grappling with the challenge of not being securely in control when it comes to employees either.  For this reason, understanding what it means to lead in the age of influence seems acutely important. 

Fast Company is running a project to find “2010’s Most Influential Person Online”    (http://influenceproject.fastcompany.com/).  This is what it says about influence: 

Real influence is about being able to affect the behavior of those you interact with, to get others in your social network to act on a suggestion or recommendation. When you post a link or recommend a site, how many people actually bother to check it out? And what’s the likelihood of those people then forwarding it on? How far does your influence spread?

So, what are ways that people affect the behavior of others through influence rather than control.  What really is the difference? (2)

  • Control – to exercise restraint or direction over; dominate; command.
  • Influence – to move or impel to some action.

Control implies that individuals have no real choice or freedom to act, influence suggests that they do, that there is no negative consequence if individuals choose to act in a way other than what is being suggested.  Perhaps this is why in most organizational systems, reality lies somewhere between control and influence.  In many cases, there are very real, very negative consequences to not acting in the way that is being suggested.   Career development may evaporate, demotion or sidelining may occur – the subtle or not so subtle understanding may develop that it’s time to go elsewhere.   If in organizational systems today, reality is more complicated than being on one side or the other of the control/influence divide, how do leaders determine when it is best to impel rather than compel?  Can both be true at the same time or then is neither true?  How do leaders inspire if they must also control? 

The fact that the answers to these questions are murky is one reason why there is debate about how open and transparent organizations must be to succeed in the marketplace and society.  It makes choices about knowledge management, innovation, and radical collaboration complicated and fraught with uncertainty.   Learning how to lead in the age of influence might well be the next critical leadership skill.

Sources:

  • (1) Digital Diplomacy, Jesse Lichtenstein, The New York Times Magazine, July 18, 2010 
  • (2) Definitions from www.dictionary.com 
Filed Under: Collaboration, Innovation, Knowledge Management, Leadership

Salted Licorice and the Secret of Customer Delight

July 14, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Hibiscus Beet.  Boccalone Prosciutto.  Chocolate Smoked Sea Salt.   These are all ice cream flavors.  They are sold at Humphry Slocombe in San Francisco, an ice cream parlor for people who are bored with traditional ice cream, people who want to be surprised, and I would claim, delighted.  Its founder/owner, Jake Godby, opened the store in 2008.  His goal was to “create a challenging ice cream store.”  In the New York Times Magazine profile that describes Godby and his ice cream parlor, Godby is likened to an artist. 

In the past six months, I have been working with the latest incarnation of a tool that helps organizations understand, serve, and ideally delight their customers – the customer journey map.  A process flow that charts a customer’s experience with purchasing and using a product or service and elicits expectations about that experience; the customer journey map highlights areas where the experience fails to meet expectations.  When it is compared with the organization’s process map, the differences bring into relief another set of disconnects.  The claim is made that by uncovering these failure points and disconnects between expectations and experience, an organization can rethink how and what it delivers to customers so that it can exceed expectations and delight them.

Reading about Jake Godby’s ice cream parlor made me wonder about that.   Can you engineer delight?  Can people tell you what will delight them?  It seems highly unlikely to me that Jake Godby’s customers could have told him that they wanted to be challenged by an ice cream store.  Maybe they were tired of fudge ripple and chocolate chip mint ice cream, but could they have dreamed up Peanut Butter Curry?  Could they have known that they wanted to be surprised and intrigued by wacky dessert options in the form of ice cream that made them think differently about ice cream altogether?

Delight seems to contain an element of surprise, something that is hard to predict, something that changes your perception of an experience.   Mapping the customer experience and hearing what customers expect can tell you how to conform to those expectations, but how do you exceed them?  How do you engineer delight?   You need to understand what your customers expect, of course, but you can’t expect them to tell you what will delight them.  Customer journey maps are one step on the journey to delight.  They are part of the critical understanding of “what is” and hint at “what might be.”  But they only provide hints.  Achieving and maintaining delight demands alertness, adaptability, and artistry from organizations.  You will have to take risks.  You will have to experiment.  Like Jake Godby, you will have to be an artist, a provocateur.  You have to be willing to fail.  If Jake Godby fails, he gets immediate feedback, the costs are manageable, and he lives to innovate another day (apparently porcini ice cream was not a hit).   What would it mean for your organization to offer the equivalent of Strawberry Candied Jalapeno?   Delight or disaster?    Is your organization willing to take the big gamble of innovation to achieve customer delight or does its risk tolerance set a limit at meeting expectations?

Sources: 

Filed Under: Customer capital, Innovation
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