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Received Wisdom

April 30, 2012 By Wendi 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

large groups
gobs of ideas
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:

Groupthink, Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, January 30, 2012
Royal Flush, Jonah Lehrer, The New Yorker, March 26, 2012
http://business.unr.edu/gaming/publications/DesigningCasinos.pdf: Bill Friedman’s 13 principles
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2001/Aug-19-Sun-2001/opinion/16762922.html, review of Friedman’s book

Filed Under: Change, Decision-making

As Clear as Mud

March 27, 2012 By Wendi 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 Wendi 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 Wendi 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 Wendi 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 Death of BIG Ideas

November 21, 2011 By Wendi Leave a Comment

Late this summer, I read a column in the The New York Times Sunday Review by Neal Gabler that drove me mad. Gabler believes that Americans do not think anymore and, as a result, we no longer formulate BIG ideas that have the power to transfix and transform society. In his editorial, Mr. Gabler points to an earlier time – pre-social networking and pre-Googling – when BIG thinkers were cultural icons – Albert Einstein, Betty Friedan, Marshal McLuhan. He makes the rather strange point that “a generation ago, these men [I assume he means “people” since he includes a few women in his examples of BIG thinkers] would have made their way into popular magazines and onto television screens.” He seems to mean that we no longer want to hear what scientists have to say if we can’t consume their ideas in a Tweet-stream.

But, I wonder about that when I watch the Daily Show or the Colbert Report with my 20-year-old son and we are listening to the US Ambassador to the UN discuss why the UN matters to the US or a Senator discuss the debt ceiling debate. Okay, okay – it’s a six minute interview with snarky humor laced throughout, but that’s about three minutes longer than the so-called major networks’ coverage of important topics and about as long as NPR gives a story (and that’s called an “in-depth” treatment). These are BIG problems calling for BIG ideas and they are not solely problems of the marketplace, the one domain in which Gabler acknowledges that BIG ideas are clearly being born.

But, if Gabler gives, he also takes away.

“Entrepreneurs have plenty of ideas, and some….have come up with some brilliant ideas in the ‘inventional’ sense of the word. Still, while these ideas may change the way we live, they rarely transform the way we think. They are material, not ideational.”

I have to say, that I am still trying to make sense of this assertion. It seems to me that many commercial inventions do, in fact, change the way we think. They create new frameworks which change how we see things and this is precisely how understanding is transformed. The fact that these ideas are embodied in a product or a service (are experienced in the corporeal world) does not – to my mind, at least – negate their “ideational” impact. And, the notion that ideas in the marketplace and ideas in the… “non-marketplace(?)” are fundamentally different also makes me wince. Are there any corners of human activity that are free from the curse of “monetization?” The marketplace subsidizes some pockets of activity, insulating them from its daily concerns – non-profits and government – but they are not immune or outside of its reach (ask any university that relied on its endowment funds for operations in 2009 or NGO that relied on donors).

Finally Gabler goes full bore and lets loose about what he calls our “post-idea” world. This is the world in which we are more concerned with amassing information to stay informed than to make sense of the world. We live in a gap between apprehending and comprehending the world in Gabler’s terms. Reducing our expression to 140 characters or video clips and restricting it to our circle of online friends (even if they number in the millions as they do for Lady Gaga and Ashton Kutcher) traps us in an endless loop of opinions which are the antithesis of BIG thinking.

I admit that I find it impossible to keep up with the flow of information that comes my way. But this was the case 20 years ago – before the Internet, before Kindles, before iPhones and iPads and netbooks and Blackberries and instant messaging and Twitter. It was nice not to be so accessible, so 24/7, but it didn’t make it any easier to be thoughtful.

In some of the work that I do, BIG ideas are afoot and they are engaging many people in provocative and energetic discussions that seek to enlarge our understanding of what it means to live in an increasingly inter-connected world in which seemingly small choices ripple outward with surprisingly large impact over long periods of time. Strands of thinking that come many different fields – complexity theory, evolutionary biology, particle physics, finance, philanthropy – are being woven together to form new ways of seeing, of understanding our world.

My children’s education at the elementary, middle and high school levels is far more concerned with understanding than it is with simply acquiring information – a marked contrast to my own experience. And, my kids are every bit as connected 24/7 via text messages and video chats as any of their peers. Yet somehow, BIG ideas still entrance them as they struggle to make sense of their world in all its close immensity. I am not a betting person, but I would still bet that there are BIG ideas out there that are heading our way and that as a species our drive to make meaning will prevail.

And, that’s as a good a reason as any on this Thanksgiving Holiday to be thankful.

Source: “The Elusive Big Idea,” Neal Gabler, Sunday Review, The New York Times, August 14, 2011.

Filed Under: Change

Timing Might NOT Be Everything

October 18, 2011 By Wendi Leave a Comment

Recently when I’ve been in the middle of political discussions with friends or family, I’ve found myself on the side of an argument where I rather sadly concede that President Obama might not be the right person for the times. It occurs to me that this point of view might have less to do with the President and more to do with a middle-aged belief about what has limited or supported my personal accomplishments to-date – a belief that I’ve been fortunate to have predilections about what I do to make a living and a temperament about how I do it that have been well-suited to the particular state of the business world during my career lifetime (so far, at least). A feeling that timing is everything.

A few weeks ago, I attended a one day seminar on the topic of Forecasting in the Face of Risk and Uncertainty. Most of the people attending this event were involved in the financial markets and their main (and in most cases, only) interest is figuring out how to make money. Ironically, virtually all of the presenters (other than the final session panelists) were people who are mostly interested in thinking about BIG problems – scientists and academics – and relatively unconcerned about how to convert their ideas into money. The seminar’s major themes that interested me were these:

Risk = Hazard x Vulnerability
Risk should not be confused with Uncertainty. Risk implies that future events will occur with measurable probability. Uncertainty implies that the likelihood of future events is indefinite or incalculable.
It appears that uncertainty is increasing as systems become more complex and tightly coupled.
The more complex and tightly coupled the system, the greater the likelihood that there will be accidents. In these environments, adding more controls or safeguards in attempts to offset the likelihood of accidents will have the perverse effect of increasing the likelihood that accidents will occur because the controls increase both the complexity and tight coupling of the system.
But, simplicity is not necessarily the solution to complexity because simple systems are just as vulnerable to phase shifts or environmental disruptions. In fact, simple systems and complex, tightly coupled systems share one design feature – they tend to be optimized perfectly for a specific environment. If the environment changes even slightly in a way that makes it difficult for the system to adapt, the system is prone to collapse.

During the final session one of the panelists observed that the cockroach is a very successful creature – having survived massive disruptions in its external environment time and time again. Apparently, cockroach survival has been enhanced by its extreme sensitivity to puffs of wind (indicating a potential predator on the move). Puff of wind, cockroach senses it, and initiates evasive maneuvers (turns and moves in the opposite direction). However, cockroaches are not very well-designed insects. In fact, this panelist described them as a perennial runner up in the competition for best insect design. However, their less than perfect optimization for the environment has served them well in the long run. They haven’t gotten to dominate the planet at any given time, but they’ve outlasted many other perfectly adapted insects (and other life forms as well).

Optimizing for a particular set of circumstances (tightly coupled complex or simple system design) is analogous to being the right person at the right time at the right place (etc., etc.). In business settings we often talk about a process being well designed if it gets the right information to the right person at the right time. But what if all this rightness is wrong? What if it’s better in the long run to be almost right? What if the right time is too short a timeframe for rightness? What if timing is not everything?

Organizational innovation, it seems to me, is an attempt to survive (retain relevance) over the long term. But, some of the limitations that organizations place on themselves in order to manage the inherent risks and uncertainty that accompany innovation might inadvertently increase those risks and not effectively manage uncertainty. For example, companies believe that it is risk limiting to hew close to their existing markets – explore adjacencies where they can leverage existing resources and expertise. And, on some level, this makes sense – you’ve got all this stuff (resources, expertise, infrastructure, systems) available and you know how to use it to make money (or create value if you’re a non-profit or an institution with a mission that has a broader definition of value than a financial one). But what if by staying close to what you know and using similar or the same resources and expertise, you are adding complexity to your system and more tightly coupling success to the same set of value drivers and risk factors? What if what looks like you’re managing risk is actually creating more risk and giving you a false sense that you are prepared to handle uncertainty? Rather than having created a more robust and resilient organization, you have created one that is ever more sensitive to slight shifts in its environment and has a reduced capacity to adapt. So you get to be the perfectly right organization for the time, but you have not become the organization that has a better chance of being around for a long time.

So, how do organizations use innovation to help manage for the long term? First, I think we need to distinguish between the long term and forever. While this might seem obvious, I’m not sure that most of us really acknowledge that every major organizational system will cease to exist at some point – nothing is forever. Even serially successful innovative companies like Apple will not last forever. Among the many musings about the significance of Steve Jobs and Apple in the wake of his untimely, recent death, one rang most true to me because it seemed like a perfect restatement of Clayton Christensen’s theory of innovation from below.

In this article (some of it is excerpted below), Cliff Kuang makes the point that Steve Jobs understood design better than anyone. For a long time, personal computing devices were pretty ugly and hard to use – they were badly designed – but they were fast and powerful. And, for an equally long time, design was too costly to be delivered to or desired by more than the elite. (Market penetration of Macs was always a fraction of the PC.) But, not very long ago, the price point of delivering great design in computing devices fell within reach of the many and computing power was a given, no longer a differentiator. Today, great design has become a standard feature required of computing devices. So, it’s possible that the wave of great design as an innovation in technology has passed. That, more than anything else, may cause Apple to stumble going forward, but Apple has already figured out how to use innovation to manage for the long term. The company has survived failures (NeXT Cube, Lisa, Newton), customer unhappiness (the iPhone 4’s antennae), and now, the death of its visionary founder/leader.

So, what makes systems resilient? Just the sort of things that have been engineered out of lean organizations – slack and redundancy – the less than perfect design. I frequently hear executives bemoaning the “hobbies” that employees pursue as evidence of innovation gone wrong. But, I think that hobbies are the quintessential redundancies that pop up when there’s a bit of slack. They’re good and necessary for innovation. At the same time, organizations must also be willing to invest in some of the hobbies that appear to be scalable which requires leadership in the face of risk and uncertainty.

And what does it look like if you’re on the wrong side of a bet? Ask yourself if you’d like to be Reed Hastings of Netflix – a guy who is experiencing what looks like BIG failure at the level of the institution. Or if you’d have been happy being Steve Jobs when Apple decided to offer Lisa customers the option of trading in their purchase for a Mac as a mea culpa for having sold them an expensive product that the company was not going to support because it was a failure. Probably not. But, if you are almost right (rather than perfectly right) and if you have a resilient organization that can absorb shocks to the system, you probably have a much better chance of thriving over the long haul because timing is not everything, even if it helps.

Sources:

“Wind Direction Coding in the Cockroach Escape Response: Winner Does Not Take All,” Rafael Levi and Jeffrey M. Camhi, sourced on 10/12/11 at http://www.jneurosci.org/content/20/10/3814.full.pdf

“What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?,” Cliff Kuang, Fast Company Newsletter, October 5 2011, sourced on 10/14/11 at http://www.fastcompany.com/design/2011/what-can-steve-jobs-still-teach-us

From What Can Steve Jobs Still Teach Us?:

A decisive factor that aided Steve Jobs was fortuitous timing. He came of age just in time to become a founding father of the personal-computer movement. And he was still young enough when he returned to Apple, in 1997, that his own instinctive sense of what a computer might become could be brought to life. In the 1980s and 1990s, computers were sold on their speed and technical capabilities. But by 2000, these features had largely become commoditized–it no longer mattered how fast a computer was when basic issues of usability and integration became paramount. What did speed matter if you didn’t know what all the menus meant, or if you were hit with pop-up errors every time you clicked your mouse?

Before 1997, Jobs was ahead of his time: The computers he made were overpriced for the market, because he thought that usability was more important than capability. But as computers reached maturity and became a staple in every home, his obsessions became more relevant to the market. Indeed, many of Apple’s recent signature products, such as the iPad or the iPhone, were ideas first conceived in the 1990s or even the 1980s–they had to bide their time.

Jobs is ahead of his time in other ways too: He has taught his entire organization to play in the span of product generations rather than product introductions. Apple designers say that now, each design they create has to be presented alongside a mock-up of how that design might evolve in the second or third generation. That should ensure Apple’s continued success for a long time, aided, of course, by the tremendous momentum that Jobs’s leadership has provided the company.

And for fun, it appears that cockroaches will NOT inherit the earth even though they are more resilient than humans.

Filed Under: Business Model, Innovation, Risk Management

Friendship – the perfect blendship!

September 12, 2011 By Wendi Leave a Comment

Pixar makes magical films – Toy Story, Up, Wall-E, Cars – so you might expect that it would be magical place to work. And yes, it seems to be every bit as employee-friendly as every other high tech enterprise in Silicon Valley you have ever read about (even though it is not located in Silicon Valley, but in Emeryville – also outside of San Francisco, but in another universe altogether apparently).

You know what I’m talking about – the carefully designed workspaces that encourage collaboration and serendipitous interactions, the mind-body solicitousness of the fitness center and outdoor sports areas, the “you could live your entire life here” cafes, bars, and eateries. But what I think is really remarkable about Pixar is this: employees really like each other.

When John Lasseter, Pixar’s CEO, describes how the Toy Story team “saved” the project when it was imperiled, he says, “’We went back to what we wanted, and that was: the characters liked each other. Because we liked each other.’” And this, according to Anthony Lane, one of The New Yorker’s film critics and the author of a Pixar profile story, is the essence of Pixar distilled in the message of Toy Story – “You got a friend in me.” At Pixar, friendship is cemented by intense devotion to craft that is married inextricably to technologies that continue to extend the possibilities for the special brand of enchantment that the company produces. Lane notes that friendship is often the most enduring form of human relationships He writes: “[friendship is]…that practical momentum, conservative in its emotions, but radical in its taste for adventure….”

But (I can imagine you thinking out loud) they are Pixar – a smallish company with highly skilled (PhD-techno nerd-graphic design-type) employees operating in a rarified atmosphere making animated movies. What does this have to do with anything other than a highly specialized corner of the entertainment industry? What indeed? To me, the idea of friendship – its practical momentum, conservative emotions and radical taste for adventure – is the energizing, forward-moving spirit that the corporate world says it wants and then crushes with a deadening, faint-hearted version that it calls “employee engagement.”

Just compare the two – would you rather be friends with the people you work with or engaged to the company you work for? (I know that you don’t really get engaged to a company, you are engaged with the work you do for the company, but just humor me a bit.) The whole construct of employee engagement seems devoid of feeling which is odd because it’s supposed to be about attachment. Just imagine, for a moment, if organizational life was built on friendship. If products and services were really all about making friends with customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. If the strong bonds of friendship were what underpinned business decisions – a balancing of short and long term consequences, a desire to sustain relationships, trying to make something last beyond the ups and downs of the moment.

I believe that the nascent corporate social responsibility movement (another label that just kills all of the passion and power of what’s going on) at its most basic is an embodiment of friendship There is something in the air these days and it’s bigger than engagement.

Perhaps it’s a consequence of how quickly changes that once seemed to take more than one person’s lifetime to experience have now become observable well within the boundaries of one person’s lifetime. We might just well have come to a point in history when kicking the can down the road doesn’t really achieve the goal of palming problems off to another generation. It may be that we are going to have to dig in and be responsible for the world in which we live – whether we inherited it or we created it.

How observable? In an article discussing the US government’s investment in lithium battery production as part of a highly controversial US-style industrial policy (betting on certain industries having the potential to create jobs and economic leadership in the world economy), the unforeseen consequences of having outsourced industrial production to Asia in the 1960s is identified as one of the major contributing factors to our lagging position industrial technologies. The author quotes a seminal article by Pisano and Shih, two Harvard professors, who believe that globalization has had the unwitting effect of tearing apart the ecosystem that generates future innovation.

Pisano and Shih write that “…US corporations, by offshoring so much manufacturing work over the past few decades, have eroded our ability to raise living standards and curtailed the development of new high-technology industries.” When consumer products companies offshored production to Asia, the drive to improve battery technology migrated to that part of the world too, because that was where it was needed – for toys and then small electronic devices. Fast forward to 2010 and now the transportation industry (manufacturers of essentially large consumer electronic devices) needs this technology, but its locus is in Asia.

While no one is prescient enough to foresee how the arc of history will bend, if one takes a long view, it’s easy to see that caring for interlocking relationships in the present might serve to strengthen the foundation for future endeavors. And what else is friendship but relationships that we tend today with a view towards tomorrow?

If we want our organizations and our economic systems to have a better chance at withstanding the vicissitudes of time, perhaps friendship is the best template we have.

Sources:

“The Fun Factory,” Anthony Lane, The New Yorker, May 16, 2011
“Make or Break,” Jon Gertner, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, August 28, 2011

And, another take on Friendship (thanks to Cole Porter, Ethel Merman and Bert Lahr)

Filed Under: Business Model, Collaboration, Sustainability

The Future Just Creeps On In

April 28, 2011 By Wendi Leave a Comment

There’s a big ol’ hole that’s gone right through the sole of this old shoe

And the water on the ground, ain’t got no place else it found

So it’s only got one thing left to do

Just creep on in, creep on in

And once it has begun, it won’t stop until it’s done, sneaking in

(“Creeping In” by Dolly Parton)

“Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” Richard Feynman

Last week, as I emerged from Penn Station in New York City, I strolled up Seventh Avenue and out of the corner of my eye caught sight of the large Borders book store that commands the corner of Seventh Avenue and 32nd Street. What flashed through my mind at that moment was “I never thought I’d live to see the end of books.” As a kid, I’d spend the entire day closeted in my room reading a book with a dictionary beside me on the bed. I loved unlocking the meaning of big, prepossessing words as I made my way through stories that were just a little too difficult for me. Looking back on it, I see that I was making a kind of intellectual journey through worlds that were otherwise inaccessible to me as a child of Jewish middleclass suburban Baltimore. Later on, in my undergraduate years, I used to sit in the Divinity School Library at Duke University, my Biblical Hebrew text before me, surrounded by dictionaries and concordances – all in an effort to untangle a foreign, dead language and try to reconstruct a way of experiencing the world that could only be understood through surviving fragments of text. When I got out of college and no longer had to read what was on a syllabus, I went on wild reading binges, foraging through the St. Mark’s Bookshop in New York City. For me, reading has always been another way of seeing and experiencing the world and books have been my passport.

But, now I own a Kindle and my dictionary is no longer beside me. Instead, I click my Kindle’s home key and enter the word I don’t know to instantly have it defined by my favorite dictionary (the OED), and then click back to exactly where I stopped reading. I made the transition to the Kindle with some trepidation – after all, I LOVE books. I had about three days of feeling very strange about not flipping a page and the heft of the reading device not feeling right and not really liking the percent completion display which was my only way of knowing how much I’d read and how much more there was to go. But then, that was that, and I was on my way to loving that my dictionary was right there, all the time. When I saw the Borders bookstore in New York City, I had just finished reading an article in The New York Times about the coming-to-me-soon future in which I would be able to borrow books from my library on my Kindle. In fact, if I owned a Nook or a Sony e-Reader, I could do that already. In my soon-to-be future, I wouldn’t have to go to my library to borrow a book. I already don’t have to go to a bookstore to buy one and I don’t have to pay at all for classics like my favorite Edith Wharton or to finally read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The future has already arrived and I am smack in the middle of it, I just hadn’t noticed.

Yesterday, I read another article in The New York Times about supercomputers used for scientific visualization that are called macroscopes. Macroscopes are “…a new class of computer-based scientific instruments…composite tools, with different kinds of physical presences that have such powerful and flexible software programs that they become a complete scientific workbench.” These supercomputers make “…it possible to uncover phenomena and processes that in the past have been, ‘too great, slow or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend.’” Macroscopes can see the future creeping in on you in ways that human beings cannot.

What’s also amazing about these supercomputers is that the technology itself is affecting the very nature of the scientific research process. From the lone independent researcher toiling away in isolation, it is now more likely that hundreds or even thousands of researchers in disparate geographies and ranging across many different disciplines collaborate on and jointly publish research, no longer isolated, but intensively connected through these supercomputers. And the supercomputers themselves are not one piece of equipment or software housed in one place, but can themselves be collaborations of different pieces of equipment and applications in far-flung corners of the world. The unrelenting force of collaboration – called the “killer app” by one scientist in the article – is also making what seemed like a risky approach, developing software in an open-source mode, now seem like the only way forward. Technology has managed to destroy a culture and build a new one, in this case, seemingly without the calamity that accompanies most destruction.

The same is going on in the organizations where we work. They are already different, but we are swept along in the currents and can’t really appreciate the full extent of how much the future is already here until, perhaps, we read an article about borrowing books from a library on an e-Reader without visiting the library and catch a glimpse of a Borders bookstore on the street corner 15 minutes later.

Sources:

“Digging Deeper, Seeing Farther: Supercomputers Alter Science,” John Markoff, The New York Times, April 26, 2011.
“Kindle Users to Be Able to Borrow Library E-Books,” Julie Bosman, The New York Times, April 21, 2011.

Filed Under: Change

Make Your Own Mistakes!

April 4, 2011 By Wendi 1 Comment

I have never liked best practices. In part, this may be due to my contrary nature. My first impulse when I’m told what to do is to push the advice far enough away until I can examine it at arm’s length and determine whether or not it makes sense for me to follow it. I’m not inclined to think that just because someone else is doing something that is working out for them that it means it’s something I should do or that even if I do it, I would necessarily get the same results. If you put a better spin on my attitude, you’d say that I have a strong independent streak.

So, some of my reaction to best practices is a matter of temperament. But some of it has to do with a feeling that the whole notion of best practices is deeply flawed.

Best practices is about the “what.” What does that company (or group or individual) do and how does it compare to what we do? Teasing out the differences, the “gaps” in business-speak, is like panning for gold. You find the little (or big) nuggets that, if adopted, can help your organization improve performance.

Part of the problem is that best practices really don’t stand the test of time. For the aspirant, it takes time and real effort to make the changes required to perform the best practice and by the time that this has occurred, it’s more than likely that the best practice itself is no longer a best practice (the best practice organization having perfected an even better practice). For the best practice organization, if it doesn’t move on and continue to evolve, the best practice is no longer best and it is no longer the bellwether.

But the most flawed aspect of best practices is that they seem to be about avoiding mistakes. They are about learning from the mistakes of others, so you don’t have to make them yourself. But what if the only way you can really learn, really master anything, is precisely by making mistakes yourself? What if it’s more risky to avoid making mistakes than to figure out how to become good at making them?

When people acquire new skills they typically progress through three stages:

*Stage*	*Characteristics*
1. Cognitive	intellectualize the task, discover new strategies to accomplish it proficiently
2. Associative	concentrate less, make fewer errors, become more efficient
3. Autonomous	become as good as we need to be, run on autopilot reaching a sustainable plateau

For a very long time, the autonomous stage was viewed as the highest level of innate capability. Sir Francis Galton identified it back in 1869 as a point beyond which an individual “…cannot by any education or exertion overpass.” However, it seems that hitting the wall is more a matter of belief than reality.

Very high achievers, those who continuously bust through limits, develop strategies to stay out of the autonomous zone. These masters use three main strategies: 1) focus on technique, 2) stay goal-oriented, and 3) get immediate feedback on performance. Nothing too shocking or out of the ordinary here. However, the first strategy is not as obvious as it might first appear and the way in which masters go about it is different from those who are good or even very good.

The key to the first strategy is technique. Observations of amateur and virtuoso musicians note that when amateurs practice, they typically play musical pieces. When virtuoso musicians practice, they play scales and difficult parts of pieces. I’d put it this way, the amateur wants the kind of feedback that makes him feel good. The virtuoso is looking for feedback that tells her how to improve. The virtuoso is looking for opportunities to make mistakes and is paying close attention to why and how failure happens. Achieving mastery is very boring and tedious. That’s why very few have the passion and commitment to persist at it.

If what it takes to be the best is a constantly moving target and requires a huge amount of humility (how else can one persist in seeking out opportunities to make mistakes and then make them?), it’s clear that simply aping a best practice is hardly likely to transform an individual or an organization. It seems to me that what does have the potential to transform performance is the process of making mistakes as one seeks improvement. But to do that, individuals and organizations have to make their own mistakes and never stop making them, something that is not readily apparent in the flawless performance that we see when we observe best practices.

Source for information about achieving mastery: