IEX #193: Golden Rules of Innovation: Part 1
A guide for Individuals who want to be innovators
Phew! It’s safe to say a lot has happened in the past 3 weeks! A recession looks like a distinct possibility and the world has turned upside down, especially in Europe. The double whammy of interest rates and energy price escalation will hit small businesses and many individuals. And yet, some of the best innovations are born out of adversity, so this may be the right time to talk about this…
Recently, while doing a workshop for a client team, I was asked this question: are there a set of 'golden rules' for innovation? It was an interesting question to ponder, and as I thought about it, I realised that the question may need to be addressed at 3 distinct levels - the individual, the team or function, and the organisation. The rules may be connected but are distinct across these areas.
Rather than cover all of them in one go, therefore, I'm breaking them up into 3 posts. In this first one, I'm going to focus on the individual. Here are my rules for being a good innovation professional:
Learn to think different, not just better. We are all trained to think 'better' - make the car faster, or make the chair more ergonomic. Different is harder and requires us to ask different questions. Problem framing and using multiple lens is key here. My favourite example is the redesign of the Ambulance which is built around reframing the definition of the ambulance from 'a means to get people to hospital', to 'a mobile extension of the hospital where treatment can start. One of the most visible aspects of this is the change from a bunk on the side of the ambulance, to a hospital style bed in the middle (for 360-degree access) and also to a change of the staff and skills on board an ambulance. It all starts with looking at the problem differently.
Practice Empathy: This is why design thinking has the currency it does because it allows and urges you to look at a problem through somebody else's eyes. Empathy is really the art of getting beyond self referencing (and cognitive biases) and learning to look at things from other people's perspective. This is harder than it looks. Just impartial observation is very useful. Marry empathy with problem solving mindset. Be conscious of your cognitive biases. The mind plays many tricks. We are more predictable and error prone than we like to think. Design thinking and empathy allows us to step aside from our own biases. But it has become a bit of a corporate panacea. Design thinking doesn't need a workshop and post its. It just needs the constant ability to observe and empathise. Some eighty years ago, Joseph Friedman observed his young daughter struggling to drink a milkshake because the counter was high and she wasn't able to reach the straw sitting down. He went home, tinkered, and created the bendy straw - and a hundred million dollar industry.
Adopt Engineering Thinking - the example above highlights the need for empathy. But you also need engineering thinking. Ole Kirk Kristiansen, the founder of Lego had a vision of creating plastic bricks that a 6-year old could snap together and snap apart - which would qualify as design thinking. But engineering thinking was also essential - the ability to master materials, tools, and the process to get there. It took the better part of a decade, in the 1940s and 50s. Today this works faster with software and technology tool sets, but the ability to go from the drawing board to a working model will always require mastery of tools and materials - aka engineering.
Include Scientific thinking in your toolbox. It's the ability to act on available data, but also to be open to changing your position when given new data. The history of scientific thinking i.e. rethinking the world with new data, is actually the story of human progress. Consider medicine: even till the mid 1800s, blood letting was thought to be a way for curing diseases, and doctors would put leaches on patients to suck the blood out. George Washington lost his life while doctors tried this procedure. In 1980, AIDS was practically incurable. The point is, at every stage of the history of medicine, doctors have worked with the best available knowledge and tried to save lives. The fact that the future may prove you wrong should neither stop you from action today, nor should it make you reject new ideas and thinking.
Incorporate Data Thinking into your mindset has emerged as one more area to understand in the current landscape. Some people call this the new radical empiricism. Sometimes you can throw large amounts of data at the machine even before you have a hypothesis, and let the machine create correlations that lead to hypotheses. In areas such as genomics, synthetic biology, or macro-economics, it seems like the huge data sets and variables, and their myriad possible relationships create networks of cause and effect that are too complex, and also too fast-changing for humans to disentangle or synthesise - which is why macro economics and policy making has become increasingly fraught with risk. Understanding data externalities, and avoiding biases in data is also a critical skillset. Remember the story of Abraham Wald and survivorship bias, for example.
Create a wide lens for reading and knowledge aggregation. Your next idea may come from fields completely unrelated to yours. Johannes Guttenberg was able to combine the Chinese movable type mechanism, with the European wine pressing technology to practically invent the printing process as we know it. And Charles Darwin dabbled in medicine and studied to become a pastor before finding his true love as a naturalist.
Explore personal creativity - everybody is creative to start with. Just listen to Sir Ken Robinson's Ted Talks. Understand your personal creativity and triggers. Use what works for you. There's no right or wrong creativity. Be comfortable with unstructure and messiness - some of the best ideas emerge from there. There's a great story about how the band Fleedwood Mac created their most successful album (Rumours) while they were collectively and personally going through very complex and destabilising situations. And their next album made with all the money and comfort was a flop.
Build a Strong execution focus - build the ability to execute in short bursts. Not at production grade, but enough to get things working. I heard Jan Koum (the founder of WhatsApp) say at an event that the first version of WhatsApp was built in 4 months with half a dozen developers. Which when you think of WhatsApp's simplicity, makes plenty of sense. Good innovation people know how to get ideas off the ground, not just brainstorm.
Be Resilient - 60-80% of innovation fails. Are you ready for that? Can you live with failing more often than not? Even for successful ideas, the path is usually spiked with a series of failures. Dyson is famous for testing over five thousand prototypes before getting to a version he was ready to market. Edison's team tested hundreds of materials before they finally got to their preferred option of a carbonised bamboo filament. In large organisations, there are dozens of ways in which your ideas will not get off the ground, and resilience and stubbornness may be your best friends.
Educate yourself on innovation read about the history of ideas, scientific progress, technologies, disciplines, movements. For example, think about why the birth of photography coincides with the emergence of impressionism. Or why the same products and breakthroughs are often created by multiple people at the same time. Patterns tend to repeat, and knowing the patterns is a great asset.
Build Playfulness and empty time into your schedule. Efficiency and productivity beyond a point is an enemy of innovation and creativity. Nokia used to have a specific role to explore the ludic qualities of their phones. Ludic refers to playfulness and fun (from where we get ludicrous). A playful product is likely to get user to engage and explore naturally, leading to discovery and use without the need for a manual. Particularly useful for complex and feature rich tech products.
‘Business’ Needs To Speak The Language of Tech
Recently I had the pleasure of speaking at the Halfords Tech Fest and a line from the day caught my attention. It was Neil Holden, the CIO, saying “IT is the business”. To me, this is the enterprise version of ‘technology is eating the world’ - Mark Andreesen’s famous observation from 20 years ago. We’ve always been told that technology folks need to speak the language of business. I believe that it’s time business people learnt to speak the language of tech. Here’s my argument.
Reading List
Healthcare: The US has passed a law allowing all medical data to be accessible to patients. Which is excellent in many ways. But it does beg the question about how many people are equipped to access, understand, and look after their own health data. (Stat News)
Sustainability: A little known practice that definitely bears a closer look is the industry around destroying hard drives. The short version is that most large companies - especially banks and tech giants - choose to physically shred rather than wipe and resell hard drives. This is terrible for the environment, but the risk of data leaks trumps the concern for the planet in this case. (FT - Requires Subscription)
Autonomous Vehicles: This Bloomberg piece decrying the lack of progress of driverless cars is a classic example of why technology progress confuses us. First, it happens in fits and starts, with many bumps. Second it happens with exponential patterns which means that for a long time it feels like nothing's happening, but then when things happen, they seem to happen very quickly. Especially if you consider the pace of evolution of AI. The overinflated valuations in this sector aren't a feature of this tech, but of almost any tech over the past 5 years. And $100bn of investment sounds like a lot till you consider that the US spends $4tn on healthcare and wastes a big chunk of it. Or that global automotive market is circa $3tn so this is about 3% of one year's revenue that has so far invested in disruptive tech. Yes, the optimism was misplaced. But 'going nowhere' seems unduly pessimistic, and centred around Levandowski's rise and fall.(Bloomberg)
Robotics: Tesla managed to show case a (sort of) autonomous humanoid robot - this piece talks about both the good and the bad of Tesla's effort. One of the interesting things the piece touches upon is the idea that the world as we know it is designed for humans. Does that mean any robot would need to be humanoid to work, or could an alternative form be even better? (Medium)
Ageing: The World Economic Forum has this excellent infographic showing the various aspects of ageing and longevity, spanning financial, education, lifestyle and more. (WEF)
Who knows what other sharp turns the world will take over the next few weeks! Stay well and see you again soon!