IEX #194: Innovation Golden Rules Part II - Teams
How can teams become more innovative.
This is Part II of the 3 part series I started in the previous newsletter. And it goes back to the question I was recently asked about whether there are some 'golden rules' of innovation. The first one looked at rules for individuals who want to innovate. This one is for teams.
Some teams are created for innovation. Most teams would like to be innovative about their work to a greater or lesser extent. And yet, most teams will tell you they struggle to achieve innovation outcomes. A team in this context might be an actual team of largely equal people, or it might be hierarchical. Or it might be a function or a department, with a specific focus, such as finance, marketing, or product development - a part of a larger organisation. It is not the whole organisation, which is the subject of Part III.
TEAM INNOVATION RULES
Diversity: If there's one rule that rules them all it is this: build diverse teams. This fundamentally boils down to diversity of thought and perspectives. But it comes from many more explicit sources of diversity and includes industry expertise/ functional training/ skills/ cultures/ languages/ sexuality/ gender/ neuro-diversity, and more. As a team your ability to look at problems from different angles, and even the ability to question and ask different questions when faced with a problem or challenge, as well as drawing upon a much wider base of experiences and culture for possible answers is at the heart of innovative teams. In our innovation team we have always prided ourselves for being diverse despite being a small team and it has always paid rich dividends.
Creativity: Encourage creativity. Creativity can look weird. Don't ostracise it. Creativity has methods, not processes. Tap into creative methods of individuals and teams. One team member might get their best ideas walking the city at night, another might have their lightbulb moments in the shower, or in the gym. Some work at night, some in the morning. Build working methods that embrace these differences and allow people to follow and share their methods.
Empathy: Practice building empathy mindsets and design thinking as a team. Usually a team will have a dedicated service design team or group, who are tasked with the design and user research activity. But this is a skill that everybody should practice. Quite apart from anything else, empathy makes us better people, and will improve the team culture. Especially if you’re looking for diversity, empathy is a must, of course. It’s also a reminder that design thinking is a state of mind, not just a methodology.
Complementarity: Build complementary expertise within the team. Combine strong generalists with deep specialists. Often teams are made of a set of specialists. Many stories and films also project this kind of team structure. But teams also need the glue that generalists bring - the ability to link up different expertise, and take a broader view of any problem. Generalists also bring a wider range of ideas which is very useful at the early exploration stages of a project. Specialists are essential to delivering outcomes correctly, but often you might find generalists will help ensure that the correct outcome is being designed.
Homework: When it comes to a problem or any piece of work, as a team, agree what good looks like currently, and then look to improve on it. A lot of times teams jump into ideation - especially if the problem is in a specific domain where the team doesn't have experience or contextual knowledge. Get somebody with the right domain expertise to talk to the team about how things are currently done, what the challenges and constraints are, and what has already been tried, before generating ideas. For example, I've seen brainstorming sessions around public transport generate lots of ideas for contactless ticketing for a major city, without an appreciation that at peak times in a busy transport system, there is a clear minimum requirement for a 200 millisecond response time, to handle the numbers.
Stakeholders: While delivering any project, especially innovation projects, you need a focus on all stakeholders - this includes internal stakeholders, and even investors. Often design research focuses almost exclusively on the needs of end users. But a good product or solution should work for all stakeholders - internal, external, end users, investors, and the support team too. Think about any successful product, from McDonalds to a pension product. Oh, and today your list of stakeholders also must include the planet.
Discovery: For innovation outcomes, it's really important to be discovery driven rather than solution driven. You can start working on a problem and building something before you know the answers to all the parts of the problem. Very few products end up exactly how they were initially envisaged. And the journey often opens up entirely new opportunities, often better than your original idea. But you can only get to those opportunities if you go down the path of discovery. Some people call it double diamond. We call it a heartbeat method. Either way, before you converge onto an idea, you need to explore divergently. One of the most interesting philosophical differences between my many colleagues who work in expertise driven teams is that while most of my like to go into meetings where they know the answers to problems being posed, our innovation team prefers to go specifically for situations where we don’t know the answers.
Permission-less Environment: In order to experiment and try new things, you need a permission-less environment - to get beyond the challenges of infrastructure, policies, team dynamics and politics. Nothing symbolises this more than the story of Building 20 at MIT, where a range of multidisciplinary work was carried out by scientists who didn't fit elsewhere. But because of the temporary nature of the building it allowed them to break walls, create new spaces and try things that would have been impossible in most places. It was a temporary building and was ultimately demolished in in 1996, but during its time, it hosted nine Nobel Prize winning scientists. It is highly unlikely you'll need to break walls, but much more likely you'll need to access and test new softwares, tools, and services which may be by default blocked by your corporate firewall. Investing time and effort in setting up a sandbox outside of the firewall will pay you back handsomely in due course.
Portfolio: Combine big/small ideas & disruptive/marginal ideas - don't over-index at either end. Ideally, create a steady stream of marginal ideas. At TCS we use the 'Clay Map' mode, which owes its name to Professor Clay Christensen, who was a mentor for TCS innovation. The Clay Map is a portfolio tool that allows us to balance the effort and resources applied to marginal and disruptive innovations. For a single team or department, this may be an overkill, but the principle balancing innovation is important. Small, quick projects create momentum and sustain innovation culture, and can collectively add up to big changes. Disruptive or breakthrough innovation is critical to change the game, and ensure you don't get caught out by next generation technology, or competitors.
Tooling: Create the right tooling for innovation - visual tools, collaboration tools, open source, experimentation based tools, tools to capture and retain ideas. A typical portfolio of tools can include Miro and Mural, Jira, Github, Slack, Trello, and Bright Ideas, underpinned by Teams or Google - depending on your organisation. And with access to a cloud based sandbox - ideally with more than one cloud option, again, depending on your organisational preferences. The ability to prototype quickly is increasingly fuelled by technology driven collaboration and the ability to simulate, test, and course-correct.
So there you have it. These are my starting 10 rules for teams. Feel free to add your own. Or let me know if you have a different set. Next up, will be the 10 rules of innovation for organisations.
Reading This Week
Healthcare - Immune Systems: This piece examines the behaviour of our immune systems. Many of our common diseases owe their spread to civilisation and the past few thousand years - as living in societies allowed diseases to take root in communities and spread. Meanwhile - autoimmune diseases, which attack hidden inflammations are often the result of the increasing levels of hygiene. And addressing them needs exposure to the right microbes and germs during childhood. (WSJ)
Healthcare - Robotics: The Pandemic has taken its toll on nurses, and robots may be a part of the answer. Not to do nursing jobs, but to support with physical aspects of hospital work, for now. (Wired)
Healthcare - Self Healing: There is a new treatment called BEAR (Bridge Enhanced ACL Restoration) Implant which uses bovine collagen and the patients blood that encourages the stumps of a torn ACL to grow back together. (WSJ)
Health/ Brain Computer Interfaces - stentrodes and helping ALS patients get on with life. (Economist)
Broadening Design Thinking: This is an interesting and exploratory discussion on how design thinking needs to be enhanced by the theory of change. The piece does not conclude, which is good, because I believe there needs to be a broader dialog between the narrow lens of design thinking and the wide lens of systems thinking. (Medium)
Systems Thinking: Talking about systems thinking - this is one from the archives, an excellent place to start thinking about systems. Donella (Dana) Meadows was a very respected system thinking and environmental change scholar and writer. This eye-opening piece talks about where and how to drive change in a system. (Donella Meadows Project)
Natural Language AI This is a thought provoking essay that suggests that the way AI learns language, without any grammatical framework being taught, could be an interesting model for humans (children) to be taught, instead of the current grammar based approach. (Fast Company)
State of AI: Every year, VCs Nathan Beniach and Ian Hogarth produce their State of AI report. Here is the 2022 edition which I haven't had time to digest, but you can have fun with it anyway. (State of AI)
AI Principles and Policies: - This map, and the initiative from Harvard, highlights exactly how complex the challenges of integrating AI into society and public policy will be. From transparency and safety to privacy and non-discrimination. These will be some of the most active debates, as AI goes mainstream. (Harvard)
Data: This is an excellent articulation of what goes into a data ecosystem, in a consumer facing platform.
That’s it for now, see you next week.