do_matic

Emergence, Innovation and Predators

(Blaine from the Predator by Dunechaser on Flickr. "I don't got time to bleed.")

I'm re-reading Emergence by Steven B. Johnson. It's great. Challenging and still fresh. I'm thinking about how the concepts do and don't apply to organizations and the discussion about the The Future or End of Management. How do Emergent behaviors apply in the case of people and ideas? What time horizons and leadership behaviors are necessary to spot and promote emergence?

A passage just forced me to put down my (paperback) book, log in to Gogo inflight wireless from 27A and reflect. In one section, Johnson describes emergent software systems and the work of Danny Hillis.

One of the many things Hillis has done is write software that "evolved" sorting algorithms. At the time (maybe still?), world-record sorting algorithms took 60 steps to organize 100 numbers. Using an initial pool of code snippets and a process that coalesced full algorithms, Hillis created an evolutionary environment in which algorithms created themselves, each successive generation an improvement on the prior generation. The evolutionary process worked brilliantly until it eventually stalled at 75 steps. The evolutionary process stalled at "local maximums" because the system only rewarded generations that improved upon the prior generation. To get better would require taking a step backwards and certain death.

The solution? Introduce predators. Here's Johnson:

"Before the introduction of predators, a miniprogram that reached a seventy-five-step ridge knew that its offspring had a chance of surviving if it stayed put at that local maximum, but faced almost certain death if it descended to search out higher ground. But the predators changed all that. They hunted down ridge dwellers and forced them to improvise: if a miniprogram settled into a seventy-five-step range, it could be destroyed by predator programs. Once the predators appeared on the scene, it became more productive to descend to lower altitudes to search out a new peek than to stay put at a local maximum."

After 30 minutes or so, the new environment produced algorithms operating in the 62-step range.

Huh.

You have to be willing to eat your own young. Or at least nudge comfortable people down into the valley to learn a little, recombine and search out higher peaks.

Leaders of organizations really need to think about this one.

Matisse: Constrain yourself to push your design craft

(Mattsse, Goldfish and Pallette, 1914-1915)

On Saturday, I visited the new Matisse show Radical Invention at the MoMA. On display is Matisse's experimentation with his craft between 1913 and 1917. The show (and the curators) explained a couple of things to me.

First, Matisse would give himself a constraint (the same subject matter, the same color palette) allowing him to focus on variation in technique. Why worry about composition or subject matter if you want to focus on something else altogether?

Second, a piece could evolve quite significantly over the course of several years. One style would morph into another. We could see the faint lines of a prior manifestation underneath the end result. The subject would be shaped and reworked ("The Italian Woman" stands out in this respect). Perhaps Matisse was the inspiration for Photoshop tools?

These principles naturally extend to those of us working on our craft or design skills. By picking a direction or a mode of expression or a technique quickly at the beginning of a project, we can focus our energy on learning or experimenting with other techniques.

Innovation: Process is no substitute for leadership

(Generic substitutes courtesy of Shazam791 on Flickr and Creative Commons. I hate beets)

Increasingly, I've been grappling with the question of process, tools and methods and its relationship (or not) to cultivating a culture that, at worst, permits and, at best, encourages innovation.

Call it a slow hunch, but I'm coming to the point of view that innovation process, methods and tools are no substitute for innovation leadership.

Sounds trite for sure, but I'd guess that less than 5% of my time in discussions with clients about innovation competency and culture revolve around this hot potato issue. There's no focused effort to develop innovation leaders at all levels within the organizations. Seems like a real miss.

There are different styles of leader for sure - the iconic ones come to mind.

Yet to lead innovation, we each have to learn our way of embodying a certain mindset and behaviors. What makes me optimistic is that I think, through experience, we can develop these competencies.

Innovation Leadership: Cocktail Parties or Sourcing Brilliance?

(Cocktail Party At The Imperial Hotel: March 13, 1961 (Tokyo, Japan) via Jim Kuhn)

Good ideas can come from cocktail parties and coffee shops. Especially if the crowd has deep and diverse expertise and are experimental / action oriented. Unfortunately, lots of cocktail parties aren't like this. As a result, the ideas often suck.

Good ideas can come from spending time with the people in your organization and network, asking them what hunches they've cultivated and what support they need to try them. But most leaders don't invest the time to do this or have such a supportive mindset. As a result, people are left stewing and fermenting.

As an innovation leader, can you go to better cocktail parties? Can you do a better job of sourcing brilliance from people in your organization?

*This post was inspired by a great dinner last night with Dave Blanchard. The idea of "sourcing brilliance" was taught to me by Anese Cavanaugh.

Interested in revolutionary innovation? Focus on the bookends.

(Check out Kristian Bjornard's fun Flickr pages. He did a design a day in 2010.)

Last Wednesday, it occurred to me that a preoccupation with process can really impede the pursuit of revolutionary innovation. By process, I mean a focus on what happens between when an idea "emerges" and when it first gets to market.

Instead, leaders should communicate constraints and conditions and then actively support action. Focus on the bookends, not the books.

Constraints and conditions

1. Utilize clear constraints
Let people know they'll get real money, but not a lot of it, to take the next development and learning step.

2. Focus on user and market outcomes
Fund fundamentally different customer experiences or "good enough" solutions to disrupt our own market.

3. Start with impact, wait for mass
Be patient for scale, but impatient for in-market proof and per-unit profitability.

Support action

4. Cultivate hunches
Steven Johnson's forthcoming book (Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation) seems to be built in part around his idea of "cultivated hunches." Think of them as wise hypotheses and patterns that you're people have seen. They're out there in your organization. Actively find them, help people develop them and unlock them. If you asked people to share their hunches right now, how many big ideas would be in there?

5. Act, preferably fast
Help people get things shipped to generate feedback from real users, in-market. One of your jobs as a big-shot leader is to help people make progress. Is there an experience out there that you can't prototype or build within 60 days?

Agile/lean thinking and the theory of disruption come together quite nicely when you do this.

Non sequitur: Fun + Reuse + Industrial Waste

Amazing art from the folks at the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation in Meadville, Pa. I took these while there for a reunion this weekend.

Dynamic duos: Bravery, Creativity and Innovation

(There are always others in pictures like this. From Clickflashphotos on Flickr.)

The last two days I've spent at the New York Forum. If you follow me on Twitter, you might know that and hate me for it!

On Tuesday night, I led a session with some colleagues on rebuilding trust in the financial system amongst 20-30 year olds. Definitely lots of energy and fun despite the heady subject. I think they might post the notes, so if they do I'll share them.

After our session, I took the luxury of attending many of the workshops. The morning session on innovation was quite (and surprisingly) good. There were many highlights, but I thought an idea shared by Shelly Lazarus of Ogilvy was quite important.

Shelly posited that having a collaborator in the formulation of ideas can be extremely productive. The way I captured it was:

"Having another person helps people to be brave. The other person hears an idea and say, 'hey, I think you have something there' which allows you to go further." (or something like that).

Not teaming for a project per se, instead collaborations that stretch over time that evolve a certain dynamism and trust.

I had the pleasure of chatting briefly with Shelly afterwards and she expanded further noting that often that the skill and quality of the two people might not matter. That is, somebody that's not quite as good could still be the missing ingredient to make the other person truly great. And if you break up the dynamic duo, you might see the greatness fade.

Seems pretty simple and anecdotally true for me. Sign of a good insight.

Leading Innovation: Ignore your instincts, say "yes"

(From Dean Terry's Flckr photostream shared herewith under the auspices of Creative Commons which says "yes.")

When in doubt, don't.

Almost every organization in the world struggles to design and bring new, valuable and cool stuff into the world. With their success, organizations evolve towards consistency and away from variance. As individuals, leaders follow suit. We develop all kinds of strengths and behaviors that help us to perform well at "consistency tasks".

To avoid being too smart, leaders looking to encourage innovation have to learn to catch themselves and overcome the urge to say "no."

Great innovation leaders learn to start with "yes." They see the possibility of new options, give the gift of emotional support for those bringing them new ideas and provide the instrumental support to help these new options progress. The strong ones survive anyway.

See Chapter 16 of Oribiting the Giant Hairball ("The Office of the Paradox") for more on this.

Non sequitur: Why don't we have a richer dialog with retail?

Saw this walking in this surprisingly crisp Summer morning in New York. Then I saw this...

Which made me recall hearing Howard Schultz's announcement at the Wired Disruption by Design conference this week that they'll be making Wi-Fi free at their retail locations.

Design and Innovation: A culture question?

(Some beautiful fungal cultures from Petrichor's Flickr stream.)

I'm in a lot of discussions with clients concerning the idea of creating, developing, instigating and encouraging a more innovative culture.

In these discussions, I've been putting a finer point on the idea of what an "innovation culture" truly is and comparing and contrasting that with other types of cultures. In some instances, a company might not really want or need to create an innovation culture at all.

In particular, I've found myself distinguishing amongst the following cultures (and at an individual level, mindsets):

• Innovative
• Entrepreneurial
• Design
• Human-centered
• Inventive
• Operational or Efficient or Productive

What would you add? What do you see as the similarities and differences of each?