Innovation is a Team Sport (but let’s forget the Sport part)

image from pixabay under Creative Commons License

In this blog, I’ll be writing a lot about teams.  That’s because innovation requires bringing together a wide variety of skillsets and perspectives.  Though individuals can work on broadening their own horizons and become better innovators, a team of amazingly talented people will always outperform the lone genius.  Learning to build and work in these teams is critical to innovating.  Plus, working in a team can be a whole lot more fun and motivating.

It’s important to note that there are many different kinds of teams.  American leadership is obsessed with American football (but not futbol) as a metaphor for teamwork.  There are many former high-paid coaches working on filling in their million dollar wage loss by writing books on leadership and teamwork.  Do not read these books…  at least not if you’re looking into applying it towards innovation team building.

Football is about centralized leadership and execution.  Individuals are heavily specialized into narrow roles.  In professional teams, there is a separate offensive team and defensive team which have no interaction whatsoever with each other.  The head coach drills specific plays into the team members so that they can execute with perfection when it’s game time.  No doubt, there is a beauty in the trust formed and the ability to rely on each other, but players are not meant to be innovative.  They are meant to be reliable.  Any innovation in football comes from the coach.

Innovation requires a more improvisational framework.  Teams exist everywhere in life, not just in sports.  A ballet company is a team.  Your family is a team.  Your work group is a team, as is your church or even a group of friends throwing a barbeque.  A team is simply a group of people working together towards a common goal.  Since each team has a different goal, they each need to function differently.  If your team’s goal is to innovate, then a good model to look at is the Improv Comedy Troupe.

Improv techniques are now often used in team offsites and in design courses.  Why?  Because, where most art forms are mostly about the execution of creativity, improv is 90% creativity with very little preparation beforehand.  Like a good brainstorm, an improv scene is created in the moment.  However, the groundwork is laid through practicing skills beforehand, collecting the right players, and running the scene using set structures.  The result is a wonderfully hilarious and beautiful show that is a unique blend of the actors and the audience at a single moment in time.

Like innovation, improv is messy, but it can be learned and practiced.  Contrary to popular belief, improv comedy isn’t just about funny people acting funny.  It is built on many rules (as is brainstorming) which are designed to move the story forward.  We’ll go deeper into Improv rules and exercises in a future post.  But to give you a sense of how an improv team works, here are some basic rules:

Say Yes, and

In improv, every interaction builds the story.  As a rule, you must accept that story and build on it.  For instance, if your improv partner comes onto the stage and says “Hi Dad, how’s your back?” you must accept the role given to you.  It is counterproductive to respond, “Uh, what’s wrong with your eyesight, I’m not your Dad, I’m your best friend.”  Instead, use your freedom to expand the story.  “Oh, my back is sore alright.  I can’t believe I carried your mother down 10 flights of stairs .”

Don’t Try to Be Funny

Trying to be funny often leads to one liners at the expense of the story.  To continue our example, what if you respond to “Hi Dad, how’s your back?” with “I don’t know, why don’t you take a look?” and turn around and moon the  other person.  Wow, you’re really trying hard to get in a laugh.  This may make you feel like you’re “funnier” than the other person, but this didn’t move the story along.  You’ve just killed the scene.  Build the story, and the hilariousness will come out.

Follow the Follower

In an Improv show, no one is in charge.  Otherwise, it would be just like watching a directed play except that no one rehearsed beforehand.  Sounds great right?  Improv only works when the story is the spontaneous creation of the group.  Someone will initiate the scene.  Support her in this.  But that doesn’t make her the leader.  When someone else shifts the scene in another direction, support him as well.

Take Risks

When the rules above are followed, individual actors can take risks.  You can turn off the filter and say whatever comes to mind, even if it’s not the safe thing to do or takes the scene in an odd direction.  Say, you’re doing a restaurant scene, and suddenly you feel like saying “Mmmm, love baby humans.”  Sure, go with that.  You don’t need to know what that means, or where it will go.  Cannibals, vampires, aliens, lawyers?  Your teammates will support you, and you’ll end up with a more interesting, more creative, and more hilarious show.

Slower, Weaker, and Less Reliable: the Power of Tradeoffs

The tortoise trades its speed for the protection of its shell.
Image from pixabay under Creative Commons license.

Mediocre product managers find it easy to spec out the next product in their portfolio.  Secret Codename 2 is the same as Secret Codename 1 but faster, cheaper and better in all ways.  This is a great strategy until product launch when all the competitors turn out identical products.  Apparently they had access to the same technological improvements (better batteries, processors, screens, etc.) that you did.  Winner?  Nobody.

The innovative product manager understands that creating truly groundbreaking products is about choosing the right tradeoffs.  It’s true that nothing in life is free.  If you want something that is a step change better in one respect, you must give up something to make that happen.  Making the right tradeoff is the key to innovation.

Most people don’t think about it this way, but this is exactly what the iphone did back in 2007.  There were smartphones back then.   Palm Treos and Blackberries tried to combine a phone that could compete with the popular 12 key Nokias, a mobile internet browser with a touchscreen, and an email machine with a full qwerty keyboard.  The existing products were making the screen a little larger, the earpiece speakers a little clearer, the processor a little faster, and the keyboards a little easier to use.  Everything was just a little bit better which was perfect for the small professional market.

Not true with the iphone.  In order to make the touchscreen bigger and better, Apple decided it was okay to make the phone experience and the typing experience worse; still usable, but worse.  By all quantitative measures, the touchscreen keyboard was slower than a dedicated tactile keyboard, and the phone call quality was worse because the receiver speaker had to be pushed up high above the screen.  But none of that mattered, because the screen was big, and it was gorgeous.  The large touchscreen ushered in the era of the true consumer smartphone for everyone: 90% media and app machine, and 10% phone.

As another example, there’s a story of an HP executive in the nineties who visited the inkjet printer division to shake things up.  He called an all-hands, took out one of their products, and stood on it.  The engineers applauded, proud that they made such quality products.  But instead of heaping on praise, the executive chided them.  “Why would the customer ever need to stand on their printer?” he asked.  This was the start of low cost product design.  Sure, as consumers, we might reminisce upon the days when things were “built to last,” but the truth is that we are all much better off when products are not overdesigned, but designed “just right”.  What is the benefit of a housing that lasts 25 years if the electronics only last 5?  To make an amazing product (one that provides what a customer needs at a price they can afford), the innovation often comes in removing features and derating specs.

So if you want to make an innovative leap, ask yourself, “What can I make worse?”  The ability to make something worse gives you the ability to make something else phenomenally better.  The innovation lies in how you make use of a slower, weaker, less reliable, or less performant product and turn it into an advantage.  So instead of Bigger, Better, Faster, Stronger, try thinking Smaller, Slower, and Weaker.

Take a Vacation: the Investigative Tourist

Image from Pixabay under Creative Commons License.

Want to hone your innovative thinking skills?  Go on vacation.  

You can learn more by going out and experiencing new environments than you can from sitting in front of a computer all day.  Developing your innovative thinking skills is all about learning new Paradigms and Metaphors and gaining fresh perspectives on the world.   A great way to do this is to put yourself in a new place with different people where you can encounter unique situations.  But it’s not enough to just show up and take a bus tour.  You must become an investigative tourist.  Here’s how.

Talk to the locals.

A book won’t tell you how Marco, your taxi driver, spends his day.  You wouldn’t learn that he used to be a factory worker but now makes more as a driver.  You wouldn’t hear about his opinion on the upcoming elections or find out how he spends a whole day waiting in line to pay his cell phone bill.  But you can learn all of this in a few minutes for free.  So chat up the waiter, taxi driver, store keeper or random person sitting in the park.  You’ll be amazed at the amazing stories that unfold.  Take these stories and try to understand this country from the lives of its people.  What do they care about?  How do they live differently?  Do they think differently?  Why?  Bring these lessons back home as souvenirs.

Be a historian.

When you see something different (e.g. architecture, attitudes, street signs, etc.) ask why.  Learn about the history of the society and try to deduce what caused this place to evolve differently than  at home.  When you go to a history museum, don’t just look at it as a gallery of dates and facts.  Think about how the past has shaped the present.  It is an experiment in cause and effect, and you can apply those same lessons as you try to shape our future through innovation.  

Seek out problems.

The key to innovation is hardship.  If everything was perfect, then there would be no room for improvement.  Next time you’re on vacation and the traffic is non-sensical, the restaurant is inefficient, or the tour is unorganized, rejoice, for this is an opportunity for you to practice your problem solving skills.  Ask why this is a problem here, but not at home.  Then go through the thought exercise of fixing it.  This typically isn’t just a case of making it the same as the US or of “replacing idiots”.  Figure out why things are fundamentally different, and then think of some unique solutions.

Appreciate genius.

People everywhere find innovative solutions to their unique situations.  Look for inspiration in the innovations, big and small, that surround you.  How do people repurpose used items in new ways?  How do businesses operate without the same infrastructure that exists in the US?  Take note of ingenious hacks and carry those images with you when you return.

Do it now.  Plan a vacation to a place you’ve never been before and start your career as an investigative tourist.  Didn’t I say innovation was fun?

Become Better at Make Believe: Choose the stick over the light saber

Image by Fraylen under Creative Commons License

“Make Believe” is perhaps one of the oldest childhood games in history.  It’s a very simple game.  Basically, the child pretends to be something that she isn’t.  Using just the tools around her (rocks, scissors, cardboard, doughnuts, etc.), she builds a fantasy world around her character (fashion photographer, astronaut, fireman, dancer, etc.)  But can one really be BETTER at make believe than someone else?  Of course.  For instance, Calvin and Hobbes (though theoretically mostly Calvin) are awesome at this game.  And like with everything else, getting better takes practice.  

There is a specific part of “Make Believe” that is especially relevant to innovative thinking: the creation of props.  Take two children, Gabriel and Gabe, who both love Star Wars because they happen to be male, under the age of 50, and are currently alive.  Gabriel’s parents bought him a fancy $200 Darth Vader Lightsaber.  Gabe’s parents clearly don’t love him because they only gave him their unconditional love.  So for their epic battle, Gabe picks up a fallen tree limb while Gabriel swings his light up lightsaber complete with sound effects.  Someone here is at a disadvantage.

But it’s not Gabe.  After sparring for a while, Gabe flips his stick down and uses it like a cane.  “I am the Emperor. “  Then he shoots lightning out of his hands.  Gabriel is stuck being Vader.  He wants to be Luke, but his lightsaber is the wrong color.  “I don’t want to play anymore,” he says, throwing his $200 toy to the ground.  Gabe throws one leg over his increasingly versatile stick.  “Oh, now I’m Harry Potter. Let’s play quidditch.”  Gabriel doesn’t know how to join in.  Gabe doesn’t give up.  He holds the stick in front of him in both hands and starts tap dancing.  Again, Gabriel doesn’t know what to do.  Then Gabe puts one end to his eye and says “Ahoy, matey.  I see land.”  Silence.  Finally, Gabe hands one end of the stick to Gabriel.  “We’re on a Viking warship.  Let’s row together.”

“Make Believe” is a game of innovation, and it’s something you can practice.  When you look at objects, try not to see just what it is supposed to be.  Try to imagine what it could be.  This is easier with plainer objects (sticks vs. lightsabers).  But even with a very specific object, you can break it down to its fundamental attributes which allows you to imagine other uses for it.  For instance, a lightsaber toy is a weapon.  But fundamentally, it is a straight object.  What else can you do with straight objects?  Use it as a cane.  Use it as a bridge.  Use it to dig.  A bed’s purpose is for sleeping.  But what is it really?  It is a structure that elevates things off the floor.  That also makes it an island in a sea of lava, a car, a coat rack, and a jungle gym.  It is also soft.  That makes it a wrestling mat and a trampoline.  Practice changing your perspective.

Now let’s look at how you can apply this to problems in the adult world.  One innovation technique is to look at the fundamental tools you have and ask “What else can I do with this?”  This has resulted in some of the most famous corporate pivots in history.  Corning used to make bottles.  But fundamentally, they were good with glass.  Glass is something that transmits light well.  So they became innovators in optical fibers.  Flickr started out as an online role playing game.  Their sharing platform also allowed for easy sharing of photos, and that is what took off.

So next time you see some kids playing “Make Believe”, go join in.  You don’t need fancy toys, in fact the simpler, the better.  Practice seeing the fundamental nature of things and ask “What else can this be used for.”

Brainstorm Meatloaf: awesome if you do it right

Image by Jeffrey W under Creative Commons license

Brainstorming has become synonymous with innovation. There have been hundreds of books and articles written about brainstorming.  Most recently, there has been some research showing that brainstorming doesn’t work.  This might resonate with you a bit because we’ve all come out of a large group brainstorm and thought ,”Wow, that was a waste of time.”  So is brainstorming total BS?  

All brainstorming is not equal. In the Great Depression, meatloaf was used to stretch the budget by mincing cheap meat and cheap grains with leftovers and then baking everything together to make it edible again.  As such, in some circles, it gained a bad reputation as some really bad meatloafs were made (and mostly eaten.)  However, taking the fundamental concept of meatloaf, it is possible to make an incredible dish by applying good ingredients and scientific experimentation (no really, go to this link.)  In the same way, the diligently planned and well facilitated brainstorm of today cannot be compared with populating a meeting with the first 10 people you run into in the hall, wriggling your fingers and shouting “Innovate!.”

It’s also true that  brainstorming ALONE doesn’t work, and that it doesn’t work for everything.  Groups are powerful ways to bring people with diverse backgrounds and skills together to find new pathways to solve problems.  They are not good ways of making decisions, creating action plans, gathering data, or designing and engineering something.  Similar to knowing whether you’re opening or closing the funnel, it’s important to know when brainstorming can be effective.

Here is a simple recipe for a great brainstorm:

1. Keep it small -  Would an eleventh finger really help?  Five to six people is ideal.  Things start to break down past eight.
2. Diversity is real - You’re looking for new perspectives, so gather people from different functional areas, roles, backgrounds, and yes, sometimes gender and race matter too.  You can’t bake a cake with just eggs (blend together one brown chicken egg, one white chicken egg, two duck eggs, and bake!)
3. Define a narrow goal - When opening the funnel, it’s hard to broaden an already broad topic.  You’ll get better results the more specific you can make the problem.  “Come up with new baby products” is too general.  Try something like “Explore new ways to improve bottle feeding for babies between 6 months and 1 year old.”
4. Pick a facilitator - Just because a brainstorm has people in it does not make it a democracy.  A designated facilitator will allow someone to keep the brainstorm on track.  Otherwise everyone will waste time debating “what should we do next” instead of thinking innovatively.  Other roles can be designated as well such as note taking and time keeping.
5. Keep it physical - A boardroom setting will result in a boardroom culture.  Avoid presenting slides and having everyone sit at a table facing one direction.  This shifts people from creating to evaluating (which is what we do when looking at slides).  Instead, get people standing and drawing.  Interpretive dance and finger painting highly encouraged.
6. Make it safe to be crazy - Bad ideas are good.  You must turn off the internal censorship to allow new thoughts to surface.  Trebuchets are a great solution to most problems.  And in this case, it’s okay to mention Nazis.
7. Say the obvious - Don’t think of a pink elephant.  Ha!  Now you just did.  Obvious ideas are often held back because they’re boring.  But then they stay in your mind (and they’re on EVERYONE’s mind).  So get the obvious ideas out there and on paper.  Then move on.
8. Keep it moving - Go for speed, not perfection.  It’s great to throw out crazy ideas if we can capture them and move on.  However, rat-holing, or getting stuck on a single topic, can suck up all the time and energy in a brainstorm.  Even worse, the fear of rat-holing creates self-censorship where people “don’t want to go there.”  If the facilitator can’t keep things moving, designate a time-keeper or use a stopwatch.

Yes.  Much more can be said on brainstorming, but for now, go forth and experiment.  It’s the best way to learn to cook, and the best way to practice innovative thinking.

The Innovator’s Textbooks: by Asimov, Clarke, and Stephensen

Image by Chris Drumm

Becoming good at anything requires not just practice but some form of study.  Luckily, for innovative thinking, the reading list is highly enjoyable and available for free at your local library.  What better way to expand your mind to new possibilities and learn new paradigms to apply to problems than through the creative thinking and exposition of great science fiction writers?

Many of the most important technical innovations in recent history were predicted by science fiction.  These include communications satellites, earbuds, and debit cards to name a few.  It is important to note that just because a novel contains robots and spaceships does not mean that it is true science fiction (in our use of the term).  A good science fiction novel, for our purposes, is a novel that makes one or more hypotheses of the future (eg. energy becomes free, cyberspace becomes more important than real life, robots do all the work).  Then it explores the resulting world that arises from these hypotheses, looking for ground-changing and surprising repercussions (matter replication and the end of money, immortality and suicide, boredom as a cause of extinction and mass welfare).

This mirrors the process of innovative thinking, a hundred times in as many pages.  Reading science fiction is like reading an endless array of entertainingly written case studies.  Each story is full of lessons and provocative thought experiments to learn from.  It is important to note that the paradigms explored in science fiction are not limited to technological predictions.  Many truly impactful works of science fiction explore bits of economics, politics, religion, existential philosophy, and fundamentally what it means to be human.  When I look back at what has shaped my own way of thinking and inspired me to learn and grow, I always come back to the books that filled my childhood and continue to dominate my reading list even today.

“But this is fiction, not fact!” some might object.  True, but we are not trying to learn facts about the world.  We are trying to learn different views on how the world works.  Paradigms are never true or false.  They are all simply models used to view a problem.  Often opposite paradigms exist, and that’s okay.  They can both be true at different times.  The reading of science fiction and the expansion of your library of paradigms is meant to give you tools with which to tackle problems.  Innovation is not about having one correct lens; it is about having millions of lenses through which to look at a problem, and sifting through them to find the right one to use at the right time.

So what are you waiting for?  Get started by browsing the shelves of your local library, or by checking out some top lists and seeing what catches your eye.

Funnel Cake: Opening and closing the funnel

Image by Ines Hegedus-Garcia

There are hundreds of diagrams on “new product development”, “innovation”, or “problem solving”.  Instead of drawing you a complex GIF, I’m going to simplify the whole process into FOUR LINES.  Ready?

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That simple.  One of the most important concepts to grasp is that you should always be either opening or closing the funnel, but not both at the same time.   These two actions are polar opposites, and problems arise when you aren’t absolutely clear on which you are engaged in.

When you first define a problem you’re trying to solve (say… urban transportation) , you start by opening the funnel.  Create tons of new ideas (dog sleds).  State the obvious (bikes and trains). Branch out (working from home).  Actively seek bad ideas (trebuchets).  Go for quantity (pigeon powered flight).  Have lots of fun.  Draw.  Don’t criticize.  Build ideas up.  Say “Yes, and… “  Use post its or paper or white boards.  We’ll discuss many of these techniques in later posts.  

Now after you’ve generated dozens or hundreds of ideas, it’s time to start closing the funnel.  Different rules apply.  You’ll want to start categorizing ideas (personal vehicles, public vehicles, social structure change…).  You need to decide on which aspects of the concepts are most important (cost, size, infrastructure, distance traveled…)  This is a process of narrowing down.  You need structure.  You need pugh charts and debating systems and voting systems.  Your end goal is to take hundreds of ideas and whittle them down to a handful.

And then you repeat.

With your new narrow focus, you’ll have to widen the funnel again, but this time within the constraints of each concept.  What are all the ways you can utilize dog sleds?  Expand.  Then it’s narrowing time.  Contract.  Yes, this process is one that requires you to be bipolar.  You need to be two different people, but again, NOT AT THE SAME TIME.

This is most important when working with a team.  People will naturally be more exploratory or more critical in nature.  As you can see, BOTH of these are important.  When told expressly to be one or the other, most people can handle this for an hour-long meeting, especially if you remind them.  But if you don’t specify whether you are opening or closing the funnel, then people will default to their natural inclinations.  And that will result in brainstorming meetings where someone kills the vibe by constantly criticizing ideas without proposing new ones.  Or imagine a meeting where you’re trying to decide between two options and someone keeps adding new options in the middle of the debate.  This happens all the time and is easy to avoid.  Just be sure to ask at all times, both with yourself and with your team: are we opening or closing the funnel?