Author: Victor

Did you know there’s a vaccine for chickenpox?

I had no idea until a friend of mine, an adult, just caught chickenpox (she actually knew about the vaccine but her doctor told her she’d been ‘exposed’ and didn’t need it). Apparently the vaccine was approved in the U.S. in 1995. If you have never had chickenpox and haven’t been vaccinated, you can no longer say no one told you.

In 1995 I had my first New York City apartment and whatever I was doing, it wasn’t reading Prevention magazine. But this is the case with many people: it’s impossible to keep up with all the things we should know. And with all the hoopla over bottom-up information organization these days, my natural inclination is to go the other way and ask, how about a radically top-down, people-centric approach? What does that look like? Maybe something like this…

Need To Know
Our educational system has failed to adapt to the changing information needs of the 21st century. The typical education lacks crucial information on such issues as managing our health, finances, and careers. Need To Know is a radically top-down approach to education. A massive research project is collecting data on millions of Americans to determine what most people do most of the time, and therefore what information they need to fruitfully live their lives. We will use this information to produce a one-hour television program composed of 360 ten-second video tutorials.

Ten seconds may not sound like a lot, but it’s enough to say, A vaccine for chickenpox was released in 1995. If you were born before 1977 and have never had chickenpox, go to a doctor and get the vaccine.

Innovation must be top-down and bottom-up simultaneously

It’s telling that this BusinessWeek/BCG survey only lists executive titles in this answer, even as executive-focused publications like HBR are publishing articles telling us, “Because so much of the learning about customers and so much of the experimentation with different segmentations, value propositions, and delivery mechanisms involve the people who regularly deal with customers, it is essential for frontline employees to be at the center of the customer-centric innovation process.”

Which is it, top-down or bottom-up?

One of our axioms at MIG is that innovation needs to be top-down and bottom-up at the same time. Good ideas come from everywhere. An open and participatory process yields more and better ideas. Learning from any part of the organization should be proliferated throughout. And support from top officers is vital in setting the tone and commitment to qualities of innovation.

The client-centered innovation imperative

There’s an inherent problem in trying to market anything complex like innovation: we practioners are passionate and by necessity employ a rich set of ideas, while our clients who need it, by definition, have focused on another aspect of business and may not have the time nor the inclination to understand these rich ideas in order to engage in the practice. Clients need something simpler to hook into the practice, and if they are willing they will gradually learn more. The problem is, the practioners (like myself) feel it’s inauthentic to over-simplify our ideas.

Grant McCracken tells a story about this in Obituary for a Friend…

This is an obituary for a friend who has gone over to the method… Working with Danny was like fishing the Grand Banks before the Europeans came in earnest. So many ideas, so thickly packed, you could walk on them anywhere. …he now plays things by the book. He’s got this method through which everything must pass.

Grant sums up the situation well, and (not ironically) the responses to Grant’s post explore the subtlety of this situation, that it depends on what you mean by method, and to some extent we all have a method.

Regarding clients, I think their motivations go beyond mere lack of time and inclination. Mark Edmunson’s recent article, Freud and the Fundamentalist Urge, reviews Freud’s work on society and politics to find an explanation of why we follow some leaders and not others…

In his last days, Freud became increasingly concerned about our longing for inner peace — our longing, in particular, to replace our old, inconsistent and often inscrutable over-I with something clearer, simpler and ultimately more permissive. We want a strong man with a simple doctrine that accounts for our sufferings, identifies our enemies, focuses our energies and gives us, more enduringly than wine or even love, a sense of being whole.

The challenge before our discipline now is to increase the ways we can assist clients by reconciling our complex ideas with their desire for something simpler.

2006 Pratt Show, May 9-11

Since I’ll be teaching Business+Design at the Pratt Institute here in New York this Fall, I plan to check out the graduate show to get inside the heads of these bright young designers. The show is open to the public May 9-11.

Inspired by graffiti, t1-12 by Victoria Haroian is a living room chair that integrates healthy postures and spinal stretching into home furniture.

Radiate information – First Draft

[ this is a first draft of a chapter in Evolve, comments are appreciated ]

Healthy organizations share information promiscuously to speed communication and generate tacit knowledge. Share current, important, non-urgent information using information radiators.

In 1966 the New York Stock Exchange installed a huge electronic board that displayed the stock prices of every company on the exchange. The constant flurry of Exchange operations revolved around this board, kept everyone informed, and helped NYSE grow into the largest exchange in the world. Even today people refer to the Exchange as the “Big Board.”

Usually we record and deliver our knowledge work in documents, documents trapped inside a computer or in a pile on someone’s desk. Imagine for a moment you are at the airport leaving for vacation. Your flight is delayed, and to find out the current departure time you and everyone else on the flight need to refer to a printed report at the gate that is updated every half hour (actually, given the efficiency of some airlines, I’m surprised this isn’t the case). Whether it’s a stock exchange, an airport, or a fast food restaurant, moving information out of documents and into the workplace helps people work faster.

Try it now
Isolate the most important information that is needed by most team members most of the time. It could be the status of each activity, how much work is left on each project, or the stage of completion for each activity. In a public area like a hallway, mount a whiteboard or poster board to track this information. Use highly visual formats like calendars, graphs, or charts so passersby can absorb updates quickly. Make it easy for everyone to make updates by leaving markers or sticky notes nearby.

Guidelines:

  • Radiate information that is current, important, but non-urgent
  • Show the state of progress but don’t try to represent process
  • Make it visible to everyone in a high-traffic area like a hallway or kitchen
  • Don’t format it in a way that’s too pretty, precious, or permanent. By designing it so it looks editable and supplying tools like markers to modify it you make it easy for team members to update

If the information needs to last a long time independently of people or teams at a company, use a format that will be found easily by subsequent employees. For more permanence, stronger materials like metal plaques can radiate long-lasting ideas like organizational values. Or you can locate information outside the organization, such as by publishing a book.

References:

What the Agile Toolbox Contains

InformationRadiator

Published
Categorized as Evolve

Design thinking for labor relations

Dr. Rudi Webster, a sports psychologist, is striving to improve the relationship between the West Indies cricket board and the players association prior to the 2007 Cricket World Cup to take place there. He’s advocating for a generative approach:

…I feel that the time has come to use a new paradigm to resolve this problem. If we use the current paradigm and stay in the same thinking box, the outcome will almost certainly be a win/loss situation, with West Indies cricket being the big loser. All stakeholders need to abandon their adversarial thinking and approach and engage in design thinking to find a win/win solution.

Recognizing this kind of relationship is usually filled with the kind of tension that can, in extreme cases, lead to violence, he calls for a third party to step in and help transform the way participants perceive the situation…

The goal of the third party is to convert a two dimensional fight into a three dimensional exploratory exercise, leading to the design of a win/win outcome. The real purpose of the third party is to create the concept of “triangular thinking”, where the third party is an integral part of the process, not an addition or an aid. What the third party is after is not compromise or consensus. Nor is it after negotiation in the usual sense of the word. It is not after arbitration, nor bargaining. It is not about showing who is wrong. It is simply about changing beliefs and perspectives and designing an optimal solution. Remember, it is beliefs that determine the limits of your achievements.

I find this fascinating as I see many effective organizations either avoiding unionization, as with Japanese auto manufacturing in the U.S., or turning unions into a competitive advantage.

This interview (.doc) with Dr. Webster explores his views on psychology.

Prosperity vs. freedom in China

The recent Frontline documentary on China, The Tank Man, set a striking contrast of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests against the business and economic boom created since then. They describe this flow one to the other as an unspoken social contract between the government and the people: we’ll give you jobs and prosperity if you accept the status quo on social freedoms. And yet they also point out the rapid growth in protests throughout the country. Is this a contradiction? Is the government just buying time?

A new business+innovation+design event

Jess and I thought it would be great to host an event where people could explore the intersection of business, innovation, and design in more depth than conferences allow. So along with some friends we created Overlap which will happen at the end of May. It’s small, non-profit, inexpensive, and centered on conversations. We’re hoping it’s going to be a very special and productive experience. There’s a few places left, if you’re interested in joining us drop me a line.

Concept car dreams

Since I’ve been thinking about tangible futures and why companies should envision the future (including car companies) I thought a visit to the Auto Show here in New York was worthwhile. The biggest surprise for me was the Toyota exhibit. While I love their process, I’m usually bored with their high quality but plain cars. But their concept cars wow’d me.

I’ve been thinking about concept cars for a few years now and how they’re a good way for companies to practice foresight. Given my advocacy of Toyota’s production system and their current success, it’s very convenient to point to their concept cars as a contributor. I can’t say how much these concepts have contributed to cause, but I certainly found their differentiated concepts a compelling correlation.

Most every concept at the show this year followed this formula:

  1. Include a selection of next generation technologies
  2. Wrap them up in a pretty styled interior and exterior

As a group they were fun to look at but failed to inspire. We know certain technology is coming, we expect it. And the styling is the same thing we’ve been seeing for years. But what Toyota did was different. They asked, “What if the car was just as much about transportation as about entertainment? Then let’s design the car with an NBA theme and fill it with five video displays all hooked up to a video game console…”

And they asked, “What if the car was just as much about transportation as about socializing? Then the car should be designed as a portable lounge that puts limos to shame…”

To me this represented the difference between merely combining engineering with styling and doing experience design. Rather than merely being safer or faster or better looking, you could feel how these cars would lead to a qualitatively different automotive experience, enhancing your life in a new way. That is the power of tangible futures.

Customer-centered poetry

In Good Poems Keillor suggests that what makes a poem good depends both on what one intends to use it for and who intends to use it. If one wants a poem for English majors to analyze in a seminar room, certain qualities are likely to be prized—complexity, density, ambivalence. But if one intends poems to reach a general audience in the ordinary business of their day, then other qualities are primary—such as expressive power, music, and memorability.

…Good Poems is not a volume aimed at academic pursuits but at ordinary human purposes. And it insists that poetry can still play a meaningful role in those purposes. So unambiguously dedicated to the notion that poetry is a vehicle for truth, self-awareness, and inspiration, Good Poems is a post-modernist’s nightmare in nineteen chapters.

from Dana Gioia’s review of Good Poems edited by Garrison Keillor.

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Categorized as Writing

Principles for tangible futures

Tangible Futures, Part 3: Principles

These are principles I’m using to develop tangible futures now…

Tangible Futures are

  • Inspirational, touching us both intellectually and emotionally.
  • Pragmatic, optimistic in a realistic way.
  • Innovative, they are a vision of something that is a mystery now because, by definition, we haven’t invented it yet.
  • Strategic, describing something happening years in the future.
  • Custom, applied to a particular organization.
  • Storytelling, encapsulating the people, places, things, and relationships of a situation in the accessible format of a story.


Tangible Futures are not

  • Predictions
  • Strategic plans

Funding and the Innovator’s Dilemma

I’ve talked with several people who are heads of business units who have faced up to the what of the innovator’s dilemma but aren’t sure about the how. They have the determination to make difficult changes in how they serve their customers. They have P&L responsibility, but not necessarily a large scale budget that allows them to create whole new departments to do the new work. And although they’re willing to supplant their cash cows, they need that revenue until the new offerings bring in new revenue.

So the main obstacle — innovation being mostly about the great management of great people — is finding resources that enable people to work on new development projects. Since it’s a common and important issue, I’ve started a list of the approaches that I use in addressing the problem. They’re mostly common sense, but hopefully will facilitate conversations to find a workable approach…

Add Resources Set a business goal such as increased market share or revenue from new products. Express this goal in the context of what is important to the company, such as how the goal contributes to overall positioning, or a financial model that specifies what constitutes a desirable financial return. Use this goal+context to justify investing in additional resources.

Re-Allocate Company Resources Determine what existing products and services are undesirable (e.g. “dogs”) and make the executive decision to discontinue them, re-allocating resources to new development.

Re-Allocate R&D Resources Benchmark the effectiveness of current R&D spending. Then allocate a small portion of existing R&D funding to the new development activities. Measure the effectiveness of the new activities and compare that to the benchmark, re-allocating funds as appropriate.

Share Resources Share new development costs with a partner who is interested in sharing the results.

Divide Resources Use existing resources in a lean way, such as devoting a portion of time each week to new development. Google does this by allowing employees to work on new projects every Friday.

Add Activites If the new development involves novel activities and techniques, start integrating these into existing work. Try different approaches and find what works in small, low-risk ways. Establish a comfortable, gradual approach leading up to bigger changes; help everyone feel more comfortable devoting more resources down the line once they’ve achieved some small victories.

Futures studies and the importance of ‘images’

Tangible Futures, Part 2: The historical context

The Wilson Quarterly’s Winter 2006 issue focuses on future studies and includes this historical review, Has Futurism Failed? In it the authors cite several practitioners hailing the importance of our images of the future. To me this could include our science fiction, our movies, and our political rhetoric, as well as our vision for business. Here’s an excerpt:

…widely shared images of the future can sometimes open up large new realms of behavior possibilities, creating chain reactions of self-organizing change. This insight actually emerged in some of the early work in future studies. The economist Kenneth Boulding put the matter clearly: “The human condition can almost be summed up in the observation that, whereas all experiences are of the past, all decisions are about the future. The image of the future, therefore, is the key to all choice-oriented behavior. The character and quality of the images of the future which prevail in a society are therefore the most important clue to its overall dynamics.”

Tangible Futures example: Futurama

Sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. The social and political upheaval of the 1960’s and 1970’s may have squelched the raw optimism of previous decades, but this only made the need for inspiring visions even more important in the face of new, complex business environments.

In 1940 General Motors offered “Futurama” as their vision of the future. It went beyond automotive design, delineating plans for a new kind of city to accommodate increased auto usage, as with the elevated walkways below. In hindsight it’s easy to criticize this particular vision, but I’m sure it inspired employees and customers with an optimistic, realistic vision which the company could work towards.

Norman Bel Geddes, “Magic Motorways” from GM’s Futurama: Pedestrians and motorcars will continue on their way without interference.