Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Real Trends and Innovation

    I attended the World Futures conference in Toronto recently, and hope to find a spare minute to write up my thoughts on the conference. But one thing that struck me was how markedly different the tone of discussion was between people who relied on forecasting techniques vs. those that relied on trends. The former produced valuable and fascinating forecasts, but had to back them up with authority based on their personal ability, the validity of the technique, or sheer confidence.

    The trend people (e.g. SRI, Ray Kurzweil), meanwhile, were remarkably calm and even humble. They looked — as Paul Saffo would have us do — at least twice as far back into the past as they looked into the future. Granted, the trend watchers tended to watch technology, particularly information technology, and this is quite a bit less chaotic then, say, terrorism or epidemics. Nevertheless when looking at 20 or 30 years of data it felt significantly easier to make plausible suppositions about what the next few years will hold. Ray Kurzweil attributes his impressive performance as an inventor to his ability to track trends: “Invention is a matter of timing.”

    Subsequently, I’ve noticed that what is often referred to as a trend actually falls — perhaps because of our apophenia or simply marketing cahones — into one of three categories:

    1. Isolated — though remarkable — events
    2. Several similar events happening at the same time
    3. Predictions based on hunches

    Harnessing weak signals, wild cards, and Blink-style instinct can be valuable, but they’re not trends. One thing futures studies has to offer those of us working in innovation and design is, somewhat surprisingly, a more sophisticated use of historical information.

  • Engage: Resources on Designing for Emotion

    Trevor van Gorp just pointed me to the Engage site which — once you’ve completed the free registration — has a wealth of resources for doing research and design with emotions in mind (which, given we’re emotional creatures, should be pretty much always).

    Trevor, incidentally, just finished an impressive master’s thesis at the University of Calgary on emotional state chaining. Hopefully he’ll start doing workshops to teach his techniques to the rest of us. He’ll have a website up soon.

  • Michael Linton on Marketing Innovation

    I attended an interview last night with Michael Linton, CMO of Best Buy, sponsored by Fortune magazine. He expressed the same healthy attitude toward trials that I’ve heard from other successful executives, e.g. “We have the programs we do regularly, the ready-aim-fire activities. Then we have the ready-fire-aim activities, the new programs we’re trying out. It’s important you don’t try to measure those in the same way. Some won’t contribute to making your numbers but will teach you new things.”

    And he offered less common advice, like “If you can be 70% successful in a new activity, that’s great. If you try to acheive the other 30%, the market will probably move on without you while you’re striving for perfection. We work hard to keep up with the market.“

  • Fortune on Agile Businesses

    Fortune magazine has rewritten Jack Welch’s rules on management to reflect changes in the business environment. Jack’s first rule was Big dogs own the street and Fortune says that rule should now be Agile is best; being big can bite you.

    With the rate of change in business today, it’s hard to argue with the benefits of being agile, but exactly how does a manager make her organization more agile? I’ve been exploring this by adapting agile development principles for general managers, creating practices for becoming adaptive, fast, and focusing on value. I’ve really only scratched the surface so far; there’s incredible potential to improve the way we structure projects, make investments, and communicate, and it’s great to see media like Fortune recognize this potential.

    Link courtesy businessinnovationinsider.com

  • Wladawsky-Berger on the Changing Nature of Strategy

    Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM, on the need to move away from a purely hierarchical approach to strategy:

    “…for technologies and markets, the hierarchical approach is too rigid and must be complemented with more dynamic, bottoms-up approaches that constantly probe and react to what is going on within the business and out in the marketplace. Achieving the proper balance between a top-down strategy — necessary for proper governance, and a bottoms-up strategy that reflects the realities of the marketplace may be one of the biggest competitive challenges facing a business.“

  • The Difference Between Customer-Focused Innovation and Cluelessness

    Last week a friend of mine was telling me about how new products are created at her software start-up. Essentially it consists of salespeople talking to current and potential customers about an existing product and asking, “What else would you like it do to?”

    That in itself is a fine question that acknowledges the customer as having valuable ideas. But in this case, and others I’ve seen, it comprises the entire idea-generation process and grows out of a requirements mentality that looks superficially at customers’ needs. The organization substitutes the customer for the business analyst and lacks a business model and product concepting process. Instead of having a vision of how the company could satisfy unmet needs or create new markets, they’ve abdicated responsibility for new product development to the customer, which doesn’t always reveal useful insights.

    These companies have a special need to move design and innovation activites from the production end of the business, which asks “How do we build?” to the front of the business, which asks, ‘What should we build?’

  • Jamais Cascio on the Role of Artifacts in Futurism

    Jamais Cascio on Artifacts from the Future: “If scenario creation was the poster-boy for futurism in the mid-1990s, artifact creation looks to play that role for mid-2000s futurism…. I can’t imagine doing a major futurist project now without using some kind of tangible element of the future, even if it’s just an article from a magazine of a decade or three hence. These artifacts provide an anchor for the recipients, not in the sense of holding them back, but in the sense of giving them a grounding from which to explore.“

  • Skirting the Edge of Disaster

    I just noticed Kevin Kelley’s New Rules book is online. From Chapter 8 comes another reason innovation is hard to sell:

    “A real innovation is sufficiently different to be dangerous. It is change just this side of being ludicrous. It skirts the edge of the disaster, without going over. Real innovation is scary. It is anything but harmonious.“

  • Can Web 2.0 Help Anyone Dabble in I.T.?

    While discussions of Web 2.0 in the popular press center around the cool technology — and it is pretty cool — the more interesting aspects for me are the changes we’ll see in how people relate to information in fundamentally different ways as companies move from creating products to creating tools.

    One ubiquitous software app at the heart of our systems is the database, and along with it is the ubiquitous understanding that mere mortals do not create databases, we need database programmers to do that. Along comes Dabble to change that, at least (for the time being) at the simpler end of applications. Watching their demo video it’s easy to imagine the day when any business person will create database-backed web applications as easily as we set up spreadsheets today.

  • Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe

    At Overlap there was a running side conversation about using real options to evaluate product investments. Eric Beinhocker explores a similar idea on the scale of business plans in Creating Strategy in an Unknowable Universe, a summary of his book The Origin of Wealth. Here’s an excerpt:

    Rather than thinking of strategy as a single plan built on predictions of the future, we should think of strategy as a portfolio of experiments, a population of competing Business Plans that evolves over time… an example will help illustrate what a portfolio of strategic experiments looks like…

    Rather than try to predict the future, [Bill] Gates created a population of competing Business Plans within Microsoft that mirrored the evolutionary competition going on outside in the marketplace. Microsoft thus was able to evolve its way into the future. Eventually, each of the other initiatives was killed off or scaled down, and Windows was amplified to become the focus of the company’s operating-system efforts.

    Of course the idea of thoughtfully managing multiple businesses has been around at least since BCG’s matrix, but Beinhocker describes this at the innovation phase rather than the maturity phase. This requres a less analytic, more opportunistic approach that simultaneously relies on the creativity needed to generate new businesses and the discpline to gently tweak investments over time.

    Beinhocker providers a hard look at the difficulties in pursuing a strategy that appears to outsiders like a jumble of half-baked ideas. We’ve been facing these issues in our client engagements, helping companies think beyond the traditional financial business case and reframe investment decisions through an evolutionary lens. I’ll have to read the book to see how much of this he’s already addressed.

  • Tangibly understanding your retirement

    Our retirement is one topic where all of us think many years into the future. In my tangible futures presentation I’ve been showing a typical screen from my online retirement account. It shows how much money I have saved, where it’s invested, the rate of return, my asset allocation, and so on. It’s a great tool for helping me understand my investments, but it fails to help me understand what I’m saving for, and therefore if I’ll have enough money to retire the way I’d like.

    Then I show a more tangible concept I like to call Cancun 2035:

    It’s just a concept, but immediately it signals to me what a great retirement I have awaiting me and how close I am to it financially. I don’t know if Cancun will actually be a nice place to retire to in 2035, or how much it will cost, or what the rate of inflation is, but my financial services company can help me with that. Then they’d be my retirement services company, a big identity and capability change for an organization, but one that might be facilitated by creating a new vision for themselves using a tangible future like this one.

    Recently I noticed Ameriprise is giving away a Dream Book that does help you plan for what you’ll do in retirement. Unfortunately the book is mostly text and not more tangible, but they’re headed in the right direction.

  • Why design thinking is so hard for designers

    “You can’t make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it.”

    In our exploration of design thinking some people assume that it is the kind of thinking that designers do, but unfortunately this isn’t usually the case. For several reasons designers are predisposed against integrative ways of thinking.

    To explain I’ll cite the example of the internal effort to fix the horrendous user interfaces of SAP’s software. A Wall St Journal article ($) this week quoted people at the company admitting to the poor design quality and describing their in-house effort to educate SAP’s engineers to be more sensitive to users’ needs. This is the designer’s goal: to design better products. A design thinker on the other hand might look at the whole system, observe that SAP has been so bad at designing UIs for so long that a massive culture change would need to take place before managers allocated the kind of resources needed to achieve significantly better designs. While this would be great, the design thinker would explore the option that UI design is not a capability that SAP should develop. One would ask if partners and customers are better equipped to design the UIs, and if SAP should simply build APIs into all the products. Would a director of design at SAP come to this conclusion? Maybe, but designers aren’t looking in this direction; doing so jeapardizes their ability to create interesting artifacts as well as the security of their jobs.

    Another example is the revived discusion about working on spec, which rarely gets beyond a binary judgement of for or against. If one looks at the entire system, we see that clients have many options these days regardless of how designers like to structure engagements, presenting market forces that could ‘creatively destroy’ old transaction models. The design thinker would recognize this new reality, generate new approaches, and start experimenting. In the BusinessWeek case the job was relatively simple. Why not, for example, split the budget into three parts and commission three designs from three different firms? Each firm would have to invent a process that was profitable but is assured of being compensated, and the client still has a number of artifacts to choose from. This approach doesn’t heap glory and profit upon any one design firm so they probably wouldn’t suggest it, even if it could be better for the system overall.

  • Hyundai Brand Evolution

    Hyundai successfully entered the U.S. market as a low-cost competitor, became established, and has even started to offer an affordable luxury model. And now a recent J.D. Power report listing them as the No. 1 non-premium auto maker in terms of perceived quality, ahead of previous frontrunner Toyota.

    But when you’re known for being the cheap option, how to you re-educate the market? (While Hyundai’s products are not of the disruptive variety, I’m interested in this challenge because it confronts the typical disruptive innovator.) This Gazelle vs. Lion 30-second commercial from The Richards Group should definitely help.

  • Successful small business units, schools

    William G. Ouchi on decentralized management:

    I had spent 35 years studying the management of very large companies, and one of the most consistent principles is decentralization. In a competitive world, you must make decisions in the smallest operating units possible, or you will go out of business…

    …We have a research project under way now in which we’re interviewing 527 principals with local autonomy and visiting their schools. We’re focusing on inner-city high schools, which have proven in the past to be the hardest schools to improve. We’re finding that control over the budget gives principals control over three key school decisions: the staffing mixture, curriculum, and schedule.

  • The Neuroscience of Leadership

    I agree with Ed when he says of The Neuroscience of Leadership “it’s an outstanding piece of work, well worth your time” but that the authors’ critique of humanism is both lame and unnecessary.