Noise Between Stations

Category: Design

  • Creating organizational vision with storytelling and artifacts

    “The Institute for the Future couldn’t get clients to read its trend forecasts. So it started giving away prescient product ideas instead.”

    These are great examples of the tangible part of what we’ve been calling Tangible Futures. The IFTF objects seem like good ways to, as they say, ‘start conversations’ about alternate futures. The intention behind our Tangible Futures is a little different. We want to help change the way organizations think about their capabilities and identity so they’re more capable of innovating. The one key difference is that instead of making the artifacts ourselves we think these artifacts are more likely to result in actual innovation if we help companies create their own artifacts. More on this in a moment.

    In either case, the conundrum is that we need the tangible artifacts to stimulate the imagination, but then we need to immediately focus away from the artifact to what is required internally for an organization to produce it.

    Why? Because innovative companies make innovative products. That sounds obvious, but some companies want to ignore the company part and jump right to the products. To illustrate the difference, consider (surprise) the iPod. Is the difference between the iPod/iTunes ecosystem that Apple had a better idea than everyone else? No. Other companies had already released components of this system, such as hard drive-based mp3 players and online music stores. Sony in particular was the logical one to lead the way, since they possess significantly more portable electronics design, manufacturing, distribution, and retail expertise than Apple. Sony also happens to own a handful of record companies. Apple’s advantage comes down to management innovation. They took smart risks and created effective collaboration across disciplines and groups, where is one place Sony definitely failed. Regardless of which was the better product, the more innovative company won.

    Artifacts from the future are highly useful to inspire us into action, but ultimately the challenge is managing people to execute on the innovative ideas. How do we get beyond the focus on the artifact? One approach could be to embed the artifact within a strong story. To use a classic example, we can conjure the story of Adam & Eve using the apple with two bites taken from it. The apple is an artifact that represents a wealth of concepts, and yet our focus is not on the apple, it’s on the people and events.

    To develop a corporate vision, scenario planning is a great way for groups to co-create stories about the future. If at the same time the groups create artifacts that conjure those stories, they possess a tangible conveyance, communicating the vision necessary for others to align their work in the same direction. That’s what Tangible Futures is all about.

  • The cost of iteration

    Iterating on paper? Cheap.

    Iterating in software? Still pretty cheap.

    Iterating the Airbus A380? Not so cheap: “Airbus said Tuesday that it would produce only 9 of its giant new A380 jets next year, not the 25 planned, because of numerous design changes…. Small changes, like moving small pieces of equipment, were cascading through the system and creating the need for additional adjustments in wiring…”

    This simple idea, illustrated in painful penalties and time-to-market costs for Airbus, is elegantly expanded upon in Austin and Devin’s book Artful Making. The authors — one a business professor and the other a theater professor — contrast the cost of iteration with the cost of exploration, look at its use in industrial and knowledge work, and how the iteration cost curve changes over a project.

    In general the book is a wonderful look at applying “artful” (i.e. design or craft) ways of working to knowledge work, which is what business design is in large part all about. I’ve been recommending it to everyone.

  • GE dares to dream of the future

    In my tangible futures presentation last week, I repeated a statement I’ve written here, that sometime during the second half of the 20th century, American companies forgot how to dream. I’m happy to contradict that statement with a clear example: GE.

    In Growth as a Process, Jeffrey Immelt reveals the process that led to their Ecomagination initiative. Not only is it not greenwashing or a flimsy vision statement, it grew out of their strategic planning process and has metrics that benefit the company and the environment, while bravely looking several years into the future.

    The whole article is full of valuable insights, but this section is worth quoting:

    The very economics [of scarcity], by the way, that drove you to read the demand for organic growth. You’re trying to make tailwind out of the headwind.

    Exactly right. So we plugged that input from S-1 [GE’s strategic planning process] into the Commercial Council, which studied it for nine months. We met with people from NGOs, government offices, and other relevant organizations. We brought a lot of assets together, including our knowledge of public policy and how it gets influenced. Once we had done our homework, we launched ecomagination with 17 products we could point to. As always, we were metric driven. We said that our $10 billion of revenue from products tapping renewable energy sources like the sun and wind had to go to $20 billion in five years. The $750 million we were spending on R&D for clean technologies had to go to a billion and a half. Our own greenhouse gas emissions had to come down by 1% by 2012.


    Has there been any push back from your customers, some of whom I can imagine would rather stick to their carbon-burning ways?

    There were plenty of guys on our energy team who hated this in the beginning because half of their customers were saying they hated it. Never mind that half of the customers loved it. We just kept talking: “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s why we think it’s good for both of us. And it’s going to come someday anyhow, so let’s get ahead of it.” We hosted what we call a dreaming session in the summer of 2004 with the 30 biggest utilities. Some of the top players in the industry—CEOs like Jim Rogers and David Rutledge—came to Crotonville and heard Jeff Sachs from Columbia talk about global warming. There were other speakers who were pretty compelling on different topics, and breakout sessions. I floated the idea of doing something on public policy on greenhouse gases, and we had a good debate.

    In part, ecomagination helped to show the organization that we can do these things. The company has been great in terms of management practice but more reluctant when it comes to what I would call business innovation. Ecomagination was one way to show the organization that it’s OK to stick your neck out and even to make customers a little bit uncomfortable.

  • Female masters of innovation

    Last year I went back to Jeanne Lietdke’s Strategy as Design article for a second, close reading. One thought I came away with was, “It’s not too surprising this has come from a woman. The creative embrace of conflict, the willingness to stay in the problem space, the lack of need to control a situation and instead turn it into a new situation… it intuitively feels right that a woman would write that piece.” My colleagues — male and female — thought I was nuts for saying so. I know these aren’t exclusively female qualities, but I see them more often in women than men.

    I thought of this just now looking at IN’s 25 Masters of Innovation. 17 of the 25 are women. I don’t want to draw any conclusion from this, but it’s another interesting data point.

  • Prediction markets blog

    My friend and former co-worker Alex Kirtland is reviewing public prediction markets on his blog. Given how important a clear understanding of the market is to the accuracy of participants’ voting, I appreciate the POV of someone like Alex who groks good digital design.

  • Two New Biz Mags: IN and Portfolio

    I believe IN launches as an insert inside BusinessWeek today, while Conde announced Portfolio (also see the NY Times introduction). The editors say the latter will be serious, long-form journalism. We’ll see if it’s more Wired or more New Yorker.

  • Stewart: ultimately, it’s all about values, and not an MBA

    The Management Myth by Matthew Stewart argues against the value of Winslow Taylor’s methods, an MBA education, and much of management theory. His tone is often snarky and flip, which is a shame because it undermines the delivery of some great ideas, such as this discussion of values:

    …as anyone who has studied Aristotle will know, “Values” aren’t something you bump into from time to time during the course of a business career. All of business is about values, all of the time. Notwithstanding the ostentatious use of stopwatches, Taylor’s pig iron case was not a description of some aspect of physical reality — how many tons can a worker lift? It was a prescription — how many tons should a worker lift? The real issue at stake in Mayo’s telephone factory was not factual — how can we best establish a sense of teamwork? It was moral — how much of a worker’s sense of identity and well-being does a business have a right to harness for its purposes?

    Someone else pointed this out to me recently by saying, “We know that McDonald’s has values. Because if they didn’t, they’d be selling crack.“

  • Tangible Futures in Philly on Wednesday

    I’ll be discussing tangible futures in Philadelphia next Wednesday, courtesy of the nice folks at PHICHI and Colony Interactive. I hope to provoke the audience with a new look at an old practice and hear some feedback. I hope to see you Philadelphians there.

  • Overlap photos

    Overlap

  • Overlapped

    We overlapped and now my mind is too busy sorting things out to write. More later.

    photo by Steve Portigal

  • Exporting management techniques

    The chief executive of Cognizant Technology Solutions, an outsourcing company that is based in Teaneck, N.J., but has most of its employees in India, says it can compete against giants like I.B.M. and Accenture partly by borrowing American-style management techniques.

  • Analyzing the past, designing the future

    If you follow Edward de Bono’s writings, you already know about his drive to improve the quality of thinking. It’s an important message he continues in Why so stupid? “There is always some risk with design…. Judgment and routine behaviour is low risk so it is the preferred method of thought… You can analyse the past, but the future has to be designed.“

  • Process Explained

    Here’s a wonderful little diagram from Central Office of Design…

  • oDesk for design & field research

    I know a lot of designers in the New York area, so frequently people ask me for references. But lately it’s very hard to find freelancers or anyone between jobs. The industry is booming, but the traditional place-an-ad, receive-a-million-resumes (or not), and interview-a-dozen-people way of finding someone is fairly inefficient.

    The globalization of the programming industry has resulted in oDesk, a website that allows employers to post a contract description which applicants from around the world then bid on. The site also facilitates payment transfers and tracking the work by taking screen shots of the programmers computer every 10 minutes.

    It would be trickier to hire designers and field researchers this way, but I’m betting it will happen eventually.

  • Business models for designers

    About every third or fourth design student I meet has a concept for helping the elderly call for help from their homes. I just saw another one last night at the Parsons show. One might wonder why such devices aren’t widespread by now.

    I ran into my friend Bill recently who works as a CTO for a company that sells such a system. He says the challenge isn’t at the device level, it’s downstream of the device: having a widespread network of installers who understand the system and who have an incentive to sell the system, maintenance, infrastructure, and so on. The device is the easy part.

    Reinventing this wheel isn’t all bad, it probably helps students learn a lot about device design. But solving this problem (which is what design is all about) won’t happen until one considers the whole system and also designs a business model within which the device operates.

    To quote John Thackara, “…connectivity is at least as much about [the design of clever business models] as it is about the private ownership of technological devices. The Doors crowd learned this lesson ten years ago when the extraordinary Sam Pitroda spoke at Doors 4, in 1996. Pitroda enabled hundreds of millons of people to gain access to telephony in India by designing the Public Call Office (PCO) concept – a low-tech, high-smarts system based on the clever sharing of devices and infrastructure.“