Noise Between Stations

  • Leapfrogging

    The fools at Fast Company lent me the keys to their blog last week. Here’s what I scrawled in lipstick on their bathroom mirror…

    Once in while I hear someone talk about innovation as leapfrogging the competition. I love this phrase because it’s so bold. It not only says we are going to innovate on the level of products or processes or management, but also that we’re going to do it in a way that jumps forward to a generation beyond the competition. A leapfrog is the most ambitious an organization can be, and few organizations are actually equipped to make such a massive change. But leapfrogging as a creative exercise to expand our thinking can be a powerful tool.

    Let’s say you’re a supermarket getting your lunch eaten by Whole Foods and you want to find an innovative new positioning. You could start by reverse engineering Whole Foods to figure out what makes them so successful and then imagine what it would take to ‘leapfrog’ that success. One way Whole Foods succeeded was by combining the progressive-but-ugly health food store with the attractive interior design and high quality merchandise of newer supermarkets. Lately they’ve also combined their stores with a vitamin store called Whole Foods Body. To leapfrog them you could brainstorm around the question, “What haven’t they combined yet?” One answer is exercise, as in diet and exercise — the keys to a healthy lifestyle. We see this combination happening as gyms open health food cafes, but this is on a smaller scale. The opportunity space for you is a modern, attractive gym and food market that combines the two in a way customers love.

    How will your organization leapfrog the competition?

  • Tangible Futures in Denver, Wednesday, August 16th

    I’ll be giving a presentation on Tangible Futures in Denver next Wednesday, August 16th. Since giving the talk in Philadelphia I’ve refined the how-to part of the talk quite a bit with more perspective of the people on the receiving end of this work. If you’re in the neighborhood and interested I’d love to meet you…

    Tangible Futures: Creating Designs of the Future to Influence the Present

    Edward de Bono has said, “You can analyse the past, but the future has to be designed.” As designers, we have influence not only over the products and services people will use in the future but also in how companies plan for the future. We can improve the quality of our influence by using our design skills to more actively anticipate and shape the future. Examples of this vary from auto designers’ concept cars to Bruce Mau’s Massive Change. These “tangible futures” act as a clear, compelling vision that helps organizations make progress.

    More info…

  • What Works: Naps and Caffiene

    Now here’s some advice I can follow…

    What does work [to remedy jet lag]? “Napping and caffeine, among various solutions,” said Dr. Rosekind. “When I was at NASA, we did a study involving 26-minute naps and we found they boosted performance by 34 percent and alertness by 54 percent. Naps of less than a half-hour work.

    “Using a combination of nap and caffeine is better than using them separately, if you can believe it. It takes 15 to 30 minutes for caffeine to kick in. So you do the two together. All it takes is a cup of coffee — not even a pill. By the time the caffeine is working, your nap is over.”

  • Customers + Information + Design + Sydney = Oz-IA 2006

    Eric Scheid, the man behind the visionary creation of the IAWiki, is at it again with Oz-IA, a conference for anyone putting information into digital media with a fantastic line up of speakers.

  • 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.“

  • City Planet

    In City Planet, Stewart Brand describes the current massive migration to the world’s cities and the reality of squatter cities. The piece changed the way I understand cities and how the world population is evolving. Here’s some quotes…

    The growth of cities has led to demographic trends exactly the opposite of what many experts have predicted… Demographically, the next 50 years may be the most wrenching in human history. Massive numbers of people are making massive changes. Having just experienced the first doubling of world population in a single lifetime (from 3.3 billion in 1962 to 6.5 billion now), we now are discovering it is the last doubling… Just as the population exploded upward exponentially when the birthrate was above 2.1, it accelerates downward exponentially when it’s below 2.1. Compound interest cuts both ways. Fewer children make fewer children.

    (more…)

  • 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.“

  • Chaulk One Up for Blogs: The Satorialist

    The Satorialist has suddenly made a big splash in both the blogging and fashion worlds with a very simple idea: take photos of wonderfully-dressed everyday people on the street and post them on a blog. The author’s eye and insightful commentary create little moments of education and beauty. We knew about the threats to classifieds and news and encyclopedias, and this peck at the high-media establishment further demonstrates that everything — even the insular fashion publishing world — is subject to the democratization of publishing.

    Next time you’re at the bookstore have a look around and wonder what wouldn’t benefit from a simpler or more social approach or a whole new perspective.

    This photo is titled, What Every American Boy Dreams Parisian Girls Look Like. Sigh.

  • Pfeffer and Sutton on Prototyping Organizations

    In Why Managing by Facts Works, Pfeffer and Sutton urge us to manage-by-evidence rather than gut instinct. This is less an argument against Blink-style decisions than it is an argument for prototyping…

    …treat the organization as an unfinished prototype. Executives who use evidence-based management best encourage their employees to learn even as they act on what they already know. They regard their companies as a work in progress — one that constantly needs to be tested, probed, and experimented with, to be certain that it is evolving in the right direction. They never view their companies as “not broke, so why fix it?” They are confident enough to act on what is already known (even when knowledge is vague and incomplete), and humble enough to change course, if need be, when new information comes along. 

    They interpret Web 2.0 companies as the evolved form of evidence-based investing: “By and large, venture capitalists only fund Web-based companies that already have proven the ability to attract customer traffic.”

    Incidentally, Bob Sutton’s blog is full of more not-so-common sense.