Why Either/Or Thinking is Dangerous

by: Tim Kastelle

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Here’s a quick quiz – see how you do:

• Do people love change or hate change?
• Are big companies more innovative or are small ones?
• Is innovation good or bad?
• Is growth good or bad?
• Is Google making is stupid or smart?

All five questions have the same answer: both.

How did you do?

I was struck by the response to my post Actually, People Love Change.  I had a surprisingly large number of people say “No they don’t!”  That kind of missed the point of the post.

The point that I was trying to make is this: there are some changes that people actively seek out.  They view these changes as good.  Yet we know that in many cases, people strongly resist change.  They view these changes as bad.

So you can’t categorically say that change is good, or that change is bad – it’s both.  The challenge is that you have to figure out type of change you’re dealing with in each particular case.  You have to categorize the change.

Classification is an incredibly important tool when you’re dealing with complexity.

It’s complexity that led Theodore Sturgeon to develop Sturgeon’s Law:

90% of everything is crap.

Here is how Sturgeon phrased it:

I repeat Sturgeon’s Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud.

Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.

His short form of this reflects the thinking behind the Tao as well:

Nothing is always absolutely so.

Everything that’s black contains some white.  Everything that’s good contains some bad.  Change can be mostly bad, but sometimes good.  Or vice versa.

Either/Or thinking is very dangerous in a complex system – precisely because nothing is always absolutely so.  And, for better or worse, we live in a whole set of complex systems.  We have to figure out how to move beyond Either/Or thinking.

So how should we respond to this?

Here are some ideas that can help:

• Classification: how do biologists learn about how the world works?  The first step is always classification.  They can’t say anything if they can’t accurately tell what type of things are interacting with each other.  That’s what The Innovation Matrix is – a classification tool.
• Study the part with the outcomes you want: we know that most large firms struggle with innovation, while some have become very good at it.  What makes them different? Figuring that out is a classification challenge.  One way to attack this is with The Positive Deviance approach:
  Positive Deviance is based on the observation that in every community there are certain individuals or groups whose uncommon behaviors and strategies enable them to find better solutions to problems than their peers, while having access to the same resources and facing similar or worse challenges.
  The Positive Deviance approach is an asset-based, problem-solving, and community-driven approach that enables the community to discover these successful behaviors and strategies and develop a plan of action to promote their adoption by all concerned.
  
  Or, alternately:
• Pay attention to outliers:  In complex systems, outliers matter – a lot.  That’s why thinking about averages is so dangerous.  If we take Sturgeon’s Law seriously, the average science fiction is bad.  But as he says, that’s uninformative.  The critical question is “how good is the best Sci-Fi?”  It turns out that the best is pretty good – the outliers a lot more important than the average.

Absolute statements get more attention.  That’s why I named that post “Actually, People Love Change” instead of “Sometimes Change isn’t so Bad” or something equally wishy-washy.  But the truth of the matter is that reality isn’t absolute.  Neither black nor white.  Neither either nor or.

It’s “both.”

Developing some skills to deal with “both” is pretty essential these days.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Change, Innovation, Tim Kastelle

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A Seven-Step Program for Innovating Right Now

by: Tim Kastelle

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You can’t wait for permission to innovate – you’ll never get it.

You need to start changing things on your own – right now.

Innovation is a powerful tool, and it’s in your possession – so what do you do?

Here’s my prescription:

• Think about how much you can get away with – if you manage a budget, how much discretion to you have? If you don’t have a budget, what are the parts of your job that you control?
• Make a list of 10 things that you can do within the current scope of your work that will make things better for the people with whom you interact – customers, co-workers, bosses, whoever.
• Do those things.
• Figure out which ones worked, and do those more.
• Figure out which ones didn’t work, learn why not, then forget about them.
• Apply what you learned to the next set of ideas.
• Do it all again.

Focus on the ideas that went well – even if only one of them works, you just made your work a better place.

The point with this is to just get started with innovation. Try things that are cheap experiments. Learn from failures, amplify successes. Try a lot of ideas at once so that you don’t get too attached to them – if you only have one idea, the stakes are much higher, even for a cheap and quick experiment.  And remember what English says about serving a higher purpose – that’s just as important for innovation as it is for art.

That’s how you can start to get the future out of your head, and out into the world where it will do some good.

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Creativity, Innovation, Tim Kastelle

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The 2 Secrets to Success for Social Media in Your Church

by: Tim Kastelle

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It’s getting hard to keep up with all the different social tools that are flying at us every day.  We constantly hear things like:

“If you’re not on Pinterest you’re in big trouble.”

or

“Blogging is dead.”

It seems like people are putting a lot of effort into trying to figure out which tools they should use, and how they should use them.  What’s the best way to deal with all of this us? I’ve been repeatedly hit in the face with the answer to this recently from my network, which teaches me a lot.

So here is the secret to social success:

Connect with people.

Simple, isn’t it.  It doesn’t matter what tools you use – and if you spend too much time worrying about tools, you’ll forget to use them to do the one thing that matters – connecting.
Connecting Ideas is the Fundamental Creative Act in Innovation.  You have to connect ideas to ideas to innovate, and you have to connect people to your ideas to get them to spread.  It’s all about connection.

Earlier, I told you about the best social media strategy of all time:

Do awesome work.

That takes care of the connecting ideas to ideas part.  Then, to get them to spread, you need to connect the ideas to people.  And that means that you have to connect with people – that is the core purpose of all of these social tools.

Connections create value – that is the core message of Nilofer Merchant in her book 11 Rules for Creating Value in the #SocialEra. Here is one of my favourite quotes from the book:

We want innovation, but without experiencing failure. We want to embrace the new, but without risk. We want to act fast and fluid, but to maintain tight controls. We want to empower everyone, but retain decision rights for ourselves. We want to experiment, but we also want predictability. We want to be flexible to customer input, but remain ruthlessly efficient. We want to adapt, but we fear the death of familiarity.

This is why it’s hard to go from being an 800-pound gorilla to a herd of nimble gazelles; an organization goes from being a centralized institution that competes through overpowering strength and scale to a set of relationships or interrelationships. Gazelles thrive and win by how they share power with one another. And, as a result, they can act fast, fluid, and flexible. For organizations, this is key to winning in the marketplace.

As organisations, we win through connections. The same is true for people.

Here is Shane Mac from his book Stop With the BS:

All these apps, gadgets, buildings—everything for that matter—they don’t make me smile and think about how much I love what I do. The people I know do. It is the people and my relationships with them that really matter. Done. Simple as that. All we have in life are relationships, so we better start spending more time building new ones and rebuilding old ones. Build bridges, Re-build bridges, never Burn Bridges.

It’s the relationships that matter. Hugh MacLeod nails it in his latest book Freedom is Blogging in Your Underwear:

…all the internet is, as Doc Searls said, is a bunch of protocols that “allow us to get along.” Protocols allow us to talk to each other. The stuff in the middle, the stuff that separates us, the stuff that directly makes use of these protocols – hosting companies, web sites, blogging platforms, microblogging platforms, etc. – matter far less.

You’re on one end of the wire. Just think about who’s on the other end of the wire, and what you can do for them. Worry less about the wire. Worry less about the shiny objects in the middle.

Just worry about MAKING your own stuff, and the rest of the internet will look after itself.

So there is your two-step guide to social success.

Do awesome work.

and

Connect with people.

The problem is that while these steps might sound simple, they’re not.  They take a lot of effort.  That’s what makes the shiny new objects so seductive – they look like shortcuts.

Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts.  That’s why it’s still remarkable when you do awesome work and connect with people.

I know that I still have a long way to go myself.  But now that we’ve connected, maybe we can do some of this awesome work together.

Tags: Awareness, Intentionality, Social Media, Tim Kastelle

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Innovation Big and Small

by: Tim Kastelle

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Can big companies innovate?

Of course they can. Even though that question has been getting asked a lot recently, it’s not really a very interesting one.  It actually goes back at least to Schumpeter, who thought about the issue throughout most of his career.  He famously changed his mind on the question of big versus small, mainly because the process of innovation changed during that forty year period.

A much more interesting and useful question is: what can my organization do to be more innovative?  The point is that innovation is not deterministic – you’re not doomed if you’re big, and you’re not automatically innovative if you’re small.  The critical issue to figure out how innovation fits with your strategy and then what skills and processes you need to innovate in your particular context.

Size becomes important when you think about context – the way that you innovate will be different if you are big than it will be if you are small.  No matter what the context, innovation is a process – it’s the process of idea management.  I’ve pictured it something like this:

However, in the excellent report on public sector innovation in Australia, Empowering Change (downloadable here), led by Alex Roberts, they had a slightly different version of this model.  It was adapted from a report on public sector innovation from Deloitte, and theirs looks like this:

I made the fourth circle red, because that is the one that I’ve always had some trouble getting my head around.  But some of my recent discussions have given me some insights into this.  The report describes Sustaining Ideas as “keeping the innovative initiative going and integrating it, which includes monitoring and adapting where necessary .”

This ends up being one of the key areas where innovation is different for big and small organisations.  If you are a startup, you don’t need to worry too much about sustaining innovation initiatives.  If you fail to do this, you go out of business.  Simple enough.

But if you’re big, you have plenty of other things to worry about.  You have quarterly objectives to meet.  You have other processes you need to make more efficient.  And so on.  Not so simple.  So if you’re big, and you’re trying to innovate, a lot of effort needs to go into this part of the idea management process.

So while big firms can indeed innovate, this means that they need to manage the process differently – there’s no one-size-fits-all solution – sorry!  If you’re big, what are some of the things that you should do?  Here are some ideas:

• Increase your innovation speed. If you’re going to innovate like the small, agile organisations, then you need to act more agile yourself.  Here’s Phillips again, in a different post on the importance of velocity in innovation:
  If these assumptions are true, then VELOCITY, as defined as speed in a specific direction, becomes very important for a firm’s ability to grow and compete. Relying on long product life cycles is not an option. Customers will demand new products, new features at an ever increasing rate. Firms can’t simply “dump” older technologies and products into “developing” markets because those market too understand the product/feature acceleration and reject older products.
  
  Phillips recommends innovating your product development process, making innovation a core part of your strategy, and building executive support for this vision as the three critical steps to achieve this.
• Open up!Think about the five steps in the innovation process model.  What are big firms good at?  They are great at getting things to market – that’s how they’re big.  So they have idea diffusion covered pretty well.  But this is often a huge problem for smaller organisations.  They might have brilliant ideas, that have been executed very well, but they can’t get anyone to pay attention to them.  How do they get around this? Collaborate.That’s the point that Ralph Ohr raised in his recent post, and Scott Anthony makes a similar point:
  
  
• WSJ: Are you saying startups are no longer capable of innovation?
  Anthony: I don’t want to go so far as to say startups are pointless. But today, the second a startup has had a taste of success, the race is on, because anyone can copy them.
  WSJ: What’s in store for these smaller companies then?
  Anthony: They have to recognize their success can’t be predicated on the stupidity or slowness of big companies. It might be time to start thinking about partnering with a big company instead of just being pirates.
  
• Get to know your customers deeply. Often, big firms resist innovation because they think that they know best.  But one of the things that they can do with their extra resources is invest more in learning what their customers really need.  And you don’t do this through focus groups – you build deeper knowledge than that. One way to do this is to follow the customer home – as Soren Kaplan explains:
  
  
• Intuit’s innovation success is tied to a value for finding and savoring customer surprises–unexpected insights about customer needs, problems, and desired experiences that can’t be anticipated or pre-defined. That’s why the company does customer “follow-me-homes,” where everyone from CEO Brad Smith to engineers and marketers immerse themselves in the customer’s natural environment to see how things are working (or not) in the real world.
  

This is actually one of the techniques of ethnography, something that PARC has been investing in over the past few years. Ellen Isaacs from PARC talks about how this works:
With ethnography, you’re more interested in what people do than what they say (usually two different things), and you’re more likely to come out of it with answers to questions you didn’t know to ask. At its best, ethnography uncovers “aha!” insights that transform thinking. But since nobody knows know what they’ll learn, there’s no guarantee — and that makes people nervous.

The issue isn’t big versus small.  And size doesn’t determine whether or not you can innovate.

The question to address is: What’s best for us?  And the key point is that the answer will probably be different if you’re big.

Tags: Innovation, Leadership Development, Leadership Engine, Tim Kastelle

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Where’s Your 10X Performance Improvement?

by: Tim Kastelle

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1969 was a pretty interesting year for the Swiss watch industry.

That was the year the Omega Speedmaster became the first watch on the moon. Meanwhile, back on earth, there was a serious race to make the first automatic match that included a chronograph. Jeffrey Stein retells this story in International Watch magazine, and it’s really interesting.

The short version is that Zenith, Heuer, Omega and Breitling were competing fiercely to be the first to bring this innovation to market. Work started in the early 1960s, and by 1969 several versions of automatic chronographs were ready to go.

Zenith was the first to show a prototype of one of these watches in January, and they called their movement the El Primero to mark the occasion.

However, the El Primero was not production ready. The first automatic chronographs on the market came from a collaboration between Heuer, Breitling and Hamilton-Buren. They showed more than 100 prototypes at the Basel Watch Fair in April, and they hit serial production in the summer.

The El Primero made it into production in October. Interestingly, even though the El Primero was third into production, it was still a first – it was the first automatic watch to have the chronograph directly integrated with the movement.

In addition to competing on innovation, the Swiss watchmakers also competed on accuracy. Zenith is an interesting brand here too. From their beginning in 1865, they won more than 1565 first-place precision awards. This is primarily due to more innovation – Zenith figured out how to get their automatic watches to run with a frequency of 36,000 alternations per hour, as opposed to the standard 28,800.

So in the early 1970s, the Swiss watchmakers were competing on precision, innovation, and customisation for particular markets. Breitling focussed on aviation, making chronographs that were well-suited to piloting, Heuer was the dominant chronograph in car-racing circles, and so on.

And then everything changed with the introduction of this:

That’s a quartz watch movement. It’s not nearly as beautiful a piece of engineering as that El Primero, is it? And yet, right from their introduction, quartz watches were 10 times more accurate than the most precise mechanical watch. And they cost 1/10 as much, or even less.

Today, out of the more than 1 billion watches sold per year, about 80% are quartz analog watches, about 17% are quartz digital, and 2% are mechanical watches like the El Primero. In terms of volume, the dominant watch brands almost instantly became Seiko and Casio. This was a hugely disruptive innovation.

There are several innovation lessons here:

1. There’s always a gap between having the idea, and making it real. The Swiss watchmakers started working on making an automatic chronograph from shortly after the point when automatic watches became widely popular in the 1950s. It took them more than 10 years to turn this idea into reality in 1969.
And in fact, automatic watches show the typical s-curve for innovation diffusion as well. There were plans for an automatic watch drawn in the middle of the 18th century. They didn’t go into production until the 1920s, and they didn’t become widespread for over 25 years.

This gap between the idea and making it real is an important reason why managing the innovation process is a challenge.

2. Great ideas usually occur to many people at once. In many respects, it doesn’t matter who had the first automatic chronograph – they all showed up at basically the same time. And these breakthrough innovations are almost always the result of collaborations, like the Chronmatic alliance between Heuer, Breitling and Hamilton-Buren.

3. If you are going to make a head-on attack in an established market, you need to have at least a 10X improvement in performance. Quartz watches are one of the few disruptive innovations that didn’t start out in a small niche. The disruptions that go big fast need to have at least a 10X improvement in performance, as quartz did over mechanical watches. When Canon and Ricoh disrupted Xerox with their cheap, small photocopiers, they had a 10X improvement in cost.

One way to disrupt a market is to come up with a 10X improvement. What would that look like in your industry? In other words, what would be equivalent to a quartz watch for you?

And if you’re not working on developing that yourself, who is? And what are you doing to get ready for it?

Where’s your 10X performance improvement?

Read more from Tim here.

Tags: Improvement, Staff, Structure, Tim Kastelle

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