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Preparedness vs. Intelligence

Friday, March 12, 2010

So, what do knife fighting and shipping software have in common? They both show the advantage of being prepared over being “smart”. Of course, these are not either/or choices. But there are two recent things I’ve stumbled on that make the point that being too intelligent, or too smart for your own good can either get you killed and/or crash your start-up.

Here’s a great talk that Seth Godin gave at the Behance 99% conference. In signature fashion, Godin’s talk seems to be about something goofy (complete with a rubber chicken prop), namely, our “lizard brain”. In fact, he spends most of his 18 minute talk extolling the virtues of focusing one’s efforts on shipping rather than perfecting things. His key insight is that being successful at shipping requires that we learn to quiet our lizard brains: that part of us that instinctively underlies our fight or flight system. He’s right, of course, but it begs the question: how do we do this?

The answer, according to Max Klein, lies in the lesson we can learn from the preparation of Israeli commandos. Klein says: “Being intelligent is like having a knife. If you train every day in using the knife, you will be invincible. If you think that just having a knife will make you win any battle you fight, then you will fail.”

I’ve been thinking a lot, especially in the work that Matt Milan & I have been doing on Innovation Parkour, about the importance of practice. I have been studying this in the context of things like yoga and surfing as well as in professional communities of practice. One of the interesting things that keeps coming up is about using practice as strategy for dealing with volatility. What I find particularly fascinating is the connection that some make between the social dimension of practice and the cultivation of what I call “stillness”: a kind of deliberate calm that prevents people from panicking or behaving counterproductively.

In the documentary, “Strapped”, about the innovation of tow-in surfing, several people in the film make this point, of how the social group formed by the Strapped Crew was crucial to what they were trying to accomplish: “these guys have united because of how many times they’ve been in there”…”enabling one another to ride these waves and do it safely”…”you have to be able to think really clearly about how you are gonna get out of that mess”.

It turns out that even in activities where achievement looks very individual, like surfing, there is a crucial element to learning and innovation that leads people to practice in groups. Part of this is obvious, peer learning is a clear strategy for advancement in many things, but it is interesting to note that people also use groups to create safety and comradeship to bolster courage and support risk.

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The Internet of Sentient Things - Upgraded twice on Day 2

Friday, February 26, 2010

Yesterday I attended a really cool event called xCAMP, organized by my friends Nabil & Riwa Harfoush (a killer father/daughter act). They have started a project to examine the opportunity for and develop a plan to scale the work of Natalie Jeremijenko’s fascinating xClinic work.

During a discussion after Natalie & Nabil had made brief presentations, I offered up a gloss on what I took to be one of the goals of their proposed project. In the process I coined a term to capture the idea of using people in networks as sensors. I called this the “Internet of sentient things”. I doubt I am the first to make this coinage, and I am certainly far from the first to discuss the underlying concept.

Then, commenting on a friend’s blog this morning I was prompted to “upgrade” the coinage to an Internet of sentient social things. Just after posting, it occurred to me that I really should have said, an Internet of intelligent sentient social things. Of course, an Internet of people would be a much more economical expression.

What I was trying to get at when I brought it up yesterday is that we are starting to design for people as beings that are augmented by their attachment to the Internet and that this connection is becoming more and more constant, at least de facto. Many things arise from this, such as the continuing erosion of the distinction between being online vs. offline, which will have policy, privacy and even cognitive implications.

Jaremijenko’s work, and certainly its possible expansion, points to the emergence of the sorts of design projects that involve working with people as sensor tech. It is not that this approach is reductive, to the contrary, Jaremijenko wants to do this, I think, precisely because the frictions that are introduced by using people as sensors provide opportunities to both rethink and rewire how we interact with complex systems like  public health and the environment.

What I find intriguing about work like the xClinic is the way its design forces the hybridization of human and non-human technologies. It reminds us that we are not slaves to our machines, but that we are deeply implicated in machines that we are building and extending. There are serious and deep issues here. They are BOTH exciting and frightening. What is comforting to me is that we are in this together. Now, more than ever.

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Innovation Parkour Field Lab in PHX

Friday, February 19, 2010

If you are anywhere near Phoenix on 8 April, you should consider coming to our daylong Innovation Parkour Field Lab workshop, part of the pre-conference workshops of the 2010 IA Summit.

Innovation Parkour is a framework for the “open source” development of a practice of innovativeness. We believe that innovativeness, like creativity, has certain roots in native human capacity. This capacity is complex and its constituents are cognitive, social and technological.

Our Field Lab workshop is designed to introduce people to the deep theory behind Innovation Parkour, but the majority of the day will be spent in an immersive learning experience. The goal of this workshop is to provide participants with an evidentiary basis for the belief that there is a path to better innovation.

Our objective is to challenge two extremely dangerous and limiting assumptions about innovation:

  1. that only special innovation “natives” can do it
  2. that innovations are the outputs of special processes

We believe that people find better ways to create value by working at it, that this work is something we can get better at by practicing, and that our practice is more productive and fulfilling when we do it with others with whom we share purpose.

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Jeff Jarvis on Google’s half-baked, Unfinished approach to product strategy

Saturday, February 13, 2010

It is so nice when people make lucid demonstrations of an argument you want to make yourself. Here, Jeff Jarvis, he of Buzz Machine & What Would Google Do?, talks about the virtues of adopting Beta not merely as a pre-launch, narrow public testing strategy, but as a core principle of product design. He says it so well and clearly, I’ll just let Jeff do the talking:

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It’s called Design Thinking: time to deal with it

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Walking through the design thinking posts at unstructure.org I am reminded yet again of the problem of the too strong association of these ideas with the work of IDEO. The time has come for us all to pick a lane: either design thinking is what IDEO says & does (and others who follow) OR design thinking is a broader set of ideas, methods and practices that are emerging as an alternative to dominant conventions in business.

I’m OK with either of these, since I don’t find the pair of words “design thinking” so completely perfect in their combination that I can’t imagine other, better ones for the job. But I want to make a case for digging in our collective heels and adopting design thinking not because its perfect and so clearly above reproach, but because, like it or not, it is the conversation we are all already having.

Reading through the posts to a Wave I started with Chris Finley a while back, I have started to see not only threads and patterns, but the outlines of the “unmet need” of design thinkers.

We need to start making some real progress on the job of what my pal, Erin Liman, describes as “codifying design thinking”.

I do and will have a lot more to say about this, but I wanted to start by offering a small thought to try and tease out what I think is a strong, but largely implicit point of broad agreement. Perhaps we can build out from there.

I offer the following crude definition of design: it is the systematic and purposeful work of making. Design thinking, I’d suggest, is a reflective approach to that practice. There is an important expression of this in the David Kelley/IDEO/d.school vernacular: to be “mindful of practice”. This suggests that the nature of design thinking is critical: which here means BOTH that it is critical of established and dominant approaches [it is polemical] AND that it is self-critical [or "scientific"].

This much may seem obvious to all. If so great. If not, let me explain why I think it is important that we share this area of agreement. First, I believe that design thinking is implicitly about the limitations of design, it is a critique of design as it is. The positions, methods and practices that have emerged as this critical “language” of design thinking has come from experience, reflection on that experience and a belief in the power design to be a progressive force. Design thinking is founded on a critical awareness that the way that WE operate businesses is broken and unsustainable. It offers us optimism and a pragmatic framework for engagement in the work changing the way we DO business: what we make, how we sell it, to whom and why. It is the leading edge of an ethics of design practice: not a morality of design, but a struggle to make design and designers conscious and responsible for what they do.

NB: this is in NO way intended to diminish or undervalue the important contribution IDEO and many of the smart folks that have and do work for that company have made to design thinking. to the contrary, I think we honor that contribution best by building on it and extending it. I believe and hope that this is their best hope for the work they have offered into the commons.

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the Unfinished is Open

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Unfinished Business was originally inspired by the conception of open tools and unfinished products that Josephine Green (of Phillips’ design group) has articulated. One way to think of her intention or project is to think of the task of applying learning from open software design to the very much more “hardware” reality of product design. Clearly, however, if we take this seriously we must come very quickly to problems of system design. This fantastic video (pointed out in a Tweet from @michele_perras) does an excellent job of expressing many of the ideas I have tried  to put at the heart of the Unfinished Business initiative.

Delivered in Beta from KS12 on Vimeo.

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Strategy Shifted

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I’ve been doing a lot of noodling about strategy. As I have been trying to articulate what I see as a fundamental shift we need to make in strategic practice, I have been trying to steer a course between two cautions: Matt Milan’s contention that strategy (as we have known it) is dead AND Roger Martin’s long asserted view that strategy as a practice is about determining “where to play and how to win” (recently expressed here).

Matt attacks the waning paradigm of strategy that emerged from statistical and computational approaches developed during WWII. I call this dominant paradigm: “strategy as ballistics”. It is about targets, precision, force, yield, efficiency and efficacy. It is almost (if not entirely) about the question of HOW we reach an objective.

Roger’s approach, which I think is a harbinger of an emerging paradigm, is by contrast, about the WHY of strategy. Even though his twin questions focus on the WHERE to play and HOW to win that he considers to be the proper norms of strategic practice, it is essential to his view that these are norms, intended to guide action, rather than questions of fact. In order to answer such questions, at least implicitly, we must have a sense of the WHY we would answer either question one way or another. Without recourse to higher order values, in other words, Roger’s WHERE & HOW questions are useless.

So, if Matt’s right, that what I call strategy as ballistics is dead (I think this ought to be true, but I suspect the news of it’s death, like Mark Twain’s, is perhaps premature), AND Roger is right that we cannot do strategy or act strategically without a sense of purpose, a conviction of WHY we act, then the question on my mind is WHAT DOES THIS PRACTICE LOOK LIKE? and as a secondary matter, WHAT SHOULD WE CALL IT?

Before I offer a hit & run suggestion about the answer to those questions, let me offer two empirical examples which I think pose real problems for a conception of strategy as direction, which here, Saul Kaplan offers up as a kind of North Star theory of strategy. One is the public global company, Google, and the other is the global public model of political society we call democracy.

First, Google. Now, I have started to wonder of late whether Google is even a business at all in the accepted sense of the word. Of course, it is a legal entity (probably a corporation) and it operates (at least partly) guided by a set of (fairly?) well understood financial goals. But what is the nature of GOOG? To test your theory here, what would you say that Google’s direction is? I find this almost impossible to answer, not only because the answer may be subject to change, but because I’m not sure that we have a very good understanding what the “object” named Google IS. But whatever it is, I challenge anyone to apply the concept of direction to its (implicit) strategy.

Second, in the case of democracy, (and let’s just take the narrow case of the United States), it is at the very heart of the design that the system not only allows for many directions too be pursued, but even allows that they may be contradictory. The point of the doctrine of freedom of speech stands as one example of this. The thin area of normative agreement that keeps people from killing each other in the streets (mostly) is very hard to consider a direction, in Saul’s sense.

OK, so here’s my hypothesis, anything that is exposed to dynamics of complexity and the causality of scale systems can no more have a direction than do quarks, OR that direction are just as helpful as the “flavor” theory of quarks, whose “directions” are: up, down, charm, strange, top, bottom. In other words, we need a more powerful theory of strategic practice that the one the idea of direction can provide.

Back to GOOG and democracy. Here are two assertions that I think are true about each: one, that the constant (desired/optimal) state of the system is volatility rather than equilibrium; and, two, that there are enough strategic actors in such systems that I think we have to let go of the idea that strategy and leadership are strongly connected, or at least accept that this connection is not what we are used to thinking of.

I think we need a concept of strategy that allows for emergence as a core dynamic. This is not to say that we do not need goals. Here, I think I agree with Saul completely. Setting goals, is indeed an important task of leadership. But, of course, strategy focused on goals gets you right back to the dilemma of “setting strategy one tactic at a time”.

So, what is the name of the post-ballistic conception of strategy? I’ve been testing candidates for a while, and just last week, I think I finally lit on the one I am prepared to bet on. I am calling it strategy as FLOW. I’ll have more to say about it soon, but for now, thanks to Saul Kaplan, Matt Milan, Roger Martin and many others, I’ve been given a lot more to think about.

Nota bene: This post started life as a WAYYYY too long comment to this post of Saul Kaplan’s.

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Dave Gray and I talk about Knowledge Games

Thursday, September 24, 2009

Dave Gray was in Toronto this week to kick off the Fall slate of the Unfinished Business lectures series, which is hosted by the Strategic Innovation Lab at OCAD and sponsored by Torch.

Dave was hangin’ out with me at Torch the day of his talk and we got to shoot the breeze about some of his thinking behind his new book project.

Dave Gray & I talk about Knowledge Games from Michael Dila on Vimeo.

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The Unfinished Interview with Dave Gray

Monday, September 14, 2009

Dave Gray is the Founder and Chairman of XPLANE, the visual thinking company. Founded in 1993, XPLANE has grown to be the world’s leading consulting and design firm focused on information-driven communications. Dave’s time is spent researching and writing on visual business, as well as speaking, coaching and delivering workshops to educators, corporate clients and the public.

Dave will be giving the Unfinished Lecture at the Ontario College of Art & Design (OCAD) on 22 Sept. 2009. The series is sponsored by Torch Partnership and hosted by Strategic Innovation Lab at OCAD.

I interviewed Dave online, Monday 14 Sept, 2009 via a live Google doc.

MICHAEL DILA: Dave, tell me about the new book you are writing. I know you are collaborating with two colleagues, Sunni Brown & James Macanufo. Last time we talked you called it a “playbook”. Can you tell me what you meant by that and what it is a playbook for?

DAVE GRAY: Dan Pink has pointed out that creative work needs a different approach than industrial work. Rewards and incentives work well for manual work, but for creative work they have the opposite effect — creative work is motivated from within; it’s intrinsically motivated. In this book we want to lay out a theory and set of principles for creative work, but at the same time offer practical methods that teams can use to inject more innovation and creativity into their work, in the same way that a team uses a playbook to approach the playing field in a cohesive way.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I know Dan is found of using right-brain, left-brain language, which I personally don’t find that illuminating as a way of thinking about these things, That said, I have more recently become interested in the neuroscience around things like the phenomena of insight and other perceptual and reasoning frameworks that are relevant to creativity and innovation. I know that you, too, have an interest in the brain. Does that figure at all in the thinking of this new book?

DAVE: Brain science is moving so quickly these days — it’s a real renaissance. We are learning so much, so quickly that it’s hard to keep up. At the same time the insights are so revealing that they are impossible to ignore. So yes, brain science definitely figures into the book. One book that offers an excellent synthesis of brain science is John Medina’s Brain Rules, which I am currently reading with great interest. Dan Pink is pretty clear that he uses the right-brain, left-brain dichotomy as a metaphor for creative vs. linear thinking, and he acknowledges that the brain is more complex than that. In our book we are focusing our attention on what Dan Pink calls “r-directed thinking” because we feel that there’s a pretty substantial set of literature and tools for the more linear, sequential aspects of knowledge work. Six Sigma, for example, which came out of Motorola and was popularized by GE, offers a comprehensive set of approaches for thinking about linear processes, manufacturing, efficiency and productivity. It’s a great set of tools, except the fundamental principles that drive Six Sigma simply don’t apply to creative work. These principles are based on manufacturing to a standard. You can measure quality down to the millimeter if you know the specifications you want to meet. You can’t apply these methods to creative work because your goal is different — you are aiming to do something new. You can’t say to Stephen King, “Here are the specifications for your next novel. I need you to meet these quality standards: 3.4 misspellings per million words. I mean, it just won’t get you a quality product.

MICHAEL: OK, well I’m glad that you brought up the word goal. It’s a favorite of our friend Paul Pangaro, who likes to remind us that all intelligent systems have goals. I know it’s difficult to always think of creative work as having a goal or at least a clear goal.

DAVE: One of the challenges creative teams face is that they *can’t* have clear goals. They need to move forward in the face of ambiguity. They have what I like to call fuzzy goals, which are clear enough to understand the target and general direction, but vague enough to account for uncertainty about the way the problem is framed. Pablo Picasso once said “You need to begin with an idea, but it should be a vague idea.” Fuzzy goals are approximate and leave ample room for unexpected, positive results. Thomas Edison once said “Just because something didn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t make it useless.” Xerox PARC is a great example of a creative effort where the company did everything right, except recognize and capitalize on the innovation when it arrived. Xerox was so focused on documents and document management that they dropped the ball on the mouse, ethernet and the graphical user interface.

MICHAEL: I want to come back to a point you made earlier about the motivation behind creative work. I am absolutely with you on the importance of intrinsic motivation. In fact, I just recently wrote a note to myself: “successful innovation lies squarely between intrinsic and instrumental motivations.” Innovation happens where those things are in balance, in other words. That said, what can you say about how people find or fail to find that balance, because there seems a need for a parallel caution to the one you indicated in reference to PARCs failure to capitalize on innovation. There’s always the danger that creativity gets lots in the woods and can’t find its way back to relevance. Maybe someone should write a playbook for creativity & innovation? But, of course, you are writing just such a book. So, please say something about what’s in a playbook. Rules, recipes, puppy dog tails?

DAVE: I am sure I am not the only one who is tired of hearing people diagnose the problem without providing a prescription. “You’re going to die and you have six months” has some value — it helps you know it’s time to get things in order — but I am sure most people would prefer to hear that there’s a cure to what’s ailing them. A playbook isn’t just a diagnosis or description of “the way things are” but a practical manual of ideas and options for making things work. In any game, including the game of life, you will find yourself in predicaments, pickles, problematic dilemmas. A playbook may not have all the answers but it *will* offer examples of what people have done when they faced similar situations in the past. To answer your question, I see rules and recipes, but probably not puppies, dogs, or tails — nor should you expect sugar, spice or any other panaceas. Creativity and innovation don’t get left in your stocking or under the Christmas tree. You have to work for them.

MICHAEL: You’ve been involved in some interesting experiments with writing, your own “unbook” Marks & Meaning which you self-published, along with contributions from others, updates and versions. I know that you and I have also both been interested in our friend Alex Osterwalder’s work on his forthcoming book about business model innovation. Tell me something about your collaboration with James and Sunny on this project. What’s the division of labor? What’s the experience like and does the design of how you are writing the book connect in any way with its content?

DAVE: It’s funny. As you may know, the publisher for this particular book is O’Reilly Media, a publisher that’s known for their technical books. Unlike the kinds of books you see from people like J. K. Rowling and Stephen King, technical books are defined by the subject they are covering more than the creativity of the author’s imagination. So as we approached this book, of course we wanted to apply some of the same innovative techniques we were writing about. This quickly became a problem, because the publisher wanted to see a detailed project plan that we would promise to stick to, and that they could use to hold us accountable. But as you well know, I believe you should practice what you preach, and as I mentioned earlier, truly creative projects require fuzzy goals, not detailed outlines. They squawked a bit at first, but I have to say that I am proud we decided to work with O’Reilly, because at the end of the day they understood very well that true innovation is a moving target and fully endorsed our approach, and it’s paying off.

MICHAEL: What would you say the hardest part about writing and thinking through these things with others has been for you. I know that you are an ace collaborator. I’ve always admired you for the way you work with others. But there must be challenges when you have a string vision or point of view. Have you had disagreements? What kind and how do work them out?

DAVE: So far I call ‘em as I see ‘em. I suppose it helps that I am the alpha dog on the team, so they do what I say. The others probably bitch behind my back, but who cares? Mercifully I am almost completely deaf and due to my age and mental infirmity, most of their jokes go completely over my head.
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Toys = Garbage: Sustainablity Ought to be Child’s Play

Monday, September 14, 2009

Since I became I parent eight years ago, I have become acutely aware and more and more incensed by the extent to which children’s toys are, in almost every respect, garbage from the very moment of purchase. Now it is a truism of many product life cycles that an object begins its depreciation in value from the moment of purchase. This has been true, with few exceptions, of cars for time immemorial. It is not true, though, for example of books, at least very little changes about their use value over time, though their resale value mostly declines. There are also a category of classic toys (Lego, Lincoln Logs, Meccano, others???) which are so “open” by design that their use over time is almost inexhaustible: both in the sense that they are infinitely configurable (doubt this, see the entire genre of online video made with Lego animations) and virtually indestructible.

For me it all started with the birth of my daughter Maggie in 2000. From the first visitors to the hospital to the end of that year, Maggie must have received no fewer that thirty stuffed animals as gifts. To make the obvious point, I’m not sure that any child needs that many “stuffies”…ever. But certainly it isn’t nuts for me to think that no baby needs so many. People buy them because they’re cute, the price is right, they are almost universally unobjectionable. So, good, there’s a strong line of business for toy makers. Nevermind that these things are made from all the world’s most unnatural fibres right in up to toxic materials (see the trailer for the new film My Toxic Baby to see the full extent of this nightmare). But, increasingly any normal kids room looks like a garbage dump to me.

Toys are, as you can imagine, a huge global business. They are increasingly things that are made mostly if not entirely of unrecoverable (cannot be recycled) plastic, and don’t even get me started on the packaging: the least of its offences these days is its wastefulness; it is starting to require an engineering degree to get full access to the booty trapped under the plastic wrap, tape and metal ties. However, there is a special kind of insult in the crappiness of all this stuff, which is that we give it to our children, passing on the insult to them (oblivious though they may be). Parents (mea culpa) are largely responsible for not challenging this status quo. Problem is, like lots of system change, it is hard to know where to get started.

As one reads about the innovation and invention in the field of dreams of our children’s playthings, one scarcely ever reads about how manufacturing processes or materials are being revolutionized, thus saving us the explosive growth of landfills, not to mention the plain crumminess of design & quality.

Longstanding hero of playland is the mighty Danish empire of Lego. The multi-colored blocks have been a staple of childhood for over 60 years. Just a couple of weeks ago, the Sunday Business section of the New York Times ran a story about Lego’s growth, spurred on by movie tie-ins and licensing deals. Nothing new or shocking about this, but it shows where the attention of this once brilliant toymaker is turning. Much ink has be spilled on the failing fortunes of the once great company (still in the top 10 globally), and much of it praising the company’s innovativeness: giving examples of Lego Factory, Lego Universe, and the Bionicle line. Notwithstanding that Lego’s business is still largely focused on plastic, their recent moves into gaming and online platforms represents the potential for a smaller, more intelligent lifecycle footprint.

Right here at home in Toronto are two of the biggest success toy stories of the last decade: one is the Webkinz platform by legacy Canadian toymaker, family owned and operated Ganz; and the more recent success of the Bakugan franchise by the upstart SpinMaster, started by three boyhood friends who ended up at business school together. On the one hand, I’d like to celebrate these local success stories, but I am also troubled by the fact that both these businesses, while innovative in many respects and certainly financially successful, are still too focused on narrow measures of success.

We need to start thinking more seriously about the sustainability of all businesses, but in the case of children’s toys it oughta be a no-brainer. The Bakugan story is at least partly about success by price point, but there are plenty of popular high cost toys, from Lego sets that go for $80 and up, to game systems like Wii, Xbox, and others, not to mention the price of the games themselves. In other words, parents might well tolerate higher costs for better products. The marketing/advertising related costs of the toy industry are another travesty, especially when these thing are and can be so effectively marketed by word of mouth.

It turns out (at least according to the Times article) that toy sales are also fairly recession-proof. With these dynamics of market resilience, this seems a sector ripe for much deeper and sustainable innovation. Anybody wanna play in that sandbox?

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