I firmly believe that the solutions to many (if not all) of our innovation problems are already out there somewhere; it's just that we need to get much better at finding them. We all know that too much 'reinvention of the wheel' happens within all organisations. But in an ever more connected world, the core innovation skill set is now migrating away from invention capability, and more towards innovation search capabilities.

This makes sense to me. I'm very sceptical of much that is said about innovation in organisations. As soon as someone introduces their "innovation process" I feel my defences going up. There seems to be a prevailing idea that innovation is scarce. For example, in meetings people worry about "capturing" outcomes as if they are rare wild animals that might get away from us fumbling humans. Along with this goes the equally dodgy notion that we need experts to control this innovation, lest it get contaminated with impurities. We end up with "stage gates" and an array of ugly flow charts all puporting to increase innovation but probably just adding layers of bureaucracy and humbug.

I remember attending an Open Space workshop which was more than averagely free flowing, some might say chaotic. Afterwards, a few strident critics moaned about the lack of "action planning" and stated, as fact, that nothing useful came of it. In fact, the sponsor found eight different projects to fund in the course of the day and its aftermath. The critics had been far too busy bloviating about process to notice a single one.

Can't help thinking of Casteneda's line:

Most of our energy goes into upholding our importance... If we are capable of losing some of that importance, two extraordinary things happen to us. One, we free our energy from trying to maintain the illusory idea of our grandeur; and, two, we provide ourselves with enough energy to enter into the second attention to catch a glimpse of the actual grandeur of the universe.

Neil Perkin highlights this video of a talk by conductor Itay Talgam. Talgam compares a variety of conducting styles as examples of leadership and explains how control gets in the way of relationship and creativity.

If you don't have 30 mins to watch the whole thing, maybe you could just skip to 26m35s where he explains that conducting "becomes something else" - and then watch Leonard Bernstein demonstrating it.

If you're running a meeting in the next day or so, wouldn't it be fun to try to do what Bernstein does for at least a few minutes and see what happens?

I have recently had the experience of people saying to me that the work I do would never work with such-and-such a group of people. My response to them is nothing will work with people if you don’t believe them capable of doing something different or trying something new. I have been responding to these kinds of limiting beliefs with two questions:

* How do you show up with a group of people when you believe they are not capable of something?
* How do YOU show up when something thinks YOU are incapaable of something?

That tends to take care of the holier than thou attitudes.

I blogged the first a while back ago: Bob Sutton found this nugget in this report

One of the simplest and yet most fascinating experiments to test the thesis is the "cookie crumbles" experiment. Researchers placed college students in groups of three and gave them an artificial assignment -- collaboration on a short policy paper about a social issue. They then randomly assigned one of the students to evaluate the other two for points that would affect their ability to win a cash bonus. Having set up this artificial power hierarchy, researchers then casually brought to working trios plates containing five cookies.

They found that not only did the disinhibited "powerful" students eat more than their share of the cookies, they were more likely to chew with their mouths open and to scatter crumbs over the table.

The most successful interrogation of an Al-Qaeda operative by U.S. officials required no sleep deprivation, no slapping or "walling" and no waterboarding. All it took to soften up Abu Jandal, who had been closer to Osama bin Laden than any other terrorist ever captured, was a handful of sugar-free cookies.

As I'm still running my "notice more, change less" mantra, I'm reminded of the simple power that come from taking time to see the subtle ways our lives are connected... something that eludes those who, for instance, still like to dismiss things like twitter as irrelevant chit-chat.

If this theme intrigues you too, and you happen to be at a loose end on Monday, you might want to tag along to the Day of Noticing I'm running with Kay Scorah. It promises to be a small and intimate workshop. So much so that I'm offering a discount of £50 now in the hope of drawing in a couple more people! Use the discount code "Twitter" to get that... or tell your friends!

After I left the consulting business, in a reversal of the usual order of things, I decided to check out the management literature. Partly, I wanted to “process” my own experience and find out what I had missed in skipping business school. Partly, I had a lot of time on my hands. As I plowed through tomes on competitive strategy, business process re-engineering, and the like, not once did I catch myself thinking, Damn! If only I had known this sooner! Instead, I found myself thinking things I never thought I’d think, like, I’d rather be reading Heidegger! It was a disturbing experience. It thickened the mystery around the question that had nagged me from the start of my business career: Why does management education exist?

Why does every new management theorist seem to want to outdo Chairman Mao in calling for perpetual havoc on the old order? Very simply, because all economic organizations involve at least some degree of power, and power always pisses people off. That is the human condition. At the end of the day, it isn’t a new world order that the management theorists are after; it’s the sensation of the revolutionary moment. They long for that exhilarating instant when they’re fighting the good fight and imagining a future utopia. What happens after the revolution—civil war and Stalinism being good bets—could not be of less concern.

As I plowed through my shelfload of bad management books, I beheld a discipline that consists mainly of unverifiable propositions and cryptic anecdotes, is rarely if ever held accountable, and produces an inordinate number of catastrophically bad writers. It was all too familiar. There are, however, at least two crucial differences between philosophers and their wayward cousins. The first and most important is that philosophers are much better at knowing what they don’t know. The second is money. In a sense, management theory is what happens to philosophers when you pay them too much.

Conventional wisdom says that to be successful, an idea must be concrete, complete, and certain. But what if that’s wrong? What if the most elegant, most imaginative, most engaging ideas are none of those things?

This is why I have become more and more wary of keynote presentations, which so often seem to serve up tired certainties instead of provoking fresh thinking and insights - by both speaker and audience. As Langer points out, when become familiar with a routine, we often become insensitive to the subtle factors that really influence its success. The curse of the expert.

Here's a bit of the blurb:

We think far too many of these sorts of workshops set out tantalising shopping lists of outcomes – but as a result deny the most important factor of all: what can happen spontaneously when a group of people get together to share learning and experience.

We will encourage you to achieve a new level of attention and noticing. We’ve come to believe that developing this kind of awareness is central to our own practice when working with individuals and groups. Attention to yourself and others, to your immediate environment, to your inner voice, to what others are saying and doing. We will share tools and games that we have ourselves found useful, and that we have used with thousands of groups over decades of experience.

We're holding it at Wallacespace St Pancras and places are £150 for the day, inc VAT - with some earlybird tickets at £95 if you book by May 25th.

Action planning has its place, and Chris Corrigan has a good post looking at some choices in the context of open space meetings.

But I think the demand for action planning can often be a tremendous if unintended red herring.

For example, I often host meetings where a very diverse group of people gather from many different backgrounds. These people will never meet again as this group and while they share some common interests, it would be quite wrong to treat them as a single entity whose purpose is to agree on some common plan. Trying to get them to agree a list of joint actions feels like an avoidance of a more interesting truth: the actions that will emerge from such a group will almost certainly NOT be agreeable, acceptable or even remotely interesting to all. Let´s not force people to sit through a pantomine at the end of an otherwise engaging meeting so that some can maintain an illusion that this diverse group can be ordered and controlled.

I´ll go further and say that action planning can be pretty toxic even where the people in the room are from the same movement or organisation and are supposed to working together going into the future. Sure, sometimes it´s important to co-ordinate, but the reality in most groups is that there is never a real consensus about anything really energising, and the actions that actually do result are not the product of some tidy consensus, but the result of a mess of politics, differing personal motivations and - crucially - the driving and sometimes unreasonable passion of a smaller number of agitators.

So when people start talking about the need for everyone singing from the same songsheet, or arguing vehemently that everyone must "buy in", I try to maintain a sanguine dispostion. It seems to me such vehemence could go different ways: it can slide into inadvertent control-freakery and lead us to a heavy handed group process... or it can be shifted with a good question towards something (IMHO) much more useful: for example, what it is YOU want to do and do you want to find the people who also want to do it, and deal in some way or other with the resistance that almost any really exciting idea must generate?

Here´s exhibit A:

This is a conventional swimming pool, and a particularly attractive one I´d say. It´s what we´ve been trained to think of as a nice, safe place to swim... and in many ways it is, if you don´t mind the chlorine. But for reasons elaborated by Rob in his post, this pool has a lot of downsides: it´s expensive, hard to sustain, uses lots of energy and chemicals, and if the maintenance fails even a little, it quite quickly becomes a pretty nasty place to be. it´s a very artificial space, sterile if you will.

Then there´s Exhibit B:

This is also a swimming pool, Jim, but not as most of us know it. No chlorine. As Rob puts it:

If designed to work with nature, Nature becomes your pool service. Not a chemical in sight! No scum on the way and if you have the right surrounding environment with the right birds and insects then no mossies either. As each year passes this pool gets easier to run and gets more attractive.

So here´s my point: too many meetings are like the conventional pool - they´re safe but a bit smelly, comfortable in a way but at the price of being sterile. Where the pool has chlorine, maintenance men and ugly cleaning machines the conventional meeting has keynotes, powerpoint and often overbearing chairmen and, er, facilitators.

The second pool is more like open space and other conversational formats: intially intimidating and messy looking but more sustainable and, at least in a sense, natural.

I know which I´d rather jump into...

We have time only to act and learn. We don’t have time to create a long term plan, develop consensus and choose only one path forward. The hubris of this approach makes any plan subject to the political machinations of the interests embedded in dying systems. Those machinations took the last great global attempt at Kyoto and scuttled it and now we are out of time. The time for planning is over, and the time for a myriad of experiments and activities is upon us. Indeed, the future is already beginning to speak through the millions of activities, social entrepreneurs, community organizers, cultural practitioners, business leaders and teachers who are not waiting for the sanction of the whole, but who are instead addressing the challenges head on and devoting their lives to saving humanity from it’s own stubborn refusal to change. And they are also showing the way forward by sharing what they learn in novel and accessible ways.