Seeing innovation

Roland at NESTA writes

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.

He illustrates his point with this rather humbling video, which completely caught me out.

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.

Doing by Not Doing

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?

Cynicism

Chris Corrigan has an excellent post on dealing with cynicism, inspired by Euan Semple's mini-rant against pomposity. Snippet:

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.

The way the cookie crumbles

I've been thinking about a couple of cookie-related stories I've noticed recently.

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.

Then I heard about the story in Time:

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.

Apart from the cookie link, both these stories highlight the surprising impact quite small gestures or shifts of apparent status can have.

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!

The management myth

I enjoyed Matthew Stewart's polemic against management education in The Atlantic. He recounts his success in management based on a mixture of philosphy and... winging it.

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?

It's a very thought provoking essay, going beyond attacking Taylorism to debunking over-idealised, supposedly humanistic, theories of management. I think this thought gets close to something that I've felt for a while:

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.

Of course as a philosophy graduate I am horribly biased, but I can't resist quoting one more chunk:

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.

It's the people...

Earl has a nice riff on Euan's post about the real value in networks being the people and not the technology.

Euan puts a better suit on something I've been saying since I found out what end-to-end meant. That the ends in question are not devices but their users

He goes on:

The problem for many "networkers" is that you can't do it by going to a conference and splashing your business card about and having 3-minute dates. You get there by persistence, shared resources, gifts of knowledge or help... those who think in terms of silver bullets and best practise wont even be in the game.

Yep, another blow to the lovers of organisational diagrams...

The Ceausescu Moment

I know I've posted this video before, but I've been thinking of it a lot lately. Watching our MPs in the wake of the expenses scandal has been like watching a minor version of Ceausescu moments.

We complete each other

I wanted to say a little more about Matthew May's work on creative elegance. Matt's eloquent challenge is this:

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?

He makes the point that by letting others complete our ideas, we create far more engagement. That's such an important lesson in a world that often seems to favour brittle certainties. A couple of years back, I wrote about Elen Langer's experiment where she rewrote a text book to deliberately introduce uncertainty and conditionality in its precepts... and discovered that this created much greater application of the material by students.

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.