Yesterday I was referred to a blog post written by Danah Boyd, an academic researcher at Microsoft and Harvard.  Her work focuses on the impacts of the internet and social networks on society.  She wrote about a horrible experience she had while presenting at the Web2.0 Expo.  The post is long but worth reading.  While Danah did take responsibililty for content or delivery problems with the talk, there were several lessons to be learned by those of us whose job it is to create thoughtful, intentional experiences.

First, Danah mentioned minor issues such as the fact that she was not allowed to have a laptop from with to present.  She then went on to describe that the podium she had to use was flat, which enabled the audience to see that she might be reading from notes.  This was exacerbated by the fact that the lights were so bright, she could not see anyone in the audience, making it hard to connect and establish a rapport with them.  And the final kicker, there was a running twitter stream that was displayed behind her, so that she could not see it, but the audience could.

What this created was an open invitation for the audience to carry on a conversation about the talk as it was happening. Not only was it distracting from the talk, it was happening literally behind the speaker's back.  This behavior is rude enough to begin with, and sadly, this audience devolved to the point of making rude comments and juvenile wisecracks.  It was like a bratty kid looking for attention in public.

New technology allows us to do many things we couldn't do before.  But the freedom to do these things comes with the responsibility to use the tools wisely.  I'm sure someone thought it was 'cool' to display a live twitter feed about the talk.  If handled responsibly and with a little more forethought, it could have served to engage the audience and allow Danah to better connect with them by seeing where their interests and energy were going.  Critical thought, active listening, and discussions that challenge existing ideas respectfully all help us to move further faster.  New technology can facilitate that type of interaction better than ever before.  However, when something like this happens people tend to shy away from the technology itself, which could actually set us all back.  It would be much better to stop and think about the experiences we want to create, and question whether what we are doing will actually help us to deliver them.

As you develop products and services at your company, how much thought is given to the actual experience a consumer will have when trying to learn about, purchase, and use your offering?  When developing a new technology, or launching a new product, are there unintended consequences that could result in the actual experience of use?  Obvoiusly there are no right answers to these questions, but it is important that someone is asking them.  Are they being asked at your company?

Last year, I wrote a post about Design Thinking in response to an article in Brandweek that I felt was misleading on the topic. In it, I pointed to Roger Martin's work as some of the very best at describing what Design Thinking actually means. Last week I got into a Twitter discussion with Steve Finikiotis after he pointed me to a Harvard Business Ideacast featuring Roger and his ideas on Design Thinking.  I agree with Roger's views, however I have noticed some unintended consequences as the terms are put into practice. I boiled down these issues to three main points that I would like to discuss.  

First, I philosophically agree with Roger regarding the need for contextual research, abductive reasoning, and problem posing.  However, what I find in practice is that the term Design Thinking can be potentially problematic in its interpretation. This is because design is a functional discipline in most organizations, just like marketing, engineering, or finance. Most design education focuses on teaching the fundamentals of honing the craft and developing tangible design skills.  The work Roger describes of creating plausible hypotheses and solutions based on contextual research is often done by people who do not have traditional design backgrounds.  As a result, I have seen the term create some organizational confusion regarding work that I have found to be discipline agnostic. 

My second point is related to the first. Roger talks about how designers and business people need each other in a way that should break down silos to allow the necessary connections between their disciplines to be made. Again, I agree wholeheartedly, yet in practice, the term Design Thinking can cause the unintended consequence within an organization to segregate, rather then integrate the disciplines.  Richard Farson, a psychologist who has written quite a bit about design, discusses the need to focus on the "meta" level of all functional disciplines as a way to rise above the executional level within a functional discipline and frame the common problem at hand. When I've presented the "meta" idea to client organizations, it tends to help to philosophically integrate the disciplines within a team, and resolve the terminology issue.  It is something to think about.

Finally, Roger very eloquently speaks of the need to integrate creative and analytical thought. (see abductive and adductive reasoning) Amen to that! However, I find the integration of these two types of reasoning to get us part of the way there, but in order to accurately connect seemingly unrelated concepts we need a different type of cognitive skill.  For example, we certainly need to integrate creative and analytical reasoning to hypothesize a consumer's motivation behind what they say, and to develop new solutions to satisfy those motivations.  However, the ability to accurately translate from a specific plausible hypothesis to a related plausible solution appears to be a different type of cognitive skill that is employed in addition to the integration of the types of reasoning. In the work I've been doing, we're just beginning to scratch the surface of what that is. When I have something concrete, I'll be sure to share it.

I'll end by saying that I'm certainly not intending to criticize Roger Martin's work. On the contrary, from what I've seen he has done a better job than anyone in terms of creating awareness of the need to integrate creative and analytical thought processes and solutions. For that, he has earned my heartfelt gratitude. However, we cannot expect him to do everything alone, or to have every answer.  It is our responsibility as practitioners to raise the issue when we sense inconsistency between theory and practice, and continue to work together to hone these concepts.

It's no secret that I believe that the ability to translate market needs into viable offerings that meet those needs is the key to successful innovation.  It's also no secret that I believe that this ability does not reside in any one discipline, educational background, or company process.  Last year I wrote three posts, each about an element of translation that I felt was important for an organization to embrace the capability. The three elements were Awareness, Capability, and Evaluation.

I still believe that these three elements are necessary for an organization to embrace translation, and I have been focusing on what it would take to actually recognize and build it.  In the post about having the capability to translate, I ask the question about whether or not the organization has the right people to perform this task.  This past year, I have been trying to put my finger on what exactly it is that a person who is good at translating is actually doing?  What skills do they posses?  Is it learned?  If so, then how do you teach someone, and by extension an organization, to make accurate connections between seemingly unrelated ideas, disciplines, process phases, or stakeholder needs?  Is it innate?  If so, then how do you teach an organization to recognize these skills, accept the differences, and embrace the outcomes?

Where I have landed is that everyone can learn better techniques and processes such as deriving motivations from contextual research, or evaluating intangible attributes.  However, even with the best techniques and processes, some people are able to make these connections, and others are not.  Once that pink elephant in the room was called out, the rest became more clear.  It gave me a different perspective on process, and has allowed me to continue to hone my best practices in identifying these people because these skills don't fit on current HR checklists.

Some people may not like this conclusion, but it's really no different than recognizing that people possess different physical abilities that make them better than others at physical tasks, so why wouldn't different mental abilities exist as well?  An exploration into the field of perceptual psychology has shed some light on this subject for me as well, especially when we look at recent research into synesthesia. 

Synesthesia is a perceptual experience, where some type of sensory crossover takes place.  For example, a person with synesthesia may hear sounds when they see certain colors, or they may experience a smell when they come in contact with certain textures.  Historically, synesthesia has been confined to describing specific sensory crossovers that are not experienced by the general population.  Recent research by experts in synesthetic perception, has broadened the understanding of what goes on in our brains as we perceive the world around us.  He has found that cross-sensory mapping is happening all the time, to the point that we take it for granted.  For example, dancing is a kinetic response to sound stimulus; a cross-sensory mapping ability that goes unquestioned by the general public.  They suggest that we only notice when people perceive sensory crossovers that are not commonly experienced by the average person.  It sticks out when someone sees a color and hears a sound, but we don’t find it odd that a person may hear a sound, and move their body in a way that mimics the rhythm of the sound.

The newest thinking actually goes so far as to define synesthesia as a consciously elevated form of the perception that everyone already has.  Just as people have varying degrees of physical abilities, it makes sense that varying degrees of perceptual abilities exist as well.  It therefore also makes sense that some people are naturally better at perceiving one type of input, such as consumer motivation, and mapping it to a seemingly disconnected output, such as an offering toward which the consumer will respond positively.  To put it bluntly, some people are better at making the connections necessary to create successful, market relevant innovation, and this skill is independent of which discipline they choose to study.

So what does this mean for translation ability?  Is it a form of synesthesia?  A form of creativity?  Much more work needs to be done before we will know for sure.  What is important is that we are beginning to develop models that support the idea that getting the right people in place to focus on innovation is an important first step.  We can then develop systems and processes to support them, rather than take the place of the human element.

We've talked about the difference between the innovation process and the development process in terms of the results they are expected to achieve; the innovation process being used to identify market relevant opportunities for innovation, and the development process being used to efficiently and reliably get offerings into the market.  We've also talked about how different people, and different thought processes lend themselves to achieving these goals. 

What we haven't talked about is how the different processes should enable people to best do their work.  This is where we often see culture clashes in companies who try to standardize performance objectives based on discipline when they should be targeted to the overall objectives they are tasked with achieving.  Let's see how this plays out by examining some common process elements and seeing how they differ between the innovation and development processes.

The complexity of the development process can best be defined by the sheer number of tasks, functions, and people that must be managed.  It is often a project manager's sole job to coordinate and keep track of everything that must happen.  This person also communicates the interrelations between the tasks required of different functions so that the team can proceed toward the goal.  For this reason, quality of work is evaluated based on whether or not the team members complete their required tasks efficiently and according to schedule.  There are well defined parameters for the completion of tasks to hit project milestones.  In fact, every task is planned and scheduled before the project starts, and the project operates under the assumption that when all tasks are completed, the project is done.  As can be expected, the planning process is very involved, but this typically happens once, when the process is being initially determined.  After that, most projects are similar to the first and can follow predictably along the same steps. So, it can be said that the purpose of the development process is to ensure that human error can be engineered out of the system.

The complexity of the innovation process can best be defined by the fact that the team typically has no idea what the tasks should be at the beginning of the project.  This team is guided by an overarching goal, and needs to be flexible and creative enough to do whatever tasks are necessary to collect the information that will help to achieve it.  The fact that a set of tasks worked on the last project may be useful knowledge, but it is certainly not a roadmap for the next project which will have a different overarching goal.  For this reason it is difficult, if not impossible, to map a process step-by-step for a person outside the work process to plan, manage, and communicate.  Quality of work is evaluated on whether or not each person is able to construct logic and create solid rationale leading to recommendations, making sure to voice any logic breaches that come up so that the team can step back and address them.  Milestones are certainly helpful, but they are more useful for the team to structure their thinking, and less useful to determine tasks.  At the end of the day, it can be said that the purpose of the innovation processes is to ensure that intuitive leaps are made transparent, able to be evaluated, and that recommendations can be presented in such a way that the rest of the organization can make use of them.

Think about how your company's development and innovation processes.  Are they different?  Do they try to achieve different goals while using a similar process?