Foresight 20/20

Individuals and organizations have one thing in common.  We all must carefully balance the time and energy we spend attending to the things that are important, and the things that are urgent.

What's important are the activities that keep you true to your mission.  Who you hire or choose to work with, how you contribute your talents, and how you solve the needs of your market are all important things to consider.  Your choices about them have long term effects on whether you will achieve your ultimate goals.

What's urgent are the activities that sustain you in the immediate future.  How you pay the rent, get the funding, or respond to external changes are all urgent issues that must be resolved along the way.  They are like bumps in the road, and your choices about how to manage them can also have long term affects on whether you will achieve your ultimate goals.

We all must attend to important and urgent issues, and how we balance them will determine our ultimate success.  For example, an entrepreneur may tweek a business model to ensure their company will get funded.  If they tweek it to the point that it is a different business altogether, they have gone too far.  It seems that those who go too far are lacking clarity or vision of their ultimate goals.  They end up becoming a product of the external forces that they have allowed to shape them, and their reactions are driven by panic and fear more than vision and mission.

Today we are seeing unprescedented panic and fear that can shatter our ability to achieve our economic and social goals - if we let it.  This current bump in the road should change the way we do business, but we should not let it change our business.  Yes, we need to innovate, and I believe that the innovations that will add the most value will come from those who clearly define what's important - and decide to make it urgent.

The internet doesn't encourage people to do anything they wouldn't already do.  It does, however, make it easier for them to do what they would want to do anyway, such as finding others with whom they share interests.  Today, groups of people can rally around a cause, idea, hobby or other passion like never before.  Even people with very niche interests can gain strength in numbers, giving them a stronger voice and greater power to make things happen.

On the surface, it would seem like this is a marketer's dream.  Just find these groups, and you have a ready audience to whom you can market your products and services.  But it's not working out that easily.  These groups have become much more than billboards for the eyeballs they attract each day.  They have become thriving, vibrant communities of people who care about each other and do not want to be assaulted by blatant marketing and sales tactics.

This has highlighted the importance of truly understanding your consumers.  The insights you derive should guide your company to new ways to provide authentic experiences that your consumers will value.  You need to become one of them before they will pay attention to you.  The internet has made this point blatently obvious as we see so many companies fail to gain traction with their "online media strategies."  But the fact that it's obvious now doesn't mean that it wasn't always true.  

Many companies make the mistake of thinking that this is how the online world is different from the traditional channels they know well.  In reality, this is how the expectations of newly empowered consumers will change the way the traditional world works.  Are you ready to meet these challenges? 

Who at your company is responsible for understanding the consumer inside and out?  How is this understanding changing the way you think about the way you do marketing and develop new products and services?  Hopefully you've discovered that the lines are blurring, which may be a bit confusing.  If so, then see it as a sign that you're on the right track.

The mantra that good ideas can come from anywhere is true.  It is also true that some of the best innovations are inspired by solutions found in nature or other unrelated categories, such as George de Mestral's idea for velcro coming from burdock thistles.

What is not entirely true is that innovation happens by chance.  While the solutions themselves were inspired by seemingly random occurrences, the fact that they were recognized as viable solutions is not random at all.  Defining the conditions that would constitute a viable solution is hard work, and it is this work that separates successful innovation from fads or irrelevant inventions.

Companies are realizing that it is more important than ever to be able to innovate in meaningful ways.  Many are scrambling to figure out how to solicit new ideas, or to figure out which new technologies will propel them into the future.  I have seen very few who are developing new processes that will enable them to recognize viable ideas when they see them.  And yet, it will be this skill that will enable long-term success from innovation efforts.

I wrote a post not long ago about how good design embraces constraints.  Consistent with that idea, I would say that good innovation processes create the right constraints.  When you think about your company's innovation processes, how much attention is given to developing the right constraints vs generating random ideas? 

I was thinking about a class I taught last month.  It was a section on innovation for an MBA product development course.  I teach this class every year and, in the beginning of the class, I ask the students to define what innovation is to them.  I am struck by how much better the answers get each year. 

A few years ago, innovation was more likely to mean inventing things that no one had ever seen before.  The students seemed to have very sci-fi ideas and definitions.  This has evolved, and this year they referred to things that included process improvements, and coming up with new ways to compete. 

Here is my definition of innovation:  Doing something new that adds value to your business.  It could be a product, a service, a new process, organizational structure or business model.  The point is that the organization does something new, and even more important, it adds value to the business.

This means that organizations who want to be more innovative need to be able to recognize and support innovation from every part of the company.  The good thing is that people generally seem more open to the fact that innovation is more than a sci-fi invention, and that they could probably contribute to it.  While this also means that there is no single way to reward it or measure it, there is one thing that remains constant.  In order to be able to do something different that will be valuable, there must be an understanding of the organizational goals. 

Does everyone in your company know what will make your organization successful?  Do they know how their day to day jobs influence that success?  If they don't, then they won't know whether doing something different will add any value.  And then they won't change a thing. 

Unless you've been living under a rock, you are aware that the current financial crisis is causing many businesses to rethink what they are doing.  That often entails scaling back or postponing large innovation efforts, or modifying new product releases to better align with consumers' changing priorities.  The intention here is good.  Since we won't realize the benefits of the big innovation project until some point in the future, what harm will a few more months do?  In the meantime, we can make a few quick hits, and shore up the bottom line.  All too often, however, the quick hit becomes an all consuming endeavor for little gain, the big innovation project falls off the rails, and the future arrives with depleted resources and precious little on the horizon.

I happen to be a proponent of quick hits.  When they fail to deliver, it's usually not because of a big, bad decision.  It's usually the result of several small, good-in-the-moment decisions, that collectively take the project off track.  Here are a few things to keep in mind at each small decision point, that should help your quick hit to add value:

Make sure that the quick hit you are undertaking is in fact quick.  Define up front what will be done, and stick to it ruthlessly.  While a bigger project may benefit from the "while you're doing this, you might as well..." syndrome, a quick hit needs relentless focus.

If at all possible, keep the longer term projects moving, even if at a slower rate.  This is hard for tiny companies, but it's crucial.  Longer term projects require that people spend more time thinking about the implications of their decisions.  Being able to tap into this will help the quick hit team to keep the right goals in mind, and not base everything on expediency.

Regarding expediency, just because something can be done quickly, does not mean it should be done.  Putting lipstick on a pig does not change the pig.  All this will do is erode your consumers' confidence in you.  They will feel like you tried to put something over on them, and they won't want to pay for it.  Best to show them that you will only act in their best interest. Everything else is waste.  Seth Godin has an interesting post today about making those tough decisions.

Remember that you exist to serve your customers.  If you know that your consumers will benefit from a certain feature, function, or service, it's better to make a small change in that direction than to implement something totally new that they care less about.  Again, you need to build their confidence that you are there for them, and they will stay with you for the longer haul.

Finally, remember that whatever you do for your quick hit, it will be with you longer than you planned.  Undertaking a quick hit diverts resources from other projects, and you may need to depend on the quick hit for longer than initially estimated while the other projects get back on track.  Make sure it's something you, and your consumers, will value.

Michael Mandel, chief economist at Business Week believes that innovation is "the only game in town."  In this time of financial meltdown and economic crisis, he believes that the only way we can pull out of this mess is for innovation to prevail in our culture.  

I agree with his intention, but most of his suggestions left me scratching my head.  Michael suggests that we need new economic policies (tax incentives, etc) to encourage companies to be more innovative.  He also suggests prizes, and encourages new technology development.  While these policies can't hurt, I find that a lack of incentives or ideas is not the problem.  While his suggestions won't hurt, and may help, I don't think they will have the deep, meaninful impact that is needed. 

In my experience, the problem lies in the fact that most companies don't know what to do to be more innovative.  They know that in order to grow or be more profitable they will need to innovate.  That is a great incentive.  There are also more than enough ideas to go around.  What is lacking is that most companies do not know how to guide innovation efforts in a way that will be valuable in the market.  They also have a difficult time managing innovation efforts within cultures that need to manage predictable processes and outcomes.  To be more innovative, companies need to find ways to reward behaviors that encourage innovation, without discouraging the maintenance of business.  To be more innovative, companies need to be encouraged to take on projects whose outcomes cannot be defined before the project is started.  To be more innovative, companies need to learn to identify problems before they search for technologies.  Otherwise we end up with solutions in search of problems.  These are difficult behaviors for organizations to manage from within organizations who need to reward reliable delivery of products and services.  

We are a community of innovators.  What would you suggest to Michael to answer the question:  What is necessary for America to become more innovative in the future?  How can we help him?

I'll share a quote today that's relevent to my last post.  Enjoy the weekend.

"Not everything that counts can be counted; and not everything that can be counted, counts"

-- Albert Einstein

I was looking over the last few blog posts and realized that the real purpose behind many of our innovation processes is to help us to work around traditional corporate reward systems.  Defining Active Thinking is a way to ascribe value to a process that many clients undervalue.  Brendan commented that mind-mapping tools are useful because they help to make thought processes more visible, and what's visible is more likely to be rewarded.

Organizations have good reasons for rewarding tangible, predictable processes.  Their main businesses typically revolve around providing high quality, consistent, relaible products or services.  The problem arises when they apply the same reward systems when trying to innovate.  If you haven't read Steven Kerr's article On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B it is well worth taking a few minutes to review it.  It's old, but the message is still fresh, and is something that is consistently overlooked.

I do believe that our tools and processes for innovation are useful. It is important to make the innovation process as consistent with our clients' processes as we reasonably can.  If it's too foreign or scary then innovation will never happen.  But sometimes the fit is just too forced.  In those cases, we may be better served to point out the obvious, and define a reward system that will enable the right work to be done.

I was reading a discussion yesterday on a closed site I get to use where it was mentioned that perfectionism is what often holds people back from achieving their goals.  When I think about this in terms of the Active Thinking concepts we've been discussing, I think perfectionism is a contributing factor when there is difficulty with this activity.

This doesn't mean that individuals are necessarily perfectionists, but most organizations reward getting right answers.  The very nature of Active Thinking requires that the team discuss many potential answers that end up being wrong.  By the end of the project, more wrong answers have been discussed than right answers.  This goes against the grain of most organizations, which in most cases is a good thing.  We want to ensure that a company is good at producing reliable products.  But when used at the wrong time it can kill innovative solutions before they have time to mature.

I was managing a team once that was having a very difficult time getting started.  We did a lot of consumer research, and the discussions were swirling around which frameworks would lead us to the answer.  The team was very reluctant to just try a few and discard what wasn't working.  No one wanted to be wrong.  So one day I asked everyone to bring their worst idea to the meeting.  Each team member was asked to present this idea and why it would be the worst thing we could possibly do.  We then guided the discussion toward what it would take to make each idea "less wrong."  This process required us to state our assumptions, question them, and build new constructs.  We were finally on our way.

What I learned is that sometimes the best way to change direction is to exaggerate the direction in which we're already going.  Since everyone was afraid to be wrong, we made being wrong the only way to complete the assignment correctly.  Sometimes being wrong is the only way to be right.

I have to clarify a point made in my last post about taking time to think.  I mentioned that clients tend to get nervous during the point in the project when they don't perceive that anything is happening, and that in fact, this thinking time is the most important part of the project. 

What clients fear is that this time is spent truly doing nothing while waiting for inspiration to strike.  I agree that this seldom works.  What I'm talking about is what I will call Active Thinking.  Louis Pasteur's quote "Chance favors the prepared mind" is relevant here.  Inspiration may in fact strike, but the only way to know if the inspiration is useful is to have done all the active thinking work necessary to prepare the mind to recognize its value.

When I refer to the active thinking part of the process, what is happening is that the team is creating the conditions necessary to prepare their minds for the solution.  They make models, try out analogies, and create frameworks, stories and scenarios.  They discuss these models, test them against their research, and keep going until they have something robust.  By this point, they are able to discern what will work, and what won't work quite easily.  When an idea strikes them, they are able to discern its value quickly, and either embrace it or move on.

I'm going to start using the term Active Thinking.  It's clear that there is a need to define this most important part of the process so that it's not confused with goofing off.