Just noticed and interesting op-ed piece in the NyTimes by an ex-MSFTee entitled “Microsoft’s Creative Destruction“. A good read which points out how hard it was to compete against the cash cows of Office and Windows within Microsoft.
And yet it is failing, even as it reports record earnings. As the fellow who tried (and largely failed) to make tablet PCs and e-books happen at Microsoft a decade ago, I could say this is because the company placed too much faith in people like me. But the decline is so broad and so striking that it would be presumptuous of me to take responsibility for it.
Microsoft has become a clumsy, uncompetitive innovator. Its products are lampooned, often unfairly but sometimes with good reason. Its image has never recovered from the antitrust prosecution of the 1990s
Hey folks, Mike here after a long pause in which both Andy and I have settled into new jobs.
The great news is that I should be in a position to run a Proof of Concept project early in the new year. With a spot of luck it may involve some very interesting and leading edge science. In preparation I have decided to write this post as a bit of a ‘to-do’ list of things I would like to collect before starting a new project. From the top of my head they would be:
Table of contents from a (generic) vision/scope document MSF team roles Learnings document table of contents
I recently tripped over the phrase ‘motor of innovation’ while reading up on a rather quirky research papers. It got me thinking about how we could describe the motor of innovation in a broader sense.
Qualitative stigmergy, which is the true motor of innovation, can be seen as the basis of symbolic consciousness in the brain. It is exemplified on the web by a variety of collaborative, “open access” sites where people freely improve on each other’s contributions (Heylighen 2007).
I’m thinking ‘play’ could well be a general term for the underlying mechanism common to my experience with innovation to date and the seemingly aimless wanderings of social insects or seemingly random neural connections common to the study of ‘stigmergy‘. But I will need to think about that for a while, and discuss it with Andy and others first…
About a year ago, Andy used a whiteboard diagram and the phrase ‘decorate the sliders with various settings’ to bring a measure of balance to a rather tense and divided group of people. The notion of using a visualisation of sliders (think of volume sliders you see on amplifiers) to gain agreement on a series of trade-offs through balance continues to prove useful.
Just yesterday I used this technique to try and clarify my postion on litigation vs co-operation in the context of innovative scientific research.
The plan for this post is to generalise the concept and provide you all with a few diagrams and examples. (coming soon, I hope).
Meanwhile, here are the notes from a discussion Andy and I have been having as he re-locates from the land of Aus to sunny Seattle:
Here is first cut of a diagram that describes the scenario below it:
Project complexity and size
The more complex the project, the more the need for short iterative “pilot” boats or “scout projects” to discover the right path and therefore to reduce the risk for the larger effort, at a low cost
This slider looks at one large project (right hand end) vs many smaller projects that have different purposes. The small projects publish and subscribe from each other (left hand end) – some of the small projects don’t exist into production but their limited lifetime purpose is to inform. The left hand end is more interesting because unforseen but happy combinations can emerge from combinatorial projects
Team size and structure (peers vs PM & rigorous plan driven)
A peer-based structure embeds the decision making in the team rather than in either a heavy and accountable plan or a Chief figurehead like a Project Manager.
This slider looks at team formality, with strong hierarchy and formal interfacing to the business on one end (right hand) and flat structure on the other end (left) with business included as a peer on the team (not a customer but a member).
Management of risk during project
Risk can be managed retrospectively and by surprise, or actively which means we detect and look for issues early, hence reducing their severity or increasing the amount of time or the maturity of the risk management approach when they appear
This slider is reactive vs proactive risk management
Funding
A slider of: Single large project, big investment (right hand end) vs Many small, deliberately low budget projects (value demonstration precedes next round of funding)
Mike and I have been discussing how strange it is that we don’t value the contribution of imagination as the pilot of new knowledge creation in an organisation.
UPDATE: I see that the Ted conference held in Feb 2008 thought Johnny Lee is pretty cool.
What if we dared to imagine - what if it was expected as part of work? What if we let ourselves imagine ideas that don’t exist today, playing with the world and its realities as if they were soft clay, ready for us to remodel? What if we saw our world as composable and reformable, like a set of shared ideas with connectors ready to be stuck quickly together to try things in a new way?
We suspect our concerns about intellectual property and our fears about lacking individual skills have something to do with our failure to innovate in collaboration. It would be inspiring if we could drop these fears and and allow the exploration of things to be both our education and the conception of new possibilities. We could compose from the component ideas of others - be they keen teenagers, business people or academic researchers.
All that stands in our way are our internally fixed boundaries around knowledge.
Mike and I hold the view that organisations should deliberately nurture the emergence of new knowledge by combination. We should honour inventions built from sticky-tape and string. The internet was made that way.
And now an examplar.
Johnny Lee has a wonderful approach to innovation. Johnny is a researcher in human-computer interaction (HCI). But Johnny’s brilliance is greatly amplified by his love of sharing how to do neat things, seemingly rather simply.
This inspiring video shows how to make a wall-sized interactive whiteboard using just a ballpoint pen, a projector and a remote control from a game console. I guarantee you’ll be intrigued. You’ll want to try it:
Johnny dares to imagine things that don’t exist today, to ask questions that begin with, “What if we could … ?”. Most of us know how limited we feel when interacting with the computer, but Johnny explores several ideas about what might emerge in the future. And he’s built them:
When Andy and I were bouncing ideas for this blog around, there was a strong sense of wanting to kindle flames of creativity. The backdrop to our thinking is discussed in THIS earlier post - against a tone of dissatisfaction against the industrialisation of everything.
While digging around our ‘draft posts’ folder I ran across this old line of inspired notage:
‘having been snuffed out by the impress of industrialised education and work practice’
Next time you are in a conversation that descends down the all too familiar path ‘every one is flat out - we are doing more for less again this time…’ think about what it would take to ‘rekindle the flame of innate creativity (snuffed out by the impress of industrialised education and work practice’).
We were reflecting about one of our earlier innovation projects with a client, from some years ago. At that time we were working to establish an innovation incubator and we found a conflict of positions with the client - we were clearly coming from different ends of the spectrum and our ideas collided.
We’d hear comments like these:
“You’re all rhetoric and no rigour!”
We were glad for this candid expression of views because it helped us all move on.
We felt their desire for rigour was inconsistent with their desire for innovation outcomes, placing constraints around the activities which severely limited what could be tried. We kept revisiting the shared vision, which helped us all reach consensus.
Rigour can be an armchair of inactivity, a comfortable cardigan that leads to nothing getting done unless it is perfectly accountable and guaranteed not to fail.
We’ll talk more the tension between process rigour and innovation activity.
A few more thoughts following on from Clips on Slime which was well received.
When Mike and I are asking questions about a firm, we try to establish what kind of organism they are looking to build. Many firms are pulled in two directions: on the one hand, there is recognition that new ideas are the vital (meaning ‘life giving’) currency of the future. On the other hand, this is counter-balanced by the desire for predictability of results, usually leading to standardisation of processes. These two forces are in opposition because the “ideas” force tends to be chaotic and emergent (ideas can come from anywhere and are risky in both failure and the potential change they represent), while the “standardisation” force looks to tune humans and systems to deliver repeatable results (we will aim to increase sales year on year by 8%).
Two organisational structures are suggested by these forces. The more common structure is ‘detergent’ in nature - it is cleansing. It aims for detailed definition of objectives and measurement of the individual, and rolls-up the sum of this work into a predictable output of the business as a machine. The oft-overlooked insight from physics is that measurement changes things: innovation is harder in a context of pervasive measurement.
Detergent:
The less common structure - and the more interesting, in our view - is ‘emergent’. It is growthful and untidy in nature. Ideas are encouraged and are evaluated without prejudice as to their origin: instead, ideas compete for attention in a kind of organisational ecology (borrowing from Jim McCarthy’s EcologyofIdeas pattern). The best ideas, large and small, are harvested and made into things: products, ways of offering services, new communities, new ways of collaborating, new processes. This organisation is a kind of brewery. The behaviour of yeast is emergent.
It’s alive! Live yeast at work in a batch of dough:
Many organisations talk about the potential of the individual, or say that their most important assets are their people. But very few organisations are self-confident enough to allow an ongoing process of innovation to deliver a stream of new ideas to the business. To do this means to increase the amount of slack for teams, so that the emergent organisation can grow, and the detergent organisation becomes subservient. It’s growth over measurement. We think this is the right way round.
So on the one hand we have clean structures tending towards ossification as they preserve what is already passing away; and on the other we have emergent structures that bring risk and lots of transforming ideas.
Or put another way - it’s detergent or yeast. Which organisation are you?
___________________________ Flickr images courteousy of:
Detergent by XcBiker
Yeast by bjortklingd
Inspiration: Mike was having a chat with a customer with 2xProof ofConcepts done and zero failures. Making me nervous - think we need to learn to fail well. Reminded of IC vision sessions - ‘expect 7/10 projects to fail, one of the other three might be a real humdinger’.
Andy was on a plane and heard about an upcoming book.
Dr Lundin - Oz book ‘the 9lives of innovation‘
- anti investment thinking
- compliance/innovation
Stay tuned for a future post that builds on these connected ideas.
