processofinnovation.com

Tom’s latest definition of Proof of Concept (PoC) is a ripper:

A proof of concept ignites innovation by exploring unproven ideas and new techniques in a managed creative, low cost, time effective way.

Mike Seyfang

One of the criticisms leveled at many of the Proof of Concept projects I have been involved with is that they do not produce robust products that are successful in the marketplace.  Until very recently, I have not been involved in any funded work that looks at incubation - hatching good ideas and nurturing them toward a desired end-state.

If the outcome of a successful Proof of Concept project is like a fertilised egg, what are the contitions required for the egg to hatch and for the tiny chick to grow into a strong healthy chook?

Step 1 - Define your Chook.

Step 2 - The Incubator.

I hope the notion of separating the conditions that suit the ‘laying of an egg’ from those that suit ‘hatching and initial growth’ is helpful in fostering innovation at your workplace.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

And thanks to BlueskyPol for granting permission to use the excellent Flickr image in this post.

Clips on slime: applying measuring clips to lovely green slime and looking for a healthy voltage across the whole organism.

A while back I read an article by Skinner & Spira (see below) which talks about a continuous line between two extreme management positions – of trust at one end, and control at the other. When it comes to getting results from a team, many organisations sit nearer the ‘control’ end of this line, meaning that a close watch is kept on people, and management strategy is dictated rather than emergent; local autonomy is not valued.

Mike and I have found that an organisation’s attitude towards how it trusts its people has a direct bearing on its ability to permit innovation in its ranks. When firms manage individuals closely, great compliance is achieved, but extraordinary things normally cannot (by definition) occur. Conversely, when measurement stops at the boundaries of divisions or teams, and individuals are trusted, innovation may flourish.

We look to emergent systems for inspiration. Complex problems are solved by abstract models such as neural networks, even though we don’t comprehend the precise contribution of each node to the result. Synergy is exactly that: more than a simple sum of parts.

In a lab, we use a Petri dish to create the best environment for a living culture to grow, and we give it time. We don’t measure the output of each cell, but look for division and growth of the whole culture. We may be surprised by how it grows. We only intervene at the individual level – the cell, the person – when we’re diagnosing a problem, to unblock progress.

In the business world, Management may impede the building of innovation teams to do good stuff. Heritage prevents organisations from allowing innovation teams to form – cutting people some slack to produce good ideas by working with others. The desire for measurement may ironically obstruct an increased level of output that stakeholders desire, because a new concept couldn’t readily emerge from within old structures.

It often amazes us that businesses that aspire to growth fail to overturn structures that block social networking; they fail to encourage the development and sharing of knowledge; and they don’t deliberately create environments to seed the creation of new ideas.

Our views are these: strive to agree on a bold team vision; provide the best environment for innovation to occur; measure the larger division, not the individual; use time and resource constraints to drive creative solutions; unblock problems; and get out of the way.

Think: clips on slime!

Andy Delin
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Spira, L. F. and Skinner, D. (2002) ‘The trust-control nexus: an unrecognised interdependence’. Paper presented at the European Academy of Management (EURAM), Stockholm, May 2002.

This is the shell for a future article to talk about the confusion of “production think” versus innovation. The discipline of developing ‘for production’ may be a hindrance in establishing innovation teams to come up with new ways of doing things.

We want to touch on marketing, driving demand, turning the innovation into a production thing.

Please bear with me while I ‘think out loud’ and save this as a shell for a future post.

While talking with Andy about his ‘Clips on Slime’ diagram, it became clear that the end of a Proof of Concept (PoC) project can be rather unsatisfying. No matter how clearly we tried to explain that a PoC finishes where a functional specification begins, the amount of remaining work to bring an idea to a completed product is always underestimated. UPDATE: I see Tom has just experienced this at show and tell 2 for one of his projects.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

While finishing my previous post ‘thinking about openness and innovation’, I found an interesting and informative article in my local newspaper. It is a small piece by Samela Harris talking about Howard Rheingold’s upcoming visit to Australia. The title is ‘Teachers should learn from cyber generation’ and it contains some biting insights from one more eloquent (and ancient) than I.

My favourite is the closing paragraph:

‘Remember the days of two or three television networks and one phone company? That’s what that these (neutrality/drm/openness) battles are all about - putting the genie of innovation back into a well-controlled bottle.’

That quote really struck a chord with me, and provides insight into the sometimes confrontational nature of the ‘battle’ to bring innovation into the workplace. Every successful innovative project I have seen has had more than its fair share of struggles around control.

Digging a little deeper into the article one finds such gems as:

‘But our educational institutions are still preparing students to be 19th century factory workers.’

- which speaks to one of the key tenets underpinning theprocessofinnovation.com - the de-industrialisation of stuff in a bid to re-kindle the inner creativity of learners.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:eduausem2007, education

While Andy is off swanning about London, I have decided to write this little narrative post in which I hope to sketch out some of the ancient and more recent background to this blog. In recent weeks I have very much enjoyed following the progress of a proof of concept project that I helped to start with one of my clients. It is with great interest that I watch the very open process of innovation via the blogs of some of the team members, like Tom (whose ideas and comments form a substantial piece of the early posts here).

I am particularly encouraged for two reasons:

1. The ‘DNA’ for Proof of Concept projects has been successfully transferred to a new and different environment.
   
2. The open approach of blogging the progress of a Project is generating some healthy debate and introducing interesting new ideas.

Many years ago (before Feb 2001), Andy and I worked together to envision, build and run projects in the Microsoft and South Australian Government Innovation Centre. During early workshops with key stakeholders I scribbled a rather large and busy whiteboard full of ideas into a shape that resembled a chemistry set - which formed the basis for running many Proof of Concept projects. Andy deftly adapted reams and reams of Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF) documentation into a single page ‘vision/scope’ template which served to guide many a successful project. I always wondered how well these projects would go outside the fertile environment we had managed to create.

Last year, I had the pleasure of working with a project team at Education.au limited who were brave enough to try out some of my crazy ideas around fostering innovation through a proof of concept (PoC) project. A small team of peers was established following the abovementioned scaled down MSF guidelines. Together we set about a sometimes bumpy journey of weekly meetings punctuated by three ‘Show and Tell’ events in which we showed anyone who would watch our hastily cobbled together prototype code and ideas. Around halfway through this first ‘PoC’ project, the team started blogging about some of the project outcomes and ideas. To me, this was the piece which really opened the bottle and let the genie of innovation out.

On reflection, the key enablers for innovation were:

1. Creating space for talented staff to ‘play’ in work time.
2. Switching the default attitude from ‘closed’ to ‘open’.

So there you have it. A little background to the journey Andy and I have been on over the last six years and and introduction into some of the key players you see hanging around this little blog.

I suspect what we see here is a foretaste / model / adumbration of great things to come in which some of the world’s bigger problems will be addressed by standing on the shoulders of giants through a culture of creative participation enabled via the internet.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Mike and I were talking recently about the impetus behind innovation. What exactly lies behind a team’s will to create something new, to do things diffferently?

We often produce business-like phrases about ‘value’, written into carefully crafted vision statements. These are important, but we suspect the real spark for innovation is more basic and more human. Tom Cotton discusses this when he talks about scratching the itch.

Tom drew a nice graphic that captures “itching” as the centre of the cyclic process of innovation. As Tom puts it, we “itch”, then brain-storm, then create something, then show it, then reflect on our progress towards the vision. And repeat:

Itchcycle by Tom Cotton, used with permission

When people are motivated to innovate, something is acting as an irritant - just like a pebble in the shoe. That irritant is felt by the team and it says either, “we can do this better”, or, “we could do this a new way”.

There are two important points here. Firstly, ideas for “doing something new” can arise in any part of the organisation, because anyone can itch. But those ideas will only develop into something of substance if they can be shared with a few others who have all been given permission to scratch. Second, we must have an ‘innovation process’ that helps people scratch - meaning, we need a quick, lightweight and flexible process that allows teams of people to try new ideas out.

(Typically, those teams start small and have limited resources, these being helpful rather than hindering attributes. A topic for another time.)

So, the next time you’re staring at some obviously burdensome workflow in your business, and it’s making you sore, we recommend scratching that itch. Nurture the thoughts and feelings that say, “this really could be done better if we …”

Quote:

“… A deliberate environment of trust was created, allowing the team the freedom to conceptualise a response to the loosely defined challenge [... it] really helped our process of innovation.”

Surely, the point about process is that it should free human beings from work of low added value to allow them to do the high value stuff which machines cannot do? If we are able to structure activities to become almost mechanical and mostly invariant, why would we bind people in teams to be governed by such processes? Wouldn’t we extract people from such processes as much as possible? Our view is that people should not be components in a process, but designers who live outside the machine. Let the process do its thing, and the people theirs: a separation of concerns, rather than a confusion of them. There are many objections to this thinking, which largely revolve around issues of the control and measurement of people - which we’ll talk more about in the future on POI.

Recently Mike and I spent time developing the vision for POI, exploring ideas about what we want this innovation community to be. Here is some of what we covered.

Previously, the draft vision was:

A community valued for guiding people towards innovation

Tom Cotton posted some insightful thoughts about human beings’ innate ingenuity and creativeness. From our childhood we explore and then change our environment, create tools, solve problems and negotiate change. Being innovative is deeply human. Tom rightly reminded us that we needed to capture some element of this in our vision for POI. (Tom’s blog is worth a visit).

This seems to link back to the Industrialisation Of Things, a set of ideas appearing in the 19th century, when there was a desire to impose order on the unruly natural world. Certainty and control must be induced at all costs and education and work must be standardised and measured. In the 21st century, continuing to follow this Victorian heritage leaves little latitude for new thinking to thrive. This Victorian industrial rationalism desired the hierarchical structure of all things, whether people or facts. Taylor in the early 20th century realised he could commoditise the tasks of industrial workers to increase output; a number of legal cases detail people’s dislike of his structures but he remained convinced that his scientific management could be applied to all areas of life, from the factory to the social club and our homes. Today, we’d rather buy a robot.

Do these structures apply to knowledge work and communities in the 21st century? Are they relevant? We talked about this process-bound view of the world actually controlling how people think, the rigour of school and work pressing or drumming the innate creativity out of humans. POI could be a community that helps rekindle that for people in teams. We’d like to set that in reverse … something like:

rekindling the flame of innate human ingenuity

Along similar lines, here are some other phrases that came up in discussion:

Inborn
Unlearned creativity
Recultivating intuitive thinking

We think the Process of Innovation community should be about finding ways to reveal that brilliance by clearing away the burdens of uncreative process. We hold the view that artistry has a place in business enterprise and that the results arising from the application of human soft skills are pre-eminent over the certainty of fixed processes. We talked about the idea that people need help today to create environments safe enough to fail in - safe enough for ideas to germinate.

(Mike thought this was rather drole: Process is rigour. Rigour - and mortis.)

Certainly we’re touching on something human and we want the POI vision to express that. If we look at people just as componentry, we don’t value what they can do or how surprising the outcome might be. Drucker wrote a paper in which he said, “They’re not employees, they’re people.” Jim McCarthy, pitying the users of poorly designed software said, “They’re human beings - not drones.” (Jim is very good at describing the importance of shared vision for teams - capturing something the team shares as a feeling. For recommended listening, see his podcasts called Twenty-Three Rules of Thumb.)

After all this, we arrived at a next cut of the POI vision:

Designing a community valued for rekindling people’s innate creativity by unlearning the impress of industrialised education and work

We’re not done yet: more iteration to follow. Comments welcome as always.

Andy Delin.