innovation playground Idris Mootee

Strategic Innovation And The Quest For Breakthrough Ideas

Innovation is now a very hot topic at the C-Suites. I have speaking a lot on the subect the last 5 years. The funny part is I am talking about Strategic Innovation and many still talk about Technology Innovation as if it was the sole source of innovation. People are very interested in my interpretation of Build-to-Last and the idea of Build-to-Fail-Fast. (Photos by Anddres Ahues)

Every large companies is thinking about it and most have little idea how to integrate that with the organization’s strategic intent; how to make it work within certain organizational structure; how to decide which project to fund; how to create a balance between reenergizing the core and attaching white space; what types of people to staff the innovation function; or simply what capabilities gap are needed to fill.

We just finished a comprehensive study of 42 top companies across 5 industries to understand what challenges and barriers that exist as well as little success stories. Generally speaking there are less success stories as we dig deeper but it is fine since they are at the early stage of the learning curve. We codified the knowledge in lessons learned as well design and implementation options as well as capabilities gap and how to fill them. It is not a 50,000 ft view but a very pragmatic understand of the situations and every company can learn from it.

The most common mistakes fell within the following:

• Focus too much on break-though ideas or staying too close to the core
• Not focus enough on creating break-through ideas and results in only incremental ideas
• Using existing (advertising and market research) vendors and infrastructures as well as toolkits that are not designed for innovation but apply them anyway and not getting the results desired.
• Fail to articulate the core purpose of innovation and how it is driven by the strategic intent and value creation
• Totally don’t understand the concept of ‘whitespace mapping’ let along the sense-making process behind it, and just called it ‘brainstorming’
• Fail to create a space that allow people to play and experiment and fail safely. A physical space that people with shared interest to play with ideas.

The idea of an innovation space is a good one. Even Microsoft has a space called Garage, a place opened last week that gives their staff access to tools such as a soldering bench, a laser cutter and a 3D printer to make prototypes and connect people with shared interest.

The Garage is in one of the oldest Microsoft buildings in campus but lots of windows. They filled the building with new "pods," basically temporary work spaces where teams of 2-6 employees can set up shop to collaborate on projects for a couple of weeks.

It is an attempt to create a safe place to fail. Fail as much as you like that and you wont get demerit points. Like all large companies, any good idea can get lost quickly because the initial market size is too small or it is threat to the core. Every company should explore having a space like this. Or they can house them in one of our offices that are even better.

The Past You Can't See, The Future Is For You To Imagine and Shape. Welcome To The New 'Future' Issue of M/I/S/C Magazine.

Here’s the Jun issue of M/I/S/C which will be coming out in newsstand in a week. This will now be available in 22 countries outside of US, Canada and UK. We’re so happy with this issue and I always thinks the ‘Future’ idea is always an exciting one. As Terri Guillemets puts it “The past can't see you, but the future is listening.” I always find it fascinating when I see a magazine cover featuring something about the future – technology, economics, design or anything.

I have been speaking with many senior executives recently on future and strategic foresights. They were so excited when I showed them how we bring strategic foresights into their planning process and how we can show tangible futures.

Our strategic foresights approach is both rigor and unique and very tangible. It is the opposite of some dream up scenarios and random visions by armchair self-claimed futurist. Let me remember the future is not an end state. Tomorrow will someday be today, which will fade into yesterday. As our world moves through this unyielding passage of time, how people act in our world will determine just which of many possible futures we end up with and how our imaginations, actions and open-mindedness can shape a very different and more positive future. Given how little we know about it today.

What do we know about the future and what’s considered useful information to help us understand the future? The “easy” and only certain answer is simply that the future will be both dramatically different and yet pretty similar. Not only we don’t know about the future, we know how little we know about the human mind and human behavior. As the proverb says: “Every 100 years, all new people.” Now every 20 years I suppose.

This new issues you will no longer find me writing every single piece of the content, I have invited numerous contributors that enriched the content but without losing a voice. This issue we are also featuring a number of Royal College of Art / Imperial College graduate students and their work-in-progress as well as a number of future oriented innovative ideas from the MIT Global Challenge all are working towards solving some of the world’s most wicked problems. For the special feature, I will let you find out yourself, it is a piece that I collaborated with Mat Lincez and Ricky Thomas which I hope you will like.

I am in London the next two weeks and will be working on a client’s site but thinking about the next issue - the “Customer Experience” issue. I have no ideas what I want to do exactly on this one. I think I will figure out in the course of the next few days or hours. And for the cover, will be casting for a cover girl and shoot the next cover in London next week.

Design Thinking Has Inspired Multi-disciplinary, Interdisciplinary and Trans-disciplinary Approaches To Problem Solving. This Is Just The Beginning Of A New Discipline.

Prague is mystical with a mix of medieval, Renaissance, and Art Nouveau architecture and the design scene is slowly taking shape. You still see traces of history of what communism had done to the city even after these buildings are completely restored. It is where Renaissance meets neo-Gothic and the baroque structures from the 18th centuries.

You can see shadow of cubist touches, which thrived in Bohemia more so in the neighborhood near Vysehrad Park. The public housing or “rabbit huts” as they called it, cheap but highly functional (the Walmart of architecture), provides a stark contrast to the Bohemia style. It is the featureless nature but with modern plumbing and heating were once considered the politically correct way to live. Or at that time, politically sustainable living as I would have called it.

I stayed at the Hotel Josef, a nine-year-old modern boutique hotel that was one of the first in Prague and still the most popular one. It is centrally located in the old Jewish quarter and right next to the Parizka Street. I don’t like the word boutique hotel, as it doesn’t mean much other than small and not part of a big chain. I rather use the word design hotel.

I was really impressed with the design and how it holds up over the years – now that’s design at its finest. There was not a thing to make you feel that it is getting out of fashion, in fact, the hotel design concept is to provide guests with a break from the fascinating baroque architectural surrounding the hotel and give them space to step back and relax in a soothing, and luminous environment. I enjoyed the hours and hours I spent sitting in the lobby lounge doing work with my Macbook while occasionally looking out the windows.

When you’re in Prague, you can’t avoid talking architecture. I’m not trained as an architect but always fascinated about the design process as well as the visual artifacts architect employs. Architects are considered designers and probably fair to say that they required the most rigor training both in art and art history compare to other design discipline such as graphic, fashion or industrial. They probably attracted a very different type of design mind than those of other design disciplines. I wonder what would happen if first year MBA students were required to spend 3 to 6 months studying the history of architecture and design, at the same time learning some basic drawing skills. I think that would drastically widen their perspectives as well as picking up some drawing skills that they can use for life.

Today, most MBAs can’t even draw simple diagrams. The pre-MBA studies are mainly statistics and accounting. There is plenty of time for accounting later in the program. The abilities to communicate using simple diagrams are extremely useful for business problem solving, strategic communications and visual sensemaking (strategic modeling and business model design). Architects use diagrams to explain their visions, elements and relationships between them. Business people can use abstract visuals to show business model options, new value chain design or customer interactions. Once business persons/design thinkers are supplied with visuals to making connections, they can see the relationships between different components better and in return easier to see something otherwise too complicated to express.

Visual sensemaking is quietly changing decision theory, it is also influencing design thinking and theories of design-oriented problem solving as a manifestation of pattern recognition. It is hard to say whether sensemaking is influencing design thinking or system thinking is influencing design thinking and in turn influencing sensemaking. It is a fact that design thinking has inspired multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary approaches to problem solving. I will explore the application of this in my coming Design Thinking for Creativity and Business Innovation seminar organized by the Harvard Graduate School of Design in NYC this month. 25% discount for early registrations and affiliates of a list of design and business schools. Now hoping on a train to Wien.

Seven Steps To Better Brainstorming. Or May Be There Are More. Is Brainstorming The Right Word?

Let’s start with this…this is not the best title. I really don’t like the word "brainstorming." It means a group of people getting together to generate a lot of deas for the solution of a problem. In 1953 Alex Faickney Osborn popularized the method in his book called Applied Imagination, he proposed that groups could double their creative output with brainstorming. Fully the book title is called Applied Imagination, which is very appropriate, and the trick is on the “Applied” part.

The authors of BRAINSTEERING by Kevin P. Coyne and Shawn T. Coyne pointed out the problem with brainstorming today is a bunch of people selected (for technical or political reasons) and put together in a room and an external moderator asking people to think outside the box. Traditional brainstorming is fast, furious, and ultimately shallow which I am in full agreement. By taking a more well planned approach can get better outcome from their ideas/solutions generating workshops investments.

I’ve seen how many moderators have no ideas of how large organization functions or any training on advanced group problem solving techniques, design thinking concepts and tools or system thinking or sense-making, and that’s usually a recipe for failure.

The McKinsey Quarterly article “Seven steps to better brainstorming,” taken from the author’s new book BRAINSTEERING, attempts to address some of these issues. They called it “Brainsteering,” it may be another buzzword but anything is better than brainstorming.  Here are their key recommendations from the authors and I’ve added my comments for readers’ considerations:

• Know Your Organization’s Decision-Making Criteria - Managers hoping to spark creative thinking in their teams should therefore start by understanding (and in some cases shaping) the real criteria the company will use to make decisions about the resulting ideas. Are there any absolute restrictions or limitations, for example?

My advice is this may be appropriate in some instances, generally speaking it puts way too much constrains on the creative process. For those of who have worked in large organizations, we know how difficult and almost impossible to know the criteria for decisions making. It is a political process as well as a realization process and it is not what is written down in any company’s operating manual. I think this is unrealistic.  Plus the fact that the change in external environment can quickly change the risks appetite of senior executives and any criteria we impose may be not valid at all. I would say ignore this one.

• Ask The Right Questions - Decades of academic research shows that traditional, loosely structured brainstorming techniques (“Go for quantity—the greater the number of ideas, the greater the likelihood of winners!”) are inferior to approaches that provide more structure. Build your workshop around a series of “right questions” that your team will explore in small groups during a series of idea generation sessions. The trick is to identify questions with two characteristics. First, they should force your participants to take a new and unfamiliar perspective.

I would say this is the number one most important part in any creative exercise.  How we practice this at Idea Couture is we apply Design Thinking techniques in helping them to frame and identify the issues, better framing means new perspectives and better solutions. There is a lot of science and art in doing this. We use visual sense making, customer journey mapping, strategic foresight scenarios and other 5 or 6 techniques to get the job done.

Strategic framing can involve using many different lenses, and one example would be time. Time could be a frame of reference. Whether we are talking about past, present, and future. Younger people frames the world in optimistic terms where mature people are realistic as they come to terms with many things in life. An organization’s past history carry forward certain orthodoxies that also limit how they see things. 

• Choose The Right People - They suggest only picking people who can answer the questions you’re asking. As obvious as these sounds, it’s not what happens in many traditional brainstorming sessions, where participants are often chosen with less regard for their specific knowledge than for their prominence on the org chart.

I understand the authors’ point, but it is about balance. I don’t think we can ignore the fact that decision-making in large organizational setting is always a political process. We need a balance of domain knowledge, outsider perspectives, and project stakeholders in order to get momentum. This is a necessary evil. You cannot ignore people who have a prominent voice in an organization and part of the power circle. That’s life.

• Divide and conquer - When assign people to subgroups, it’s important to isolate “idea crushers” in their own subgroup. These people are otherwise suitable for the workshop but, intentionally or not; prevent others from suggesting good ideas. They come in three varieties: bosses, “big mouths,” and subject matter experts. The boss’s presence, which often makes people hesitant to express unproven ideas, is particularly damaging if participants span multiple organizational levels. Big mouths take up air time, intimidate the less confident, and give everyone else an excuse to be lazy. Subject matter experts can squelch new ideas because everyone defers to their presumed superior wisdom, even if they are biased or have incomplete knowledge of the issue at hand.

The authors have a lot of good suggestions here about carefully picking the people and assign them to the group and managing "big mouths" is a very good one. This requires a little bit of advance planning but our experiences says it is an important step that we should not ignore.  Yes, brainstorming needs strategic planning.

One big big one the authors have missed is the role of social technologies play in the idea generation and management value chain. This has a big implications on how ideas are collected, socialized and activated. Ideas are far better when they are built on top of one another, at that point, you can't even chase it back to where the idea was originated from. That’s another post, next week perhaps.

 

Do You Practice Intuition? If So, Do You Know Where It Comes From? Do You Keep It Secret?

Do you trust your intuition? And if so why? Intuition is most practiced and least understood. And why some people are betting at it and some not? Can intuition be rational and strategic? Is there something called ‘strategic intuition?’ What makes your intuition strategic and mine not?

Most see an interesting connection between innovation, imagination and intuition. Often intuition may even exert a paranormal or even magical influence on everything new and unknown. What do we mean by intuition. In Educating Intuition Robin Hogarth describes various ways we can improve our intuition. He points out two notable impediments to the education of intuition. One is the presence of confusing or “wicked” environments where feedback is unreliable. The other is the limited scope or “domain specific” nature of intuition. Intuition can therefore inhibit innovation because such obstacles exist.

• A person who has a giant database of ideas and insights and supported by fast access to those information as the brain processes these knowledge in a non-linear way and as a result the person is more likely to guess correctly in a more educated than others who do not posses the data points and fast access. In another word, a large database, faster access like a SSD drive and better classification of data.
• A person who has a strong theoretical or philosophical understanding of why things happen through life experiences or as a scholar and therefore can quickly draw on those theories and associated metaphor and as a result can look at these very complex problems and not overwhelmed by its complexity. Getting right to the core and a possible decision pops out disguised as intuition. They perceive wholes and compress much into a flash. Philosophers and prophets are often intuitive. It is wisdom secretly disguised as intuition.
• A person who has a strong logical and deductive reasoning capabilities and it to eliminate the impossibilities and therefore left with the more realistic options and by probability the person is in a better position to conclude. This can be dangerous as the person can be very wrong if the answers lie outside conventional logic. But in 90% of the time, the guess is correct due to the narrow nature of the problems. It is fast logic disguised as intuition.

Intuition is a very general word, it is not taught in school (may be art school) and we don’t know what prompt some rely more on it more and some completely ignore it.  The value of intuition is not celebrated in the world of scientific management but commonly practice in the world of design thinking. Many CEOs made important decisions based on it but won't admit it. In the world of data-dominance, it is not easy to find a place for intuition, you can still use it discreetly. Or just call it innovation or sense-making.

"Build to Fail" And "Fail To Build" Can Have Different Meanings. To Fail Is Part Of To Build. To Fail Is To Hep To Build To Last. I Hope I'm Not Confusing You.

In London this week, fully packed with meetings. Staying at St. Marins Lane and it is one of my favourite hotels in London. Both for style and location even I am not the saturday night crowd that hangs out in the cocktail lounge. I am getting a lot of work done writing and editing for the next issue of M/I/S/C. Deadline is a few days away.

We love to read successful innovation and design stories of how a cool idea turns into great success story. The reality is most cute or good ideas don’t make it to the executive’s desk and even for those who did, most products and services launched to the market ended up failed. What good is innovation if the failure rate is so high and how we wonder how it would impact our credibility or career future? Is it a good thing after all? Do we know why we fail? Most don’t have any idea.

How do we anticipating failing as part of design thinking? How fast should be fail? How soon should we fail? What’s the right mindset? “Dream to Fail” or “Fail to Dream?” Or should be thinking about how to “Build to Fail” or “Fail to Last?” What is right approach to embrace a culture of failure? Fail often and fail faster is a bad idea, I know how easy it is for people to say, “oh you should fail more and fail often”. That means you’re no good in innovation management or don’t understand how to manage innovation risks.

Business schools do not celebrate failure and design schools spend too little time understand how not to fail. If you've failed too much and too often then it doesn’t reflect well on you. And if you’ve never failed, it means you never tried anything innovative. And if you tell me your innovation success rate is 70% or 80%, you don’t know what innovation is all about.That's part of the reason I wanted to publish M/I/S/C Magazine.

So what design thinking has to do with failing forward? Design thinking is about helping business managers (with no design training) to understand “play” and "exploring white space." We should question the practice of segregating design thinking solely for use by so-called “design professionals.” What’s the social bases of separating design and business?

There are semantic gaps, conceptual blocks, and social and definition barriers between design and business. What are the first stops teaching business managers the concepts of design thinking? And what’s design thinking? Most common description includes application of ethnographic research, strategic foresight, sense-making, multidisciplinary teams, strategic framming, visual mapping, strategic prototyping and iteration and form-giving. So how can entire organizations benefit from design thinking in their everyday jobs?

With some exceptions, both design industry and business community is lacking an understanding of design thinking and its potential role in business strategies and decisions making. Design thinking is a mind-set, common languages, a practice, a set of tools as well as a framework to generate more and better solutions or options. It is where D-School meets B-School.

It is not creative brainstorming; in fact it is quite the opposite of that. Design thinking is a systematic way to identify and frame issues; develop multiple solution options; test them with rapid prototypes; and iterate on them. To prototyping is to strategize.

Friday Morning Ramblings: The 5 Myths Of Design Thinking In Business Applications.

Myth #1: Every creative person is a design thinker.

So you’re creative but doesn’t mean you are equipped to be with design methodologies and trained to be a design thinker, and even so you may not be able to apply them effectively in business decision making. Design Thinkers can imagine the world from multiple perspectives (a creative person see themselves as the center of the universe)—those of clients, end users, and customers. By taking a humanistic first approach, Design Thinkers can imagine solutions that are inherently desirable and meet explicit or latent needs. I don’t know how to a label who is a “design thinker”. I guess I know one when I see one.

Myth #2: Design Thinking can replace strategic planning and designers can be good manager.

You’ve drinking too much Design Thinking Kool-Aid while Design Thinking can help companies to be more innovative and more customer-centric, it does not equate strategic planning. The idea is to use Design Thinking to power up your strategic planning. And no, designers generally don’t make good managers, just the opposite.

Myth #3: There is value in learning best practices in Design Thinking.

For many consultants, it is such as easy sell for best practices in Design Thinking,  “look what’s Apple is doing and you can do that too?” I don’t know if Apple knows what’s Design Thinking is although they practice it well. For decades, the hope and goal of managers has been that by studying and adopting the practices of organizations reported to be the best or “benchmark” in a given area  (i.e. Design Thinking and Innovation) they will realize commensurate success. In truth, this activity has historically yielded very little of value. In the world of Design Thinking and Innovation, there is little value in best practices – only next practices. While out for firms that have written books about it and sell you yesterday’s theories.

Myth #4: Your market research companies can provide insights to support Design Thinking.

That’s not usually the case, and in fact almost never the case. Most of these firms came up with fancy name about their research methodologies and in fact it is the same old same old. Most hardly understand what Design Thinking is but happy to send a few 20 year olds out with a Canon camera and gives you ethnography, it is photography they’re giving you – not ethnography. You notice the two words are spelled differently.

Myth #5: Design Thinking is for senior managers only since they have a bigger responsibility for making important decisions.

The more senior you become, things become less black and white. You need to deal with many managerial dilemmas. Senior managers often have far less freedom to act alone and they have to deal with a more complicated political environment plus lot more paper pushing, and less freedom. Design Thinking can be helpful for organization as a way to develop visualization of new possibilities, prototyping, and refining and facilitate collective decision making which is often painful. It is can be a good painkiller and not only for senior managers and decision makers.

If you're interested in Design Thinking in applied everyday decision making, Idea Couture will be running a Design Thinking Seminar in NYC in the last week of May 2011 in collaboration with Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education. Look out for more info when we officially open for registration.

When We Look Back After Ten Years From Now, We Will Call This A Facebook Decade For Sure.

Maria Jesus Galan, a nun who has spent 35 years with the Santo Domingo el Rea convent in Toledo, Spain has been spending a lot of time on Facebook and digitizing the Dominican convent's archives.

When the local government gave her a prize for her hard work and she has over 600 Facebook friends, but she is not making any friends in the convent. Some nuns reportedly claimed that Sister Maria's Facebook activity "made life impossible" for them. So she was therefore asked to leave the convent and now back to live with her mom. There are still so many who are afraid of technology, not just the crazy leaders of Iran or Libya.

Today the keyboard is mightier than the sword. It bought down Tunisia and then Egypt and not sure who is next? Libya? They wish there is a kill switch but even there is one there is still no use. There are always channel for information to leak and eventually you cannot shut down the world’s Internet and mobile networks.

The Egypt case has proved the power of social network. It sparked biggest challenge to the regimes that are not democratically elected but also to corporations and brands. Twitter played a less important role this time, but it is till part of the social networks that power up revolution.

Called it "Social Revolution Networks". Ideas flow back and forth in real time and momentum multiplying every second. No one can control or dictate these voices anymore, they echoed through Facebook and it is the ultimate freedom of speech. Facebook is probably the number media today, more powerful that TV for sure. But I still like my New York Times. And for Linkedin, I won’t sleep well if I am running the company. It is easy to tell your staff and investors that people want to keep their professional and personal profile separate; I think it is a false sense of security.

LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner thinks many of us prefer to keep their professional online personas and their personal personas distinct. Weiner argued that while LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter are often lumped together in a broad social networking category, all three represent separate social platforms that serve different needs for people. Well, yes and no. I think linked in missed a lot of opportunities to go beyond what they do and the interface is pretty bad. They can use a lot of help.

Here is a big idea. The next big magazine should be entirely Facebook based. There will be a print version but online context is entirely available through a FB app. The stories gathered all the feedback and perspectives from the users and fully incorporated into the content.

I have one more killer feature to make this work……. but I will keep it to myself as I think I have a buyer for that idea. Think about it this way, FB reminds us that everything in this world is organized around people. Somehow people forget that. If we rethink our business and organize them around people, I think we can come up plenty of new ideas to leap forward. Businesses are transforming how they relate to people and operate. CMOs that can throw away their notion of mass media and start recognizing and embracing this shift will gain strategic advantage over competitors. I think this is the new theory of marketing, time to write a new book. But I don’t have time.

A man in Egypt wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to name his firstborn girl "Facebook" Jamal Ibrahim, The girl’s family and friends gathered around the new born to express their continuing support for the revolution that started on Facebook. Facebook hold a special place in Egyptians' hearts because of its role in the revolution. I don't know anyone named their sons or daughter Twitters or Linkedin or Skype. Do you?

Can You Teach MBAs To Be More Creative? Or Can Creativity Can Be Taught At All? I Think So. Same For Making Good Cupcakes.

The picture above is the Valentine's Day cupcakes Sarah Yoon (an IC designer) designed and produced, limied edition and no photoshop. Yum. I am happy to discover that many of our folks have talents outside their work and formal training. One guy makes bowtie and another one makes coasters. I think it is important that people should possess an artistic craft outside of Adobe CS5 and Power Point.

As the Harvard B-School’s MBA class of 2010 celebrated their graduation outside Baker’s Library last summer, they were listening to speech by John W. Coleman (also a member of the grauating class and getting a joint degree from the Kennedy School). Lots of talk around the need to think outside the box and be creative. I always wonder how much more creative you can become before and after B-schools.

I think generally speaking people are less creative post B-schools as they pick up more management concpets.  “As we cross the stage tomorrow and step out into the world beyond this school, what if it’s more important than ever to recapture that child-like sense of imagination?” Coleman said. “What if, in a world so vastly transformed by crisis that it barely resembles the one we left in 2008, what matters most is not Excel proficiency or accounting acumen, but a passion and capacity for creativity?” It is very true, the question remains what do you need to do? May be start with cupcakes.

Not many B-schools, if any, treat business creativity seriously (let alone they understand what it means). Even No.1 schools (three years in a row) like London Business School, there are nothing in the curriculum that teaches students to be creative. What they have is a Centre for Creative Business, a not-for-profit joint venture between London Business School and University of the Arts London, which exists to educate and equip creative industry (TV, music, arts and film etc.) management teams, that’s very different from applying creativity in everyday managerial capacity.

In today hyper-competitive cut-throat business environment, creativity in business is really the most important capability. I am interested to know how many MBA and other Master programs are teaching the personal AND professional tools of creativity and methods for applied creativity in problem solving? Telling students to think outside the box is one thing, being able to teach them how to think outside the box but within a bigger box is the art – we all work with constrains. This is where design thinking comes into play.

The second biggest challenge is teaching them to be creative but also a good team worker. Creative people are generally speaking not good team worker. I get pissed every time people try to tell me “I come up with the idea!” and I wished I have taped the session and play them back where the idea actually came from. Being creative AND collaborative is another big bridge to cross.

And the third one, B-school profs struggle to understand creativity, let alone teach them. There is no point sceamibng out-of-the-box thinking and then talking about compliances and accounting policies. I am 100% sure that we can teach creativity (which I've done for decades), once you get slightly above an average I.Q. and a resonably interesting person (I cannot help you if you are a super boring person, there may be a medication for that but I am not sure). I can teach you applied design thinking. Intelligence and creativity are not directly correlated. So you could be a genius and display little creativity or have fairly average intelligence and wield artistic talent and amazing creative powers.

Creativity is a learned behavior. I can teach and train people to be creative. But I cannot teach style and taste. Buying a Chanel cupcake doesn't mean you appreaciate one. That’s a different post another day.

A creative manager needs to have the courage to try new things and risk failure and understand calculated failure. It is like understanding there is a chance your parachute will not open and have a spare one. The not-so-strategic creative types will end up dropping from the sky without a parachute, the strategic creatives know how to handle risks and also understand the risk/reward relationships. They are not interested in doing crazy thing with no reward or knowing the reward is not big enough. These strategic creative people are innovators.

Apple iPad Is More Than A Tablet, It Is A Window To New Behavior That Has Yet To Fully Emerge. And I Want A New MacBook Pro With A New Design Before The Summer.

Microsoft and Apple are both great companies for different reasons and operate under very different philosophies. The interesting thing is as Apple grows bigger and bigger, will it begin to behave like other large mature organizations such as Microsoft or IBM? Ever since Apple market cap surpassed Microsoft, it signified an indicator that the investment community was sending a message to the industries..

But Microsoft is still a much bigger company from both topline and bottom as well as other measure. What it means, now Apple is given the currency and blessing to go out and play the next game. Who’s the next big target? I don’t think is Microsoft, I don’t even think Apple sees Microsoft as competition. They are onto the next game.

I have three companies in mind that I think Apple will be out there trying to push out. Apple was set out not to beat Microsoft, but IBM. Are they still on that mission? Apple is still a fraction of IBM’s. Both companies have significant customers lock-in for different reasons and both are tied into the fabric of our economy. Let’s face it, the primary reason for Apple's stellar growth and valuation was due to their track record of repeatedly innovating and creating new products while at the same time maintaining a long-range vision – most companies do one at the expense of the other.

Apple's advantage is that it has a good view of the end game and driven by strategic foresight – not by today’s balance sheet and they can afford to be strategic. The iPad is not important not as a tablet, there are enough tablets out there. It is the first member of a growing family of 21st century computing appliances from Apple that co-creating a new behavior. Much like the first generation iPod. I think there will be a wave of innovation from the industry as people realize this is not just another computing device to fit between a phone and a computer. Many still don’t get it when I talked to people in CES. Tablets are dead, iPad is an appliance.

I am looking forward to the next gen MacBook Pro and I hope we will see something in 3 months. For sure it will be thinner, Light Peak will replace firewire, and the DVD drive will disappear (it should) and equipped with solid state drive. he next update to its MacBook line to make way for Intel's Sandy Bridge processors. There is 90% chance that Sandy Bridge processors will be used on the 13” MacBooks Pro, it is the first to feature a graphics chip grafted atop a processor. I hope they provide a choice of different colors (unlikely) such as silver, white and black. I will take black. I don’t think they will upgrade the 15’ and 17” until later in the year. I don’t think MacAir will survive long when the MacBookPro gets thinner. It is too pricey.

I am interested to see when the revenue stream from the iPad will eventually overtake the Mac's -- much as the iPhone did a few years ago and the iPod did before that. MacBook will eventually become just be a small business unit of Apple.

The State Of Design Thinking And The Future Of Management (And Education)

I’ve a lot of requests to speak to the business and design communities iabout the state of "design thinking" and how it is being practiced. Talking about what that means is one thing but practicing it in the real world is a different thing. Idea Couture is probably the first large scale experiment that was built in day one to apply design thinking in the most sophisticated setting. Here's photos of our SF office. I am really liking it. Still a lot of work needed and new talents to add.

I see Idea Couture as still a work in progress (and will be for another 3 years) and serves as real world laboratories in fostering collaboration between the information design, engineering, foresight, visual art and industrial design in applied complex business problem solving. Our firm practices reflective collaboration – bringing interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary teams tegether to visually model complex systems and industry structures to yield new insights and foresights, the results improve the quality of our thinking in a predominately right-brain biased world of decision-making.

I like to think of our offices as a global network of "encounter spaces” that design thinkers from differing disciplines are assembled together as teams to work on specific projects and share insights, uncover foresights -- it is a collaboration among the arts + design + economics + technology in support of clients who are looking to create meaningful differentiation, economic value and strategic impact through design thinking and design doing. It is basically the future of management. And the future of education.

I see serious challenges with people coming out from design schools (as well as business schools) and I wonder what are they teaching these people at some schools today. The missing interdependency of broader functions and the lack of visual sensibilities are impacting the quality of graduates.

Through art, students can learn to have alternative contact with any kind of knowledge or information about different thematic topics. When a student is interacting with a piece of art, he/she can live a holistic experience, with his mind by the symbols, with his/her body by the senses and with his/her heart by the emotion evoked. A piece of art is a very special because it carries the human history and provoke ways of developing perspectives, which is lacking in MBA education.

Teaching is an art, engineering is an art, urban planning is an art, photography is an art, business is an art, and design is an art. All have form as well as content, like a piece of art; therefore, a business person, a technology architect or a school teacher can be an artist, too. Both jobs can be creative, imaginative and communicative.

A new generation of hybrid-thinkers (art+business) is extremely valuable to companies and they will be hot potatoes. Why? They are hard to find and they are best positioned to solve many complex or wicked problems that are way over the head of people trained with one skill set. These hybrid or design thinkers (design doesn’t mean design as a craft taught in many design school) are the creative forces behind creative industries. They are not the creative types from ad agencies; they are real strategic creative thinkers.

At IC, our jobs are solving complex problems, helping our clients to deal with massive changes in consumer behavior, technological disruptions, global competition and many will face extinction unless they figure out how to innovate their way out of hyper-competitive landscape. That’s why we are recruiting people that we can train to become hybrid thinkers or design thinkers. I use the term interchangly. At the root of hybrid thinking is the ability to transfer - to use knowledge from one discipline in another. That's what I teach them to do everyday.

The iPhone Is A "Creative Destruction". So Is An iPad. So What Do We Mean By "Creative Destruction"?

Earlier this month Michael Tompert, a San Francisco digital imaging artist, violently destroyed some brand-new Apple products for the sake of art and the results are a collection high resolution prints with a statement "our relationship with fetish, fashion, freedom, and bondage.

The collection of giant prints including one called "Targeting" that shows a 3G iPhone that's been shot with a Heckler & Koch handgun. I guess we can call it “creative destruction.” What’s “creative destruction?” It is of communist origin --a term originally derived from Marxist economic theory which refers to the linked processes of the accumulation and annihilation of wealth under capitalism. These processes were first described in The Communist Manifesto and were expanded in Marx's Grundrisse "Volume IV" (1863) of Das Kapital.

It is about economic innovation, the way in how capitalist economic development arises out of the destruction of some prior economic order. Only since the 50s the "creative destruction" has become more readily identified with economist Joseph Schumpeter who popularized it as a theory of economic innovation and progress. The idea is company needs radical innovation (radical new proposition and business design) and even the most exceptional, enduring corporations cannot continue to beat the capital markets indefinitely – there is no built-to-last. In order to continue to maintain excellence and remain competitive, they must adopt the dynamic strategies of discontinuity and creative destruction. In a simple word-innovation.

Foster and Kaplan (McKinsey) in the late 80s examined more than 1,000 companies in 15 industries and discovered that even the best-run and most widely admired companies are unable to sustain market-beating levels of performance for more than 10 to 15 years. This was in the 80s’, with today’s technological progress, we are talking about 5-8 years.

Their research suggested that: "Corporations are built on the assumption of continuity; their focus is on operations. Capital markets are built on the assumption of discontinuity; their focus is on creation and destruction. The data present a clear warning: Unless companies open up their decision-making processes, relax conventional notions of control, and change at the pace and scale of the market, their performances will be drawn into an entropic slide to mediocrity."

Every company should engineer its own “creative destruction” while they have the resource based to do so and have the luxury to examine and explore new organization design and new mental models. At Idea Couture we use strategic foresights and scenario development to show clients the future of "creative destructions" that could happen to their industries. They are so real and executives can actually feel the future. May be an idea is to take a framed copy of their vision and mission statement, shot it with a Heckler & Koch handgun and hang a giant high resolution print in the board room to remind them. More business for Michael Tompert and his digital print shop.

Adorno Refuses To Choose Between Music And Philosophy. Now Idea Couture Refuses To Choose Between Design And Business. We Wanted Both.

My dining room as well as other 6 rooms in the house are now turned into back office and soon we will move in the SAP servers. Between my work, hobby and personal projects my life is a mess and I really have no time to eat and sleep. The paper monster is taking over the house and the kitchen is the last defense…not for long.

On another note, I am very excited to recieve the advance copy of my magazine M/I/S/T which will be in newsstands in London, Germany, New York, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Sydney and every Barnes and Noble and Borders in a few weeks. I love the cover design and it stands out among other magazines. Why another magazine? I don’t know but I think it is just a good idea. What's next after a magazine? I have another idea.

I wanted to see a design-thinking magazine that talks about design and business as one. Design and business is part of our culture. Question for myself is if I have to ask Therodor Adorno what magazine should I publish, I think this is it. M/I/S/C is a about ideas, it is about culture, it is a magazine about business innovation and design thinking.

Every issue the content are organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity (I jsut thought of the name one night while having ice-cream) The magazine original idea was originally devised as a straightforward collection of random thoughts around innovation, design thinking, business, culture and technology. It is for exploration of creativity, collaboration and co-created meanings that sits at the intersections between the culture of art, design, business, filtered by an unique editorial lens.

When it comes to media, I think I belong to the Frankfurt School. It has been more than 20 years since I last read the English translation of Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (1947 Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno). The English title is called Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments.

My favorite part of the book is what Horkheimer and Adorno called the culture industry. It was their contention that the culture industry was the result of an historical process that with an increase in technology (including mass communication technology or social media of today if you wish) there was an increase in the ability to produce commodities, which then enabled increased consumption of goods.

The consumption of mechanically reproduced cultural products—predominantly magazines and film—led to formulas of producing them for entertainment purposes, and it did not occur to consumers to question the idea that the entertainment presented to them had an ideological purpose or purposes. Consumers adapted their needs around these cultural products, and in doing so no longer knew of anything else that they might desire, or that there might be anything else they could desire. While we’re all part of the Facebook culture and occupied with media streams from everywhere, we don’t even notice that we are being manipulated (maybe there is a better word) and in fact even our lives are going through a commodization process.

According to Thomas Mann, Adorno refused to choose between music and philosophy throughout his entire life, believing that he was pursuing the same objective in two disparate fields. Sometimes I think about myself, I have been pursuing business and design my entire life and for a long time I kept them separate as two disparate fields. Now I realize it is one. Business is not just about the economies or making money, it is a great part of our culture, just look at Fast Company or better Monocle. Now business, design and technology are co-producing our culture and it is to be debated whether we’re destroying authenticity or promoting it. For Adorno, popular culture on film and radio did not bother to present itself as art. They were instead a business, and this in turn became an ideology “to legitimize the trash they intentionally produce”. Can we say the same for social media?

Design Thinking, Visual Sensemaking And Personal Transformation. Can't Separate The Three.

I was listening to John Seely Brown’s presentation last week in SF on his ideas about the future of learning and education. He is extremely well respected, now retired and a visiting scholar at the USC. His view of the world is very tech bias naturally as a scientist, struggling a bit in terms of understanding the world of large organizations’ behavior and decision-making. He was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of the famous Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) for many years, it is worth a debate whether PARC was worth the investments from Xerox’s perspective but nevertheless it was a place where the smartest people worked on the coolest projects that still influencing us in our everyday life.

His perspectives on education is probably more interesting that his ideas on business. His ideas of learning mainly evolve around social learning, not only “learning about” the subject matter but also “learning to be” a full participant in a field. This involves acquiring the practices and the norms of established practitioners in that field or acculturating into a community of practice. He put a lot of emphasis on tacit learning and use examples such as the studio system in architecture represents a good example of social learning under the guidance of an established practitioner. In this system, students work together in a common space and peripherally participate in each other’s design process; hence they can benefit from their instructors’ comments on and critiques of other students’ projects and not just from comments on their own work. This sounds exactly like how we work at Idea Couture.

Clients often put an over-emphasis on the processes and transfer of explicit knowledge in the innovation process and neglect or avoid dealing with tacit learning and sensemaking. It is the opposite of what business schools teach and many find themselves uncomfortable dealing with what they perceived as unknowns. Those are not exactly unknowns, may be uncodified and unstructured.

Dreaming up scenarios and sensemaking of these scenarios are often the toughest part. Seeing bits and pieces of data and the ability to connect them together to develop visible “data maps” of what are making sense around us, it is the learning organization at work and often requires some degree of personal transformations or basic shifts in how we think, frame and interpret.

As Edwards Deming says, nothing happens without "personal transformation." And at IC, we’re trying hard to provide a safe space to allow for this transformation as a social learning community. Everyone is encourage to dream, but also asked to anchor themselves on the reality of business dynamics and competitive forces. In additional to imagining, we use design thinking and system thinking to avoid the quick-fix mentality that makes us "system blind."

Think about it, many of today's problems come from yesterdays what were considered creative solutions, and many of today's creative solutions will become tomorrow's wicked problems. The most perplexing thing is that many quick fixes are being implemented by snart people even though no one actually believes they address underlying problems or they work at all. But we still feel compelled to implement these "solutions" just to show progress.

Hey a bad decision is a bad decision, whether it takes a second or a month to make that decision. We need to learn to apply design thinking and sensemaking as part of our everyday life decisions approach and learn to use unstructured data to enhance human decisions rather than automate them. The mortgage crisis is partially due to the automation of calling the loans even though it may not be necessary. On that note, next month we will have training sessions on strategic framing and sensemaking for our folks ... design thinking at work.

 

People Talk About Building An Innovation Culture Mainly By Cultivating Creativity. Culture Of Innovation Is A Lot More Than Just Creativity.

Long week in our SF office running our Innovation Masterclass and it is extrememly intense and people are overloaded with ideas and learnings. Post sessions discussions happen in the evening in the bar unsupervised. We covered the whole innovation process from the fuzzy-front end to opportunity mapping to strategic innovation and social innovation, everyone is now well equipped to bring our core capability to the filed including our new team members in San Francisco.

The office is coming together very nicely and when I walked in I felt the positive energy. We may open up this training to outside people later in the year. First thing this week we started with defining strategic innovation as an organization’s ability to adapt and evolve repeatedly and rapidly to imagine, capture and execute on opportunities that emerge. To do that, not only you need all the mechanism to collect, socialize, deposit, filter conversations and stories, at the end of the day, you can have all the processes you need, but without a culture to empower it, it will not work.

A culture of innovation (another overused phrase) when done right (different depending on organizational and cultural context), can provide you with a competitive edge because it makes you more agile and increase your organization’s ability to sense and respond to change. A culture of innovation may has less to do specifically with new products, new processes, or incentive system. It is not about more ideas and more brainstorming or dressing something funny to go to work, or those weekly creative events. A culture of innovation is more than new ideas. It needs to be closely sitting next to the core and to some degree to be sustainable. This only happens when you treat innovation like you treat all other capabilities in your business.

If you have it, let the good times roll and you have a lot to celebrate. At Idea Couture, we make sure everyone understand what it means and it is part of our core and reflected in everything we do. Not about creating novel ideas, but creatively framing and reframing issues and challenges for our clients. You almost cannot separate an innovative culture with some elements of fun, but for us, it is more than fun, it is also about our seriousness about innovation. We take it very seriously at Idea Couture. And I am a pretty serious person (my business schools’ legacies). But that never stops me from making fun of other and ourselves. Ask my folks, I optimize every opportunity to make fun of everyone. A good sense of hunor is also a strategic capability.

Our partner in Korea told me that we are really good at bring tangibility to something that otherwise very intangible so people can act on it. So not only we do it well from both substance and style, we inject a strong sense of passion into it and people can feel it. We have so much enthusiasm for new ideas that not just cool but also transformational in nature. And I am quick to get rid of those who do not make sense and people won’t feel bad about it. They are never discouraged, as they understand that’s ok. The notion of experimentation and crazy thoughts are part of our everyday work.

All of us have a portfolio of wicked challenges in the back our heads that we want to solve; we also have a portfolio of ideas that constantly manifesting in our everyday dialogue; and accumulated sleep debt that we have built up over working on great projects and the travel (just learned this from Adam Ruben). There is a lot of trust and I do everything I can to empower them and support them, I don’t mean a few words of encouragement, I mean hands on involvement and showing them a framework to get started. I don’t think many CEOs do what I do. And that's why my sleep deficit is reaching a dangerous level, I need to restructure my sleep debt.