innovation playground Idris Mootee

Some Celebrate Failure. Some Even Romaniticize Failure. The Best Strategy Is To Avoid It!

The new M/I/S/C Bounce Back issue is out in newstand.This issue is packed with great articles about how companies should deal with adversity. It is one of the best issues ever.

For the last few years, magazines have made failure romantic, and start-ups love their failure stories. It’s true, there are some great stories out there: at the top of the list is Steve Jobs who was fired from the very company he founded. J.K. Rowling took Harry Potter to 12 publishers; all of them turned her down. Walt Disney filed for bankruptcy in his early twenties.

And there was Bernie Marcus who was the son of a poor Russian cabinetmaker from New Jersey who got fired from his job working at hardware store. With US $2 million in capital, Marcus and a partner went into business and opened a different format store with hangar-size, no-frills outlets, friendly service and a huge selection of products, they called it Home Depot. For Marcus failing was about character building and part of the journey to excellence.

These stories are both motivational and inspirational. Magazines from Fast Company to Harvard Business Review jumped on the bandwagon, selling the message it’s ok, even cool, to fail. Some people take this as a ticket to push bad ideas forward. Sometimes people carry failure as a badge of honor. There was a guy who wanted to join our company; his resume read ‘six times failure, a proud veteran.’ When I asked him whether he had any confidence that he will succeed the next time, he said no. It sounds like Vegas to me. The organizations we design and operate are not agile enough to support smaller experiments and the bigger the company is, the harder it is to bring innovation to the market.

Companies are using the stage-gate approach, taken from product development, to the innovation process, which is a big mistake. They’re also applying the wrong metrics to measure innovation projects. But the fact is failure is a bad thing – if you can avoid it, avoid it. Instead of putting too much focus on those who ‘made it’, and their struggles and resilience, we should be really be focusing on teaching people how to avoid failure in the first place.

The problem is we should not encourage people to fail, but should not penalize them either. We should be encouraging them to take calculated risks. The danger I am seeing is when young people embrace failure in the wrong way. It almost seems like they’re trying to race through more failures to earn a badge, rather than trying the best they can to give the idea the best chance. This ‘failure movement’ is mostly supported by mediocre people who have few ideas and cannot execute. They continue to romanticize failure, to the extent that they start to expect it. We need to prepare for failure, but never expect it. The failure movement is growing an irresponsible attitude toward risk-taking and Design Thinking.

Just because you fail many times, doesn’t mean that you have a better chance of emerging from challenges unscathed. It gives people an excuse to think harder and learn to apply Design Thinking principles to model scenarios to avoid or minimize failure. Most innovation can’t avoid failure. In fact failure is often by design, it is part of the process of iterative development and market learning. I don’t consider that failure.

Prototyping and learning from mistakes can ultimately lead to a higher chance of success, but it also de-risks project mistakes that usually come from the weaknesses of our human mind, such as hindsight bias. We should be teaching people how to deal with those biases.

The failure movement often falls prey to both of these biases. How many people can you name that went broke while attempting various business ventures, and are still broke? Can you write a list of these people more easily than a list of successful entrepreneurs who overcame immense obstacles to succeed? I think we are giving ‘failure’ too much credit.

I can see why those stories sell, they’re comforting to read and somehow people feels closer to success. This is not the case. If you’ve failed 50 times it doesn’t mean you’re closer to making it. Let’s stop over-glorifying failure and avoid the pain. We know what it means when you have your fingers burnt once. The smartest way is to teach people to learn from Other People’s Failure (OPF). There is so much we can and should learn from it.

When I teach my strategy courses in master level programs, 80% of my teachings are around how companies fail and how to avoid it in the first place. For me, it’s called ‘strategy.’ There are so many free lessons our there, you don’t need to pay the price to feel the pain. Someone did it already. There is no need to romanticize failures, instead, we should learn how to best avoid failure and, in the worst-case scenarios, be prepared to bounce back from it. That’s what Design Thinking can do.

For the full story, pls see the June issue of M/I/S/C which is available in 26 countries and digital subscription is available through Zinio.

Idea Couture Is Ready To Take Innovation And Design Thinking To The Next Level.

This has been a very tough two months for me in terms of time and I have not been spending much time writing my blog as much as I used to. It is getting a bit difficult to find the time as we were going through a reorganization, adding new offices, putting new management system in place and at the same time trying to finish my two books on the weekends which will be published in May and Oct this year.

I am excited about my new Design Thinking and Strategic Innovation book that I hope to fill a gap in the market place. And management of the company is taking more and more of my time. So the time I can afford to touch projects is shrinking, I think I only spend 25-30% on projects these days instead of 40%. And people think I spend a lot of time on my MISC magazine, the reality is it is less than 2% of my time. I have a great team helping me with that. I only pick the theme, cover girl and the designs.

We have always designed Idea Couture to be a company that is agile, high style and deserve great love. But we recognize this is an ambitious goal because we want style, speed and substance. Not everyone can make it. I remember someone said something like "Out of difficulties and impossibilities grow miracles." Perhaps we’re naïve. Idea Couture is not a place for small thinkers or people with big egos. It is place for people who believe in being AWESOME and won’t spend time fighting for excuses.

I take pride of seeing people that I mentor growing everyday. We’ve come a long way since launching what we called an innovation firm – whatever that means. It is not a design firm with MBAs; or management consulting firms with some designers or digital agencies calling themselves innovation agencies. We are built from the ground up to do what we’re supposed to do – we work with organizations to uncover innovative ideas that sustainably grow market share or create new markets through powerful customer experiences innovation. We are close to the completion of our reorganization and I am very excited to wait for more new people joining us every week.

Our technology team is amazing and we’re now adapting new methodologies so we can deliver better and faster cross-platform solutions. Our strategy team is growing and growing and have so much untapped potential (unsolicited resumes are flying in dozens everyday).

Our design team is world class and I personally make sure they will remain the best all the time. They not only produce great work, but also open minded and egoless, and fun. At Idea Couture, design is at our very core, not the surface. Design here is under transformation and it is not done within a studio, it is done in the real world in future tense. Design is where technology and art breakeven and where love and logic intersects.

Our insight team is AWESOME with all capital and it is our intellectual powerhouse. When the company advanced forward to a new stage, our foresight capability was not meeting the standard that I required both in terms of strategic knowledge and professionalism. So we needed a full upgrade. Now we have a new global team and a plan to fully integrate that into our innovation process.

We have no time for amateurism. People are committed to giving their best. We just launched our idea couture culture page, which is my personal most favorite part of our site that best represents us. It shows us who we are as individuals which really what this company is all about. People are here for a reason, not for a job. They find their best and it is our job to bring out their bests. It is not always easy. It is how they find meanings. There is a strong correlation between job satisfaction and meaning.

We refuse to act like a "grown-up" company; however at times the company and will always want to think we’re small even though we have 6 offices around the world.

We refuse to act like a “think tank" as we don’t just think, we do.We don't just produce report, we ation on them. We use visual output for sensemaking and mobilizing change that increases organization adaptability and agility.

We refuse to act like we "know it all" but we believe we are equipped to find the best available solutions.

We refuse to accept any "best practices" as we are the one who invent “next practices”.

We refuse to accept that “amateur foresights” is better than no foresights. Actually it is better to have no foresights than wasting time on amateur futurists.

We refuse to accept that "ideas are everything", in fact ideas don’t worth much. They are cheap. There are no shortage of people with ideas and can never execute anything. The art of jump starting innovation is strategic commitment and it is more valuable because nothing happens until someone do something.

We refuse to accept people with "big egos", it is simply not part of our culture. But there is one nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk and think about other people at all.

Idea Couture is a working prototype and will remain a working prototype in time to come.

How Imagination Can Create The Future? Start With Those Old Comic Books and Sci-Fi VHS Tapes From The Flea Markets.

For centuries we show our human spirit with stories about our glories,hopes, desires and dreams for a better future, one filled with modern machines that enable us to do things we long to do from being invisible or traveling in flying cars or telepods (may be not telepods as I always worried that something would go missing during the transmission). These stories manifested itself in art, comics, fictions, movies and even science discoveries.

What was known as “futurism” is the artistic movement that began in Italy and Russia that fast-forward us to the future of the machine age into progressive state of mind. Futurism also championed speed, technology, science, youth and also a lot of uncertainties. It's mantra was that the answers to humankind’s problems lay in the future driven by technology – and not the past. The main literary work of the movement was Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, published in 1909, and generally considered the beginning of Futurism. I still enjoy reading that once in a while.

To invent the futures that we desire, business and government leaders need to see things in new ways that trigger their imagination to dream of new possibilities. Many of them are too "stuck" in the present. That’s when Design Thinking comes into play. Design Thinking is not just about understanding  people's needs.  It can also be used to bring people's imagination to propel us into the future. To see the future, Design Thinkers are equipped to creating guidepost for developing strategic foresight. It is called Future Casting.

Future Casting is how people from the past thought of the future. I remember visiting an exhibition in Prague where artists from the former USSR were imagining how the future was like with its futuristic art of space vehicles. Those Russian Futurists were fascinated with the optimism, speed, and restlessness of modern machines and urban life. They were actually performing Future Casting for the public.

I grew up watching Thunderbird and Ultramen and as a boy and they were the only things that were available for me that I could use as a guidepost for imagination. Funny enough, Ironman is like an unfinished prototype based on Ultraman design with the same battery problem. Ultraman highlighted the bottleneck of all technologies decades ago which is the battery. From iPhone to the latest Boeing 787 we still have not solved the battery problem.

We have always tried to look into the future and try to figure out what comes next. Sometimes we create fictions, fantasies of what may come. Will some of these fictions ultimately become real? There is no scientific evidence for this, I suspect the percentage of fiction becomes real is way higher that some thought our research based predictions that never made it close to become real. These materials open a window into the past and in term a perspective of the future… how the future should have been or their fears of how they were afraid it would turn out.

The realities of tomorrow are the fictions of today. If you want to have good strategic foresights, don’t hire designers or futurists. Hire Sci-Fi writers! And pair them up with behavioral economists and anthropologists and you will get good foresights.

The latest issue of MISC The Gadget Issue which has a special design feature Project 2020 about the future of sex, social and beauty. There is also the main feature How New Technologies With The Power To Evolve, Disolve, Disrupt and Democratie Industy which is fun to read. MISC is now in bookstores in 26 countries. And you can get it from Amazon too.

Design Thinking Requires Storytelling. It Is Both An Insight Tool And An Organization Culture Building Tool.

 
Stories inspire, motivate, and shift the way the people think and work. Many civilizations throughout history understood the power of storytelling. From ancient Egypt to modern China story- telling provided the foundation for nearly everything. For business, often there needs to socialize strategies within executive management, the board and senior staff and they include telling innovaiton, survival and hero/heroine stories. Most survival stories are around when organization had to overcome big challenges from disruptive business models that threatened its existence. It is an important piece of organization culture building.

There are a few universities offering storytelling degrees. I believe Columbia University offers a BA in storytelling an mythology and East Tennessee State University offers MA Storytelling, one of a select few fully accredited graduate programs in Professional and Applied Storytelling. All MBA should include a module for this.

From our daily routines to historic events, storytelling can be the best tool to uncover insights. Historians use storytelling to draw out the facts – and it can be used in the modern corporate world too.

Storytelling has been used as an insight tool to give idealized accounts of ancient life. Sometimes drawing from events and at other times drawing from art itself. When I was in Egypt, I learned about the poems found in an excavated workers' village on the outskirts of the Valley of Kings. These poems contain insights into the life of ancient Egypt – a window that can still shed light on ancient life.

In Japan, Kamishibai was a popular form of visual and participatory storytelling that combines the use of hand drawn visuals with the engaging narration of a live presenter. ‘Kami’ in Japanese means ‘paper’ and ‘shibai’ means ‘play’ or ‘drama.’ The presenter stands to the right of a small wooden box (call it a mini stage) that holds the 12-20 cards that feature the visuals that accompany each story. The presenter changes the cards at the speed that matches the flow of the story he is telling. Today, this type of performance is rare but the essence of what was achieved is still alive and well – to capture the audience with a story.

Anthropologists and ethnographers have long been using storytelling to communicate findings. By painting a picture of a situation, the insights gleaned become clear and understandable. Not only used to communicate the findings, anthropologists use the method as part of the research as well. Individuals are asked questions and in return, a story is told. CEOs are telling stories everyday from painting a future to crystalizating emerging market opportunities.

Despite the universality of storytelling, many research professionals that use classic research methodologies for qualitative and quantitative studies are reluctant to accept storytelling as an insight tool and some may be skeptical about how storytelling can be beneficial in applied research.

A few tips to keep in mind if you are willing to embark on a new story. First it is not about the number of stories that correspond to a particular segment; it is the quality of the stories. There is no need to be overly concerned about the factual accuracy of the story. And second, the focus should never be around the discussions. While it may be useful for the researcher to understand the questions in the client’s mind, a discussion guide is only useful in a limited sense. At idea Couture, storytelling is considered a leadership skills as much as it is an insight tool.

 

The Hardest Part Of Any Innovation Process Is Sensemaking. And Sensemaking Is Closely Linked To Insights.

The hardest part of any innovation process is where data and insights come together and trying to make sesen of them. Sensemaking is about using visual mappings and narrative techniques to mine the non-quantitative data. This except is taken from a piece in the current issue of M/I/S/C magazine on Insights and Sensemaking co-written by me and Richard Thomas.

Customer inishgts can be inspiring but insights are only useful when they prompt action and self-reflection. Ideally, the best insights inspire even more insights and them more insights, but vast amounts of insights or the lack of context gives way to a different difficulty – the loss of both inherit and intended meaning leaves insights appearing senseless. For this reason sensemaking and insights are closely related. These pictures are from our M/I/S/C Insight Issue launc party. This is a thick issue and flying off the selves fast.

Sensemaking helps to illustrate unthought-of rules-of-order and insights are the direct experience of these perceived rules. Often they are under pressure and cue toward the yet-to-be but insights, by nature, are descriptive and reflective – retrospective of lived experiences. Insights are the past. They have been separated from life. To exist as unpredictable patterns they may or may not fully characterize the ‘real world’ or persist as perceived. The list of problems and challenges organizations face in managing and applying relevant consumer insights continue to grow. Here are a few:

Insight Speed & Complexity: Organizations believe they are working from a complex abundance of insights at an increasing rate – that they are diverse, independent and conflicting – but at times their insights are not insights at all. The pressure to categorize, prioritize and validate dominates the conversation as opposed to getting at the heart of the matter. How does ‘what is going on,’ effect what you desire to be?

Old Insights: Organizations often work form the same cues, and the same insights from the same reports. Managers facing time restraints carry over insights from project to project and create a self-reinforcing false reality and homogenous actionable intelligence at the organizational level, and a lameness that is visible from the shelf.

Biased Insights: Often projects, products and categories come equipped with bias toward the past and dominant insights that reinforce the known and the safe. They are often out of context, separated from their original time, expired but treated anew.

Insight Translation and Application: Drawing value from out of scope, irrelevant or intangible ‘inactionable’ insights is resource heavy. If they do not fit with the current mental model of the market or consumer, and they are cast aside.

Navigating Misinformation: Mistaking repetition and self-similarity as truth or validation. Aging Insights have resulted in a loss of their meaning – and relevancy over time.

Insight Disbelief and Disregard: The insights and processes are becoming contradictory, trust and belief is bleeding out. The inaccuracy of the processes in the real world occupies our emotional intelligence when it should be ‘feeling opportunity’ – sensing valuable cues for action. People want insights to be singular in their validity but as a reflection of the real world, insights could and should complicate and contradict each other to accurately describe reality and texture.

These problems are symptomatic of more than the solutions they seek. The imperative to describe and validate the past, present and future has engaged tension between hesitations and over eagerness about change, insecurity and confusion associated with ambiguity. These problems stem from an over objectification of ‘the insight’ where we wish to be accurate. Insights have become ‘processed’ from perspectives of existing evaluation techniques to control, predict and guide the outcomes of their application in order to ‘de-risk’.

Overly fetishized instrumentation, metrics and measures have become the source of confidence in decision-making. It is hard to put the "sense" back into our everday managerial settings increase the signal-to-noise ration.

Sensemaking is where we sense of complexity and masstive conflicting information is being sorted through and relationships are mapped out and the emerging themes and weak signals are identified and clarified. I have been training senior managers and executives of applied sensemaking in strategy, marketing, product development, operations and technology planning. It is the most important skill managers need to master today.

Design Thinking Is A Cognitive And Intellectual Process That Balances The Rational And Emotional. Not Included With Your MBA.

What is Design Thinking? Because of the word “design” and many automatically associate it with the craft of design or design as a profession. Actually it is less to do with “design” and more with “system”. There are many ways to define "design thinking" and this list is not exhaustive:

• A way to instill customer-centricity and empathy
• A framework for exploration and experimentation
• An approach to sense-making and problem solving
• A methodology to foster exploration and experimentation
• A design buzzword to tell you a designer can do more than design
• A management buzzword sold as the “next” strategic tool
• A marketing slogan or tag line
• A self-gratifying term for those who think they are creative

The term “design thinkers” implies that designers are craftsmen and not thinkers, which is NOT always the case. It is also a stretch for traditional industrial or brand/graphic design firms to claim to be able to use "design thinking" to solve complex strategic issues. These firms need to go through a radical transformation and close a big capability gap before they can even attempt to implement it for others.

Today, "design thinking" is frequently compared and contrasted to business. This is often an over simplification that forces us into predetermined roles along with their associated rules, conventions, behaviors and formal expectations. It Is important to recognize that "design thinking" is NOT exclusive to designers or unattainable to those in another discipline. Design thinking is natural and inherent in all of us who are smart and creative.

"Design thinking" is a cognitive and intellectual process that balances the rational and emotional – in effect combining left brain and right brain thinking. When applied, it harmonizes with other modes of thinking and closes knowledge and information gaps, creating order and refining meaning. Because "design thinking" is a dynamic, constructive process that is iterative in nature, developing ideas requires ongoing definition, redefinition, representation and assessment.

To achieve those tangible outcomes, you need to open the process to multiple participants and socialize the process and outcomes, visualization is a very critical part of the process, not an outcome. Even the Department of Defence recognizes the needs to train "design thinkers" that are capable of critical and creative thinking to plan operations in dynamic environments with fast-changing uncertainties in extremely complex conditions.

People who are capable of using "design thinking" to identify and develop different military response options within the context of a big strategy are crucial to successful military operations. The development of such skills requires a shift in their focus from the operational and tactical environments to the strategic environment. This is an extremely challenging undertaking given that many military officers spend the majority of their career starting at lower levels and their advancement depends upon how well they perform tactically. This is very much like managers in large organizations who were promoted based on their ability to execute tactically.

To develop senior commanding officers with "design thinking" capabilities require DOF to train them new skills including analysis as well as synthesis. "Design thinkers" possess the ability to think critically on a "system" level; break concepts into simpler parts and mapping out their relationship and system impact before rearranging the elements into a new whole; in other words, to produce something through imaginative skills and quick experiments. And yes, imagination is always needed.

Success For Organizations Comes From The Ability To Drive The Strategic Transformation At The Most Critical Points. “Business As Usual” Is A Very Dangerous Expression These Days.

What is "Strategic Transformation?" For some, it is the framework and process of altering the way in which an organisation does business using new technologies and processes. For others, it is the effort to develop a measured, goal-orientated response to marketplace events, or to improve performance by becoming more customer-centricity. But the most stratgic reason is the design and execution of an integrated, future-oriented, enterprise-wide program aimed at moving to an improved future and achieve stretch goals.

In the multitude of voices and noises, strategic and organizational paradoxes, CEOs and their executive team need to learn to navigate, transition and lead their organizations into a new future. Companies that failed to transform their organizations because they put too much emphasis on tools and technology and not enough on foresights, mental mindsets and leadership behaviors. Their leaders failed to develop the shared visions, values and beliefs that serve as foundation for dynamic culture and to engage all employees to co-create the new culture and to provide opportunities for them to initiate and participate in a shared destiny.

They need to start by identifying the specific beliefs and practices that need to be changed, challenge them to create new “experiences” that form those new belief. Convincing someone to change is hard and trying to convince and mobilize a large organization to change is an almost impossible task. But it is still possible. You just need to know where to start and where to push and pull.

There are many reasons why transformation efforts failed, because they over emphasis on the business processes redesign and not enough attention on the underlying human behavior. Strategic transformation is not just about helping people to rethink and reflect on the past and the present; it is also a way to prepare people for future unknowns.

The heart of any transformation lies in finding and embedding the “purpose” of the business and what they individually must do to accomplish that purpose, how to build trust, create networks and innovate. In the course of Idea Couture six years journey of helping large companies to transform, we determined that to create a new level of performance or jump back into a growth mode, a few things matter most. Most transformation will include building a culture of purposeful innovation and high performance. They consist of the following core components: mental mindsets, purpose and meanings, innovation practices, co-creation and measureable results.

When mental mindsets are anchored on a perspective of the future and the executives, board of directors, managers and employees are all aligned, they generate managerial actions that, in turn, lead to superior business performance. An exciting future state and here executives can leverage this to create the cultural momentum that is critical to ongoing innovation success. This cultural capital can help companies to deal with the ambiguities of technological disruptions and external market uncertainties and to direct their energy to adapt to fast changing competitive conditions. Facing increasing complexity applying a single-dimensional focus is absolutely fatal. And any attempt to emulate a successful strategy of your largest competitor is also fatal.

Transformation leaders understand the importance of using “strategic foresights” to help their companies maintain relevancy to the future and it is an ongoing attempt rather than a one-off exercise. Transformation leaders also understand the need to invest a disproportionate amount of time in bringing the organization together and function as one, not as departments or business units that ended-up sub-optimizing the business performance.

Executives in lower-performing organizations complain that they don't have time for the "soft stuff" and needed all the attention for a real business strategy. Yes we need a strategy on where and how we compete and what part of the value chain we can leverage and how to leverage from the economics of scale and scope. Executives are sometimes confused about managing conflicting strategies and they think they have to make difficult trade-offs. It is 100% possible to manage two conflicting strategies without keeping them apart. But to do so first required to develop a strong culture of trust and the ability to accommodate a new management mindset. That's why trasnformation is needed.

There Is An Inherent Conflict Between Logic, Emotion And Creativity. So How Should We Deal With It?

When peope ask the quesion "Do you know the correct answer?" I don't like that question at all. It is not a smart question as a start. The biggest problem with our formal education systems is our over-emphasis on finding the correct answer to a particular problem. While the quest for correct answers helps us to function at work, it also impedes us when it comes to making the bigger, more important decisions, largely because many bigger, real-life business issues are ambiguous, complex and dynamic. If you have been around for over 50 years and have travelled to more than 20 countries and speak a few languages and have a few degrees under your belt, you probably know there is no right answer, may be a lot of wrong answers.

Creativity is not a license to be wrong (you have been reading too much Fast Company), strategy is not a license to be boring or lack of imagination (Reading too much HBR). A PhD degree is not a license to overintellectualize and being irrelevant to the real world and use words that you need to explain what you mean. And an MBA is not an automatic license to make key business decision, you need to earn it.

However an MBA does teach you a few important concepts if only if you understand how to apply them. You should know how to re-org your in-laws into a 'team-based family.' You learn to refer having babies as pilot market testing. You should understand the cost structure and sytem implications of starting a family. You know the cost of capital when your spouse decided to purchase a Hermes Birkin. And most of all, you know how to talk about your past relationships as ‘sunk costs.’

I definitely school needs to teach more creativity. Not the crazy useless exercises but applied creativity and design thinking in everyday life from science to economics. Today (and I should say it has always been) creative thinking is critical to business strategy and innovation; however, If you look at the top 20 MBA programs around the world, you will be challenged to find any courses, core or elective, which teach, train or even inspire students to be truly creative. Instead, most MBA programs and courses focus on numbers, analysis and the logic of deductive reasoning.

There is an inherent conflict between this kind of logic and creativity, and in most business settings, logic is usually quick to get in the way of creativity. Creative ideas can run into the walls of business logic because 1/ it does not quickly, clearly or at all connect to 2/ business strategists often operate within the boundaries of defined roles, and decisions are made based on those boundaries – they draw on what they know and what they have learned including formulaic behaviors, processes and the “best practices” that have evolved through mass consensus – to shape how they think and act.

That explains how many MBA students had Adam Smith on their reading list. The 18th Century idea that people – given their limited time, information, resources and budgets – act purposefully to maximize their own satisfaction is epistemologically central to business thinking. In Smith’s view, all human behavior is rationally self-interested and we are innately selfish. Thanks to this model convinces many how “easy” it is to predict individual or organizational behavior. It is not quite that simple.

When it comes to human behavior, this is where many economic principles, particularly Smith’s, break down. I am not rational (ask those people who work wiht me) and many of us are not. The economist's notion that people act rationally only implies that they try to act in ways that are consistent with their own personal objectives, even if those objectives seem absurd to outsiders. That's the beauty of being human. Read more about creativity in this coming issue of M/I/S/C - The Creativity Issue.

Why Traditional Apporach To Business Transformation Don't Work Anymore?

Over 60% of companies out there are operating on a dated buisness model and 20% operating with a mental model that had expired for more than 5 years. There are little reasons for those 20% of companies to survie another 5 years or even 3 and for the other 60% they have a short window of opportunity to design and orchestrate their transformation.

Rapid changes in external environment, consumer behavior, global economics and disruptive technologies are throwing off the most rigor business strategies and the best trained managers. Although everyone expect to see big changes ahead but people reacts differently to change.

Many people become accustomed to the status quo and don't want to alter the way things are being done -- regardless of the potential benefits or the disruptive threats from emerging competition. For many, fear of the unknowns and the concerned about the ramifications on their careers are barriers to acknowlege the need for change. People don't like change. And winning belongs to those who thrive with change.

Success for operating in a neck-breaking speed and unknown environment often comes from the ability to drive the proper (or mulitple) transformation at different critical points -- for industry breakpoints. “Business as usual” simply means "end of a business or an industry." Being able to reimainge and reinvent offerings and models are critical to addressing economic volatility and staying on top of the market.

Business transformation traditionally takes the form of unfreezing to refreezing and briding the gaps in capabilities, mindset and performance. And these changes which can take the form of business strategy, management style, culture, organization design and business processes.  One most popular model is the classic model proposed by Lewin which argues that the process of change involves three stages 1/ unfreezing, 2/ change and 3/ refreezing. This model was valuable in recognizing the importance of not only new learning, but also “unlearning” old attitudes, habits and behavior patterns. Today many question the practicality of this model suggesting that a “refreeze” implies a resistance to future change and partucular the future is uncertain.

The Idea Couture Brand-Driven Transformation Model has a strong future oritentation and focused on bringing strategic foresights and organization insights to reimage futures. It uses a lot of Design Thinking principles and makes the process very tangible and collaborative. It is a process of organzation co-creation which people put their stake on what shared destinies they wanted to particiapte in creating and thus releasing energy in the process. It will take 80 Power Point slides to illustrate the process, a high-level view of this model is captured by the following formula: Successful Brand-Driven Business Transformation = P+N+C+M+I+F

• P = Develop a perspective of the future(s) informed by strategic foresights (both customer and technology contexts) and deep organizational insights;
• N = Develop a co-created brand narrative that inspired people of possibilities and put purpsoe at the core of the story;
• C = Develop a compelling case for the need for change developed and shared by all executives, investors, employees and B2B business partners;
• M = Develop a practical means to tie innovation (roadmap) and projects to the desired future(s);
• I = Design an incentive systems that are aligned to identify and encourage appropriate behaviors compatible with the desired future;
• F = Develop feedback mechanism for each stage of the process to monitor progress and provide input for continuous improvement.

Any Business Transformation process is painful. The way many organisations manage change or transformation using existing model is facing the challenge of speed. They are too slow and by the time they refreeze, the market has shifted and they need another transformation. The other important issue is key decisions are made in isolation and the change piece comes later which I argue often is too late. The future of Business Transformation is a co-created one.

On Building The Creative Culture And Learning How To "Forget" Creatively.

We had our Idea Couture Christmas staff part last week. Looking back there were a lot being accomplished and a lot more to do. What started as a little experiment bringing multi-disciplinary design thinkers together and now becoming a key driving force and intellectual engine advancing the practice of design thinking in innovation and business applications. Idea Couture is where multidisciplinary thinkers come together with shared purpose and where creativity flourishes. I am looking forward to have our London and Mexico City offices running in 3-6 months. I feel I have the right people in place and that's a great start.

At Idea Couture, creativity means more than just novelty ideas. It means new ways to frame problem, using new lenses and developing new perspectives. I am so happy when I see happy people in the company doing great things. I am happy to see people growing and that's gives me tremendous satisfaction.

At the end of the day, we're in the business of producing the non-conforming super smart and creative thinkers and doers. I am pushing the envelope everyday and so far no one is complaining. Heartiest thanks to my management team who did a great job of putting togther the first Idea Couture Award.  You guys rock!

On the road this week and spending time with people hearing them talk about their innovation challenges and how they apply design thinking. Lots of great meetings. We're aware of the big changes coming ahead. Every business, government and instirutions will be impacted. Change does not creep up on us every 10 or 20 years, it is an ever-present business and organization phenomenon that is disrupting industries and causing firms and industries to disappear. Although the degree and velocity of change is unprecedented.

Everyday we’re dealing with more and more unknown and unknowable, but decisions still need to be made. Many of the challenges today are unique and have few or no precedents, so textbook solutions (and no guru don’t waste time buying whatever best sellers) or trying to find aHarvard Business School case study. Past solutions do not necessarily apply today. The external environment is constantly absorbing shocks from technological advancement, cultural change and systems failure.

Creativity is needed everywhere to rethink and reimagine products, experiences, companies, processes and even industries. Top executives are looking everywhere for new thinking and solutions that are outside the routine of orthodox strategies and old paradigms. So where can you look for new ideas? And how can you design an environment in which creative people can survive, thrive and flourish? We can begin by asking, how can you make people creatively forget what they know in order to reinvent the future? This is where sensemaking comes into play.

A big part of sensemaking is creative “forgetting” and it is first thing you must do. We all create our own environments and then constrained by them. Being able to aware and realize the impact of our own behavior in creating the environment in which we’re in is a very important first step. Forget who we are is something worth practicing. There may not be any scientific evidence to suggest that those who know what to forget can think more creatively about the future, but in the formulation of business strategy, creativity can be seriously constrained if it is burdened by the past. The problem lies in the notion of “core competencies,” which suggest that companies should stick to what they know best. If that’s the case, then why many of those once great companies should still be around.

Thank You Steve! Let's Type This On Our Touchscreens "We Will Miss You Steve Jobs."

It is a very very day with the news that Steve Jobs, who has died aged 56 following a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The world has lost a visionary, not only he made an unprecedented impact not only on the world of computing and consumer electronics with insanely great products that inspired a generation of people to dream big and be different, he has also reinvented management by building and rebuilding one of the greatest companies on earth. His creative and innovative spirit and remarkable accomplishments will forever be remembered by all of us.

Steve was the most creative person on earth in business I’ve known of. His creative spirit will inspire many for decades to come. You wonder what’s makes Steve so creative? And what is creativity anway? How creativity happens? How do we prepare ourselves for creativity? Do you have to be a whole-brain thinker? Or you only need to be a rightbrainer? Are there many more young Steve Jobs out there?

Creative individuals have a few distinctive features that distinguish them from their peers: They have a rich body of domain-relevant knowledge and well-developed skills, also they find their work intrinsically motivating (Simonton 2000; Amabile 1988). They tend to be independent, unconventional, and more risk-taking, and to have wide interests and a greater openness to new experiences (Simonton 2000). Steve met all those criteria and was a perfect archetype of a super creative person.

Creative individuals also tend to have a strong “discovery” orientation, which leads them to look at situations from different perspectives at the same time, to frame problems differently, and to ask novel questions. Some academics and creative managers like to describe creativity as a process, I belong to the school of Vinacke that believes creative thinking in the arts does not follow a model or any models. Ask any top creative talent, see if they follow a process. I never like the idea to reduce creativity to a five staged process. It is simply not creative to do so.

The best creativity comes from managed chaos and applied fuzzy logic. It is never about careful calculations and you simply cannot engineer lucky accidents. It is also about committment to make change, it is a powerful motivator for creative people. Design Thinking helps organization to improve its creative and imagination capability, but it is not a creative process. Creativity has no process. Don’t waste your money on any books. Just read Steve Jobs’ story.

Steven Paul Jobs, management guru, creative visionary, businessman, born 24 February 1955; died 5 October 2011.

'Purpose' Can Consciously And Authentically Infuse Workplace With Positive Emotive Energy Beyond Money Can Buy. There Is No Strategy Wihout 'Purpose'.

Teaching and practicing strategy is what I love. Strategy or strategic innovation is like a chess game except the chessboard keeps morphing into different shapes and there are always players entering and leaving the game. My experience is that it is subject that is undertaught in business schools and least understood in the business world. It seems like my students at CEDIM Master of Innovation Program are all having a good time. And I got a bottle of Tequila from Carolos and Michael. You need that to teach innovation I supposed.

First you cannot separate strategy from strategic innovation, competitive strategy can sustain you but cannot leapfrog others. Second strategy has a soft side, such as the putting ‘Purpose’ into the strategy equation. You cannot differentiate around something that you don’t have a heart for it.

Finding differentiation is hard enough, making sure it is relevant and sustainable is even more difficult. Putting ‘Purpose’ into it is the most difficult, you simply can’t fake it. When it comes to strategy implementation, purpose is even more important. Often you will have to make very difficult economic trade offs, without that, you will simply make those decisions based on short term economic benefits.

If Zappos did that, they would not have offered one year return policy or have their call center in India instead of Las Vegas. These all add up to the happiness indexes of Zappos which is the core of its strategy. Strategy implementation is also iterative, a process inducing various forms of individual and organizational learning, because both external threats and strategic responses are shaping these decisions on an everyday basis.

What every organization needs to achieve enduring success and power up true differentiation is ‘Purpose’. It is critical and can break the most robust strategy if there is a lack of one. It is not a mission statement or something that hangs on the wall. It is core reason for people to come to work and to mobilize all managers and employees to act consistently, responsibly and decisively. It triggers innovative thinking and trustful working relationships.

‘Purpose’ can consciously and authentically infuse workplace with positive emotive energy can impact every aspect of performance. It is the heart and soul of strategy.

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 New Game Of Strategy: Applied Design Thinking In Business Innovation And Transformation

Just when I thought I can have 2 days in an office then I realized I have to be In NYC tomorrow for a few days. I am writing this post on a flight after missing my connection in Houston, and just finished teaching a three days Strategy graduate course with a focus on strategic innovation and design thinking. What I did was bringing the Harvard Business School case study method of teaching and apply it to design thinking and innovation, it is really interesting and probably an innovation itself because innovation means going against the conventional analytical thinking.

The shift from teaching competitive strategy to strategic innovation changes how the case studies were originally written for. I am using the same teaching material but instead applying atotally different pedagogical focus – which is how to avoid the very obvious and how to develop and apply ‘New Game’ in strategy making. It was intense for the students but they were liking it. I theorize, practice and teach these concepts and so for me, it is not academic, it is real.

Strategy is never that simple as picking the right competitive positioning, segments or competing on different dimensions. It is often complicated because it involves changing of mindset and mental models – mindsets that inspire individuals and teams to think imaginatively, to take risks, to seek out, and to expand the boundaries of a business or redefining customer value. It is hard.

Then there are structural, systems and processes for sharing of ideas, sense-making of data and working together. This includes developing new perspectives and collaborate on ‘white space mapping’ which was never taught at business schools. The very nature of competitive advantaged has changed and I challenged anyone who tell me if they really have a real and relevant competitive advantage that they thought they have.

The information revolution continues and is enabling companies to easily (and sometimes cheaply) match current competitive differentiators and rapidly create new ones. The result is that competitive advantage is evolving from simply focusing on differentiation, low cost or focus. The idea is to do all, the stuck in the middle can be a desirable position if you understand the underlying economic forces. Most business school students and even professors hardly understand how to apply the Five-Forces properly and let alone adapting it to a very different business environment where speed, empathy and community become key strategic elements in addition to bargaining powers and competitive dynamics. We need a new framework that takes into consideration the use of community in business strategy development. I’ve used cases including Method, Microsoft X-Box, Loco Motor and a few others to illustrate the concepts.

I think I should start developing teaching notes based on the original case study but with a different teaching emphasis. Classic views on strategy include Joseph Schumpeter focuses attention on innovation and entrepreneurialism. He suggested that bigger the company the more resources and diversification one can bring to R&D and as a result get better return on innovation. Michael Porter, following Alfred Chandler, focuses attention on business organization and competitive strategy and introduces the concept of cluster to explain competitiveness.

Today’s the nature of strategy and competitive advantage is drastically shaped by strategic innovation -- powered by customer co-creation; desire of consumer to change the status quo and powerful social innovation networks; integrates customer deep into business organization; demand chain into supply chain and contrasts inter-firm relations in terms of market, and closed or semi-closed and open-networks.

The attempt to develop competitive advantage is only the first step. It is sustaining the advantage that is far more challenging. How often companies invested millions and millions of dollars to create barriers for entry only to find out they lasted only for a short a few months. Waking up one morning seeing that your industry value chain was being reconfigured and the expiry date of your business model was last week is not exactly a fun thing. If you find that every six months you have to innovate on something the market will embrace is too exhausting, it is time to embrace design thinking.

Random Thoughts On Muggles, Magic And Design Thinking.

For those of you who are not familiar with Muggles, they are people who are incapable of magic, and who are usually unaware of the wizarding world. Design Thinking is sort of like wizardries, it takes certain type of people with the certain type of training, Hogwarts or Harvard.

When Muggles think Design Thinking, they see nothing new there and they believe it has been around for a long time, it basically means they still don’t get it and may never will. They hardly see the real challenge, it is simply not to invent a better mouse traps. We care capable of doing more and being more innovative. The power of our imagaination is what it is.

"It is our choices that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities."  ~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 1999, spoken by the character Albus Dumbledore

Design Thinkin is alot more than lateral thinking and creativity de Bono style or ad agency style brainstorming. Design Thinking fills the gap created by management theories and business schools which analytical thinking and data-driven decision making override intuition where empathy is never part of the equation.

Companies have been battered by system level economic failure, extreme uncertainties, and the failure of traditional forms of strategic making, leadership styles and management model. These wounds have left businesses gazing hopefully towards Design Thinking. Design Thinking is bringing a refreshed, revitalized, and rejuvenated approach to management and strategic thinking- however, design thinking is far from a cure-all. It takes a certain type of people who are comfortable with different thinking styles. I’ve read so much poorly written papers about design thinking and many of them don’t even grab the basic principles and its true transformational power.

Often people talk narrowly about design and prototyping, but Design Thinking is not just bringing the power of empathetic creative problem-solving to bear on a human needs, it is an organization culture, a mindset, a framework and a toolkit to solve complex wicked problems that we created. It provides a balance between the needs to create customer value, shareholder return and social value. Design Thinking is strategic.

Everyone comes to me hoping to join Idea Couture claims they are creative, they have great ideas and can turn ideas into great products and create new markets. Go deeper and I ask the how… there comes the sound of silence. Great Idea, great products, great business is a tagline, not a strategy. Design Thinking can be applied to fill the gaps of traditional strategic thinking. The increasingly complex needs of the business need a new toolkit and Design Thinking is exactly what is needed. It helps to uncover new needs, creatively redefine value, reconfiguration of value-chain activities, develop compelling brand narratives and create markets that are yet to exist. When my friend Roger Martin advocates Design Thinking, he is not talking about ethnography or prototyping; he is talking about a whole new management paradigm.

Everything is designed—from behavior, systems, organizations to public policies. Design is universal. The dirty secrets of why how big corporations destroy shareholder value are actually no secrets. Everyone from the board of directors to the frontline employees knows 'why' a company is 'stuck.' Because their structures and management systems are so rigid and can’t adapt to changing market shifts or respond to any disruptions; their over focus on core competencies and optimization that prevent them to see beyond the core and; fail to see and anticipate the future and even if they see it they fail to act on it. This is where Design Thinking comes into play.

Everyone understands the need to make money and everyone hope they can do magic. And everyday many moguls are trying to create magic with cute packaging and fancy taglines and hoping to make a lot of money, off course it won’t work. The real magic lies in understanding deep human desire and unmet needs and anticipate emerging behavior, not every company truly understands how to do it. They teach those at the Ministry of Design Thinking.