innovation playground Idris Mootee

Leadership Without Consensus Is Great Leadership. Great Leadership Means Deciding On What Is Best For the Company. And Sticking With It.

Many times when people walk out of a meeting and look happy it is because they have achieved consensus and can now move forward. I always question if this is a sign of a good outcome or not. While having everyone on the same page and sharing the same vision is without question a good thing. But arriving on a strategic decision based on consensus may not.

So they say a good team worker knows how to get consensus. It is an overly simplistic way of management decisions making. The best teamwork and team leadership is not about getting quick consensus. 99% of the time consensus making is a time wasting exercise (much like those UN meetings) and is a false ideal that many young managers are trying to follow.

Consensus means using the lowest common denominator and is a sure way to achieve under-performance and mediocrity. More, it means poor leadership - you just reduced your leadership capacity to a facilitator and avoided doing the job that you're supposed to do - make decisions that you are capable of and justifiable.

It has been said that true consensus involves "meeting everyone’s or those with the needs." Consensus decision-making is intended to de-emphasize the role of factions and get stakeholders to arrive at a common acceptable solution. Because it seeks to minimize objection, it is great for large organizations so no one will be taking the full responsibility in the event of a bad outcome.

The goal for a CEO is never to seek an OK or acceptable solution for the organization. His/her job is not to please everyone. The job is to make the right decision considering all risks factors and possibilities. Consensus involves debate. It is fine to debate; it is fine to allow people to have a voice; it is also fine to ignore many of these requests; and it is fine to ignore them when there is no logic to support it. Today, if you wait for every last person to agree and add in their feedback, you competition will eat you. Or your great idea will be diluted into some incremental thing that takes 3 years to fully implement.

Consensus often means the status quo. It means not taking the threat lightly and deciding to stay the course, which is human nature. So, when people get together to discuss the possibility of doing something radically innovative, expect 80% of people will vote for avoiding making such changes. Those who push for the status quo will always gain better support because it is easily to show data to support it. Consensus brings people back to the middle where the majority approves but mediocrity reigns.

Consensus often means leaving unresolved conflict or issues and pretending it would go away. Consensus prevents tough conversations from happening and so one will upset anyone so the meeting can end quickly. It helps avoid facing the reality. Then they will talk after meeting. Consensus means forget the idea go big or go home. No one will bet their career on any crazy idea even though deep down in their hearts they like the idea. They are just managerially uncomfortable or incapable of making those bold decisions. They are trained for the opposite.

Good leadership is to make tough decisions and trade offs. Leadership is to know where a company is heading and make decisions that lead to the best results. Good leadership is not wasting too much time to get consensus. Good leadership is making a strategic decision and committing to it.

Random Thoughts On Maturing Companies and Start-Ups. When Do You Need A Reset?

In an interesting conversation with clients this week and discussions were around the question: “should companies plan for the distant future (10 years and beyond) and what is needed to get out of a death spiral where a slow death is in the making?”

There is a big difference between growing with age and growing old. With age, it sometimes comes with wisdom. With more than a dozen of C-suite execs that I have worked with or coached, for most of them, the wisdom came one day after they had passed the age of 50. Growing comes with age, which sometimes take away the energy and urge to make radical change. Ask yourself or your organization, the last 5 years your company or yourself should be referred to as a “growth experience” or “aging experience”.

A CEO’s job is to make sure the company is growing with experience” and not “aging with experience”. Company needs constant renewal, the leadership team is expected to generate enough energy to motivate the entire company. You need a strategy to energize and motivate. Not empty speech and propaganda video and banners. Time doesn’t mean we gain more experience. Reinvention, renewal and resetting are mantras for growing experiences. We shape what we become. When companies are stuck in a stagnant mode or worse in a downward spiral, it is because of the experience they have. Not because the new things that they try. They are usually too old (state of mind), conservative, naive and irrelevant and that managerial mindset is holding the company back for serious reinvention.

A look back at many failing leaders’ biggest attempts to bring their companies back for the past 10 years reveals an embarrassing series of missteps, mistakes, and flat-out bad products, culminating in a flurry of poorly-executed uncommitted attempt to create and own a distinct market positioning. Most of the time, the product failed before they are being introduced. No one can do anything at that time. Think about the following:

• We have been very good in making this and we should be fine.
• We always do things this way. It is too risky for us to change.
• Let’s watch where the market is going first. We can wait.
• We need to do what Apple, Nike, Amazon and Starbucks do.
• We should hedge our bets and try different things too.
• Let’s give the market what they want and make sure we have a competitively cheaper offer.

If you do one or a few of the above, you will most likely be somewhere along the downward spiral. For companies to end the spiral of death, it takes more than cost-cutting and requires an orchestrated effort for everyone involved to imagine and see the possibility forward. It is about applying a practical future-oriented foresight to drive strategy and unleashing the company from legacy people, thinking and even management board. There is no place for the “old" in the world of constant resets.

Disruption Is Less About Technology. It's About Customer Experience. Disruptive CX Strategy Needs To Get Emotional.

Why do some companies make so much profit and command price premiums while some continually  struggle to make minimum margin and gain market share despite spending good money on advertising, buying channel presence with some even having a better designed product?

The secret is very simple. Though these different high performance companies operate in very different industries and face different challenges, the major reason for their success comes down to one thing. They understand it is all about the customer experience. And they don’t even have to do it for everyone. At least not initially.

They are putting their customers at the center of their universe; they also understand that not every company can do that (including their competitors who are many times bigger and with big marketing budget) because it will be difficult or too expensive for them to make that work for everyone.

The secret is that you should start with ‘not everyone’ and identify those ‘someone who cares’. Those someones who appreciate the extra things that you do and will ultimate tell everyone about it and essentially those become the most tangible evidence of your brand promise. The declining effectiveness of advertising is well evidenced and many marketers are still doing that despite their value propositions which are unclear, and customer experience is underwhelming. And instead of spending time and resources on the latter, they take the easy path and buy more display advertising, it is not going to work.

Smart companies understand that success depends most fundamentally on a few core customers and if you can tailor your customer value propositions to them and then design the experiences just for them, you’re on the right track and can achieve a new level of performance and differentiation. These customer experiences are not about a $50 rebate, or a free something or many thank you emails. These are things that consumers take for granted and believe you’re doing it to get their business as the cost of doing business.

Customer experience needs to get emotional. This is how our brains are wired and this is when design thinking comes into play. You need to map the customer journeys and engineer happy accidents. Not a business process exercise at all and don’t mix them up. Walk their shoes in their everyday life and constantly invent new ways to apply the best value propositions on minimal scale. Remember customer experience is not about being well said, it is about being well done and it is not a published rule book. It is embedded in your culture and how your brand dictates your behavior.

In Algorithms We Trust. Do We?

Let's try to paint a likely not-too-distant future. In this future, everything around us will be managed by algorithms. They manage and recommend what we want to watch; they control traffic of our driver-less cars; they control those drones which deliver our pizza; predict for you which one of your friends will become your future spouse, etc. They will make our life effortless and predict what things will happen next or what's best for us. We all wish that it is that simple.

As we are picking up massive data every second, algorithms are critical to how we make sense of them and our reliance on algorithms is growing by the second. But how much faith should we put into those algorithms, and how reliable they are depends on who you talk to. The accuracy of the algorithmic differentiation (automatic differentiation) is key in dealing with data volatility in many complex cases where accuracy of data is critical to the final outcome. I don’t know when we can have statistical evidence comparing how often driverless cars mistakes and how often human drivers make mistakes or how well a software program investing in stocks makes mistakes and human making investment mistakes.

We need to develop programs to check whether algorithms are working as they were intended and monitoring algorithms by the results they produce based on machine performance metrics. Vetting algorithms in advance isn't practical at all as many are too complex for their outcome to be predicted. Algorithmic differentiation is used to fine tune algorithms that are complex to optimize. We will be placing our faith into the accuracy of these algorithms and trusting that they will deliver. I think we may be over-optimistic and mining a lot of data using statistical analysis still has a very strong random component to it. To optimize these models we need algorithmic differentiation and sometimes it feels like a scientific random number generator. The more data we have, the more simulation is needed and the more reliance on the significance of data, and significance means sensitivities. We’re in the midst of a transformation when industries are exploring how to use big data to create new business models.

There’s one certain thing in big data, it’s that all algorithms are not created equal. The biggest question is how many jobs will disappear when algorithms take over human jobs? People ask the same question during the first industrial revolution when machines started making goods a lot faster and cheaper. Are we entering a world in which the algorithms themselves will be competing with humans? Honestly, I just don't like it when algorithms make decisions for us. They can help me analyze my options and probabilities, but not making a decision until they prove that they can think smarter than me. And so the game begins…

Thank You Robert Downey Junior For The Nine Creative Short Films You Created to Celebrate The HTC M9. Honestly, I Don't Quite Get It.

Thank you, Robert Downey Jr, for the nine inspirational short films you created to celebrate our all-new HTC One M9. Honestly, as HTC's CMO and the client who commissioned you the project and telling everyone it is a great idea, I am really not getting it. At least not all of it. I just want to be honest about it.

I am considered a very creative person and, as a designer, I appreciate all kinds of art from surrealism to post-modernism. I understood the concepts explained to me by team RDJ before we started this project and I deeply appreciate all the effort and enthusiasm you put into this. It was a lot of hard work and you did it for love (I will keep that secret between us). Thank you RDJ! But I still don’t get it! Ask the Internet?

Yes, I have my official explanation captured in a video of these nine playful vignettes juxtaposing the sleek, color-changing attributes of the new HTC One M9 with timeless pop-culture inspirations, from The Prisoner to Andy Warhol to Charlie Chaplin. I believe you drew inspirations from the features that I explained to you before you started your ideation process, and I can see those connections. The official launch of the films at SXSW last week was a great success, and we received very good feedback from folks in the creative industries. Whether they are viewed individually or as a whole, these nine films are not only entertaining, but they get us thinking.  And hopefully they inspire us to go out and make something!

The important question for me is, do these very creative short films improve brand presence, brand preferences, and brand relevance for HTC? Those are the right questions, and I don’t have all the answers yet. To put it in context these are not expensive productions, so to get our ROCA (Return on Creative Assets) is not an issue. 

Let's start with the first one brand presence; with millions of people viewing these videos within the first 48 hours, and now spreading across the Internet, the first one is not a question after all. It gets HTC the awareness we needed without spending any money buying paid media on TV or social platforms. So, it is a very effective way for maintaining awareness in an already noisy world. It is a lot better than chest thumping to get noticed. We don’t want to be Tarzan. We’d rather be Charlie Chaplain.

The second question is, does it create brand preference for the HTC brand? This effort itself is no easy undertaking. To make a brand more preferred over others in a defined category (in our case, the smartphone) is an expensive and long-term undertaking, and there is no short cut. The most common approaches involve highlighting certain unique selling propositions to make the brand more attractive; focusing on incremental performance (such as battery life) or improved service (extended warranty programs, and so on) as differentiators. These things don’t change brand preferences at all, and even highly visible sponsorships, celebrity endorsements, and more engaging social media programs rarely change it. Shaping brand preferences is not an overnight thing.

The problem is that over-investing in advertising (beyond the minimum level) rarely changes the market share structure. Customers are less inclined or motivated to change brand loyalties in established markets – emerging markets are a very different story – unless it is a low involvement purchase. Over-spending on marketing usually hurts margins, profitability, and, ultimately, results in a decline into irrelevance. HTC made that mistake before with the big TV campaign. Internal numbers showed an increase of just 10 to 15 percent of improved brand awareness. In short, it doesn't do anything at all. It was a disaster and a laughingstock. Sony made the same mistake by pouring out big ad dollars in 2014. Sony overall generated $17.4 billion in revenue, but posted a net loss of $1.2 billion during its fiscal second quarter last year. Sony smartphone units saw revenue rise 1.2% year over year to $2.8 billion, but slid to a $1.6 billion operating loss and effectively wiped out all the profits Sony made from other business units during the quarter.

The average tenure for a CMO is very short. Samsung and HTC burnt through a few CMOs in a short period, and so do many other companies. For CMOs to succeed, they must sit at the top of an ASS – “Agile, Scientific, and Social” – marketing organization, and new capabilities need to be built from the ground up based on these new requirements. The art and science of marketing is advancing towards the ASS model. Advertising agencies are further behind the curve than clients, and clients are demanding more.

The third question is, do these films create Brand Relevance? This is a question for debate. These short films are irrelevant on their own at least for some, including myself. But does it matter? Apple and Samsung are known to everyone as two market leaders, and so they need to market to everyone. They need to appeal to their served customers. But HTC is different. We are definitely not selling to everyone, even though it is fair to say that our products are for everyone. The reality is that awareness is not the main driver in increasing brand strength and relevance; how relevant your product is in the minds of your customers, and how your brand is being perceived to be unique is more important. The world is desperately moving towards being more individualized and personalized. Mass advertising works based on appealing to the lowest denominators and it has its place. 

I believe in the market of ONE. Industrial economics may not (yet) allow us to produce highly customized smartphones, and mass media is the same. Even though social media is slowly behaving like broadcast media, it is hard to create customized messages due to the economics of content production. Here this is a good experiment to allow people draw on their imagination to create their own interpretations. I hope this encourage more brands to take bolder moves to co-create meanings with customers and not brainwashing the with a message and a reason to believe. That's so 80s.

If you are able to achieve greater customization (through messages and meanings), it will be very relevant to your customers and it will resonate with them. As a result, customers will specifically seek out that brand or product. This is the hypothesis the super short mini-films are based upon. It is an experiment; they are not ads, they are not viral videos, and they are not micro-films. I don’t know what to call them – just some very short films.

Transformative marketing has no cruise control or auto-pilot switch. It exists in an accelerating paradigm: more dramatic changes, more often. Brands of the future will take risks and lead change, not simply respond to it. As marketers we need to have the courage to commit to finding new and bold ways of doing things and being relevant. 

I’ll now take off my marketer’s hat and switch to an art critic’s hat. The literal definition of artist as brand (Robert Downey Jr) is “a creator who has become a unique star, symbol, icon, Mr. Iron Man,” but the idea goes deeper that that. I believe marketing can empower an artist’s authentic purpose, identity and creativity. When an individual’s core purpose and creative talent are synergistically aligned and amplified with a product's design philosophy, they can become “transcendent symbols.” This is not about fame. This is about creative power in the truest sense of the word. Know thyself. The world will recognize it too.

One artist + One phone = Nine visions.

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Design Leadership Is More Than Simplicity. It Is About Design Discipline.

El·e·gant, an adjective and define or characterized by or exhibiting refined, tasteful beauty of manner, form, or style. Marc Jacob? Chanel? Jil Sander? Hermes? All are unquestionably elegant by design in the fashion world. How about smartphones or interfaces? Can they be elegant? Or what about customer experiences? Can you describe a banking or customer service experience as elegant? Most people don’t.

Is elegant a word reserved solely for tangible product? The design world likes to use words such as “elegant”, “simple” and “user friendly”, many designers understand how to subtract in creating simple and elegant design solutions. Human factors usually subtract more than add. Good designers often take away complexity in objects or interfaces. Design is more than just making things simple. They appears simple but not necessarily simple. Design is the most complicated process but least understood.

Design should be strategic. Being strategic also means being human. 9 out of 10 designers barely understand what that means. Most are trained as design craftsman. There are very few design visionary and I only know a handful of them. They are also very few design managers. And that’s the reason why designers never made it to the boardroom and they complain they don’t have a voice. Because they are not strategic. Design becomes a competitive advantage for corporations when it is used strategically. At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism supporting by the underlying economics to make it feasible to produce and sell.

I have been hiring and mentoring designers (including some of the very best talents) for decades and can tell you which typology they belong in 5 minutes. It is very easy to find designers, it is not too difficult to find good designers, it is very hard to find design visionary. Because they are not trained in design schools. They need to be cultivated.

But there are so much business can learn from design. If the best design can be elegant, then can a business strategy be “elegant”? Or can a particular management style be described as “elegant”? Anything elegant is often simple; not everything simple is elegant. Things that are simple are often user friendly, not everything simple is user friendly. Sometimes complexity is needed. Simplicity has different meanings. Good businesses need to be simple and easy to understand, and that’s the investment criteria for Warren Buffet. Businesses are getting too complex these days and same for design. Long gone are the days where a few talented young folks sketching out ideas in a room. That's a mindset that stops designers from growing up to a highly complicated world.

Design process is never simple, it is often very messy as everyone has an opinion. Don't try to make it simple. But the result shouldn't be complicated. Design needs strong leadership and no different from other disciplines. Design never works in a highly politically environment and as a result you get design by committee – which is a recipe for disaster. Design management is to take the politics out and allow the essence remains. And the process is true to the mission - design to delight and make profits - not one but both.

Design needs strong leadership. Design never works if it is not managed. Best designers perform well in a professionally managed environment. Not the most desirable for many, but it is necessary. Apple design team is professionally managed and same for Mercedes and Burberry or BMW. There is no design without discipline. There is no discipline without intelligence. Strong design leaders are never popular, because they need to cut out the non-sense that designers to hide behind. To force people to unlearn old theories of design.

Designers wants to remain small, fully independent and less disciplined and that’s why most design firms cannot scale beyond certain size and fail after a few years. They want to ignore the commercial complexities and stay pure. I appreciate that too but companies cannot afford it. Unless it is your own business and you don't care about making profits.

Design for elegance is better for design for simplicity. Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, “I wouldn’t give a fig for simplicity on this side of complexity, but I would give my life for simplicity on the other side of complexity.” Elegance is “far side” simplicity that is emotionally engaging, profoundly intelligent, and artfully crafted to be two things at once: simple and powerful. In today's super connected world, the proliferation of digital devices and experiences require designers to create new ways of harmonizing software and hardware with elegant connectivity – connecting humans in an elegant way. Industrial designers, human interface designers and mechanical engineers need to explore new theories for them to make physical products real and meaningful and elegant. Why elegance? It is not an elusive target? Industrial designers should stop thinking about functional ease and simplicity, that is an over simplify way of thinking design. Some times people love things that are not so easy. Think about your personal relationships, you don’t go for the easiest one, you go for where your hearts is. Design is the same. How do you put love in an industrial produced object? That’s our job.

The Best Kept Secrets Of Breakthrough. Everyone Should Start Practicing Them.

Everyone is looking for a breakthrough. The massive shift in generation differences in consumer behavior and rapid technological shift are casuing many companies to fail.... and it will happen fast. Companies that are stuck in their old mental model cannot breakout for many reasons. It is usually a combination of all that causes them to be irrelevant. It includes leadership’s blind sight, organization legacies and lack of foresights and the list goes on and on...

How often companies can act swiftly and not taking a wait and see attitude? All the time. It takes strong leadership to take bold decisions even though they feel fear while making these decisions. Here are a few ideas, which I often make accessible to a my select clients. How do breakthroughs happen? It is not just luck or strategic thinking. Can they be engineered? Are there preconditions? Or is it a skill that we can develop and learned? When companies are stuck whether in an old paradigm of doing business or a legacy business design, they need breakthrough.

Exploring the “Grey” area. The central core of organizations contains beliefs that were built up over the years and a value system that provides us with perspectives of the world and forms the grayscale of our personality. Seeing the world in black and white is terribly dangerous. Sticking to your core does not mean you should not understand the ‘grey’ around it. Making explicit attempt to push the “grey” area of what consider your core.

Anticipate and Leverage Moments Most breakthroughs don’t happen through excessive rationalization or planning. In fact, almost all breakthroughs are sparked by “moments.” This is one of the things I teach people about looking for breakthroughs. The process of finding any breakthrough – whether in business, technology or design – often involve immersing oneself in large amounts of data and extensive debate and synthesizing information. Most people fail to see the moments when they happen or fail to capture them. I have a long list of things you can do to maximize it happening.

Expand Awareness through Emotions. There is so much myth about emotions; we often associate them with the extreme cases when we overreact or how they prevent us from making the right decision or making us too aggressive with the things that we want. These are all true, but emotions also have a positive side – if you know how to use them. Emotions are our inner sensors at work, sending us weak signals from the outside. It triggers our desire to heighten our senses as our whole and even affect our brains in memory, basically expanding the operating parameters of our cognition. It helps us take in more information, store them in a deeper place inside our mind, hold multiple ideas in mind at once, and layers a feeling over objects and situations.

Imagineering as Daily Ritual. Unless you’re in the business of creative production such as film, animation or video gaming, most likely you don’t have a need to use imagination in your daily work. But imagination is not a tool we can call up on demand; we need to practice it every day in order to maintain our ability to imagine. Imagination is a major part of how we frame and solve problems. The practice of applied imagination (or imagineering) can increase the number of creative options available for a specific problem that we’re trying to solve. Imagination is part of our subconscious way to assist with idea generation. You’re not so much thinking of specific ideas of how to solve a problem, but rapidly and randomly envisioning what might be, what could be, and what couldn’t be. It's very easy to compare creativity and knowledge in an abstract, metaphorical sense – but we know that our imagination is developed from the knowledge we gain in the experiences of our daily lives and little encounters.

Practice Design of Meanings. Try to design a breakthrough project or pilot activity for yourself as experiment. Some breakthroughs are sparked by eureka moments based on insights – but far more are based on design. Design-driven innovation is spurred by thinking about possible breakthrough features, meanings and product languages that could emerge in the future. This cannot be done by talking to consumers or looking at current user behaviors. Consumers can’t really imagine radical futures, as they are anchored and invested in the current one; thus they are not helpful in anticipating possible radical changes in new product meanings. Big breakthroughs don’t necessarily come from disruptive applications or advanced functions; sometimes it’s new meanings that shift the universe. Think about how every one of the everyday objects that we see around our home can be transformed: instead of being simply functional, consider how to turn them into symbolic objects of irony, desire and affection.

Let's Not Confuse Drawing Circles And Arrows With Real Sensemaking.

As everything is moving faster and less predictable as it seems while organizations struggling to understand what it means and what options to take and how to land on the right decisions at the right time.The results often are inactions or delayed repsonses that cost companies.

Both senior and middle managers’ job include understanding, interpreting and communicating options for executive decisions, both as change agents and advocates. The toolkit that they have is very limited. Sensemaking is a vital skill and a new managerial discipline that is lacking across many organizations and functional units. How do we define sensemaking? It is how we try to make sense of the world and associated challenges so we can see and act in it. It also carries the concept of sufficiency, which is whether we know enough about the interrelationships and dynamics of the scenarios (events, places, people etc.) to make a contextually appropriate decision.

The two main academic thinkers in the field are Karl Weick and Brenda Dervin both of their work are very user readable. Weick I think tends to apply a more normative and organizational approach while Dervin looks at individuals and communication. Karl Weick emphases the importance of “mapping.” It is not enough to collect a lot of data, as we do these days and it is often overwhelming for managers, what is really important is that we need to take that complexity and map it in a simple way that can be communicated and shared so that a team or an organization can have a shared view of what the environment is like right now. Make complexity communicable but yet not making it overly simple.

I have seen people drawing simple circles or big maps with arrows and boxes but fail to communicate anything except the situation is complex and end up comfusing themselves as well as others. So beware of those fancy arrows and boxes that are useless. Good mapping provide managers with the benefit of seeing what’s going on and comparing that with their mental models. Good decisions making depends heavily on good sensemaking that includes important cues and signals so managers and senior executives can have a bigger capacity to make sense of uncertainty and emerging behavior. It has always been a core part of our strategic design thinking toolkit and there is no shortage of demand from clients to learn that skills. 

Does Social Media Makes All Of Us Phenomenologists?

It is every designer’s dream to design a chair. I have yet to meet an industrial designer that doesn’t want to design a chair or a car. It is designer’s dream for those who study transportation design is to design a car and I get it. Chairs and tables? The reality is how often designers get a chance to design their own chairs? And every transportation designers ended up doing is styling a car that was designed by a computer. There are disproporationately large amount of chairs being designed than to other objects and products.

Any object whether it is chair, a table, a smartphone, or a coffee maker does not exist in a vacuum and are part of a informal system that links to a complex set of interactions both human and machines. And even a complex layer of meanings for a relatively simple object – a chair or a functional tool – a smartphone. For some, the term “phenomenology” is only restricted to the characterization of sensing qualities such as seeing, touching, hearing, etc.: what it is like to have sensations of different kinds that forms a human experience. But our experience is normally much richer in content than mere sensation.

Sensational experience is great but short-lived. To create meanings is the ultimate human experience. To design, in phenomenological terms, is to address the meaning of things or objects have in our own experience, in our own “life-world” and how we "experience" them. Just ask any designers if they see their discipline this way? Mostly not and 90% of designers’ effort are on aesthetics and not phenomenology. Is there a discipline called "design phenomenology"?

Phenomenology is the examination of the structure of various types of experience ranging from a broader and deeper perspectives and including deep diving on perception, thought, memory, imagination, emotion, desire, and volition to bodily awareness, embodied action, and social activities, linguistic activity etc. We need to apply that before we strategize a new business concept, a new service design model or an innovative new product.

It is what we need to understand context of anything. The structure of these forms of experience typically involves what Edmund Albrecht Husserl (German philosopher who established the school of phenomenology) called “intentionality”, that is, the directedness of experience toward things in the world, the property of consciousness that it is a consciousness of or about something and this is what makes the jon fun. It is not for someone without imagination. It is all about seeing “intends” as well as “jobs-to-perform” and “concepts of the world”. The idea is studying the units of consciousness is like “giving voice to” and these units of consciousness are called intentional acts or intentional experiences. It is basically the most human centric approach to understanding human experiences.

When designers try to design experiences, perhaps they should need to first consider phenomenology. It is not really a rocket science, for centuries poets, writers, painters, film producers are born phenomenologists. I think most of us are born phenomenologists particular in the days of Facebook and other social media where we share everything, we understand very well by means of words, videos and images, our insights with our friends — we are all practicing phenomenology without knowing it.

How Do Breakthroughs Happen? Here's My Little Secrets For Breakthroughs After Helping Executives For Decades..

How do breakthroughs happen? Can they be engineered? Are they pure luck? Or are they the result of skills that we can develop and improve upon over time? Along with the fear of the unknown and the pressure to make it happen, breakthroughs come with an incredible sense of possibility and satisfaction.

The experience of uncovering a breakthrough is exhilarating and hard to explain. It’s a sense of not knowing exactly where I am going, but knowing that I am going somewhere. Here’s my secrets to achieving breakthroughs:

• Preserve the “Me”. The world we're living in today seems to be a completely different one from 10 or 20 years ago and a crazie one. Sometimes I wonder if the world is really changing that fast at a break-neck pace. There is a notion that if you can’t change the world you should change the way you look at it, but I don’t like the idea of changing myself according to the world and adapting to it. The central core of what’s “me” contains beliefs that we’ve built up over the years and a value system that provides us with perspectives on the world and forms the grey scale of my personality. Black and white only exists in film, photography and my Prada suit; seeing the world in black and white is terribly dangerous. The person who views things only in black and white will always be miserable or unsuccessful in whatever they pursue. That’s not and never was the rule of the universe. Sticking to your core does not necessarily mean you are not open to the world. It means you open the world to “you” and everything you experience adds one more layer of sophistication to the “you” and heightens your awareness and sense of being. Any personal breakthrough need not give away or suppress the “you.” What you experience every day should make a beter “you.” Breakthroughs require the “you” in “you.”

• Anticipate and Leverage Moments. Most breakthroughs don’t happen through excessive rationalization or planning. In fact, almost all breakthroughs are sparked by “moments.” This is one of the things I teach people about looking for breakthroughs. The process of finding any breakthrough – whether in business, technology or design – often involves immersing oneself in large amounts of data and extensive debate and the synthesis of complex information. Most people fail to see the moments when they happen or fail to capture them. I started working to facilitate these moments a long time ago, making them happen more easily and more often. How I ask questions and how I push people to their limits (as I do with my staff) is one way that I try to help them to experience moments. I feel bad for sometimes being seen as critical and demanding, but that’s how I get myself and others to create those moments.
• Expand Awareness through Emotions. There are so many myths about emotions. We often associate them with extreme cases where we overreact, when they prevent us from making the right decision or make us irrational pursuing things that we want. This is all true, but emotions also have a positive side if you know recognize and respond to them. Emotions are our inner sensors at work, sending us weak signals from the outside. They trigger how we expand the operating parameters of our cognition, help us take in more detailed information, hold multiple ideas in our minds at once, and ascribe meaning to the things, people and events in our lives.
• Imagineering as Daily Ritual. Unless you’re in the business of producing film, animation, video games or other highly creative outputs you most likely don’t have a need to use imagination in your daily work. But imagination is not a tool we can call up on demand; we need to practice using it every day in order to maintain our ability to imagine. Imagination is a major part of how we frame and solve problems. Much like yoga, tai chi or voice training, imagining requires that we put in practice time in order to expand our ability. Applied imagination (or imagineering) can increase the number of creative options available for specific problems that we’re trying to solve and help with tasks like ideation. Rather than focusing on developing ideas or how to solve a problem, Imagineering is about rapidly and randomly envisioning what might be, what could be, and what couldn’t be. It's very easy to compare creativity and knowledge in an abstract, metaphorical sense – but we know that our imagination is developed from the knowledge we gain in the experiences of our daily lives and works by employing that information subconsciously until it’s ready to break through into awareness.
• Practice Design of Meanings. Try to design a breakthrough project or pilot activity for yourself as an experiment. Some breakthroughs are sparked by eureka moments based on insights – but far more are based on design. Design-driven innovation is spurred by thinking about possible breakthrough features, meanings and product languages that could emerge in the future. This cannot be done by talking to consumers or looking at current user behaviors. Consumers can’t really imagine radical futures, as they are anchored and invested in the current one; thus they are not helpful in anticipating possible radical changes in new product meanings. Big breakthroughs don’t necessarily come from disruptive applications or advanced functions; sometimes it’s new meanings that shift the universe. Think about how every one of the everyday objects that we see around our home can be transformed: instead of being simply functional, consider how to turn them into symbolic objects of irony, desire and affection.

Strategy Lessons From The Safari. There Is More Than Just The Survival Of The Fittest.

I recently took my strategy and innovation class out of the classroom. Guess where we ended up? A safari or a zoo (whatever you want to call it). What’s a better place that teaching strategy where you can see the survival of the fittest. It was a suggestion from my students.

History is filled with examples of animal species with Dinosaurs as the lead example that were made extinct by their inability to adapt environmental change and the prediction from scientists is that there are more to come. An alarming finding that was published in the scientific journal Nature that suggested more than a million existing species could be extinct by 2050 because of climate change. Probably 80% of those species we have never heard of.

Can studying why species in the safari went extinct provide us with lessons for business? The answer is a yes, the first being that not everyone will survive. Everyone knows that but the big question is how to make sure your company is not on that list? To survive, it means understanding what is your food chain. There is a simple food link between two animals and many animals struggle to obtain adequate amounts of their particular food(s) and cannot simply change their diets as other foods becomes available and ultimately face extinction. For business, the lesson is about your revenue streams might not sustain as the industry structure shifts and you need to reinvent your business models. Companies needs to change diet before they run out of food.

The second lesson is to know your role in the food chain. Some animals in the jungle can eat both plants and each other, as well as use each other for shelter and nesting. Companies need to learn to use other companies by way of strategic alliances to shelter competition to increase their chance of survival especially for those who are not in a position of influence the market. Think about what these terms like predator, prey, continent, climate, and habitat means in business strategy and what role does your company play? Darwin suggested that extinctions were a prolonged and often undetectable process. It is true for business as people or animals in the jungle don’t see survival in a strategic manner.

The third one is understanding your competition and their innovation capabilities. Companies should not just worry about the external change such as discontinuties but need to be aware of the evolutionary potential of other companies or species if we are talking about the safari. Animals cannot do that because they do not posses the intelligence, nor will they hire consultants - but companies can. It is the practice of strategic foresights, what we do that to ensure companies can engineer their own evolution and create their most favorable conditions for that to happen. Someone once said “The rules of the jungle do not apply to those who wrote the rules of the jungle." There is a lot you can learn by spending a day at the safari with me.

 

China Is Pushing The Frontiers Of Innovation. It Needs To Move Beyond Just Technological Progress. China Is Behind In Commercialization And It Is A Big Gap To Fill.

There were lots of interesting debates about "new thinking around innovation and future development of enterprises in China.” With almost three decades of sustained economic growth and orchestrated government support for advance technology research resulted in a large talent pool (but still not large enough) and many are well trained by foreign univerisities and companies.

China has made impressive achievement in many areas including network technologies, article physics, structural biology, genomics, human space exploration, supercomputing and high-speed rail which is part of China's centrally designed and state-led innovation model. Moving towards a more innovative economy is one of the main challenges facing China's President Xi Jinping. He understands what is important for China to sustain prosperity and development. China has developed a range of policies to create "indigenous innovation" to reduce dependence on foreign countries for advanced technologies including government procurement, competing technology standards, and requiring technology transfer from multinational corporations in return for access to Chinese market. Is this enough?

At the same time there is more proof that the western style of management is becoming more and more less effective and sometimes even becoming a barrier to innovation reform. To achieve China’s vision and development goal, China must produce and support innovators whose ideas and execution will enable China to create greater and broader economic wealth beyond manufacturing, infrastructure and real estate development. For most companies in China I've talked to, they are a long way from understanding what it takes to make innovation real beyond basic R&D and to compete outside of its demestic market.

China’s innovation cannot just rely on progress in science and technology but in both education and research; the most crucial piece is to be able to own the core technologies and design applications (let me stress - technology alone is not enough, without design), which China is still reliant on foreign companies. The most important strategy is to acquire innovation skills as a core capability so China’s companies will be less dependent on foreign IP and can create ecosystem of technologies that local companies can build upon.

Innovation goes beyond idea generation but also commercialization. It requires a new level of thinking and cross-industries and collaborative-competition that is currently not happening in China. Currently, the model of business education doesn’t deliver on innovation training as they basically modeled after the west.

Most of today's Western style of management and business problem-solving is primarily made up of prescriptive remedies still very much rooted in decades-old conceptual frameworks, developed in the 80’s as a response to pressing events then. They not only have long outlived their usefulness for Fortune 500s, they were not designed to handle today’s unprecedented pace of continuous disruption nor are they irrelevant when applying in emerging economic power such as China which has a very different historical, political and cultural values as well as a unique operating environment and a well deserved national aspirations.

My guess is that 80% of what they teach in business schools MBA’s curriculum today are not applicable for managers in China. Despite managers in China being thirsty for management development training, the net results are less to be desired. In short, we are beyond the point of questioning the effectiveness of western management practices; we need a China approach to management. Or perhaps China should take on the role to reinvent management.

Exploring The Four Biggest Myths of Creativity. Design Educators Take Note.

The party at Idea Couture London office last week was a fantastic event. Get to meet many young talented people there and looking forward to work with them on projects. My work takes me around the world and it is hard to get to know everyone in different offices. I enjoy talking to creative people from creative engineers to designers. And I have a very different idea of what "creative" people means. Idea Couture is a creative powerhose and it is creativity in the deepest and most systematic sense, looking at challenges from new perspectives but achor in a highly logical manner. That's our creative algorithm and it is rooted in every IC office.

Design educators take note. Design schools have built up an expectation that they can equip students to tackle complex problems through the power of creativity alone. They can’t. They don’t. And they continue to fool themselves with four big myths about creativity.

The first myth is that creativity and design are inseparable. Here, we have led ourselves down a garden path of consensus where many of us believe that because designers are designers they are creative. But design is not creativity manifested, and creativity is not the exclusive to the design mind. One can be creative without having any design skills or sensibility, and there are many skilled designers who utterly lack in creativity. Design doesn't = creatiivty. It needs creativity.

The second myth is that analytical people are generally not creative people. Here, in subscribing to the popular oversimplification of human complexity that there are right-brain thinkers and left-brain thinkers, we assume that those of us who lean towards analysis, process, logic and science are – admit it – a little uninspired. As anyone who understands what goes into big and small leaps of science knows, this is rubbish. The analytic and the creative can, and often do, live side by side in the same brain.

The third myth is that, when it comes to design, creativity must be unbound from the laws, structures and processes of the day-to-day world. Bound up in the long-standing mythology of the artist as a visionary or hero who must be free to do what he/she – and he/she alone – does best, this can sometimes be little more than an excuse for the fact that the artist or visionary lacks the ability to apply his creativity beyond his own imagination. Nowhere is this more prevalent than at the intersection of business and design where many creative people prove themselves incapable or unwilling to grasp (and design for) the realities of what a company does and how it operates.

The fourth and final myth is that which surrounds the recent and very popular theme of ‘design for social change’. While the output of many such projects is little more than a poster and a campaign, not an actual solution, most of us would agree that such work starts with the best of intentions. Here, as in the third myth, the challenge is that designers are generally not educationally or experientially equipped to identify the social or cultural genesis of a problem and are typically blind-sided by the economics of an issue. The result is that many develop ideas (not really solutions) that are irrelevant, unsustainable and, in some cases, lead to further problems. They were one minute inspiration and not sustainable change.

If I was to start a design school (not sure I would)  from scratch tomorrow, the program would be based on Movement, Intuition, Structure and Complexity. These would be the “subjects” that would become the permanent vocabulary of every graduating student for one simple reason: we need to train a new breed of professionals that can live up to the promise of how design can change the world. Only by balancing the ‘general’ with the ‘specific’, the ‘whole’ with the ‘part’, the ‘abstract’ with the ‘concrete’, and the ‘indefinite’ with the ‘definite’ can we prepare young people for the increasingly competitive job market, the stakes of what it means to be a citizen of design in the global community, and the what it means to be a human being who enjoys deeper forms of beauty, meaning and purpose while understanding economics.

Adapted from an article in Dec 2013 issue of MISC magazine.

What Do We Need More? Managers Or Strategists? Or Design Thinkers?

In business school we are taught the difference between a good decision and a bad one, and how to leverage a good one to get the most out of it. We are also taught that the best decisions are those that minimize risk and produce the highest return. On the ground, management decision-making is never that simple.

We want managers to have a vision for the long term but be flexible enough to respond to competition in the short term. We want them to produce consistent results and yet experiment with innovative ideas for growth. We want both change and stability. If change is the only constant, its constant companion is the avoidance of change.

Because the future is full of unknowns, it’s far more comfortable for managers to pursue stability by optimizing existing core business operations than to prepare for change. There is no theory to teach managers how to achieve a balance between the known and the unknown; the ability to do that comes from experience. But if your experience is defined by an unwillingness to step outside the envelope of stability, you will never know if or how the unknown may help you make a better decision. You will never think beyond the immediate tactic. You may become the world’s best manager of the known, but the least able to think strategically about the future. And the future is where the money is supposed to be. Just ask your shareholders. This unwillingness to strategically embrace the unknown is often why companies fail. When they do, we naturally apply 20/20 hindsight to expose all their wrong moves or analyze how management didn’t act fast enough or how it refused to act at all.

Sometimes management acts too slow to transform the organization when the value is shifting to other activities. Sometimes it bets on new things and fails to protect the core. Sometimes it just can’t keep up with rate of change caused by technological disruption. Is the lack of management development progress for the last 30 years a contributing factor? We produce tons of MBAs every year (it’s estimated to be over 150,000 in the US and 375,000 globally). Should we not expect companies to be smarter as a result?

In the current business climate, management tends to prioritize risk-avoidance and career protection over bold strategic action. Managers operate in fear and tend not to bring their imagination and empathy to work. They succeed by avoiding blame when things go wrong and taking credit when things go right. We forget that the best managers take calculated risks and develop strategies to encourage others to do the same.

For the strategist, the only true way to maintain a useful level of predictability is to actively engage in the shaping of the organization’s future. Through conceptualization and development of forward-looking scenarios, an organization can equip and prepare itself for the inevitable future. Our emphasis on education and management development has been on training managers more than training strategists. Today, we need strategies more than ever and we need to convert our top managers to strategists. We need to encourage and empower mid-to-senior managers to take bolder risks and become the innovative force that out-strategizes the competition.

The practice of management needs to move away from purely avoiding risks to a deeper understanding of risks and how to master them to develop business opportunities and create value. Ultimately we need to train people that are equally versatile as managers and strategists. That's why Design Thinking can play a big role. Whether you're a good manager or strategist, you also need to be a good design thinker.

This article is an except from the coming issue of MISC magazine the Balance issue which will be available in bookstores Dec 2013.

Diversity Is The Short Cut To Buidling An Innovative Culture. It Is Pretty Simple.

Sometimes I wonder how much progress we’ve actually made over the last 50 years. In Saudi Arabia, women are still not allowed to drive along with many other things. Today, a group of Saudi women have taken to the streets in their cars on a day of collective protest against the ban on female drivers. I am sure they will be getting threats of all kinds and if we’re talking about human rights let's start with this. There were about 17,000 people who signed a petition calling for women to be allowed to drive.

Still, many companies do not understand the importance and benefit of normalizing the workplace for LGBT beyond just offering workplace protection. Protection is one thing, but realizing the power of true diversity is another and creating a diverse, inclusive workforce where we can bring people from all backgrounds together produces a dynamic workplace and actually helps with innovation. Despite how open we think the world is, we’re still living in a very conservative world while technologies are racing us forward and bringing more open-mindedness and thereby widening the gap. Innovation is the core of organization competitiveness and gone are the days when corporations had their workforce that looked the same, trained the same, dressed the same, worked the same, spoke the same language and was predominantly of the same gender (usually male) and lifestyle. No wonder it is hard for them to innovate.

Any homogeneous corporations will not survive the shock that organizations are experiencing. The most basic not-so-secret formula for building an innovation culture is pretty simple - embrace diversity and start to attract, retain and promote a diverse workforce that looks differently, works differently, dress differently, speaks differently and is inclusive of the full spectrum of human sexual orientation and gender identities. Do this before you start hiring consultants and rethinking your innovation process, there is no process that works without true diversity.

In fact, there is a very close correlation between diversity and innovation. Senior executives and employees alike are recognizing that a diverse set of experiences, perspectives, and backgrounds is crucial to innovation and the development of new ideas in and outside the workplace. All great companies of the future embrace true diversity, not just a policy to satisfy the public, but truly and deeply believe that diversity is the key for the future and the survival of organizations. When Tim Cook stepped into the role of Apple CEO in Aug 2011, the appointment earned him the unofficial title of “the most powerful gay executive in the world.” That move alone convinced me Apple gets it.

“It is never too late to give up your prejudices” ― Henry David Thoreau. I don't thing we are working hard enough. Perhaps someone should design an app to deal with prejudices.