innovation playground Idris Mootee

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.

Design Thinking, Business Transformation And The Creative Enterprise.

It is time to take a look at the report card of our design for business organization, management and strategy. After half a century of quality movement, brand management, marketing and catefory management, globalization, customer service automation and organizational design fine-tuning, we should have a pretty good of idea of what is working and what is not. As a result of all suboptimization efforts over past decades, we begin to see the impact on the whole system.

The idea is that optimizing the outcome for a subsystem will in general not optimize the outcome for the system as a whole. Some porodcts, brands, businesses are better at the expense of other things. This intrinsic difficulty may degenerate into the "tragedy of the commons": the exhaustion of shared resources because of competition between the subsystems. This is exactly what had been happening in different business units and functions including product design, marketing, operations and sales/channel management. The principle of suboptimization states that suboptimization in general does not lead to global optimization, and as whole businesses and societies are far worse. Here comes Design Thiking.

Finally, this is the Design Thinking Workbook for the Harvard Design Thinking Seminar. It ook us a week to put this together. Coming together nicely. Design Thinking allows us to to rethink, reimagaine and reset the game. I am not saying every company needs to make radical changes in its core business itself, and a lot of instances the case for change becomes desperately obvious – as in the case of Blockbuster, it came too late.

Business model redesign is driven by of strategic innovation (to play a new game). This means complete or partial transformation—of the organization, its core offerings, structure, systems, culture and capabilities—to create, deliver and capture value at the new way not in a sub-systems level.

Business model transformation may include a strategic decisions to move up-market or down-market or sideways along the value chain or shift from products to services or solutions when the pace of commoditization continues to accelerate or the industry boundaries is opening up for new entrants. The idea is to apply visual sense making as part of the Design Thinking tool kit to reimagine new value ecosystem and value chain reconfigurations.

Vvisual thinking can play a very vital part in the business design process. The key to successfully design a capital-efficient business model is to visually identifying assets, risks, and cash flows by their distinct risk characteristics and then visually modeling them and retaining only those that are central to how a company creates value.

The Harvard Design Thinking for Business Creativity Seminar in NYC tomorrow, for the first time I will be introducing these applications to people outside Idea Couture and expecting a large group of very senior executives and looking forward to a great day of intensive discussions. Here’s the workbook as takeaway together with the 150 slides. Here’s a first glance at the workbook and workshop material. Planning to bring this seminar to Europe and Asia next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Officially Launching The First And Only Design Thinking And Innovation Magazine - M/I/S/C. Available In 18 Countires. Now Reviewing Proposals For Foreign Language Editions.

Great lacunch party last night for M/I/S/C, second launch party in San Francisco in a few weeks..and then Shanghai. 200+ cool people showed up. Food is good..and the cupcakes too. Special thanks to the folks who pulled this off in such a short time..Ashely, Lucy, Marla, Sherry, Jessica, Christian, Brooke and a few others... great job! The food was great, food catered by Caplansky's Delicatessan, speciality bite-size cupcakes by Cutlepiecupcakes. Speical thanks to Umbra for hosting us. Let's do another one soon.

I was once a "magazine junkie"; now after rehabitation I am now a very selective reader or not having the luxury for not being one. I cut my magazine subscriptions from 105 periodicals a fewyears back to 10. I have to cut one if I want to add a new one (I learned this from someone...). So it will always be 10.

Last year we’ve seen the changing hands and closing of some of the most prestige and long established business magazines including Business Week and Newsweek and some new one such as Portfolio which I find the positioning odd. So people ask me if I am crazy or foolish publishing another new magazine.

I am kind of both I guess. I think there is a future in magazines, but it won’t be like the old one. I love Business Week, but it is not a sustainable business model. It is an educated-consumer read: venerable, timely, credible, respected, well packaged and produced. Which is another way to say, in new media: slow, old, closed and expensive to produce. And it is still based on an old publishing model.

Newsstand sales for the almost 500 consumer magazines in the US measured by the Audit Bureau of Circulations have been on a steady decline last three years between 8-12% for consumer magazines. Many publishers didn’t make it through the rapid decline in advertising dollars and struggling with integrating with the Internet thing. And the iPad thing turned the publishing upside down and changing the game quietly.

I have been having problems with mainstream publishing anyway so I don’t see this as an entirely bad thing. The whole thing about “culture of mass media” or “popular culture” is moving our society backward or at least stopping us from moving forward. Let's take the "mass" or "popular" out of "mass media" or "popular media". Just look at what magazines they are selling at Walmart and you understand what I am talking about.

To some extend it is the same case for TV. JTV and JP (Junk TV and Junk Publishing) are hurting us and thanks to the Internet, many of us can do without TV and same for these poorly produced magazines. Many don't worth the trees they killed.

What is M/I/S/C magazine? I came up with the idea one night flying redeye. I said to myself I am trying to pick up what Bruce Nussbaum left behind at Business Week. I really like that supplement when he was the editor-in-chief of that section. 

Inpsired by Nussbaum's vision, M/I/S/C will be a new global media brand designed to take over when he left unfinished at Business Week, the mission is make design thinking and innovation practices accessible to a broader readership; the magazine will be positioned on newsstands alongside the other cutting-edge cool titles such as Monocle and Fast Company. I can't name another cool magazine, there are a bunch of good design and architecture magazines and not much that gets me excited. Bring me back Industry Standard, not sure if anyone remember that short-lived one. 

M/I/S/C is basically organized around four key concepts: Movement / Intuition / Structure / Complexity, M/I/S/C blurs the boundaries between business, innovation, design, technology, art and culture. I want to show the world we can produce a world-class product in 30 days with limited resources. M/I/S/C will always be in Beta. I never promise you a finished product, there wont' be one.

Theodor Adorno said it right, "Standardization, moreover, means the strengthening of the lasting domination of the listening public and of their conditioned reflexes. They are expected to want that to which they have become accustomed and to become enraged whenever their expectations are disappointed and fulfillment, which they regard as the customer's inalienable right, is denied, and even if there were attempts to introduce anything really different into light music, they would be deceived from the start by virtue of economic concentration."

Actually Adorno's critique was not directed against popular culture per se, but the specific kind of mass culture produced under monopoly capitalism which our system is designed to encouoraged in order to get market power. Consolidation of industry that drives efficiencies also takes out the heart and soul of the culture business. Take a look around us and see how popular culutre media = junk.

Popular culture posses a threat to innovation by destroying niche and novelties and sensibility of micro-cultures, which are essential to innovation. Many of today’s mass culture was not ‘mass’, these mass culture was imposed from marketers and media owners rather than derived from the people. Is there something called "mass culture" or it is just the advertisers that liked us to believe that.

I need to get back to my day job and this weekend I will start looking at content for the next issue.  Now onto the next one – the Future issue. The future is exciting.

 

Powerful And Affordable Real Time Data Mining, Visualization And Interactions Are Powering Up A New Culture Act - And Enabling "Infovation".

Just landed in Rhode Island and spendin the next 2 days in Providence, long working sessions ahead, expect to some productive knowledge exchange. The topic will be around where arts meets science, design meets technology.

We talk about how information changes our life and how it affect the way we make decisions both as individual and as a team or society, I think we are still unaware of the true power of change information visualization can have and the impact when applied in an interactive and social mobile settings.

Imagine a scenario everytime a politician suggests an idea and you can see realtime information in simple graphics visual data to confirm his/her coment or when a company makes a statment you can see how other respond with an instant trust index? That's a very likely future, an idea which I am working on. Can't say more.

And I don’t mean just data visualization such as bar chart and 3D chart etc, primarily it is the study and application of the visual representation of quantitative data, meaning "information which has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information."

Infodesign of infographics is actually different (it is like when I was trying to explain the differencne between customer experience and user experience/usabiity 10 years ago) from data visulaization. Information graphics (or so called infographics) instead of visualizing data, it is the strategic use of data by incorporating interactions, icons, charts, diagrams, graphs, tables and maps to present information that could bring new knowledge and sense making. Not only it helps to explain oterhwise difficult to understand data, but also illuminate and explain system complexities or system relationships in an easy to digest manner.

This is not new, in our human history our ancestors created cave murals and giant paintings to show us what was happening including what their understand of the the world, an event or even the universe. The power of infodesign lies in its effectiveness in simplifying complex data into understandable visual representations that can be universally interpreted.

The power of real time interactions with live data brings the potential to a whole new level. The human minds are real time computing machines that works to constantly changing and creating value and meaning of objects; the interactions between human brain and semiotics is conducted every time we see a visual representation of a scenario and makes possible of expanding our human cognition to absorb large amounts of data at just one single glance or click.

Here comes the most interesting part, infodesign is powering up an “infoculture” where massive real-time socailly digitally distributed (useful and useless) information is enabling a new form of cultural act. It is where science meets arts, and will continue to power up new possibilities as we learn how to use them. I will be the first one here to call it “Infovation.” Remember you hear it here first. Will write more about it next few days.

One more thing, how many schools out there actually teaches information design? Not many. We are still training people yesterday's skills for yesterday's job. No wonder it is hard for designers to find work. I think design schools should be paying for the continuous education of their graduates, becasue they never trained them enough or properly in the first place.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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