Cult of Innovation

Wow, what a month of good news! First, I learn that imperfection can actually be valuable for companies, and now I’ve found this article by Paul Sloane that says a bad attitude can lead to innovation. Good to know that if this blogging gig comes to an end, someone may actually want to hire me.

In related news, a recent article from the New York Times profiles the new C.E.O. of Xerox, Ursula Burns, who hopes to change her company’s culture from one of “terminal niceness” to one that takes more initiative, becomes more fearless, and is more frank and impatient, in order to ratchet up their performance. Hmm, well, I’m not sure I’d want to work there, but she definitely sounds like an interesting addition to the company.

These days, the value of brainstorming is sometimes questioned, such as in the Wall Street Journal article Brainstorming Works Best if People Scramble For Ideas on Their Own, or the study described in my earlier post Is There An Optimal Environment For Brainstorming? which revealed that development usually works best when collaboration involves participants from varied specialties who gather to develop a simple product, but when a project is more complex, it’s better to work in private.

According to BusinessWeek article Eight Tips for Better Brainstorming, however, a broad body of peer-reviewed research on teams and organizations suggests that when brainstorming sessions are managed well and linked to other work practices, those efforts can certainly promote innovation.  The article offers these tips for running a productive brainstorming session:

1. Use brainstorming to combine and extend ideas, not just to harvest ideas.
2. Don’t bother if people live in fear.
3. Do individual brainstorming before and after group sessions.
4. Brainstorming sessions are worthless unless they are woven with other work practices.
5. Brainstorming requires skill and experience both to do and, especially, to facilitate.
6. A good brainstorming session is competitive—in the right way.
7. Use brainstorming sessions for more than just generating good ideas.
8. Follow the rules, or don’t call it a brainstorm.

While I agree with all of the above recommendations (read the article for more detail about each) I feel that the most valuable, in terms of fostering innovation, is #7. At Arc90, brainstorming isn’t just used to generate ideas. Much like the company behind the article, IDEO, our brainstorming sessions support our company culture. When we take a break from our usual activities to gather in a room, we gain a valuable opportunity to share insight across disciplines and perspectives. We begin to think about what we are working on in new and different ways. Whether or not the technique leads to a perfect solution is not really the point. There is much value in keeping people engaged in idea generation. It encourages creative thinking and in turn provides an environment where everyone feels excited about their work and respected for their contributions.

So..anyone want to meet in the boardroom in ten?

In the past, I wrote a post about what Led Zeppelin can teach us about reaching goals.  Well, this time an article from the Atlantic offers insight about business and management from a band more frequently associated with turnin’ on, tunin’ in, and droppin’ out.

In Management Secrets of the Grateful Dead, Joshua Green discusses the soon-to-be opened Grateful Dead Archive at UC Santa Cruz, which aside from offering historians and ethnomusicologists four decades’ worth of obsessively collected stuff to sift through, provides a glimpse into some of the larger social influences now attributed to the band.

In one example from the late 80s, sociologist Rebecca G. Adams studied friendships among Grateful Dead fans and discovered that despite generally not living near  each other, they formed meaningful bonds. This contradicted the then-popular assumption that communities based on common interests, whose members lacked proximity, would lack emotional and moral depth. These relationships are now considered an early form of “social networking.”

Another influence, one now widely embraced by corporate America, is the band’s talent for “creating and delivering superior customer value” as described by business professor Barry Barnes. Treating customers well may seem like common sense to us now, but in the 60s and 70s most companies held more of a top-down attitude. The Dead rewarded their most loyal fans by establishing a hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved some of the best seats in the house for those fans, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house.  They also allowed their fans to record their shows, assuming that tape sharing could widen their audience, a ban would be unenforceable, and that anyone inclined to tape a show would probably spend money elsewhere, such as on merchandise or tickets.

Barnes also recommends one more major influence. He notes that the key to the band’s success and the characteristic of  greatest importance for current business leaders is a flexibility he calls “strategic improvisation.”  Because of this ability to adapt, he explains, the Dead have thrived for decades, in good times and bad.  In a recession, Barnes says, strategic improvisation is even more important. :If you’re going to survive this economic downturn, you better be able to turn on a dime,” he says. “The Dead were exemplars.”

Interestingly, up until recently, examining the sociological significance of the Grateful Dead had been considered risky for most academics. Rebecca G. Adams was strongly discouraged from pursuing her line of inquiry and very little research has been supported by other educational institutions.  In an exciting move, UC Santa Cruz is going to try try to post as much of the archive online as possible.  It will be fascinating to see what this attempt at collaboration between a bunch of Deadheads and some stuffy intellectuals will produce.

Fast Company’s annual review includes some of the usual suspects, like Apple, Google, and Amazon, but there are some new guys you may want to keep your eye on, like the cloud-enabled music repository Spotify, online sample sale company Gilt Groupe, and biofuel company Synthetic Genomics.

In an older study by Teresa Amabile (we featured the results of another of her studies in Making Progress Everyday: A Better Way to Motivate Innovators), the head of the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School explored myths about creativity in the workplace. Some of the results, including “Creativity Comes From Creative ” and “Time Pressure Fuels Creativity” published a while back in Fast Company may be a bit jarring to some of our sensibilities, but they are interesting and rather valuable to note.

And while you are at it, check out her profile on the Harvard Business School site, which links to some of her more recent research.  She’s the only tenured professor at a top business school who has devoted her entire research program to the study of creativity and is considered one of the country’s foremost explorers of business innovation.

Cool chick game designer, Jane McGonigal, recently spoke at the TED conference about how playing games can help us solve real-world problems.

“Reality is broken,” McGonigal said. “And we all need to tap into a collective sense of urgent optimism — as well as the ability and capacity to act now — to make the future.”

As director of game research and development for the Institute for the Future, McGonigal explores how games — particularly alternate reality games — can inspire large groups of people to pool their collective intelligence to overcome obstacles. McGonigal says that this is precisely what’s needed to tackle global social issues, such as poverty, hunger, disease, and climate change to improve the state of the world.

An example of this type of game is one McGonigal developed in 2007 with Ken Eklund called World Without Oil. The game asked 1,800 players in 12 countries to re-imagine their life in a world bereft of oil. The goal was to get players to think about alternative actions they might take if there wasn’t enough fuel to ship foods, transport their children to school, or commute to work.

At TED, McGonigal also unveiled a new massive multiplayer game called Evoke.  The free 10-week game, which debuts  on March 3^rd, was designed for the World Bank Institute, the teaching division of the World Bank. The game asks participants to develop skills and solutions to world problems, with the help of whichever real-world mentors they wish to enlist. The aim of the game is to help empower people all over the world, and especially young people in Africa, to come up with creative solutions to some of our most pressing world problems, like ones listed above.

McGonigal feels that tapping into large groups of people in a way only recently made possible through digital media opens up the possibility of combining a lot of small efforts into bigger change. As described in a recent Wired interview,“When you add up [small] contributions, they make something bigger, like Wikipedia, like micro-financing. There are scalable actions that when you add them all up you do make something bigger.”

More than just providing entertainment or distraction, she hopes such ambitious collective actions may just be powerful to enough to change the world.

The Fresh Grocer is an exciting new supermarket chain that has been developing new stores in communities generally ignored by growing businesses, such as low-income urban areas or near university campuses.

Rather than viewing those locations as undesirable, the company considers building within in them to be a great opportunity to gain loyal customers by serving the needs, tastes, and heritages of previously untapped populations. And, in addition to helping the locals communities, they aim to better serve the world at large, by providing quality shopping experiences in environmentally-friendly buildings that minimize energy consumption and helps reduce the stores’ carbon footprint.

The idea of fresh fruit and veg being affordable and available to previously under-served areas makes me terribly happy, yet I cannot help but worry about their business model, sources of funding, and sustainability.  In an effort to remain optimistic, I’ll hope that it illustrates how smart people can find a niche in a down economy, while rent is cheap and there’s a growing awareness of the need for healthier eating across the globe.  But Jamie Oliver winning the TED Prize? That’s about where my optimism ends.

From laser-etched beef jerky to a set of lock picks, business cards like these may not get you the job, but they’ll certainly help get you in the door. Check out these bold business cards in Entrepreneur and Inc.com for some inspiration.

Or, if you are feeling really ambitious, try something like this guy.

While doing some research on Amazon (okay, fine I was totally browsing fiction) I came across these Creative and Innovation Whack Packs and found them sort of interesting.

Created by Roger von Oech, inventor, speaker, and author of the hugely popular A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative, the decks provide users with creative thinking strategies meant to shake up habitual thought patterns. Apparently the cards have been used by many organizations, including NASA, in strategy development and problem solving, but after reading some examples, I found them a bit facile.

The company also offers a best-selling Creative Whack Pack iPhone app, as well some physical tools, such as the X-Ball and the Ball of Whacks, also meant to help stimulate the thinking process.

Come to think of it, I did notice that many of the folks at Arc90, a company known for ideas and creativity, have magnetic sculptures on their desks that they manipulate while staring off into space, so maybe there is something to some of this.

Have any of you tried any of this stuff?  Does it really help? What other techniques have you found useful for kick-starting your brain?

Five important concepts for organizations to keep in mind this year, from the blog of Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, which helps associations realize their full potential by thinking differently about the future.