My dear,
Find what you love and let it kill you. Let it drain from you your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness. Let it kill you, and let it devour your remains.
For all things will kill you, both slowly and fastly, but it’s much better to be killed by a lover.
Falsely yours,
Hank
DK’s sessions on social media highlighted the importance of utilising a variety of tools to build an online company culture quickly and effectively—which is a priority for a startup business. One of the most important themes was how you can use your online culture to build your brand and leverage it to build a marketplace around your business. He is an absolute guru in the field and his hands on approach allowed people to pick up practical areas to focus and develop during each session. This was not your usual run down on social media, it is a look at who you are, who is your audience and most importantly—how do you get started today. I am forever reciting “Culture eats strategy for lunch.”
Jill McCarthy, Business Associate, CreativeHQ
Blush.
Tim Kastelle is the Senior Lecturer in Innovation Management at University of Queensland. His Discipline of Innovation blog is a wonderfully rich source of ideas, articles and discussions (follow him on Twitter via @timkastelle).
PODCAST NO LONGER BEING PRODUCED
Show notes / timestamps :
00:00 Intro / academic definition of innovation
02:53 focus of Tim’s work
05:36 how do you teach innovation
08:49 cultural conditions for organisations / companies
13:45 the air sandwich
17:00 creating change
21:10 what’s impressing Tim
23:41 Thanks / outro
Know of any innovative folks who should be interviewed / featured then contact us here.
00:01 DK: Welcome again to the Defining Innovation podcast. This is episode number three where today I’m chatting to Tim Kastelle. He’s the senior lecturer for Innovation Management at the University of Queensland, in the business school there. He has an amazing blog, which is just an embarrassment of riches. It’s called Discipline of Innovation. Find it in the show notes. And you can also find him on Twitter @timkastelle. I asked him straight off the bat what his academic definition of innovation is and if it differs from any others?
00:34 Tim: So the definition that I always use for innovation is executing new ideas to create value. And everyone that studies it has their own definition but they all basically boil down to some way of saying that same thing. And there’s a couple of critical issues there, one is that everyone has the new ideas part and they get that. But you have to execute. So the issue of, you know you don’t want to be the guy in the bar that said I had the idea for Facebook ten years ago. You actually want to be the guy that builds Facebook, or the girl that builds the next Facebook. So you actually have to execute. And then the third point is the idea of creating value. Sometimes people will say — they’ll actually talk about money in their definition. So they say that innovation is an idea that has been translated into money. But I prefer value because value is more interesting. When we talk about value it means that education institutes can innovate without having to make a bunch of money. Governments can innovate without having to make a bunch of profit. So value I think is really important as a third part of it so executing new ideas to create value. To innovate you have to do all three of those things. It’s not enough to just have an idea. It’s not enough to be really good at executing without creating value. You have to do all of them. I think the biggest error that people often make, and this will come up again later as we continue to talk is to mistake innovation just for having ideas. Often people just say, “Well I have the idea. What more do you want?” and you absolutely have to execute. And it may be different people. If you have an organization it might be different people that have the idea and the execute, but at the end of the day — I hate when people say at the end of the day. But anyway to innovate effectively you have to be able to carry the idea all the way through and that means that you don’t just have them. It means that you actually have to do something with them. So that’s why that definition is fairly broad. But it covers I think all of the different types of innovation that you might have.
02:53 DK: That’s superb. Thank you for that Tim. So tell us what you do with those definitions because you work at the University of Queensland doing what sir?
03:02 Tim: I do sort of everything. I divide my time up in a number of ways. I spend a lot of time just out talking to people in firms about how innovation works. Sometimes that can be very formally as a piece of research where I’m doing it through interviews or through surveys. A lot of time it’s just more casual where people have come to me with a problem and they want some kind of help. I have a number of people that I just have sort of mentoring relationships with that are trying to run innovation programs inside of their organizations. I just touch base with them on a fairly regular basis to see what issues they’re facing because that helps me learn about what the big obstacles are and what people are struggling with. So a lot of my time is actually spent out in the field actually studying what’s going on inside of organizations. So that’s a big part of my time. And then I spent a fair bit of time then also teaching about innovation. So I teach into the MBA program. I’ve got other courses, educational courses and other things where I try to take all that stuff that I’ve learned and that other people have learned and packaged it up into some set of ideas that people can then take and apply in their particular setting in a way that will help them create value for whoever it is that they’re trying to create value for. So those are the two main things that I spend my time doing. And then kinds of my spare time hobby in the evenings is I then write a blog about innovation as well which kind of cuts across both of those things. My original thought with that was that I wanted to have a way to communicate with people that had taken my classes just to keep them up to date with what was going on with innovation. And then it’s just kind of grown and grown and grown and now I’ve gotten an opportunity to talk to even some people that have never met me about what’s going on in innovation and so the blog is basically when I take all these other things that I’ve learned and apply them in a way again that hopefully is useful to people.
05:16 DK: And we’ll be sticking that in the show notes because Discipline Innovation, which is the blog title, is a fantastic resource. I spend far too much time in there researching this interview. The digital kind of breadcrumbs and the rabbit hole really goes deep on your blog, in a good way.
05:32 Tim: It’s goes deep for me too.
05:36 DK: So tell us a little bit if you can how you actually teach innovation.
05:41 Tim: Well it’s one of those things where my official title is senior lecturer in innovation management. And often I’ll explain that to people and they’ll say well that’s an oxymoron. You can’t manage innovation. And it gets down to again that issue of thinking about innovation as just ideas. And the thing of it is we can’t — I can’t manage it so that you have an awesome idea in the next ten minutes. Maybe it will trigger one in the next ten minutes through conversation which is one of the things that you try to do to support innovation but if I’m a manager I can’t say, “Hey you guys, go have great ideas. And do it tomorrow or do it right now.” And I think one of the guys that I have done a lot of research with is a guy named Mike Coles and he did knowledge management for Hatch Engineering for a number of years. Now he’s out on his own. And one of the things that he said about knowledge management that has always stuck with me is he said, “Look people talk about herding cats, that knowledge management is like herding cats. And it’s not. It’s actually like herding butterflies because the thing with cats is that they’re actually some things you can do to herd cats. There’s nothing you can do to herd a butterfly. All you can do is set up the conditions that will attract the butterfly in.” And innovation is kind of the same thing. So the issue you have when we’re saying well how do we teach it, what we’re talking about is how do we create the conditions that will be attractive for good ideas? And it will help us then execute them once we’ve had them. And so when we talk about how do we train or how do we teach it, we talk about what are those conditions? How do we enable the construction of those inside of our organizations? There are some mechanical things, once we have really good ideas, do we have resources in place to execute? Do we have the skills that we need to execute and that sort of thing? And then that value bit we can also think about really clearly who are we creating value for and be very specific about is our strategy right for doing that? So you can think about the different parts of the definition. You can think about some of the tools and the techniques that support that and then if you pull all that together, that ends up being a little bit of an innovation course. It’s often not what people expect when they come in because they’re thinking well we’re going to have a class with beanbag chairs and Nerf guns and that’s not it. And there are situations when the bean bags chairs and the Nerf guns are cool but the main thing we try to get across in the course is here’s some stuff you can do. And I think that herding butterflies analogy is a really good one because what we’re really trying to do is we’re trying to create the conditions that enable people to innovate. We’re not forcing people to innovate.
08:49 DK: And you’ve written a little bit about this and I remember reading a bit about habits and forming habits which comes from the conditions and there’s a thing I used to say a lot was habitats form the habit right? And could you speak a little bit how an organization, for a lot of organizations that means a cultural shift rather than an operational or a hierarchical kind of fragmentation, maybe it is. But what’s the cultural shift that organizations have to do then to get their heads on the conditional side of innovation?
09:19 Tim: Yeah so that’s a great question and I think there’s a couple of key issues there. One is that if we’re talking about organizational habits or routines or the processes that we try to put in place, I think for me the most critical one is building up a skill for experimenting.
09:45 DK: A skill for experimenting.
09:47 Tim: Yeah or a habit, right but basically having that system in place where basically somebody says, “Hey I’ve got this great idea,” and then the response is, “That’s pretty cool. Let’s see if it works.” And the whole point, there’s a few I think critical points with that. One is that when you’re seeing if it works, if it’s an experiment, we’re just testing. And so we’re not trying to prove that it works. We’re not assuming all the way through oh yeah that’s the right idea. We actually have to figure out well how would we test it? So is there a way that we can build a prototype? Is there a way that we can scale it down to a really small level to see if it’s going to work to gather some data and then to see if that’s something that’s worth building more? The other thing with experimenting is that with an experiment you don’t fail. The whole thing with an experiment is we try it, and then the thing that we expected to happen either happens or it doesn’t and in both cases, then we have data. So either we’ve learned hey we have this idea and in this particular setting and under these circumstances it doesn’t work, so either we need to try different circumstances or a different way to approach it or do it with a different set of people or maybe it’s not right for us right now. But it’s not a failure. But then if it does work then we can say okay we learned something and let’s do more of that. But I think that habit of experimenting gets around a lot of problems that we run into with innovation including just getting hung up on the idea because if you’re experimenting we have to actually execute to figure out if the ideas any good. The second thing that it does is it gets around this issue of well what happens if we try an idea and it doesn’t work as we’re going out to learn? And I think the third thing that experimenting does is it just gets you into that habit of action. So if you talk about what’s the core skill of innovating, for me that’s it. And a lot of everything else that’s really important for innovation builds on that. So we have that habit of experimenting and that culture of experimenting and learning in place, then you can build a lot on top of that. And so if we’re saying well how can we be more innovative, a lot of people say well let’s go get an idea management tool. Or let’s get an innovation (inaudible) or all this other stuff. And for me all that stuff can be fine and it has it’s place but all the other stuff doesn’t really help you that much. So for me that whole thing is to experiment because that where an innovation culture then comes from.
12:38 DK: I love that and I never thought about how powerful just that one singular point, that granular point of experimentation can be and it leads into so many things. And then unhinges all the barriers, which you talked about.
12:50 Tim: Yeah if you’re talking about well what’s the thin edge of the wedge, you know we want to make our organization more innovative, what’s the one thing that we can do that would start to expand the way that we’re thinking, for me that’s it. It’s just how do we figure out a way to do that? And if you can do that a lot of really good stuff sort of naturally follows from it. And the thing of it is it’s not straightforward. It takes some changes to do that. You require different relationships in terms of power. You require different things in terms of empowerment that enable experimenting. And so it’s not like we can just walk in the door and say now we’re experimenting. But it’s for me the way to start.
13:45 DK: Wonderful, thank you for that. So let’s shift a little bit. Talk to us a little bit about the air sandwich. Just because I love this thing that I read on your blog about expectations between senior teams and implementation staff and how that is sometimes one of the biggest barriers for any innovation programs or even just communicating new ideas. Just talk to us about the air sandwich, it’s just so cool.
14:14 Tim: Okay well that’s an idea that I’ve stolen from my colleague and co-author Nilofer Merchant. So she wrote about that in her book The New How, which is wonderful. And in that she talked about how strategy gets built. And her whole argument is that within our organizations we’re not inclusive enough in how strategy happens. And I think it applies also to innovation. So the idea of the air sandwich is that if you’ve got one group that sets the strategy and then you’ve got a second group that’s expected to implement, you end up with a gap between them. And that’s what she calls the air sandwich. And so what happens is if the strategy group which is often a senior group, they set the strategy and then they just throw it over the wall and they say, “Here it is, go to it.” If the people that have to execute it have no investment in it, they’ve had no participation in developing the strategy. They have often no understanding of what the goals and objectives are, they can’t and they won’t do what you need to do to make that strategy work. And so what you end up with, if we think back to that definition of innovation, you have a gap in the value that’s trying to be created because the people that are being expected to implement don’t understand it, they don’t buy into it, they don’t see the value for themselves. So Nilofer’s argument and I endorse this 100% is that to be more effective with building our strategy we have to be more inclusive in including more people in the building of strategy. And that’s the way that you get rid of that air sandwich. And it’s too bad that everyone is just listening to this on the podcast because my physical gestures is really expressive. But the issue that if more people participate in building the strategy and building the goals and building the objectives of an organization, they’re more invested in making sure that those things work. Often those people are closer to the people you’re trying to create value for so they often have a better understanding of what your other stake holders will value. And so that idea being more inclusive in building strategy and building the ideas that you try to innovate around I think is very powerful one.
17:00 DK: I really love it. It’s just such an obvious thing that probably between us we can cite so many examples from our previous experience of working in global authorities or education institutions, you see it. My kind of only frown point with that if there is one is if you’re talking to an organization which is quite fat like maybe a governmental organization or university like Queensland, it’s quite big, how do you make sure the air sandwich is nonexistent which is what you’re advocating for or at least has a very thin layer of air?
17:36 Tim: Yeah, well so that gets into a huge can of worms. So the bigger question there is if we have a large organization and they’ve got set ways of doing things and we want to get them to change, how do we do that? And I think there’s a few points with that. One is that first off it’s really hard, unsurprisingly. And so that’s one issue but the second thing then is that there are in fact organizations that have done it successfully. IBM has transformed themselves twice in the past 20 years. You know first to respond to the rise of PCs and second to respond to the rise of the Internet. And so they’ve gone from being a hardware manufacturer to being a service company. And if you look at who were their big competitors in the 60s and 70s, they’re all gone. So all the organizations that were just as big that they were competing against have just disappeared because they didn’t make that transition. And IBM was thousands and thousands of people. So how did they do it? They did it by doing exactly the sort of thing that we’re talking about which was broaden the base of people that are participating in generating ideas and coming up with a strategy. You know their big innovation in the 1990s was the innovation jam. And the whole idea of that was well wait a minute we’ve been setting direction here in the boardroom with 20 people for years and that was fine while the environment was stable. But now the environment isn’t stable so maybe we should talk to everyone. Those first innovation jams, we went from having our strategy and our objects set by 20 people to having 10,000 people participating in figuring out what we should do next. So that idea of can we broaden the base of the people that are contributing ideas and contributing to our purpose and contributing to our direction, it can be done. So we have examples that we can look at. The third point in all of this is that often — so that’s doing that on a big scale. If we’re in an organization and we’re not the CEO, so we don’t have the power to change everything, I think the next question to ask then is okay there’s good stuff going on someplace here, how do we identify that and build on that? Because you’re better off finding the positive things and building on those than trying to stamp out barriers even if there’s barriers that are hindering innovation or change, it doesn’t necessarily just unleash a torrent of ideas or innovation that was just sitting there waiting to be unleashed. You’re better off finding the people that have already figured out a way to fight that inertia and of succeeding that system and encourage that. Try to get that to spread. You knock down barriers (inaudible) actually building the behaviors that you want rather than — supporting the behaviors that you want rather than trying to get rid of the ones that we don’t.
21:10 DK: Thank you, yeah that’s brilliant. So we could just rap forever man but we’re going to have to bring this to a close so I’m going to ask you, which I’ve asked the other guys I did a podcast with, who’s impressing you in this innovation space whether that be a person, a brand or organization, or even just an idea that’s popping in that you think has some legs?
21:30 Tim: Okay, I’m going to cheat and pick two because as you can tell I can talk. And so there’s a couple of ideas that has popped up. One is for an idea the thing that I think is really powerful and you and I met when I was talking about this is business model innovation. I think business model innovation the idea that we can change not the thing that we’re delivering to people but everything around it and then we’re creating fundamentally different value for people, I think is incredibly powerful. And it’s something that is available to pretty much every organization. So I think that the idea that we can innovate a business model is something that is a relatively new idea, obviously the activities that go into have been around for ages but thinking about it as a business model and innovating that relatively new and I think it’s very powerful. And so when we look at things like wing start up, that business model is right in the middle of that and that’s transforming the way that we start businesses. It’s also having a huge impact on larger firms as well and so I think that’s a really important idea and one that people should investigate. If we’re talking about organizations it’s another one that you and I were talking off mic at the start. The company that’s really impressing me right now is Under Current. And I think if we think about ideas that we’ve been discussing, how do we get (inaudible)? How do we flatten? How do we experiment? How do we find (inaudible) and expand it? That’s the think that their whole practice is built around. And I just think that they’re doing great work and I would love to see more companies like that. I would love to see them get really huge because I think that their approach to this is really, really good. They’re doing fundamentally good work. And it’s based on good theory and pretty solid theoretical underpinnings and that to me is the kind of company I’d love to see more of.
23:41 DK: I appreciate that and thank you. So Tim thanks for your time. It’s really been a joy to speak to you.
23:47 Tim: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity. As you can tell I love talking about innovation with pretty much anyone I get a chance to and I hope that this is been a good useful thing for people.
24:01 DK: That was Tim Kastelle, senior lecturer of the innovation management at the University of Queensland. You can follow him on Twitter because of course you’re young and funky and follow people on Twitter right? You can follow him on Tim Kastelle, that’s T-I-M-K-A-S-T-E-double-L-E, timkastelle, please subscribe to the blog, leave a comment or review it on iTunes. That would really help me out immensely. If you think we should be interviewing anybody for the Defining Innovation podcast just leave a comment or drop us a note on the contact page of justadandak.com. Until next time, I’ll speak to you then.
Would your CEO deconstruct your product / services to expose its quality (after all these guys are 100 year warranty)?
I literally only watched 90 seconds of the above video and had to grab a pen and piece of paper (always good to kick it old school) to jot down the opening point: Data > Information > Knowledge > Understanding > Wisdom.
Often cited as the DIKW Pyramid (although this model lacks the ‘understanding’ level), the pause was needed to reflect, as something ‘connected’ in my brain / soul and the ideas needed time to percolate:
There’s a difference between doing things right and doing the right thing.
Peter Drucker
So many organisations / companies / social issues are about maintaining and sharpening the core operations (efficiencies) without re-examining the fundamentals of their origins (effectiveness).
Over the past few weeks I’ve shared the following with so many peers and friends as a way to get my head around it. When sharing, the example that’s become handy to ascribe it to is the oil industry:
The big oil companies have a wonderful understanding of how to protect and create the market for their product and to drive the consistent need. They have deep knowledge of how to both get the oil from where it is and then to refine and package it. They have precise information on where it is and how much it will make them based on the patterns. They have masses of data on all aspects of the process so they can refine and become more and more efficient.
What they don’t have is the wisdom to drive them into the future of becoming effective on a higher plane. They are doing the wrong thing righter.
Wisdom would allow them to pivot their whole business model. Taking their profits and for the next 5-10 years investing everything they have into more sustainable energies / renewables. This alone would revolutionise the whole sector via investment, ensure they continue to profit in the energy space whilst also pivoting the whole industry into serving the world and its global health.
Thoughts?
Thank you Russell Ackoff.
Mike Arauz is a partner at Undercurrent a digital strategy firm who help influential organizations transform into digital leaders.
PODCAST NO LONGER BEING PRODUCED
Show notes / timestamps :
00:00 Intros
00:46 What is Undercurrent?
01:10 The five P’s (see their website front page)
05:28 Delivery approach
07:21 Methodologies: Joanna Beltowska / strategist shares “The 10x Workshop: / Google Ventures Design Sprint format
11:04 Innovation
14:34 Undercurrent is now a Holacracy: the management structure used by GitHub and Zappos
18:36 Sustaining change
23:20 Who / What is impressing : Valve, Ev Williams and Medium, Zappos, Third Wave in Berlin, London Strategy Unit and Made By Many
26:12 Outro
Know of any innovative folks who should be interviewed / featured then contact us here.
00:01 DK: Welcome to the Defining Innovation podcast. This is episode number two where I get to speak to Mike Arauz. He’s a partner at Undercurrent. You can find that on the undercurrent.com, a digital strategy firm who help in organizations and companies become more responsive due to digital technologies out there and everything else. So they’ve worked with amazing clients like American Express, Hyatt, General Electric, Ford, even my friends at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. So we’re going to explore today in the podcast really how they go about doing what they do which is incredible by the way. And I kicked off asking him basically about Undercurrent, describe what they actually do.
00:46 Mike: So Undercurrent is a strategy partner, a consultancy based in New York City and we currently just opened up a new office in Los Angeles. And we work with business leaders primarily at large organizations to help them change the way that they work through our combination of both strategy and implementation.
01:10 DK: Great so how does that manifest then? I’d love to get your take and for you to share your five Ps with us.
01:20 Mike: Yeah absolutely. So what we’ve been noticing, we started around 2007 and since we were founded we’ve been very close and kind of integrated into the tech start up world. Our founders are very involved in that space. We actually have a ventures arm of our business. So at the same time that we’ve been working with these large established companies, we’ve also had very close relationships with folks in start up world. And what we’ve observed is that there are fundamentally new ways of operating that we see in the companies that are growing the fastest and having the most disruptive impact on the world. Sometimes those can be very large organizations, you know someone like Google or Amazon. And other times they can be much more emergent start up, someone like Uber for instance which kind of came out of nowhere and has grown at a very, very fast pace. And so if you think about the aspects of any organization and how they operate, it basically comes down to five areas. And you can kind of think of them in a kind of Maslow’s Hierarchy level from purpose at the top, why do we exist? What are we here for? Then process what’s kind of the governance that decides how we do things. Then people, our employees and our wider network. Then product, what are our products and services that we actually sell or make our business off of? And then lastly platform which traditionally could be the underlying infrastructure, the distribution network or supply chain or something like that. But more and more these days it’s a very kind of active and external facing aspect or element of a business. And what we noticed is that across those five domains there’s a value shift in how more responsive organizations think about those elements of their model. So rather than when it comes to purpose for instance, we see an emphasis on a kind of visionary dent on the world even over a commercial purpose with process do turn towards agile processes even over more linear or predictive processes. With people you see a shift towards makers even over managers, people who are actually capable of doing and not just over seeing or planning. With products, products is much more moving towards evolutionary or emergent products, operating under the assumption that there’s no way to know what the best product is going to be six months or a year from now so we have to build a product that is designed to evolve from the start. And then lastly platforms are mostly about opening up. Amazon web services is probably the best example in the world I bet, something that began as an internal infrastructure piece was built in such a way that it could become opened up and became a huge lucrative line of business for Amazon and has had huge, huge, very far reaching implications for the entire business world.
05:28 DK: Fantastic. I just love the language you guys are using and that’s what drew me to Undercurrent in the first instant. And in the beginning I said I’ve been following you for like six to nine months even though you’ve been going for a few years now and I think you’ve got the language really framed right now days and that’s what drew me to you, like I said from an innovation perspective. And in terms of those five Ps I can imagine when you’re going in and working with clients, where do you start? Do you do the whole thing? Do you do just one of those things? Do you do it in stages?
06:01 Mike: Yeah well certain clients of ours we’ve been working with for a while and so it’s a much more fluid process. But we like to do our preference is to do some kind of initial audit of where they currently stack up against this new way of operating. So that can be through a combination of kind of traditional interviews, going around and talking to people within the organization, qualitative research as well as both surveying and virtual tools, and even data mining of publicly available online information, looking at data that you might gleam from company profiles, employee profiles on LinkedIn or what people have been saying about the company on a site like glass door. Those can be interesting sources as well. So we typically start with some kind of assessment that says these are the areas where you are most efficient or where you have the most strength to build off of. And then we can kind of go back and forth and say, all right should we focus on recruiting for instance or should we focus on implementing new process or whatever it might be.
07:21 DK: And one of your staff members and strategist Joanna Beltowska, sorry if I pronounced that wrong —
07:28 Mike: No that’s correct.
07:30 DK: — did a great blog post around the ten times workshop or the ten, yeah 10x, I’ll link to that in the show notes, which really just shares the methodologies of your approach in one of your hands on sessions with your clients. I’d love to hear from you a little bit of an overview of that so people can get a flavor and get them to click through.
07:53 Mike: Yeah I think that that’s a really good example of particularly how we’re putting together a few different sources of inspiration into our work and particularly how we think about doing strategic planning in the most traditional way versus how McKenzie or Boston Consulting or those other established consulting firms would go about it. So the 10x Workshop as Joanna calls it in her post brings together a few different things. One is there’s a really good write up from Google Ventures, a week long structure that they use to rapidly prototype and validate product ideas. And I can send you the link to that. It’s definitely worth clicking as well. And we put that together with ten best practices from agile software development and design thinking. So the process essentially starts with empathy with the user, the customer, understanding their needs and what their problems are, then generating a kind of wide array of potential solutions or value propositions for them, then prioritizing that list based on what you’ve heard from them, then very quickly beginning to prototype some solutions, working as quickly as possible in a very low-fi (phonetic) manner. Typically it’s like sketches on a piece of paper or something like that. Sometimes depending on what it is you might do it in some kind of interactive format. And then putting in front of real potential users and that could be in person. The workshop that Joanna was writing about, this was a structured workshop with a client of ours and so we’re able to bring customers in and do some remote interviews and validation. But you can also do it in an even more distributed manner. You could do search engine marketing to drive to some rough prototype and see how people click or what not. So that’s all by Wednesday and then by Thursday you have some feedback, you have some favorite ideas and you create a slightly more refined prototype. Maybe it has some design components or maybe it has a really simple development back end to it. And you create a slightly more flashed out prototype. And Friday you go back again, you put that narrowed down prototype again in front of some real users. And at the end of the week rather than just coming up with a bunch of neat ideas that everyone feels excited about, you actually have something that you can look at and say we’ve collected feedback on this. This is what works about it, this is what doesn’t. These are some more realistic expectations about how or in what way it could be successful and why the sponsors or the stakeholders should invest in it further.
11:04 DK: That’s great. Thank you for that. I know people are going to click through because it’s just a great write up. So share if you can kind of how you guys because you have a great group of partners and strategists and consultants there, how do you guys define innovation and chat about it or do you even? Do you have those kind of sessions where you talk through stuff?
11:26 Mike: Yeah I mean to be honest I think innovation is one of those words that we try not to worry about too much because we’ve kind of accepted that it’s overused and used in a lot of different ways. But we do, even though that term itself is something that we try not to take too seriously I think the underlying ideas and practices that are associated with it is something that we take very seriously. And the way that we that we think about it is the ability to imagine what could be better and to create it in some way is more important than ever. And that involves a lot of different things. You know the design thinking piece is really important because design thinking — one of the things that’s best about design thinking is reminding yourself to pay really close attention to what users or customers actually need. So that’s always going to be critical in taking that inspiration from them and adding your own intuition. So it’s not like that famous Ford quote, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse.” And part of the reason why someone like Steve Jobs was as great as he was, was that he was able to imagine solutions that no one else could conceive of yet. But at the same time Apple is a really good reference I think for innovation because their biggest successes were not completely invented out of nothing. If you look at the iPod, MP3 players and portable music players had been around for a long, long time before the iPod came along. And yet they were able to solve the user needs in such a way that their solution blew everybody else’s solution out of the water. And they did the same thing again with the iPhone. So it’s a combination of that design thinking plus I think the agile software development comes in where you have these built in routines of validation and fast shipping, that you’re always shipping, you’re always trying something new. You’re always collecting and learning about what’s working and what’s not and then improving on it. So those are the things that we think of and try to bake into how we do things.
14:20 DK: I love that description of the iPod and you’re right. They basically iterated better than anybody else.
14:28 Mike: Yeah and maybe that’s all innovation is just iterating better.
14:34 DK: Yeah improve it faster or improve it better or whatever it is but you’re right and thank you for that. It’s great. Now you guys at Undercurrent also just changed how you operate yourself so you’re talking about creating responsive organizations but you guys just adopted and again I’ll check the fast company link into holacracy right?
14:57 Mike: Yeah.
14:58 DK: So your management structure now matches people like Zappos and Github. What does that look like?
15:06 Mike: Yeah so actually after we get off her I’m happy to send you a screen shot of our org structure because we use a piece of software that goes along with it that helps us keep track of everything. So there’s this practice, this kind of governance, more than anything it’s a rulebook for a way that an organization can govern itself. It’s called holacracy and it’s very largely based off of a philosophical approach to government called sociocracy that was started earlier in the 20th century. And the fundamentals of it are essentially that there are very explicit roles and accountabilities that are transparent to the entire organization, that roles are separate from the people who fill them so any individual might and likely will fill multiple roles in different areas of the company. And then there are weekly and monthly rhythms for checking in and like in a scrum way on what are the things that you are working on in these particular roles, in this particular group? So there’s a reputation group for instance. There’s a client group that focuses on our paid client work. There’s a growth group that’s focused on business development. And so each of those groups gets together on a regular basis and says, “How are our projects going? What’s holding you back? What do you need?” As well as governance meetings, which are about saying there’s this thing that’s really important that’s not getting done. I think we need to create a new role to focus on that area. Or we have this role and we’re all expecting them to do a certain thing but they’re not doing it. I think we should let them know that we’re all expecting that of them so let’s make that official and record it here. So yeah that’s what we’ve been practicing for a little over maybe seven or eight months now. And it’s been interesting. It’s been most useful I think to us in terms of the focus and kind of priority it’s given us. Before we started practicing this we’ve always been a company that is continually adapting and is very eager to change and question ourselves about how things are going. So that aspect of it, it forced us to change was very natural to us. But what was new was the explicitness and the focus of that change. So it was more deliberate instead of more accidental.
18:36 DK: It’s a fascinating model and I referenced Github and Zappos and some of the other companies out there who are using it and for a lot of people I would imagine it’s hard to get their head around. But just that statement you made at the end there, if I can paraphrase, you know adopting and eager to change and that’s what you guys are. And in a sense that’s what you guys sell right? That brings me around to a question which I didn’t ask you earlier on which I’d love to ask you now is how do you create the conditions internally for organizations you’re working with for that eagerness to change to continue the sustainability angle? How does that happen?
19:13 Mike: Well that’s actually, trying to answer that question is probably the main thing that has pushed us to become the kind of company we are today and work in the way that we work today because our earlier work was much more typical of consulting in that we were brought in to answer some question. We have this problem. Tell us how we should fix it. We would go away. We would think about it. We’d come back with these beautiful PowerPoint documents and these great bulletproof charts and you’d say, “Here’s the solution, thank you very much. We’ll see you later.” And we’d go and leave it to them to figure it out. And we quickly realized that that wasn’t enough. Those PowerPoint documents end up collecting dust on the shelf instead of actually having any impact in the organization. And we also have, you know very few of us come from a traditional business or consulting background. Most of us have more of a — we have a handful of developers front end, back end, software developers, engineers by trade. And so even though we act as strategist, I think it’s baked into our DNA that we actually want to get our hands dirty a little bit. So we’ve tried to structure our engagements to be more imbedded and more about quickly, in an agile sense. We have a really well informed intuition about how this could be improved. Let’s start working in that new way. Let’s start creating some kind of solution that we can test and validate as quickly as possible. And then adjust and move on from there. And so a lot of our work today is about creating conditions to work in that way. And sometimes that means in a classic Clay Christensen innovators dilemma approach creating some kind of independent team that is kind of siloed from the rest of the rest of the organization who is given the authority and the autonomy to explore new spaces. We’ve done that approach. We’re also doing more things that are more tied in to existing structures and sometimes reorganizing a group or a division to work in a new way. So if they were functionally structured before we might look to something like the scaling agile at Spotify approach and say all right this is a relatively scaled organization. They have a pretty big complex product that serves a lot of users. And it can be broken down into a lot of component. You have the radio and you have the play lists and you have recommendations. You have all these different aspects and they structure around those user needs and that’s a good source of inspiration so we can take — we help clients think about how they could reorganize their structures and put together more cross functional or cross disciplinary teams to focus on user needs rather than some HR construct that was set up 20 years ago.
23:05 DK: Fascinating. Thank you for that. That’s juicy for me. It excites me, that kind of conditions versus sustainability.
23:13 Mike: It’s not easy. That’s definitely the hardest part.
23:16 DK: But that’s why it’s so important right?
23:18 Mike: Yeah, exactly.
23:20 DK: So let’s end this interview with a brief kind of insight from you in terms of what’s exciting and new out there? Who’s doing amazing work, rather it be a brand or just even a consultant or an offer? What’s making your eyebrows go north?
23:35 Mike: Yeah well I mean we’re really excited to kind of see what we’re thinking of as responsiveness or the responsive organization. There’s this ideal of a responsive organization and we see companies like Valve, like Ev Williams and Medium who are fully embracing or testing out these new ways of working. Zappos would be another one. So it’s kind of like this legitimization of these new ways of working and it’s getting more publicity. So that’s really exciting to see. But then on the other side we’re seeing more and more kind of compatriots who are kind of carrying this and kind of brining it to more organizations. And regardless of how it’s articulated there are a handful of companies, like a small group called Third Wave in Berlin, some really, really sharp guys that we admire a lot and do very similar and great work. There’s London Strategy Unit and Made By Many who are both based in London. Made By Many we’ve known for a while and have tremendous respect for what they do. We always laugh about Made By Many because we seem to be on the exact same wave length but they’ve always come at it — their background is much more on the making and developing side of things and our background is more on the strategy and planning side of things. So we’re kind of coming at it from two different directions but we always seem to arrive at the exact same approach. So we like those guys a lot. There’s also a website called Responsive Org, I think its responsiveorg.com. We can double check that afterwards but it’s a good kind of repository of a lot of thinking on this subject.
25:59 DK: That’s great. We’ll check them out and check into some notes (phonetic). Mike I really want to appreciate you giving your time. It’s really insightful and thank you.
26:09 Mike: Yeah my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
26:12 DK: That was the second Defining Innovation podcast. Thanks for listening. You can follow Mike on Twitter. He’s on Mike Arauz, that’s M-I-K-E A-R-A-U-Z. Please follow up on justadandak.com, that’s J-U-S-T-A-D-A-N-D-A-K.com. Leave us a message if you think I should be interviewing anybody who should get the Defining Innovation podcast treatment. I love that interview. I love what they were saying about being adaptive and eager to change. That is driving what they do with their clients. Please check out Undercurrent on undercurrent.com. Say hi when you give them a shout from me and we’ll catch you next time on the Defining Innovation podcast.
Chet Baker had a voice like honey.
He was bad. He was trouble and he was beautiful.
Invention is something new which hasn’t yet been adopted or fully proven to the audience or market it’s aiming to assist.
Innovation is doing something different that has an ongoing positive effect.
Improvement is the result of advances on a status quo.
Do they each require a different model or are they complimentary stages along an evolutionary framework?
Like:
Invention -> Innovation -> Improvement
Or maybe improving something through invention is innovative?
Raw ideas in need of collaborative critiquing—what do you think?
Referencing the utopian visions of 1960’s architecture practice Archigram, Walking City is a slowly evolving video sculpture. The language of materials and patterns seen in radical architecture transform as the nomadic city walks endlessly, adapting to the environments she encounters.
Here’s something I’ve been challenging clients with for the past couple of years during internal strategy workshop sessions.
A simple action that if done properly will produce the following:
…and I guarantee hardly any of you will do it!
What is it?
Commenting.
Simply adding value to existing digital content out there.
Not a “hey yeh man, great post” but a “great post, really made me think about X and wanted to share this great book / video / quote with you which I thought was fitting. Thanks for creating it and looking forward to more related stuff from you.”
The simple truth is as creators of online material (whether it be blog posts like this one, videos, a tweeted image, slideshows etc) it’s extremely validating to receive a comment. And one of the first things we do is click through the digital breadcrumb to check out the persons background who took the time to connect.
Personally, loads of friendships to inspirational souls have been formed this way.
This one action also scales massively.
Just imagine the accumulative impact of every individual in your organisation / company leaving one comment, once a week on a piece of digital content out there… (a very small strategic commitment).
Imagine the gain in engagement if a council / a startup / a design firm / a theatre / a charity etc did this!
If you’re not adding value into the community by recognising their work then why should you expect them to give you their attention when you produce content?
Me
