IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a great fan of creating fake newspaper front pages from the future.  They are very effective at positioning people to think differently about how the future could be, and what decisions lie ahead.

Last week, The Yes Men did it again, and printed a fake IHT from December 19th 2009 to illustrate the decisions facing the Copenhagen Climate conference.  Read all about it here.

From the cover story of the June 09 issue of Fast Company comes this quote from Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab:

“I like to be on the edge because it makes me vulnerable. On the fringes, I think, is where disruptive innovation begins.”

Oxman appears to be a one-person study of exploration across disciplines. She’s described as “artist, architect, ecologist, computer scientist, and designer.” Digging slightly deeper behind the hyperbole, it turns out not to be far from reality. She studied medicine in Israel, graduated from the Architectural Institute in London and is now based in the computation department of the architectural department of the MIT Media Lab. Her work has recently been displayed at MoMA, now part of its collection.

That’s the sort of background that would even make Frans Johansson’s head spin. The collision points between disciplines are often where the sparks are created that light the fires of disruption. Given Oxman’s background, she’s probably got enough spark-ability to re-start the Large Hadron Collider.

In this current climate, companies that double down on innovation and invest in R&D can expect to do well when the cycle changes.  There’s plenty of literature around that supports this, and I’ve been interested to spot companies that are taking the message to heart.

In Australia, one of the largest financial services companies - AMP - is continuing to run it’s fantastic Innovation and Thought Leadership Festival called AMPLIFY.  Of course it’s not just fantastic because I was one of the headline speakers last time it ran in ‘07  - if anything it was fantastic despite me being a headline speaker.

Annalie Killian is the organiser of the bi-annual event, and manages to pull in a mind-expanding array of speakers from around the world.  When you look at the festival website you have to keep reminding yourself that this is an internal event, aimed at inspiring and provoking employees from across the entire organisation.

If it was a public event it would easily justify having a few zeros tacked onto the end of the ticket price.

The event appears to be quite unique in the corporate world, and sends very clear signals about what AMP is about, and the core values that will underpin it’s growth. I was curious to know more about the event being staged in the middle of The Great Recession, and fired three questions at Annalie:

This is the third innovation festival you have organised - what have you learnt from the first two?

Be bold, trust your instincts but keep your nearest and dearest colleagues as a sounding board. We are a very collaborative and supportive team and I know that my team colleagues will support me when I want to push the envelope- but they will also not let me stray that far that I fall off the edge!

Being a bit of a maverick is a delicate balancing act and having supportive and trusted colleagues is key to surviving and thriving.

Create an event for both the Heart and the Mind! In corporations, there is an over-emphasis on the mind at the expense of the heart and aesthetics. When you touch people emotionally - be that by creating joy, humour, laughter, wonder….it goes a lot further than logic and deductive reasoning in terms of lasting cultural impact. (This is a tip I have learnt from the amazing Andrew Zolli- Curator and producer of Poptech)

The festival is interesting in many ways, not least of which is the fact that anyone in the organisation can attend, not just senior management. How does this benefit the organisation?

This is what sets AMPLIFY and AMP apart - it’s an inversion of the usual organisation development model where the more senior you are, the more exposure you get to the world’s leading thinkers by attending global events or expensive business school courses- and the less the lower you are in rank and seniority.

These learning exchanges are valuable for the personal development of those individuals, but they seldom come back able to transform the organisation they’ve returned to after a few days of a “Damascus experience”.

If you can give a substantial number of your employees exposure to the very same thought leaders and thinkers in a concentrated dosage, you create an organisational tipping point much quicker and  can actually accelerate the pace of cultural change, idea adoption and implementation. It also goes a lot further a lot quicker in creating a learning organisation.

As a consequence of past Festivals, I now have employees spontaneously sharing with me (and others) articles they have discovered, introductions to talent and or interesting thought leaders-  behaviour that I just didn’t experience before.  It may sound bizarre- but it’s as if the free access to any dimension of the Festival offerings gives people a permission to dare and to dream and to think big.

We also hear stories of the AMP Innovation Festival repeated to us in hiring interviews by candidates who have heard about it and liked what they heard. They cite the company’s investment in an innovation culture as one of the reasons why they want to work for AMP- so it clearly has a talent retention and attraction benefit for the organisation.

The same goes for employee engagement. We have steadily seen an improvement in our employee engagement score over the past 9 years- and whilst the Innovation Festivals are not singularly responsible for that- its the convergence of many leadership initiatives- it plays its part in what people believe is possible to achieve personally and collectively in the organisation.

You’ve made the event open to non-AMP staff also.  What was behind this gesture, and what sort of response have you had?

Because of the quality of the event we create and top notch speaker line-up, people outside AMP hear about it and request if they too can attend.  In the past, we have had a small number of guests at management discretion, but this demand has grown so much that we thought it best to manage it by way of offering a small number of Festival tickets at roughly the market rate of the average conference.  AMP makes no money from this it goes a small way to offsetting the cost of speaker expenses and production costs.

Some of the folks who have requested to buy a Festival pass say its like a TED Downunder. That’s a lovely compliment but its not far from the mark albeit on a much smaller scale. Conferences like TED, POPTECH and Business Innovation Factory are what we benchmark against, but we don’t have the venue overheads because everything is held on site by turning our corporate offices into a learning campus for the Festival.

I recently stumbled across a book by Bob Sutton called Weird Ideas That Work (and subtitled how to build a creative company).

It’s interesting because it does not have the word ‘innovation’ on the cover.

It’s interesting because it’s written by a guy who wrote a book called “Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths And Total Nonsense” (he also wrote the “No Arsehole Rule,” which surely must go down in history as the best title ever given to a business book.)

It’s interesting because it’s based on research and observations by a Stanford professor over ten years.

The book is fascinating because it’s not some breathless magazine article extolling the virtues of a fad, or some factoid one-pager from a consultancy group (in my experience nothing pulls your head ten directions quicker than a whole bunch of shallow articles rabbiting on about business trends).

Here’s the summary (I’m still digesting the book):

The three key principles are to increase variance in available knowledge,see old things in new ways, and break from the past.

The weird ideas that aid in implementing those principles are:

1. Hire smart people who will avoid doing things the same way your company has always done things.
2. Diversify your talent and knowledge base, especially with people who get under your skin.
3. Hire people with skills you don’t need yet, and put them in nontraditional assignments.
4. Use job interviews as a source of new ideas more than as a way to hire.
5. Give room for people to focus on what interests them, and to develop their ideas in their own way.
6. Help people learn how to be tougher in testing ideas, while being considerate of the people involved.
7. Focus attention on new and smarter attempts whether they succeed or not.
8. Use the power of self-confidence to encourage unconventional trials.
9. Use “bad” ideas to help reveal good ones.
10. Keep a balance between having too much and too little outside contact in your creative activities.
11. Have people with little experience and new perspectives tackle key issues.
12. Escape from the mental shackles of your organisation’s past successes.

Highly recommended if you are grappling with how your organisation builds an innovation culture while still having people focused on operational goals (which, by their nature, tend to stifle innovation).

I recently got in touch with Bill Cockayne at Stanford.  The conversation was wide and varied - as you’d expect  - and among other things we discussed the Shell Technology Futures work I’d done with Innovaro. As he lectures at Stanford on foresight and innovation, I was interested in his perspective on some of the issues that I had encountered with various organisations.  With that in mind, I asked him four questions:

1. While a lot of people may describe you as a futurist, your work extends a lot further than that.  Do you have a title that sums up your work?

Innovation is the simplest word.
My team and I take the stance that future that will exist is the one we build.
We’ve developed our tools and methods with the goal of helping potential innovators move from thinking critically about the long-term to building… starting today… the future that will emerge.

2. In my work I see a continuum between foresight, strategy, innovation and design. I expect that you have a similar view, and, if so, where do you see the links between these disciplines?

The links are the most important part, and at the same time the last understood. But they are not hard to understand.

The links exist at the boundaries between “disciplines.” But like the ampersand in R&D, the link is often viewed as a boundary between research and development. I’m sure we’ve all heard the old adage about “throwing it over the wall” as being the biggest problem in actually doing R&D. And at the same time we’ve read the stories of the innovations that can occur when real researchers and developers made the link.

Viewed this way, the links that make the innovation process work — from foresight to the next new thing — are the result of the practitioners. Our tools and methods help, say, a foresight thinker to anticipate the information that the strategist and engineer need, then work hard communicate his learning to them. At the same time, he must play a role in helping the strategist and engineer to understand his needs as a partner in the overall process. So it is with these two pieces — an understanding of how the knowledge I create in the innovation process will be used by others, and a focus on communicating it in a way that they can use it — that the links work.

3. Many consultancies confuse the four disciplines, and try to sell themselves in areas where they lack experience.  For example, I’ve witnessed one of the worlds best design agencies try to sell themselves as strategists. In your experience which organisations have a good understanding of how to traverse the spectrum between foresight and design?

The list of companies that have succeeded in bringing truly innovative solutions to the world span industries, eras, and inventions. So it is from these stories that I’d look for our best understanding of connecting foresight to innovation. The answer to the question of who has the best understanding is the same in each and every story — it is the people who imagine building a better future, and who then take it upon themselves to do the building.

4. Given the current economic climate, what is your advice for an organisation that is toying with the idea of cutting back on strategic innovation?

As we’ve all read, this economic environment is the best time to invest in the discovery and creation of the next big thing. The reasons are well understood, and yet it’s not easy for companies to be thinking and investing long-term when they are so busy delivering the next product. My only recommendation to companies lately is to worry less about “thinking long-term” and more about “planning the next few steps.”

A company knows when it hopes to deliver that new product to its customers. The company is planning for that next new opportunity developing in the marketplace. And it has developed the financial and talent plans for making these events happen. Any company that is thinking ahead, planning, and then making sure to measure how well it performs to plan, is doing exactly the right thing in this and any other economic environment. At which point I might mischievously ask, “if you are happy with your plans… have you thought about what you’re going to do after those plans come to fruition?”

There’s a nice bio of Bill here, along with a video of him speaking at LIFT 08.

In futures thinking there is an increasing level of conversation around sustainability, and the concepts that surround it.  It’s worth a closer look, and with this in mind I asked Tim Nichols to weigh in with his view. Tim came recommended by a colleague and as a recent graduate, brings a fresh and informed perspective (in June 2008, he completed a Masters in Strategic Sustainable Development at the Blekinge Institute of Technology in Karlskrona, Sweden).  Here’s Tim’s view:

What is meant by sustainability? For many people who work to promote the idea, the essence of the concept is centred on cultivating long-term thinking. The goal is to get people to be thinking about the repercussions of the actions beyond their lives. In essence, think about your grandchildren.

This seems easy enough, but it actually goes against human nature. We thrive on immediate satisfaction; feed me when I’m hungry, sleep when I’m tired, etc. And we have ingrained this methodology for life into the fabric of existence, with everything at our disposal and disposable. The “take, make, waste” mantra of our culture has put us on a speeding train into an unknown abyss. And currently, actions to try to stop the train has had been the equivalent of throwing marshmallows on the tracks, soft, easy to swallow but doing nothing.

Fortunately, sustainability was the buzzword of 2008, so the seeds have been sown. And it is unlikely that the core targets of sustainability: degradation of the environment, pollution from heavy metals and toxic chemicals, and the destruction of humans ability to meet their basic needs, will not be as easily altered as changing buzzwords. The current economic atmosphere offers the perfect opportunity for society to call on business and government to come together to form a model that has a more long-term view.

Without risking being called an alarmist, or underestimating the brilliantly resilient nature of humans, it seems we have been given another, possibly last, chance. With a plethora of scientists claiming that we are pushing the ecological thresholds of multiple natural systems, as well as the ever-increasing population surviving on constantly decreasing natural resources, there’s no time like the present.

Sustainable Futures covers an area too wide to fully define. However, it will require the collaboration of business and NGO, Government and 3rd Sector, communities and business, and on and on to ensure full participation. These groups must come together to establish where sustainability needs to be, and understand where it’s at now. They can then develop a plan to move from where they are to where they want to go, always with that clear, collaboratively formed vision of a sustainable future.

Timothy J. Nichols is an independent Sustainability Strategist for the public, private, and third sector. Current partners include Energizer Batteries, Clarks Shoes, Student Partnership Worldwide and the Brixton Pound, a local community currency to be launched in September 2009. The Brixton Pound is part of a greater movement called Transition Town which seeks to engage communities on how they can move towards becoming low-carbon communities. Tim is also affiliated with The Hub, a worldwide organization which provides a space for entrepreneurs focusing on social and sustainable projects.  In addition to sustainability, Tim is passionate about writing, biking and beer.

From 2006-2008 I spent the majority of my time working alongside the Shell Gamechanger team in The Hague. It was a fascinating exercise on many fronts.

Firstly I was based in New Zealand and working for Innovaro in London for a client which although had some of it’s team in The Hague, could meet anywhere in the world.  Inevitably London and The Hague worked fine for us, although Houston or Bangalore would have equally fine. Personally Europe worked well for me as I could regularly visit Singapore on the way - a city with a firm view on the future (but that’s another story).

Secondly, as an organisation Shell is arguably the best user of scenarios in the world. Innovaro’s Technology Futures programme dovetailed into - and fed - the scenario development.  Innovaro ran the programme in 2004, again in 2007 and there should be another update in 2010.

The Technology Futures programme built a view of the impact of technology on society in the next twenty years. To construct something that was robust  - but still captured enough leading edge thinking - was a detailed process.  the summary is as follows : identify which adjacent sectors can impact upon the core business (either postively or negatively), seek out the subject matter experts in these sectors, gather them together for a week and then synthesise the output of the sessions.

We assembled a huge variety of people - from those who are pioneering the creation of life from scratch, to Mars roboticists and architects that are designing massive new green cities in China (the workshops are held under Chatham House rules which means that I cannot name the people or organisations that were represented). The conversations that resulted were compelling, intriguing, confronting, dynamic and never dull.

From the discussion we created a view of the world in twenty years time.  What is interesting about this view is that we can track everything back to a spark in a peer reviewed journal, or the commentary of a world expert in a certain field.

In this instance there were a series of outputs, the most visible being the book I co-edited and breathed into life (along with Barry Fox of New Scientist fame).  The book is also the only publicly accessible output from the programme, and you can download it here (5MB PDF).

The book is also the only publication to leave Shell without being edited by the PR department and as such is an untouched view of the Technology Futures programme.

The Innovaro Futures programmes are a proven way of seeking out white space opportunities for organisations looking to find new high-growth businesses, but they are also applicable at a macro level.  Innovaro has been talking to Governments about the possibility of running the programme at a country level, and this would be a natural fit for the process.

People get intrigued by the programme, but in the interests of blogging brevity I will close this post.  Howewver if you are interested to know more, please drop me a mail (now *at* rogerdennis.com)

At the end of last year I had an interview for the Leadership Through Project Management magazine.  An annual publication in the USA, the 2009 issue is about managing change.

I talk about crowd sourcing, strategic innovation and also make mention of the work for the Shell Technology Futures programme.  The full article can be downloaded as a PDF here.

Further to my posting about the McKinsey article about seeking contradictory opinion, there’s an interesting new book on Amazon.  It’s called “The Deniers” and contains articles from scientists challenging the paradigm of climate change.

Note that I say that the theory of climate change is now a paradigm. People that challenge paradigms are often ridiculed and professionally ostracised.

Before you get hysterical and start hyperventilating, it’s important to point out that I’m not a climate change sceptic. Please don’t try and burn me at a stake, or stone me.  That would ruin my day.

The difference with the theory of climate change is that the stakes are too high to ignore it.  If we disregard the theory - and it is a theory - then the planet as we know it will be a distant memory.  That’s not a risk worth taking, no matter how highly regarded the nay-sayers are.

Why is this interesting from an innovation point of view? Watch the comments that this book receives, and see how much anger and disbelief it attracts. Paradigms are not easily changed, and assumptions not easily challenged.

Disruptive innovation tackles paradigms and assumptions head on.  There will always be the sceptics, the doubters and the critics. Sometimes - but not always - the most ardent of these will be the ones you need to convince.  In the majority of companies they’re usually the ones that site in the C-suite of your company.

Davison Creators has just published an interview I did with them.  There were some interesting questions, and you can catch the full blurb here.

The company itself has a fascinating 20 year track record of commercialising ideas, and if you have the time, you can dig around the Davison web site where there are some relevant case studies.