IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

When I suggest a workshop to clients, the usual expectation is for a half day format – or – if they are really serious – a full day event. I always find it interesting to gauge the reaction when I recommend taking three full days to address strategic impertatives.

There are many reasons why you should have multi-day workshops when tackling thorny issues.

Most importantly they give people time to think, and acknowledge the complexity that is inherent in many of the problems and challenges that are common to large organisations.  It’s unrealistic to dumb this type of work down, and expect solid, coherent solutions from a half day workshop, let alone one that was conducted as an ‘off-site’ complete with  Jack Daniels and golf (although not necessarily in that order).

One of the more subtle reasons is that by focusing on issues over several days (three days is about right) you provide the opportunity to absorb, sort and frame new information.  This is not a hunch, or some half baked concept, but something that has attracted serious scientific attention.  For example, read this from The New Scientist :

Ever wondered why sleeping on a problem works? It seems that as well as strengthening our memories, sleep also helps us to extract themes and rules from the masses of information we soak up during the day.

Bob Stickgold from Harvard Medical School and his colleagues found that people were better able to recall lists of related words after a night’s sleep than after the same time spent awake during the day. They also found it easier to recollect themes that the words had in common – forgetting around 25 per cent more themes after a waking rest. “We’re not just stabilising memories during sleep,” says Stickgold. “We’re extracting the meaning.”

And, more recently from the BBC:

Sleeping on a problem really can help solve it, say scientists who found a dreamy nap boosts creative powers.They tested whether “incubating” a problem allowed a flash of insight, and found it did, especially when people entered a phase of sleep known as REM.

Volunteers who had entered REM or rapid eye movement sleep – when most dreams occur – were then better able to solve a new problem with lateral thinking.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has published the US work.

“We propose that REM sleep is important for assimilating new information into past experience to create a richer network of associations for future use”

These findings reinforce the need to tackle complex issues – such as those prevalent in strategic innovation – over the course of two or more days.  While the body is sleeping, the brain is processing, and that means that people return to the issues better equipped.

The findings also have an unexpected payback for office workers who are bored to tears with mundane roles.  Armed with the above research, they can awake from a mid-afternoon desk slumber, ready with the defense: “I was problem solving.”

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.

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).

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.

For various clients  – on various projects – I’ve worked up fake front page newspapers from the future.  It’s an excellent way of getting people to think about the future in a more tangible manner.

However this site is in a whole new league, and is unbelievably good. Check out the date of the site. What’s more staggering is that the paper also went out in print.

The adverts are as good as the content  – one of my favourites is below:

 Hats off to The Yes Men.

(via IFTF)

If you are after a good overview of disruptive/discontinuous approaches to innovation, then look no further than the UK organisation Advanced Institute of Management.  It has compiled an Executive Briefing that is comprehensive in its coverage of the field. The blurb reads:

In a fast moving world, one of the biggest challenges facing organisations is dealing with discontinuous innovation (DI).  This briefing document  focuses on at what some leading organisations are doing in this area it suggests 12 different strategies for developing a search capability to detect triggers of discontinuous innovation. These strategies are also useful for more conventional innovation, and all organisations should employ some at least, if they aim to remain both competitive and durable.

The Futures approach we use at Innovaro with clients such as Shell and GM (Europe) is referenced, although not quite in the full context.

Direct download of the PDF is also available.

The latest edition of the Innovaro publication “Innovation Leaders” is now available. As the name suggests, it looks across a number of sectors to identify the companies that are leveraging innovation to the maximum benefit. You can download the summary or buy the book from the Innovation Leaders website.

If you are in The States this week, and want to hear more about the book Innovaro, then the founder of Innovaro – Tim Jones – will be doing a live interview discussing the research innovation in Ireland on CNBC for the “Business of Innovation” 2008 series which goes to air in the next couple of weeks.  USA this Thursday at 8pm/ET (1am GMT).

(edited update reflects the changed focus of the interview)

The Foresight Department of the UK Government Office for Science has released a new update to The Horizon Scanning Toolkit. “Exploring the future: tools for strategic futures thinking” discusses 24 different futures techniques.

If you are in any way interested in futures approaches, methods and case studies, this is a treasure trove of information which will keep you occupied for days.

It is a project that has been put together by the ever enthusiastic and sound futures/innovation/branding thinker Patrick Harris of thoughtengine.

I’ve made a small contribution to the toolkit via a recording of my thoughts on the subject of using folksonomies.

Via the Australian bog – Innovation  Feeder – comes this rich vein of futures and technology related links.  Highly recommended but comes with a “time suction” warning…