IdeaPort : strategic innovation, foresight, and futures thinking.

“What’s the point of branding, if your brand can be knocked off completely?” The difference lies in the experiences we have and associate with that brand. That cannot be copied or knocked off.

via Brains On Fire Blog.

There is a wonderful story floating around about foresight in the 1300s. Stewart Brand captures it nicely in this video. The story is summed up on the website of New College as follows:

…when the college fellows decided to restore the hall roof in 1862, they were wondering where to get the oak for the beams in the new roof Gilbert Scott proposed to build for them. The college woodsman pointed out that their predecessors had planted acorns in their Buckinghamshire woods in about 1380, so that mature trees would be available when needed for the repair of the buildings.

It is a great story that encapsulates foresight before a time when the phrase existed.  The problem is that it’s not true. The archive of the New College website refutes it in several ways.

However the general theme of the story has historical merit and  on this site there was mention that “oaks in the New Forest (in the UK) are a battleship factory.” This led me to some further research.  It turns out that this has much more substance to it as referenced on the history of the New Forest here:

1698 Enclosure Act “For the Increase and Preservation of Timber in the New Forest” : William III needed timber for the Navy. The Act permitted immediate planting of 2,000 acres, and a further 200 acres/annum for 20 years. In 1776 under George III a further 2,044 acres were planted.

However the foresight behind the continued planting of oaks was flawed and failed to take into account a technology development : iron ships.  This development in ship building meant that oaks were no longer in demand.

In an ironic twist however in World War II some oaks from the forest were used to build minesweepers as wooden hulls would not cause magnetic mines to detonate when the ship passed overhead.

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.

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.

Before I head off for a well earned – and overdue break – here’s a great quote that relates to the last few weeks of work that I’ve been focusing on:

“Strategy can be awfully boring. The consultants can be straighter than we academics, not to mention the planners. Everybody is so serious. If that gets us better strategies, fine. But it often gets us worse ones – standard, generic, uninspiring. Strategy doesn’t only have to position, it also has to inspire. So an uninspiring strategy is really no strategy at all.”

Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand & Joseph Lampel. “Strategy Bites Back” 2005

Ponder on that over the new year…

Southland Tales is a very odd movie. Very odd indeed. However the character played by Sarah Michelle Geller has a line in the film which was just too good not to share:

“Apparently, the future is much more futuristic then scientists thought.”

Here ends the Thought-For-Today.

Last night in Sydney I presented at Interesting South. Modelled on the event of a similar name in London, it was, as the name suggests, damn interesting.

The organisers aimed to capture the feeling of jumping from blog to blog – but in a face-to-face context. They succeeded.

I cried twice – once when listening to Zoe Horton – a genetic counseller – talking about a baby called Ruby being born with an incurable genetic disorder, and the tale of her short three month life.

The second time was for polar opposite reasons when listening to the tale of the Viral Waistcoat. There was a degree of unitentional hilarity when the Powerpoint failed to perform, but in the context I actualy thought this was intentional. Crying with laughter was the best way to mark the end of the evening.

The highlights? Tales of diving with humpback whales in Tonga (now on my to-do-in-the-very-near-future list), Tim Noonan celebrating being different (he has a huge potential as a stand-up comedian) and Michael Lister on how to design bus routes.

The videos should be online soon linked from the site, and if you were one of the many who could not get into the soldout event, I’d recommend a look.

I’m already marking next years event in my diary – it’s worth catching a plane for…

As a self confessed neophile, I now have a better understanding of why I read so widely – especially online. The answer – which comes from an article in the WSJ – is not encouraging

When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

For most of human history, there was little chance of overdosing on information, because any one day in the Olduvai Gorge was a lot like any other. Today, though, we can find in the course of a few hours online more information than our ancient ancestors could in their whole lives.

I wonder if the Betty Ford clinic  lets it’s “clients” surf the web?

Via Nat.

There’s a great little two minute video featuring Bruce Nussbaum (of BusinessWeek innovation blog fame) and his experience in setting up an “innovation gym.” If anything else it’s a great reflection of – an insight into – the person behind the writing (he comes across as quite amusing). One thing that surprised me was that he is wearing a tie. I’d always assumed that the ‘head and shoulders’ shot on his blog was one of those ‘file shots’…

This does however go someway to soundly disproving my theory that to find the interesting people at a conference, avoid those that wear ties….

Slightly off topic, but worth noting an article in the recent issue of Technology Review. It’s an extract from the autobiography of James Watson.

Never be the brightest person in a room

Getting out of intellectual ruts more often than not requires unexpected intellectual jousts. Nothing can replace the company of others who have the background to catch errors in your reasoning or provide facts that may either prove or disprove your argument of the moment. And the sharper those around you, the sharper you will become. It’s contrary to human, and especially to human male, nature, but being the top dog in the pack can work against greater accomplishments.