Rocket Surgery

Picture Imperfect

You’ve heard the old saying is that a picture is worth a thousand words.  If you are innovating, what you want to do is supply maybe three hundred or so to prime the picture pump and then listen for the rest.  We hound people about prototyping early and often to get great user feedback and focus on the really good ideas.  An experience we had this week drove home to me the importance of the just-enough picture imperfect prototype.

The other day we demonstrated a prototype to a group we’ve been working with recently.  We’d been through several meetings understanding their process and got to the point where we knew the basic approach people who use it take.  We’d been talking, doing some sketches, but the implementation just wasn’t clicking until we—you guessed it—produced a quick and dirty prototype. 

We needed to be able to program and control some basic shapes and connections on the screen, show some stuff when you rolled over the connectors and shapes, and we needed a rudimentary database to drive the whole thing.  It needed to look like the web application it would eventually become. Lots of times we use Excel for rapid prototyping, and, knowing it has drawing elements, we decided to give it a whirl.  Turns out it was perfect.  Turn off the grid lines, put some hyperlinks in some of the cells in the first column, freeze the first column so as you scroll it stays in one place and blamo! you have something that looks like a web page.  If you’ll pardon the geek speak, one of the great things about Excel is that you can record a macro to do something, say insert a shape and name it, and then go in and copy that code.  Rapid coding, it’s all in one file, and it’s easy to distribute.  Great for prototyping.

When we showed it, the group instantly got it.  They took the picture we could create on the fly and started adding to it, making comments on how it should work, and we ended up with a basic requirements document.  It would have taken months to get there by just discussing and I know we would have missed some of the requirements.

A major point is that the prototype was incomplete.  On purpose.  We left some simple stuff out (e.g., color coding) we knew they’d suggest.  Why?  Because that gave them a start.  Once they added to the picture, they felt comfortable adding more.  And that’s really important, because it became everyone’s, not just ours.

That’s why I think it’s important to prototype just enough to get the juices going.  If you go too far, it looks to complete and people are afraid to mess with it.  With the evolution of applications that allow us to make everything look perfect, we’ve also made it less comfortable for people to think they can make adjustments.  You might tinker with an old car or give your kids an old radio to take apart, but no way will you mess with the new shiny one.  The presentation gets in the way.  Presentation is everything and sometimes everything is way too much.

We really shy away from presenting application prototypes on projectors as well.  Flip on the projector and everyone goes into movie mode—they watch, but it doesn’t seem as interactive as everyone huddled around a screen.

The point is that imperfection is the goal in the beginning of innovation.  Make a prototype that people feel comfortable working with. Suggest half-baked ideas—if they’re fully baked, you’ll lose the flavor someone else can provide. If you’re brainstorming, don’t worry about spelling.  We had a person recently tell us that they’d like a spell checker for our brainstorming product so they could fix the spelling when they entered an idea.  If you are worried about spelling, you are focusing on the wrong thing.  I want you thinking about the ideas you are contributing, not the spelling.  Do you think Google would have passed the spell checker five years ago?

So, if you want to get to the real requirements, if you want people to really contribute, make the initial pass look like a rough draft.  Don’t polish it too much.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but most of those words should come from the people who are going to use the picture.

Sandlot Innovation--the Do Over

When I was growing up, we played two main sports.  Starting in the fall, we played tackle football.  We played that until spring, at which time we switched over to baseball in the local vacant lot.  Baseball lasted through the summer until fall rolled around again and we took to football.  Interspersed with these we played flashlight tag, kick the can, and a number of other pick-up games.

I sometimes wish we had some of the same rules in business that we had back on the sandlot.  If something didn’t work out and you couldn’t agree on whose side was right, somebody eventually would yell out “Do over!”  No matter what, this meant that you had to reset the play to whatever state it was in before the disagreement occurred.  Nobody could question the do over, nobody was blamed for whatever caused the do over—it was just a do over.  That was it.  Period.  Any kid that moved into the neighborhood came preprogrammed for the do over.  I don’t think we ever had to explain it—it was just a recognized law in kiddom.  Someone calls “do over!” and you do it over.

I’ve often wished we had the do over in business.  I’ve come to realize that although it would be great to have a do over in any business aspect, the do over is critical to innovation.  It embodies two really important principles behind innovation—prototyping and the fear of failure.  In previous blogs we’ve looked at the importance of prototyping early and often:  to get feedback quickly, to help figure out what the product or service really should be, to understand what people really want but can't say until they see it, and to eliminate things that don’t work fast.  Everyone in innovation knows that your first prototype will likely be thrown away.  It’s a built in do over.  It’s accepted, nobody gets blamed—it’s part of doing innovation as a business process.

It’s the fear of failure where the do over really shines.  The number one innovative-culture killer is the fear of failure.  What if I try this and it doesn’t work—do I get a black mark on my permanent record?  Is my career at risk?  Do I get another chance?  What if I actually try something that will pay off in a year instead of next quarter?  Will I get beaned if it doesn’t work?  The do over mentality takes care of this.  Did you screw up?  Did you do it fast?  Did you learn something we can apply next time?  Great!  Do over!  No questions, no finger pointing.  Just a do over.

I started playing a game in the street with a neighbor a few years back.  At one point early on, we couldn’t decide if the ball was over the line or not.  We looked at each other and said “Do over!”  Just like that.  So I know that the do over is not something that gets beat out of us or repressed, like some of our creative skills that we have to reignite.  It’s innate.

So let’s let it out.  Promote the do over.  Give people permission in your organization to fail forward.  Give an award for do overs.  The metric for failure shouldn’t be the failure itself—it should be the learning from the failure.  It should be what happens after the do over.  The game continues, with nobody punished.  Everyone wins because nobody loses over something that was just part of the process.

In a future blog we’ll discuss the one-twice-three-shoot method of making decisions—another sandlot technique that I’ve used in business.  It works great, unless someone mumbles and you start to argue over what the person said.  If you can’t decide, then of course someone will call “Do Over!” and off you go to make it right.  Here’s to the mighty Do Over in your innovating on purpose.

Building the Prototyping Muscle

In the innovation space there's always lots of talk about prototyping.  Prototype fast and often to find out what customers really want in your product or service.  Prototype quickly to eliminate the ideas that aren’t going to pan out.  Tom Kelly, in The Art of Innovation devotes a whole chapter to prototyping, including some really neat things IDEO does with foam blocks and other full size prototypes.

All of this is absolutely true.  I am always amazed when we watch clients use stuff for the first time and they discover something missing that none of us on the team saw.  Sometimes they look at you and you think “yeah, we really are lunkheads for not thinking of that one”.

But what isn’t covered much is what you get out of prototyping.  For me, prototyping is like working out or practicing an instrument—the more you do it the better you get and the more confident you are in both trying things out and in the specific skill you exercise while doing the prototype.

What you build doesn’t have to be a big thing; small things you build work just as well.  It’s the actual process of doing that strengthens the prototyping muscles.  For example, when I was in high school I worked at the public library.  They called us pages--a standard library pun I think.  In addition to my duties to shelve books, go reorganize the sporting books (which always got out of whack), clean records (this tells you when I worked at the library), tell the weekly flasher to leave, and shout out “the library will be closing in 15 minutes; please bring your materials to the check out desk at this time”, on Saturdays I got to actually check out books for patrons.  This required practice, because back then in order to check out someone’s books you had to put their library card (which had raised letters) in a special machine.  Then you took the card from the back of each book and put it in a slot.  After a big “kerchunk!” you pulled the card out.  On the left side was the person’s library card number.  On the right was the due date.  You filed that card for reference and inserted a card into the book with the due date so they’d know when to bring the book back or face stiff fines and an evil look from the head librarian.

Because the stamping part required a delicate twisting of the card to get it to work, they made us practice by creating the cards that went in the back of the books.  You created those the same way as checking someone out except there wasn’t a library card in the machine.  What this meant was you only could use half of the card; the other half was where the person’s library card number would have been had the card been one for the records.

My bright idea?  Create a library card that could hold the date.  This would allow us to use the entire checkout card, cutting the number of cards we used in half.  So one day during lunch I got a pair of scissors, a blank library card, and some other materials and put the prototype card together.  After some finagling, I got it to work.  Then someone pointed out that there were two dates on the card—the one where the library card went in the inky black smudge with the old date and the current date stamped on top.  Simple solution: draw a line through the used side.  Viola!  We cut the card cost in half.

After the success implementing the prototype, I was much more confident in making suggestions and I think they were received with more respect (hey, a page is pretty low in the pecking order).  The point is that by the simple act of prototyping, I was gaining confidence in stepping up to prototype and not worry about what other people thought so much.

It’s also important to get clients used to prototyping.  It not only helps them understand that it can be very beneficial to work with something that’s not all the way right but also it starts getting their muscles stronger.  For example, we recently had an organization call us who uses our Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In and wanted to do additional things with their tasks.  They were pretty sure they knew what they wanted; in about an our we prototyped some views that allowed them to use some existing Task fields and views for the next month to see if their idea would work.  By doing this and explaining how they could change things, we get them hooked on prototyping, which allows them to come back to us with a much clearer picture of what they want.  It also means they understand the prototype process and get excited about prototyping with us.  Everyone wins.

I recently met the head of R&D for one of the top five consumer goods producers in the U.S.  I asked him what the mean time between concept to prototype is for their company.  His response: 24 hours.  If it involves a big retooling, maybe a week.  He said they have this one guy who sometimes leaves the meeting with customers and comes back with a prototype look and feel held together with tape and glue.  He’s one of the most popular guys to have at the meeting because they get instant feedback from the customer.  Now there are some prototyping muscles!

So my advice to you is go build something.  Start prototyping.  Make a foam version of the device you want to produce.  Use toothpaste to fill the cracks.  Make the hot glue gun your friend.  It ranks up there with duct tape and bailing wire. Cut and paste images of a service you want to offer.  Go to the dollar store and get cheap stuff and glue it together.

It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty or fully functional.  The act of building the prototype will help you start to turn to building other prototypes more often, which will lead to much better products or services.  Your prototyping muscles will grow and you’ll be a better innovator.  You’ll build your repertoire of how to prototype things.  People will start wanting you to be involved because your skills will help them.

So let's get those muscles moving.  One and two and one and two...get prototyping!

Youthful Innovation

We sent our kids to the grandparents for a week.  This used to mean we would take a week off and build something at the house (bookcases in the living room, an entertainment center under the stairs, a bridge over the little creek in the back); now it means we get to work extra hours--but we do see a lot more late movies.  Anyway, one thing I noticed after the kids come back is that for the first day or so when they ask us something they start out with Grandmother or Daddio and then realize they need to change to Mom or Dad.  Sample conversation:

"Grand---Mom, can I eat a Snickers for breakfast?"
"No"
"OK.  Daddio--Dad, can I eat a Snickers for breakfast?"
"Sure, just don't tell your mother."

The point is that in one short week, their pattern has changed from Mom and Dad to Grandmother and Daddio.  It takes only a day or so for them to switch back, but it is noticeable.  Their pattern-making and pattern-breaking mechanisms are quite pliable.  This, I surmise, is one good reason why kids are also so great at imagining things.  Their patterns aren't yet set.  They haven't been exposed to the same constructs over and over, so they can forget things easier and make new connections.  Until we beat all the creativity out of them in school or through routine, they can make infinitely better connections than adults can.  They also suspend their judgments more readily.

When is the last time you took a problem you were trying to solve to a child?  A teenager?  You'd be surprised at the viewpoint you get--and sometimes how readily they solve the problem you are having.  Have you thought about setting up a session at the local elementary school where you go in and present a few problems you are wrestling with or client needs and let them have at it?  I know from first hand experience organizing the Science Fair at a couple of schools that student solutions sometimes work really well.

When was the last time you thought like a child?  Go look out the window and tell me what that cloud looks like.  I'm serious.  I've been in Europe the last several weeks and I sat by a pool in Italy with a high powered real estate guy and we started the "that one looks like" game.  After a couple minutes, you could really start loosening up the patterns and seeing lots of different shapes.  And not once was it a Word document.

So here's my advice.  Start doing some things you did as a kid.  Ride your bike.  Build a sandcastle.  Make an automatic mailbox announcer for those boring summer afternoons (my colleagues tell me that was probably just me).  At work, start singing hot dog theme songs ("oh I wish I were an Oscar Meyer wiener"...or "hot dogs, Armour hot dogs...").  Soon everyone else will join in and the patterns will be easier to make and break.  Your goal is to loosen up the pattern machine we call a brain and kick yourself out of the rut. 

If you manage innovation at your workplace (or someone else does), suggest adding a new item to the performance appraisal:  examples of when you thought like a kid.  That should be in there with "times I failed and was rewarded" and "risks I took".  If you aren't doing these, you need to start.

So start now.  Nobody seems to have a problem being seen reading the new Harry Potter book.  Start taking kidding around seriously, just like risk taking and failing forward.

Are you kidding?

The Face in the Interface

How many times have you received an email from someone less than 100 feet away?  Then you reply and they reply, and on and on.  Is that really more efficient or effective than just getting up, going over there, and speaking with them face to face (what—see someone in person—gasp!)?  Unless it’s a yes/no question, you might want to consider it.  If it’s about an idea, you might want to demand it.

A major source of innovating is making connections—connections between people, ideas, and things.  The people connection is especially important and actually putting in face time in interfaces makes a huge impact.  Getting up and going over to the person provides several advantages:

• You can see the person’s facial expressions, hear intonations, play off each other’s thoughts, and build on each other’s thoughts much faster than electronically possible
• You can deepen your connection with them so each interaction becomes more effective
• Others might hear what you are talking about and contribute
• You get some dang exercise

That second to last one is very important for innovating on purpose.  Stories abound about chance secondary interactions that lead to innovations, like the guy in the office who hears two coworkers discussing a design problem in the shoe industry in the hall and goes out and solves the problem with a solution from a medical device.  Thomas Edison did this on purpose by putting all his muckers in one large room.  Everyone knew what everyone else was working on and could make valuable connections from different viewpoints, even though some were working on telegraphs, some on railroads, and some on mining.  I doubt that the innovation factory at Menlo Park would have cranked out 400 inventions in six years if the muckers stayed in their cubes quietly emailing each other.

Have you ever noticed that really big deals boil down to two people in a room making sure they trust each other before they sign the agreement?  They are making a connection with each other.  How many deals happen over lunch?  A friend of mine who manages several billion dollars for a large corporation told me one time that the biggest deals happen at parties where all the people know each other or know somebody in common.  Humans are built for connecting and some of the best innovations arise from purely human interaction.

For an idea to be put into valuable action—a good definition of innovation—somebody needs to make a connection between a problem they are trying to solve and the solution you have.  Many times that requires some discussion.  How do you handle that?  You talk to the person and make a connection.

If you want to innovate, get up, go out, and start connecting.  Observe people, read new things, play, surf, and then find someone to discuss it with over lunch.  People are interested in stories and experiences; humans are wired to best share them face to face.  Those interactions will result in more ideas and better thoughts than delayed emails or instant messaging.  Make sure you put your face in the interface.

Marching to a Different Tune

A couple of Fridays ago four or five of us were yucking it up around quitting time.  Somebody said something which led to the theme from Underdog, which, of course, most of us knew.  Why is it that we can remember all the words to songs from cartoons we watched as kids but we can’t remember birthdays and anniversaries?

I think the answer lies in how we store information.  I think songs stick with us because we store the relationship between the notes rather than the notes themselves.  The progression of notes makes up the song we remember.  If I hum the first two notes of the theme from Star Wars I’ll bet good money you can take it from there.  Before John Williams wrote that theme, those notes together probably would not have meant anything to you at all.  But once you know them, you can extract the rest of the song from that little bit.  Name That Tune built a whole game show around the concept.

Most birthdays and anniversaries, on the other hand, are disconnected—one day out of the year.  A piece of data that goes with a person, like their middle name, that isn’t part of a progression.  Some however, have a relationship to ours, so we remember it.  I call my business partner’s son every year on his birthday, because it is the day before mine.  It’s a progression that’s related, so it stays with me.

The only problem is jumping into the middle of the progression.  The other night I played Songburst, a game where they give you the title of a song and a line from the song and you have to finish it.  If it’s the beginning of a verse or a chorus, it’s easy.  If it’s in the middle, you have to sing up to that point before you can start remembering the rest of the line.  How many ring tones have you heard that start in the middle of the song (and isn’t it amazing that people will pay double for a few cheesy notes from a song than a CD quality version of the whole thing)?   All the ones I’ve heard are at the beginning of the song or the chorus—the part you immediately recognize.

Innovations that stick work the same way.  If your innovation relates to something that resonates with a customer, a pattern that they have or they realize they need, it’s a song.  If you introduce it without a context or, as Clayton Christensen might say, not in their particular circumstance, your chances of them adopting it will be significantly less—it’s too hard to fit—you’re somewhere in the middle of the song rather than at the chorus.  Innovations that pull patterns together, that make meaningful related connections, resonate with people and are adopted.  It can even be an entirely new context for someone—a new song—but if they see how it fits, it can be successful.

It’s also important to be able to arrange new patterns to innovate.  Song writers and composers use the same set of notes to write new songs.  By combining them, along with rhythms, different instruments, and all the like, they create new patterns that resonate with us and stick.   If you were around in the late 70’s you might remember the five notes that instantly conveyed Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  As you read this you probably hummed them.  Those notes have been around for centuries; now you associate them with a movie.  Combining ideas, people, technology, and other base components result in innovations. Many innovations are just good ideas from one industry applied and adapted for another.  Same song, different instruments or a different audience.

You can hear the same song sung by a rock band, played by an orchestra, tapped out on a xylophone, blasted from a bullhorn, screeched as a ring tone or cast in elevator music.  Your kids can tap Jingle Bells with a stick and you’ll recognize it.  The relationship of the notes is what sticks, not the details of what the notes actually are.  By making the relationships between your idea, other ideas, things, and people work you’ll have a song rather than a collection of notes.

Time to go.  I think I just missed someone’s birthday—but I know the tune.

How to Measure Up

I've spoken with two people in the last couple of weeks who said that innovation is one of their company's hot buttons right now.  One is in a mid-sized company and one runs a group responsible for a huge amount of money (as in if you're a small company their rounding errors could fund you for a year) for a large global company.  In both cases when asked on what metrics are they being measured the answer was "not a dang thing".  In fact, said my friend at the large company, although failure is expected when innovating, everyone is scared to make the smallest misstep that might mess up next quarter and get them canned.  "We are measured on profit for the next quarter."

Lots of people have said it: you get what you measure.  If you don't set up some metrics to measure and reward people for the fundamental activities surrounding innovation people won't spend their time and resources doing those things.  How many salespeople do you know who spend their time doing things that don't bring in their commission? 

How many stories do you have in your organization of spectacular failures?  How many people go into their performance reviews and proudly tell their managers they failed five times?  Of course, those better not be the same five failures--and hopefully those failures provided lessons learned that led to or will lead to successes. 

Does your performance review have a place to indicate the five places you took a risk and what you think the result was?  For your manager to indicate the same?  For the fifty ideas you submitted, the twenty that you provided serious details for, and the one that made it through the first stage?  The mean time between ideation and market?  The external technologies, ideas, and concepts you explored that were related and unrelated to your job that led to ideas or innovations? The rewards you gave people for submitting ideas, for taking risks, for failing forward, for sacrificing some profit next quarter for a whole bunch more three quarters from now?

Do staff keep innovation journals?  Are unit managers measured on the number of substantive initiatives they have taken with other units to create new offerings?  Is there a place to record it and is it part of how they are measured?

Start with yourself.  If you don't already do it for productivity reasons, start writing down how you spend your time.  Do it real time.  Every time you switch activities record it.  Peter Drucker wrote and excellent chapter called "Know Thy Time" in The Effective Executive that provides great insight and examples of how people really don't know how they spend their time.  When he recommended recording everything you do for a period of time on a regular basis, some of the executives had their assistants do it--and then almost fired them for recording "the wrong things" when, in fact, their assistants recorded exactly what the executives did.  It was only when the executive recorded his time himself that he found out he didn't spend his time where he thought.

Analyzing the results of a two week log will not only help you be more effective, but will also tell you what is important to you--or at least what you make important to you.  Your time is the most important resource you have; how you spend it tells you what you've made important.  How much of it was doing innovation-related activities?  If they aren't important enough for your organization to measure, staff will likely not spend time doing them.  If the boss comes by and says "what are you doing" and the answer is "experimenting" and that's not something measured and the reply is "get back to work", you can bet that won't happen again very often.

So, what you don't measure you don't get.  Not only that, but sometimes what you do measure opposes what you say you want.  As mentioned above, short term results is a great example.  "We've changed the corporate vision to include innovation.  Thou shalt now innovate. Go forth and innovate using all the best practices."  Great!  But then if next quarter is the only measurement, you have to fund the innovations that don't contribute to next quarter, and that funding has to come from your current budget, guess what?  You got it--nothing happens.  Similarly, if the CEO isn't measured on practical innovation metrics (amount of revenue from offerings in the past x years, number of new offerings per year, number of ideas from outside the organization, etc.) and doesn't insist on innovation measurements, then no dice.

The long and short of it is the two guys I mentioned at the beginning are very innovative.  Both could drive more long term success at their organizations.  Both would have to buck the system to actually do it.  So their organizations lose in the long run.  Go tell a construction worker to create a straight line to cut using a one inch ruler instead of his 25 foot measuring tape and see what he says.  I'll bet I can guess the number of letters in some of the words.

Here's to measuring up.

Rocket Surgery

Innovation is not rocket surgery.  It's a manageable process you can do on purpose. 

We know this because Thomas Edison did it very well starting not in this century, not in the 20th century, but in the 19th century.  He assembled a group of muckers (they mucked around) all in one big room in Menlo Park.  He set a goal of inventing one major invention every 6 months and one minor one every 10 days.  He brought in all kinds of materials for the muckers to muck with and to figure out new uses for as they worked in the railroad, telegraphy, mining, and electric light industry. The muckers cross-pollinated, making connections and applying what they learned from one project to another.

Edison had individuals who recorded all ideas and trials.  He had a pretty straightforward evaluation process--it had to be something they could sell (he had been burned on his first patented invention--a device to help legislators vote, which was rejected by the lawmakers--and vowed that he would never invent anything else that he couldn't sell).  He was well connected to help launch his inventions and readily formed businesses to do so. He built whole products (way before Geoffrey Moore brought the idea to us in Crossing the Chasm); although he is credited with inventing the light bulb, his true contribution was the whole product around the light bulb--a longer lasting filament, a socket so the light bulb could be easily held in place, and the electrical distribution system to bring electricity to people buying the light bulb. 

He also launched products in such a way as to make them well known; for example, when launching the light bulb by throwing a switch to illuminate 150 lights, his audience was JP Morgan and Wall Street--thus guaranteeing that his whole product was put in front of customers who could make it a success. His colleagues help create the persona Edison so that people could identify with a person rather than a company. 

Basically, Edison set the model that is being rediscovered today.  And he succeeded--in the first six years he patented some 400 inventions.  Interested in learning more?  I suggest starting with Edison articles at the Henry Ford and the IEEE Virtual Museum, and Andrew Hargadon's excellent book How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth About How Companies Innovate.

At The Front End of Innovation conference a couple weeks back there were many presentations and discussions on managing innovation.  Remarkably, almost everything discussed happened at Menlo Park.  Making connections, establishing a culture to innovate, allowing people to fail (remember "I didn't fail, I found out 1800 ways not to make a light bulb"?), generating ideas, capturing ideas, evaluating ideas, developing ideas, and launching ideas--all of these are being rediscovered as we move into an era where innovation has become one of the top five most strategic topics for organizations.  And, although over 70% of CEOs identify it as such, most organizations are not measuring or compensating for innovation, treating it as a black art.  We manage projects, sales pipelines, quality, finances, and all other key business components--almost all related to costs and efficiency.  But we do a haphazard job at managing the area most important to growth--innovation.

Here we're going to explore the facets of innovation.  Some will be based on research (heck, there's been over 100 books published this past year alone on innovation), some on current and past projects, and a lot on people who innovate on purpose everyday.  We'll make connections and talk about how to innovate on purpose and how to learn from really messing things up.  We'll explore thoughts, processes and people.  I hope you will contribute, experiment, and innovate as well.

Let's launch the rocket.