Just as “cloud computing” has made its way into our vocabulary, “big data” seems sure to follow.
Enabled by ever-more capable and abundant digital storage systems, access capabilities, and bandwidth, it seems big data comes with the underlying assumption that it is always better to have more data. After all, data is crucial to sustain any endeavor. Whether the data we amass is numerical, statistically valid, qualitative, or even anecdotal; the more data we have the better.
My own experience leading a team reinforces this. When I was managing a small team of consultants, data turned out to be essential in the team’s success. Actually, it wasn’t just the data that was so helpful. It was also its collaborative collection, frequent updating and visual display. Even in creative endeavors “connecting the dots” is often about seeing correlations between previously unassociated data points. Data is essential to both operating and innovating.
However, data is always derived. It comes from direct experience and observation. The biologist, chemist and market researcher alike generate data to prove or disprove their hypotheses. But it is their hypotheses that drive the generation and analysis of the data in the first place. And solid hypotheses come from personal observation and direct experience, infused with empathy and imagination.
Observation and experience may be more nutritious to innovating than data. Don’t get me wrong. Data and analytics are necessary contributors to every successful innovating effort. But while innovating may be informed by data, knowledge-creation and understanding are driven by personal experience and direct observation.
This might sound like an obvious observation, were it not for the fact that innovators are faced with an ever-present challenge: anticipate the future. Innovating requires lead times, sometimes long lead times. Innovators must innovate in the present but for the future. Delays require anticipatory behavior. Like hockey’s Wayne Gretzky, innovators must skate to where the puck is going, not to where it is.
The future looms large in the thinking and acting of innovators. But the future is always both “data-less” and “experience-less.” Innovators cannot rely completely on data or their own experience. Something else is required, something that “one person cannot directly communicate to another,” i.e., faith. (See Prisoners of Hope: How Engineers and Others Get Lift for Innovating.)
“Data-addiction” is one reason many hosted innovating efforts prove less than satisfying and never really get beyond “creative imitating.” If innovating is allowed to be driven by data, it will likely end up more imitation than innovation.
Just as the new is surrounded by considerable and unavoidable uncertainty, so also is the future. Uncertainty is perhaps the future’s signature. Attempts to avoid uncertainty by searching for assurance from more data can lead us away from innovation and toward incremental improvements. Improvements are not without value, but let’s be honest with ourselves, they are not innovations either.
Recovering from data-addiction requires innovators to cultivate the art of advocacy—a phrase I learned from Larry Plotkin at Hewlett-Packard Company some 15 years ago. Plotkin, an innovating engineer, was taking part in a five-company study we were conducting on how companies manage to both operate and innovate at the same time. Plotkin was very clear about the need for innovators to learn the art of advocacy—what the ancient Greeks referred to as rhetoric.
Aristotle said rhetoric was comprised of three essential elements: logos (appeals to logic or reason), ethos (appeals to conscience), and pathos (emotional appeals). Lest you think ancient is “old and out-of-date,” consider the recent discoveries of neurology that suggest emotionless thought is a myth. All thinking is processed through the amygdala, wherein emotions are “processed” as well. Pathos. And when innovators are directed to targets of opportunity, where the need is fulfilled with a compelling solution, little additional incentive is needed. Ethos. The examples of logos are legion. More recently, in his book Changing Minds, Howard Gardner (theorist of multiple intelligences) gives us a more tactical and practical look at what are essentially Aristotle’s three basic dimensions of rhetoric.
Thirty years ago it was well understood that innovators would run into resistance from their own “host” organizations, not to mention, in the marketplace. In anticipation of this resistance, innovators were thought to need deep conviction—passion—if they were to have any chance of success. Today, I don’t hear or see much of this understanding among my clients or in the literature. Have we become too reliant upon data, because we are not stretching ourselves enough. Perhaps we are not confident enough in our own convictions or appreciative enough of the courage it takes to innovate?
The remedy is not more data. Nor is it more logos. We have plenty of both. Instead, the remedy is to bring to our unavoidable advocacy more ethos (conscience) and pathos (conviction). This requires innovators to be willing to go deeper into the unknown and let go of what we think we know. As Dee Hock, founder of VISA International, said in his book, The Birth of the Chaordic Age, “the problem is never how to get new, innovative thoughts into your mind, but how to get old ones out. Every mind is a building filled with archaic furniture. Clean out a corner of your mind and creativity will instantly fill it. Once you got the old ideas out of your mind, new ones come automatically.”
Perhaps this is what we need to keep our heads out of the clouds (computing and big data) and to keep our feet firmly planted on innovating that works.
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2012. For this and other back issues of our newsletter,
please visit our website at
innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 387-1270.
Showing posts with label innovating. Show all posts
Showing posts with label innovating. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 11, 2012
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Content Trumps Process
When you hear someone say, “Trust the process,” do you take it literally or figuratively?
The old adage form follows function, or process follows content, still applies whether we are talking about innovating or operating. Yet these days it appears to be increasingly difficult for some to either know the difference between the two or remember this most basic principle.
Don’t get me wrong. Process—which often is used as a label for a sequence of steps, activities or procedures—is an important ingredient to getting things done well and in a timely manner. It is invaluable in coordinating diverse sets of arms, legs and minds, if not hearts. When process works well it is invisible; when it doesn’t work well, it becomes very visible. Without process, collaboration is more difficult. But when process gets in front of the content—that which is being attempted and why—activity and motion get easily confused with progress and productivity.
Over the past 30 years, I have heard many well-intentioned leaders say, “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to improve how we innovate.” A statement like this may be a true and necessary message; but on its own, it is insufficient and incomplete. Stating where innovations are needed (and why they are needed there) is also required for a coherent and complete act of leadership.
Yet all too often, company leadership—the CEO, CTO and others—are silent or inarticulate in this regard. Perhaps they are too focused on the best method to take the next hill. But even with the best methods executed well, if you are on the wrong hill, the execution and method are irrelevant. When leaders actually do articulate where innovations are needed and why, innovators within the company naturally respond vigorously and effectively.
Innovating is like parenting—a particular type of managing. In parenting, each child responds differently to discipline, love and teaching moments. While parenting principles may be transferable from one child to the next, the actual methods, practices and process itself is likely to vary, sometimes a great deal. The same is true with each and every innovation. By definition each innovation is unique, like children. If and when we insist on applying the same sequence in the same way we are likely to relearn that “trusting the process” is better understood figuratively, not literally.
Peter Drucker made the observation in his book Management decades ago that the process one team used in its success is never exactly or directly transferable to another. Drucker says each project team needs to work out its own process appropriate to the particularities (or content) of the project at hand. This is not to say that one team cannot learn from the experience of another, particularly at the level of principles. Nor is it inferring that no new product development Stage-Gate framework is needed to define a common vocabulary and starting roles and responsibilities. It is merely a caution to being process-driven rather than content- or results-driven.
Many organizations are becoming more than “make and sell” execution machines by taking on the increasingly necessary “sense and respond” capabilities normally associated with living organisms. As this continues, the art of clearly communicating where and why innovations are needed will only become more important and valuable. Stephan Haeckel from IBM’s Advanced Business Institute wrote an interesting thought piece back in 1999 called Adaptive Enterprise (Harvard Business School Press). Haeckel suggests that the traditional command and control leadership required by organizations that are all about making and selling, centered around “offers” to customers is increasingly being complimented by a new kind of “context and coordination” leadership, centered in “responses” to customers more than offers to them. This kind of organization requires from its leaders a clear, unambiguous, “roomy” and shared understanding of where the organization is headed and why.
For knowledge workers to be productive in creating new knowledge where it matters Ikujiro Nonaka, author of The Knowledge Creating Company, says knowing where the organization is headed and why is not optional. It is essential. It establishes context, and all value is context-based. Process may be important, but context and content trump process.
One of the startling “aha’s” that came from our Innovation Practitioners Network’s study of Toyota’s innovation management system is Toyota’s agnosticism regarding process. They appear to see the value in processes, tools and methods, but are eclectic in their mix of methods. Does Toyota have clearly stated principles and a firm sense of where the company is headed? Absolutely. But they do not have an overall canonized Toyota innovation process! The results speak for themselves.
Trust the process? Take it figuratively. But, by all means, trust the process.
The old adage form follows function, or process follows content, still applies whether we are talking about innovating or operating. Yet these days it appears to be increasingly difficult for some to either know the difference between the two or remember this most basic principle.
Don’t get me wrong. Process—which often is used as a label for a sequence of steps, activities or procedures—is an important ingredient to getting things done well and in a timely manner. It is invaluable in coordinating diverse sets of arms, legs and minds, if not hearts. When process works well it is invisible; when it doesn’t work well, it becomes very visible. Without process, collaboration is more difficult. But when process gets in front of the content—that which is being attempted and why—activity and motion get easily confused with progress and productivity.
Over the past 30 years, I have heard many well-intentioned leaders say, “we need to be more innovative” or “we need to improve how we innovate.” A statement like this may be a true and necessary message; but on its own, it is insufficient and incomplete. Stating where innovations are needed (and why they are needed there) is also required for a coherent and complete act of leadership.
Yet all too often, company leadership—the CEO, CTO and others—are silent or inarticulate in this regard. Perhaps they are too focused on the best method to take the next hill. But even with the best methods executed well, if you are on the wrong hill, the execution and method are irrelevant. When leaders actually do articulate where innovations are needed and why, innovators within the company naturally respond vigorously and effectively.
Innovating is like parenting—a particular type of managing. In parenting, each child responds differently to discipline, love and teaching moments. While parenting principles may be transferable from one child to the next, the actual methods, practices and process itself is likely to vary, sometimes a great deal. The same is true with each and every innovation. By definition each innovation is unique, like children. If and when we insist on applying the same sequence in the same way we are likely to relearn that “trusting the process” is better understood figuratively, not literally.
Peter Drucker made the observation in his book Management decades ago that the process one team used in its success is never exactly or directly transferable to another. Drucker says each project team needs to work out its own process appropriate to the particularities (or content) of the project at hand. This is not to say that one team cannot learn from the experience of another, particularly at the level of principles. Nor is it inferring that no new product development Stage-Gate framework is needed to define a common vocabulary and starting roles and responsibilities. It is merely a caution to being process-driven rather than content- or results-driven.
Many organizations are becoming more than “make and sell” execution machines by taking on the increasingly necessary “sense and respond” capabilities normally associated with living organisms. As this continues, the art of clearly communicating where and why innovations are needed will only become more important and valuable. Stephan Haeckel from IBM’s Advanced Business Institute wrote an interesting thought piece back in 1999 called Adaptive Enterprise (Harvard Business School Press). Haeckel suggests that the traditional command and control leadership required by organizations that are all about making and selling, centered around “offers” to customers is increasingly being complimented by a new kind of “context and coordination” leadership, centered in “responses” to customers more than offers to them. This kind of organization requires from its leaders a clear, unambiguous, “roomy” and shared understanding of where the organization is headed and why.
For knowledge workers to be productive in creating new knowledge where it matters Ikujiro Nonaka, author of The Knowledge Creating Company, says knowing where the organization is headed and why is not optional. It is essential. It establishes context, and all value is context-based. Process may be important, but context and content trump process.
One of the startling “aha’s” that came from our Innovation Practitioners Network’s study of Toyota’s innovation management system is Toyota’s agnosticism regarding process. They appear to see the value in processes, tools and methods, but are eclectic in their mix of methods. Does Toyota have clearly stated principles and a firm sense of where the company is headed? Absolutely. But they do not have an overall canonized Toyota innovation process! The results speak for themselves.
Trust the process? Take it figuratively. But, by all means, trust the process.
This article was originally published in Innovating Perspectives in November 2009. For this and other back issues of our newsletter, please visit our website at innovationsthatwork.com or call (415) 460-1313.
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