Innovation Garden

Problem solving starts with a problem – right?

If you read a lot of blogs and books about innovation, one recurring theme is that too many ideas are not good enough. Objectively, this may be true – if we define the situation in a certain way. I am in the process of reading Turing’s Cathedral (by George Dyson) about the beginning of the computer era. One of the interesting dynamics in this story relates to the relationship between theory-focused and applications-focused people. Mostly, they did not get along. That is the stereotype, but what is clear is that the people developing the computer were dependent on the theoreticians for ideas, but not just any ideas. The people focused on theory were able to suggest mental models of the world that could be applied to the real world.

 I learned about an era of technology development that I knew nothing about, including something about the extraordinary people who were part of this story. The story was amazing at the time, and looking back makes it seem more amazing.  

 The earliest computers were asked to solve simple problems and the primary issue was how to get the computer (hardware) to work. Very clever people used these relatively simple machines to do very complex calculations.  As those hardware problems were resolved, the problem became one of programming. In other words, how would a programmer express the problem in the programming language of the computer? In the flow of this conversation was the following passage.

 In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It is easier to draw something that looks like a cat than to define what, exactly, makes a cat looks like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. An answer finds a question, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and unused neural connections) are left behind.

 In innovation, the two extremes of innovation might be incremental and transformational. We often think about them as points on a continuum, but maybe they exist on completely different dimensions. Maybe we have also reached the point when our ability to solve problems exceeds our ability to describe problems. If true, then maybe transformation arises from answers finding questions, but incremental innovation arises from questions finding answers. This is why transformation often shocks. People did not “see” the problem, until somebody used the answer to shine a light on the problem.

 Maybe one of the problems with some of the inadequate ideas is that business leaders have not been looking for the problem that they have been given the answer for.

Ideation cycles

Most business people dislike ideation. While constantly advised to lead brainstorming sessions, managers are routinely disappointed in the output. Ideas are "old" or "bad". Often, no idea is adequate to generate action. People blame the ideators, but I blame expectations.

The drive for continuous efficiency improvement, combined with the quality movement, created an expectation that people will "do it right the first time". The output of a single round of ideation does not look like the "right" stuff; ideas are incomplete, have "obvious" flaws, and are often just the same old ideas brought back again. Why ideate, if the output is so poor?

Resolution of this requires first recognition that the ideators did it right the first time. They had an idea. Maybe they did not know all the issues. In a modern business, there are so many issues and nobody is expert enough to address all issues. Maybe they did not know all the nuance of the problem. It is not possible to concisely explain any problem completely.

But once some potentially useful ideas are offered, there is a chance to repair the weaknesses of those ideas in a second round of ideation. Take a few interesting ideas, identify the main problems with these ideas, and ask people for ideas to solve those problems in the context of the original idea. Explain the problem more clearly, seek specific ideas on how to create a complete solution, and to set the stage for execution on the best idea(s). This requires that managers suspend judgment more than they are accustomed to. It also requires that they use more intuition to select ideas. Early stage ideas may resist logical analysis, making intuition more important. Because there are cycles of idea improvement, mistakes will have chances to be caught and eliminated. So here the advantages of continuous improvement come full circle. Why not engage in cycles of improvement for ideas - not just products and processes?

This approach is not new. Synectics has promoted it for a long time, and idea capture software often incorporates the approach. But the mis-expectation of a single cycle of ideation is so common that organizations that develop an expectation of multi-cyclic ideation will probably be safe from copy-cats for some time to come.

 

Simplistification

Simplicity is getting plenty of attention. Many things have become very complicated, and people are beginning to realize that some things are actually complex. Countering this anxiety is teh call for simplification.

Some things are unnecessaily complicated and should be simplified. But some things have become complicated because that is what is needed to handle all possible contingencies. Faced with the reality that simplification is hard work, many people seek simplistification. Simplistification is teh process of making something look simple by hiding the complexity and asserting that things are simple.

Politicians simplistify, as do many pundits, business leaders, and everyday people. By taking a simplistic view, we can avoid the uncomfortable feeling that we can't understand and control our world. We can avoid confronting the hard work of understand complex, uncertain environments.

Einstein thought about simplicity. Two quotes attributed to Einstein include:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.

Three Rules of Work: out of clutter find simplicity; from discord find harmony; in the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Simplification is wonderful, go for it. Simplistify at your peril.

Simplicity's siren call

The social and commercial environment is complicated and uncertain. This is usually true, but it seems worse now. Dealing with all of the possible things that could happen tends to freeze people and organizations. One approach is to initiate analysis to understand and neutralize all of the barriers to survival or success. Systems analysis in all of its forms is one expression of this approach. The probable outcome of this is a growing awareness of the extreme connectivity of modern markets. A bit of analysis may make the problem seem much worse. Another approach is to simplify so that things don’t seem so uncertain and dangerous. This approach is the continuation of business process reengineering, but it has grown beyond operational management into strategy as a whole. The two approaches seem essentially opposite, but that is an illusion.

 Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction." — E. F. Schumacker

 The proper goal of any organization is to understand the systems of which they are part and then choose a few actions to focus on to thrive in the system. In other words, use complex mental models and simple actions to succeed.  Many organizations try to avoid this approach. They seek to simplify the analysis and mental models too. This is one place where things can go wrong. The world is complex, full of interactions, non-linear relationships and hidden connections. These can’t be wished away. But complex problems don’t require complex solutions. Studies in complex systems suggest that rather simple actions can have profound effects. The problem is that the only way to show that an action is useful is to try it. Often this means trying many things before finding a few that work. This makes the process of finding a simple solution into a complicated process. It is a bit ironic that the path to simplicity is through complexity, but that is the way it is. Most simple things are deceptive because their simplicity is the product of their complex environment; they fit the environment so well that their effect seems simple.

 The other place things go wrong is that organizations come to believe that their approach is permanently applicable – they become rigid in their ways. The complex social and market systems that we live in are not static; simple approaches that worked well in 2000 may not work well in 2012. Companies dedicated to simplicity must not let their mental models become simple. They must be regularly updating their understanding of the world and modifying their approach. Success may depend on simple actions; it rarely depends on simple minds.

Uncertainty

I read a scientific article about the effect of uncertainty on people’s recognition of creativity (Bias Against Creativity). In brief, they authors did some experiments that showed that when people were put into an uncertain state, they became much less receptive to creativity.

The organizational triangle

As part of our 1990s effort to understand how people in our research department contributed to progress, we identified a number of traits that people exhibited. While we may have started with the idea of identifying the good and the bad, we soon switched to the good and the complementary good.

For example, problem solving was good, but what was the opposite or complement? We soon decided that problem identifying was the opposite.

A second type of effort in our research group was capability-driven. Chemists sought opportunities to use their chemistry knowledge. We realized that the complement to this was needs-driven. Needs-driven people are motivated by what people need rather than what they can do.

The final dimension that we identified reflected that fact that many of our colleagues were very oriented to logical and fact-based thinking, while others were more intuitive in their approaches.

Projects & programs

In the mid-1990s, Bob Thomas and I spent a few weeks thinking about the type of work our research department did. We initially thought we were trying to fit all of our work into a project management framework, but soon discovered that this was incorrect. Some of our work was clearly projects, and benefited from better project management. Some of our work was much more open ended. We eventually chose to call this type of work program management. Some years later, I had occassion to write this down again, with the material below being the result.

The driving insight to making this distinction was that the mindset and practices of project management don't really work when managing programs. It is very important that any work leader be clear about which type of work they are leading (or more likely what the mix of work is) and to apply the right mindset to the work. With that as contxt, here are some thoughts on the similarities and differences between the two.

 

Reading

I was always a reader, even before starting formal schooling. I was never especially picky about what I read from food labels to science and history to science fiction and historical biographies. In 2004 I read my first "business" book, Post-capitalist Society by Peter Drucker.

I immediately saw a connection between this world of business and the world of my academic training in physiology and biochemistry. Years later, I can't explain the connection, but this launched me into a habit of reading business books.  Some were not very interesting, some were silly, but most had some nugget of insight that I thought worth capturing.

More recently, I have been focusing on books that are loosely related to innovation.

Over the years, I've occasionally given a book to a colleague to read, but about 2 years ago I started something different. I started to write summaries of the books I read. This was partly a form of notetaking for myself and partly a way of sharing the books' content with colleagues without having to lend the books out. It also reflected the observation that most people don't read as voraciously as I do and were happy to have the summary instead.

As I write this, a number of my colleagues are leaving the company I work at, and I want to continue sharing with them. Some colleagues have asked if they could pass my summaries to people outside the company. I decided that I should see if I can generate some discussions with others on these topics. All of this lead to starting this blog.

Some of what I'll post will be these book summaries. I try to simply condense and abstract the most important features of these books, without comment of the concepts' validity or practicality. Inevitably, what I feature represents a biased view of the book. However, I will do my best to avoid saying anything negative about any book I summarize. My goal is to highlight the useful and interesting - not critique the books.

Some of what I post will be "original" content of my own. I am a synthesist, so I can't be sure how much of my own content is really original and how much is just re-processed content from others. However, when I label it original, that is what I think it is.

Finally, I have always like quotes, so some of what I will post will be quotes that have caught my eye. These quotes will probably seem all over the map to some readers, but that is OK. In my creative life, I found a bit of random input to be good for the health of my mind. Think of them as fertilizer for the garden of innovation.

I have a nice backlog of book summaries to post, and I will dole them out slowly to make them last.