Three Universal Methods to Drive Innovation and Creativity

 In this newsletter we focus on three wonderful processes that are powerful stimulants for effective ideation and innovation.  Their application across all types of innovation is virtually unlimited. 

1.  Questions.  Success at innovation depends on asking questions, the single most universal and effective tool for exploring and generating ideas.  

Questions open doors to new possibilities, and a fine example of this is the invention of Polaroid camera.  One day Edwin Land was in front of his house taking a picture of his young daughter.  She smiled and he clicked the camera.  She wanted to see the picture.  He said that she had to wait because he had to develop the film, and then print it. "No Daddy," she insisted, "Why can't I see it now!"  Humm, he wondered.  Why not?  This question, innocently asked by his daughter, set him on the path that led, eventually, to the Polaroid instant camera:  "Why can't I ... ?"

       To repeat, questions open doors to new vistas, to new ideas that would not have been imagined if the questions had not been asked. 

Coming at this issue from the opposite perspective, from the viewpoint of ideas you've developed, how do you figure out if an idea is a good one or not?  You ask questions.  Tough questions.  Deep, probing, thoughtful, and stimulating questions.  Lots of them.

Tough, probing questions express leadership, and the habit of asking questions is indeed one of the notable characteristics of great managers.  They don't do it to put people on the defensive, but rather to expose and test their own thinking, and the thinking of everyone around them.

In the day to day practice of corporate life, questions can stimulate creativity and innovativeness, fostering and nurturing good thinking.  Thus, the Hewlett Packard management practice known as MBWA, management by wandering around, was just a term to describe a culture of questions and possibilities that served HP quite well for many decades. 

Thus, if you think about the differences between good managers and great ones, you could identify many different qualities, qualifications, and characteristics.  You might choose charisma, or brilliance, or experience, or perhaps compassion.  But above all others the one that I would choose as the hallmark of greatness is the propensity to ask insightful and tough questions.  Why? 

Because a good question is itself a model; it embodies a concept and a point of view, and if it's well-crafted then by its very nature it gives structure to reality by framing a world view, bringing context and awareness, uncovering insights and possibilities that were formerly hidden. A good question makes you think.

To get a feel for this, consider your own experience, and remember a time when you were wondering about something.  As a child you may have wondered, for example, why the sky is blue. Suppose you ask your mother, but instead of answering directly she responds to your question with another question, "Well, why do you think so?"  You could probably have come up with five or ten great possibilities, and then you'd compare them in your mind, and perhaps select the most interesting one. And through all of this you may well have learned.  This happens because questions make you think, and thinking makes you grow.

Good questions, tough questions, are often far more valuable than good answers, so managers - as well as parents and teachers - use questions as tools to expand engagement, creativity, innovation, and ultimately the options available to their organizations.  The right questions focus attention on the right issues at the right time, and they are invaluable allies of thoughtful and careful management.

What can a question do for science? The art of asking questions, and particularly asking the ones that lead someplace useful, is a central element of the scientific method.  Scientists use questions to frame their ideas, and present them in the form of concepts or hypotheses that are then tested via experiment.  Throughout the history of science, those who framed their questions with great elegance, and who designed the cleverest experiments, gained the admiration of their peers, and they have advanced our collective knowledge and capability in the process.

Einstein reported that when he was deeply immersed in the thoughts that led to the revolution in physics, he asked himself what it would be like to ride on a photon.  From this thought experiment he was able to grasp the meaning of the speed of light. A simple question opened him up to a new view of the universe, and the resulting insights led to a revolution in our collective understanding of reality.

 What can questions do for business?

They will lead to insights that shape the future.  So while it may be fun to be the one that everyone else comes to for answers, real leaders are the ones who know the right questions. How good are the questions that you've been asking lately?

One of Peter Drucker's best books is his compact treatise on innovation entitled Innovation and Entrepreneurship[1] in which he describes the pursuit of innovation as a practice and a discipline, a systematic questioning activity to be engaged in by senior managers and their teams.

One of the most valuable aspects of the book is the very simple structure that he provides, from which I have extracted the following nine questions that you can ask to expose new ideas that may lead to innovation opportunities. 

1.     What surprised us?

2.     What caused the unexpected success?

3.     What caused the unexpected failure?

4.     In what ways did reality turn out differently than our expectations?

5.     What did our customers value that was different from what we expected them to value?

6.     Where is our process inefficient?

7.     How do changing demographics create new needs?

8.     How are people's attitudes and beliefs changing?

9.     What impact will new knowledge have on our markets?

Among educators, a related field has emerged under the name of "critical thinking," whose intent is to help students learn important thinking skills.  Critical thinking explores concepts such as reasoning, argument, interpretation, credibility, causality, and soundness of logic.  Learning to ask better questions is a process of learning to think more clearly, which is obviously a critical attribute in any innovation process, and indeed in all aspects of management.  There is profound power in the right question, simply posed.  What questions have you asked today? 

2.   The second universal ideation method is ethnography, the branch of anthropology that's focused on the study of human culture. It was developed early in the last century when Western civilization first encountered indigenous peoples who had never had contact with the outside world.  Since human culture is still the driving force that shapes the present and the future of every market, ethnography is an ideal method for studying many of the key issues that matter to your company's future.

The practice of ethnography is also an example of the power of questions, as at root ethnographic methodology is a systematic and sophisticated approach to question-asking that seeks to identify the "right" question that will expose hidden beliefs and realities.  But why hidden? 

The power of ethnography derives from the fact that conscious awareness brings to our attention only a tiny fraction of our experiences, of everything that our senses perceive.  The reason for this, of course, is that if we were to become aware of everything that our senses pick up, we'd immediately be overwhelmed.  So our brains filter reality into patterns and concepts that we can cope with, but with the side effect that a lot is eliminated from our awareness.  This is "acquired blindness," but what's left out is often particularly fertile ground for innovation, so we need a method of accessing the parts of experience that may be unconscious, and ethnography provides that.

Knowledge that we have, but about which we are not conscious, is sometimes referred to as tacit knowledge, and the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge is important for innovation.  While explicit knowledge can be shared through verbal and written expression, tacit knowledge is that which we feel, experience, and believe, but which we probably cannot express. 

The differences between these two forms of knowledge are beautifully explained in Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi's book The Knowledge-Creating Company.[2] They point out that while Westerners tend to value explicit knowledge most highly, there is great appreciation for tacit knowledge among the Asian cultures, and this contributed enormously to the success of Japanese companies during recent decades. 

In the design of their products, Japanese companies learned to pay careful attention to the tacit factors pertaining to how products are used, including the feel of a product in your hands and its ease of operation. 

A simple example of tacit factors in design is your car key. Today it's an accepted standard that a single key both opens and starts the car.  Since the key is symmetrical, it works facing either direction, which assures 100% success with the key in the lock or the ignition.  Until recently, however, American car makers provided two different keys, and neither was symmetrical.  Hence, fumbling at random in the dark, the GM driver had only a 25% chance to get the right key in the lock correctly. 

Why is this tacit knowledge?  Because if you ask 100 drivers of Japanese or GM cars, 98 probably aren't aware of this detail even though they experience its consequences many times each day.  Point out the difference and ask again on a dark and stormy night, and you can be sure that the drivers of the Japanese cars were happy with their choice, which is why all the other automakers copied it.

And why is there tacit knowledge at all?  Why does so much of our experience lie beyond our conscious awareness?  For an answer to this question we must turn to physiology and cognitive science. Studies of the human brain reveal that the sensory organs generate information at a prodigious rate, as the eyes, ears, skin, taste and smell systems send approximately eleven million bits of data per second to the brain.  However, conscious perception lags considerably behind at a paltry forty bits per second.[3] This means that the brain is processing approximately 300,000 times more information than consciousness is aware of. 

Knowledge, however, is more than sensory data.  It is also the complex concepts that we synthesize from sensory data, combined with our memories.  The field of cognitive science addresses this issue, and calls to our attention the fact that most of our concepts also remain at the tacit level. George Lakoff puts it very simply: "One of the most fundamental results in cognitive science, one that comes from the study of commonsense reasoning, is that most of our thought is unconscious - not unconscious in the Freudian sense of being repressed, but unconscious simply in that we are not aware of it.  We think and talk at too fast a rate and at too deep a level to have conscious awareness and control over everything we think and say.  We are even less conscious of the components of thoughts - concepts.  When we think, we use an elaborate system of concepts, but we are not usually aware of just what those concepts are like and how they fit together into a system."[4]

Since the gap between tacit and explicit processing is so great at both the sensory and conceptual levels, we begin to understand why face to face interaction is so dense and so important.  Nuances of tone, inflection, timing, cadence, body language, attention, smell, and facial expression are all richly present in any encounter, but they are captured only partially - if at all - in interactions via telephones and computers.  From our own experiences, we know that these factors contribute enormously to the completeness of human interaction, to our ability to communicate effectively with one another.  This is not to say that telephones and computers do not have their uses, but it does tell us clearly that there's something unique about encountering each other in the many dimensions of face to face contact.

And what of the common experience of interaction leading to new insight?  Physiology and cognitive science also tell us that the brain in general and memory in particular work by association,[5] and that interacting with one another stimulates new associations, new connections that sometimes lead to breakthrough concepts.  Face to face interactions also enable people to share experiences, which means sharing tacit knowledge and in the process creating new tacit and explicit knowledge.  From this process we get the title of James Burke's best-selling study of innovation called Connections,[6] which we also call "creativity."

But since so much of what we are discussing happens unconsciously, how would you know what's actually occurring?  You would have to turn some of that tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge, which you could do by studying the behavior of people using ethnographic methods, and indeed ethnography is just what many on the leading edge of research and product design are now doing.[7]

Because it turns out that ethnographic methods are as useful for studying tribesmen in New Guinea as computer programmers in Palo Alto or shoppers in Pittsburgh or Paris, as they expose the important tacit factors embedded in interactions.  Product design firms use ethnography to find new needs and new markets that haven't already been recognized, and ethnography also helps companies to design better products and better buildings, and educators to design better curricula.

This is critically important in activities such as market research, because traditional tools focus on explicit knowledge and are therefore likely to miss the vital tacit dimension of the customer's experiences. Consequently, ethnographers in the consumer marketplace can tell us important things about customer behavior that customers themselves could not articulate.[8]

Among the key insights about the workplace that ethnographers have found is that there is frequently a huge difference between what people say they do, and what they actually do.  This issue is important to architects, for example, because when they design buildings they rely on what their clients tell them.  If a client, out of ignorance or unawareness, tells them wrongly, chances are the resulting building will disappoint them in some important ways, perhaps failing to meet the true needs of its users.

Ethnographers have also developed some very useful theories about the behavior of people in organizations and how they develop new knowledge.  A concept called "communities of practice" describes how new knowledge emerges in work groups as people gradually transform the tacit experiences gained doing their particular jobs into explicit shared methods and practices.[9] Such methods and practices define a group as a community, and provide the de facto context in which their aggregate knowledge grows and develops.  It is through the progressive transformation of tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge via human interaction that groups develop their capabilities, become more productive, and add increasing value.

The discipline of ethnography was invented for the study of human culture, and its importance to us lies in the compelling insights it has provided into the behavior of people - customers, organizations, and markets. It exposes hidden assumptions and values, uncovering experiences that are important but unseen, helping researchers to see opportunities and to develop breakthrough products and services that address the sort of needs that may be the most valuable for any company to become aware of, namely unknown and unmet needs.

This is, in fact, so important for innovation that it reminds us of the sixth principle.  The first half noted that, "Great innovations begin with great ideas."  Now we can focus on the second half:  "To find them, identify unknown and unmet needs." 

Ethnography has proven to be an exceptional method of generating ideas and insights by exposing valuable tacit knowledge, addressing the entire range of possibilities to serve customers and improve organizations, and as such it truly is a universal tool.

 

3.   The Innovation SWAT Team, or iTeam, is a powerful bottom-up method of carrying the spirit and the practices of innovation throughout any organization that's on the road to permanent innovation.  This team is a group of roving innovation specialists who move throughout the company partly according to a plan, and partly directed by their own ears to the ground, looking for ideas to evoke and enrich, and for creative people to engage with.  Their mission is to link top-level strategy, problem areas in the company, and innovation methods and tools with people at all levels, so that they become lively, engaged, and enthusiastic co-inventors of the future.[10]

iTeams find venues of activity anywhere and everywhere by engaging people in thinking and talking about what's happening inside and outside the organization, about what they do, how they do it, how the results of their work create experiences for customers, and how innovation in all its many guises can lead to improvements.

The tools at their disposal include an unlimited array of possibilities, including asking questions, ethnographic research, all the ideas and approaches you'll find the following pages, and more besides.  In other words, they bring innovation methodology to the organization by interacting with people in rigorous, systematic, and persistent ways.

One of the most important reasons that the iTeam exists is that although the innovation process is much more than just a glorified suggestion box, the people who may have the ideas, and who certainly have the relevant day to day experiences, may not have enough knowledge about how to apply innovation processes to turn their own ideas into useful progress.  The iTeam uses all forms of interaction to bring forth latent ideas and interests, to help people at all levels of an organization to give shape to their ideas in a useful framework so that they can contribute to the ongoing improvements that changing markets demand.

iTeam members are like Six-Sigma black belts for innovation, and when coupled with the practice of ethnography and the habit of asking excellent questions, you'll have three tools to give you an exceptional start on your quest for innovation.

---

We hope that you'll find these thoughts helpful as you work through the innovation issues and challenges in your own organization.  We'd love to hear how it's going!

Thanks, 

Langdon

This newsletter was adapted from Chapter 6 of Permanent Innovation. 

---

[1]  Peter Drucker.  Innovation and Entrepreneurship. HarperCollins, 1993.

[2]  Nonaka , Ikujiro and Hirotaka Takeuchi, The Knowledge-Creating Company.  New York, Oxford University Press, 1995.

[3]  Zimmermann, Manfred, "Neurophysiology of Sensory Systems."  Fundamentals of Sensory Physiology, Robert F. Schmidt, ed.  Berlin, Springer-Verlag, 1986.  p. 115.

[4]  Lakeoff, George, Moral Politics:  What Conservatives Know that Liberals Don't.  Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1996.

[5]  Calvin, William H., The River that Flows Uphill:  A Journey from the Big Bang to Big Brain.  New York, MacMillan, 1986. 

[6]  Burke, James, Connections.  Boston, Little, Brown and Company, 1978.

[7]  Jordan, Dr. Brigitte, "Ethnographic Workplace Studies and Computer Supported Cooperative Work."  Institute for Research on Learning, Report No. IRL94-0026, 1994.

[8]  Paco Underhill.  Why We Buy:  The Science of Shopping.  Simon & Schuster, 1999.

[9]  Wenger, Etienne, Communities of Practice.  New York, Oxford University Press, 1998.

[10] The iTeam was pioneered by Brigitte Jordan and her colleagues at IBM's Hardware Networking Division.  See also: Alan M. Webber.  "XBS Learns to Grow."  Fast Company Magazine, October-November 1996.