About this Author
Gwen Smith Ishmael, Sr. Vice President of Insights and Innovation at Decision Analyst in Arlington, TX, has led marketing and new product development activities in the CPG and technology industries since 1986. She also conceived and developed ground-breaking Web-based promotional vehicles, two of which are patent pending. Gwen holds an MBA in Marketing and is a featured speaker on insights and innovation around the world. Her writings have been featured in international text books, most recently in Managing 4 Ps of Marketing FMCG Sector, and Product Innovation: A Strategic Tool for Growth, by ICFAI Publications, 2006 and 2007, respectively.
Founding Author
Renee Hopkins Callahan started IdeaFlow and serves as chief blog-wrangler. She is Director of Innovation Services at Decision Analyst in Arlington, Texas, is a former journalist who worked as an editor and reporter for The Dallas Morning News and the Nashville Tennessean, and was managing editor of D, the Dallas city magazine. She has a master's degree in rhetoric and has also taught college-level English and informal logic.
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February 24, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
 Watching the Olympics these last couple of weeks I have been struck by the difference between mistakes and failure. Last night Sasha Cohen skated onto the ice as a potential gold medalist and within seconds fell attempting her first jump. What came next? She bobbled the second jump too. What came next? She pulled herself together and won the silver.
A week or so ago, also within seconds of starting her program, Chinese pairs skater Zhang Dan was thrown to the ice and crashed into the wall. What came next? Her partner Zhang Hao helped her up, and within minutes they restarted their program and they won silver in their event as well.
How do they try these jumps again so soon after falling on that hard, unforgiving ice? The figure-skating commentators (who aren't winning many fans themselves, but that's another story) have pointed out more than once that attempting a difficult jump and failing gets more points than not attempting it at all. So you could say that it's built into the mechanism of the sport. Try, fail, try again.
I understand making a mistake and "covering" for it in performance. I'm a musician, and one of the things I practice is how I might fudge my way past a forgotten chord change or lyric, so that the performance doesn't come screeching to a halt. But that's not the same thing. There is no fudging around when you land on your butt on the ice. It's obvious. And it's painful. So how do they learn to move past the pain, shame and fear quickly enough to jump right up and move back into the program?
If we could learn that in business, our innovation efforts would be vastly more successful. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Gwen and I are working on a conference presentation based on the "what drives innovation?" theme I've written about here before. As part of our research, last week I interviewed Vincent Barabba, former head of strategy at GM and author of Surviving Transformation. The discussion turned to fear of failure and learning from mistakes, and at one point I apologized for letting us get off topic. "Actually, this is central to your topic," he replied. He's right. Vince's theory -- one mistake should be allowed, and a concerted effort made to learn from that mistake. And the rewards system should reward experimentation.
It seems to me that as a culture -- except for isolated pockets such as sports -- we've lost any serious approach to learning from mistakes. This may be partly because learning from a mistake means taking responsibility for having made it in the first place. If you can't do that, you can't get to the learning.
And then, how *do* you learn from mistakes? It can't be as simple as,"Well, I won't do that *that* way again." It's much too facile to say "we must learn from our mistakes" and "we must create an environment that rewards risk-taking." *How* does that work on a corporate level, or in a business of any size?
Photo: ©Amy Sancetta/AP, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Comments (8)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Corporate Climate | Experimentation, culture of | Failure
February 11, 2006
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
 The last post talked about creativity at work and collaborative creativity, and those are the subjects of the book Orchestrating Collaboration At Work: Using Music, Improv, Storytelling, and Other Arts to Improve Teamwork by Linda Naiman and Arthur Van Gundy. The book was published in 2003 by Wiley/Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer, but is now available through Linda's website as a .PDF download for $48.99.
This is a hefty book -- 265 pages -- chock full of exercises that can be used for teambuilding, ice breakers, energizers, and to stimulate creativity, to teach teams to work through change, think strategically, and collaborate more effectively. I downloaded it, printed it out, and had it comb-bound, and now my copy is now is full of sticky notes on exercises I've vowed to try for various client projects and training sessions.
Those who have to defend the use of the arts in business will find a lot of help here as well. The first part of the book lays out th authors' argument that the arts are just what business needs today. A sample: "Businesses today want to break away from their limitations, aim higher, and be a creative force for good in the world. We need the transformative experiences that the arts give us to thrive in a world of change." This section includes interviews with luminaries such as John Seely Brown, and case studies from companies such as the World Bank and Lexis-Nexis.
Van Gundy and Naiman did not make up every single exercise -- approximately 35 others contributed exercises as well. The resulting variety is a welcome breath of air after the shelves of books available that set forth a theory for creativity and then offer exercises that don't vary much. In addition to many exercises, the authors' contribution is in the extremely useful and clear presentation of these exercises. They're divided into section according to the art form used -- music, drawing, painting, collage, storytelling, improv, poetry, and others. And each one includes a clear statement of the objectives, the uses (team-building, change management, etc.), the time required and materials needed.
Bottom line -- this is well worth the $48.99. I have spent many times that amount to go to week-long conferences that didn't give me anywhere near this much useful information that I could take back to my work.
Comments (0)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Books | Coaching | Collaborative Creativity | Corporate Climate | Creativity | Training
October 27, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Another way to incorporate "learning from failure" into a company's culture might be to recast the entire notion of failure by creating a culture of experimentation. Over on the Fortune Business Innovation blog, Dominic Basulto cited an article by James Cash of Harvard Business School that highlighted the importance of creating a culture of business experimentation within a company, pointing out examples from a broad spectrum of companies: Wal-Mart, Capital One and General Electric. Creating this culture of business experimentation is harder than it sounds, since you can't always know whether or not an idea will work until you put it into action, and most companies are not prepared for the downside risk of failure.
Cash's article contains some interesting comments on failure tolerance and the need for a “culture of experimentation. For example, Cash says:
"It's not an easy feat to create an environment that walks the line between so-called failed experiments—where the discipline of data collection, analysis and iteration results in learning even if the experiment itself doesn't produce a desired result—and the frivolous waste of resources, where ideas are tested in an undisciplined manner."
What I'm thinking is that you could undercut the negative psychological energy around the concept of "failure" by incorporating a culture of experimentation. Here's my guess at what this culture of experimentation might look like:
Experiments would be fashioned from specific innovation challenges framed to meet certain strategic objectives. The resulting concepts would be prototyped in successive iterations, each designed to get closer to the "finished" product or process. At each prototype level an evaluation would take place using criteria developed out of the original objectives. The decision to kill the concept or develop it further would be made. If the decision was to kill, then a full report on what worked and what didn't would be made.
Here's what's most important:
1. Set up a specific process for experimentation and identify experiments as such from the start so that projects that don’t go through the process aren’t allowed to “bring down” the process.
2. Start the process with a specific challenge tied to strategic objectives – this kind of disciplined approach will ensure the relevance of both the process and the results.
3. Make evaluation criteria as specific as possible and relevant as well (which it will be if it’s tied back to the strategic objectives). This is critical to a disciplined approach, and it’s also critical to avoid blame and finger-pointing when failures do occur.
4. Subject all prototypes to rigorous analysis. The ability to build on what’s working and change what’s not is based on the understanding that would come from such an analysis.
5. When a project is killed, document all possible learnings, including things that can be learned about the process itself.
Comments (9)
| Category: Corporate Climate | Failure
June 9, 2005
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Jim McGee over at McGee's Musings says apprenticeship is the best model when it comes to learning how to do knowledge work. This dovetails with some things I've been thinking about as well in regards to innovation and creativity (though not in nearly as well-developed a manner as Jim has been).
The problem with apprenticeship, says Jim, is that in terms of knowledge work, there really aren't many masters and the process is very slow. It's also self-directed and far from comfortable. It's as far as you can possibly get from the standard "impart expert knowledge, then test" model of learning.
I think this is also true of learning how to "do" innovation or of learning how to "do" creativity. You can teach someone creative skills, but you can't teach them explicitly how to think more creatively. Or to be more innovative.
Yet some companies seem to believe that there's a tangible set of knowledge and skills called "innovation" that can be captured and set free within an organization, quickly transforming everyone within it.
The reality is much more complicated than that. But is there a way to speed up the process without "looking for answers to copy," as Jim says? It almost seems like he is talking about being able to adopt the Zen beginner's mind. Except this would be more like "novice's mind." I wonder if it's even possible in today's corporate world for people to do this. And for those of us who are consultants -- how can we market ourselves as experts and yet still keep our minds open enough to stay innovation apprentices, so we can continue to learn?
Comments (4)
| Category: Corporate Climate
February 17, 2004
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
I’m going to do a little reporting on Braintrust, a conference on knowledge management I attended last week. My experience of knowledge management as a field is that it seems to take two approaches. The first approach, the one that interests me most, is all about creating knowledge and working collaboratively and sustaining “communities of practice.” The second approach seems to be all about the nuts and bolts of getting knowledge out of the head of employee A and into the head of employee B, via intranets and software models and concepts for collaboration that seem just a short step above the old company suggestion box.
Keynote speaker Nancy Dixon spoke about the conflict between these two approaches in a talk about conversation. “You can’t give someone else your knowledge – every person recreates the knowledge they apply,” said she, and therein lies the conflict. Conversations are a preferred way to get knowledge shared, although they are not always as effective a way to share knowledge, because communication by conversation inherently also creates confusion. But -- along with that confusion, conversations also inherently create new meaning. When the same word means different things to different people; when the listener quickly interprets what’s being said against his or her own unquestioned inferences and worldview; when each mind in the conversation creates its own knowledge that’s slightly different from what the other minds involved in the conversation are understanding and creating -- these factors make sharing existing knowledge difficult. But they also lead to the creation of new knowledge.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Dixon’s talk was that her suggestion for making knowledge-sharing through conversation easier is also a suggestion that will make creating new knowledge through conversation easier as well. Her suggestion: Ask the "powerful question." Assume the other person has a reason for their conclusion that makes sense to them, because the knowledge that you want is not their conclusion but the reasoning for their conclusion. So you ask a “powerful question” meant to discover that reasoning.
Said Dixon: “The powerful question is, 'Help me understand your thinking, how did you reach that conclusion?' Each time the question is asked the language is slightly different, but what is the same is that you are asking for the other to let you in on the connections that exist in his/her own mind. What is so powerful is that it is the thinking behind other's conclusions that provide the needed in-depth understanding.”
Why is the “powerful question” also a useful concept for knowledge creation as well as sharing? Because it uncovers the connections that the other person has made that led them to create the knowledge they are sharing with you. Assuming you do the same and share your connections, then the pool of information from which connections can be made grows, including what I’d call “meta-connection” information – information about the logical framework from which connections can be made. All of this in turn increases the chances of inventive recombination.
Comments (5)
| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Creativity | Inventive Recombination
October 3, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
One absolutely fascinating talk was by Phil Fawcett, who’s a Technology Transfer Agent at Microsoft. Phil, a 20-year veteran of Microsoft (one assumes he probably doesn’t have to work anymore!) created this job and has grown it to the point where there’s a small staff of people helping him. His goal: Get research and product people to talk to each other. Right now, half of Microsoft ideas get into release. He’d like to increase that percentage so that the $7 billion Microsoft will invest in R&D in fiscal 2004 will be best used.
Phil says technoloy transfer is a fundamentally social process for managing key technology assets, and it’s a process that requires trust. Trust and risk must be balanced using communication processes. And this is where Phil comes in. Much of his talk was about how he fosters communication among his constituencies (researchers, product groups, senior management) to create a development environment suited to product-ready research.
One point that’s a little beside the point but still interesting: Phil says that for Microsoft researchers, failure isn’t fatal. At Microsoft, the real failure is not to document what you’ve learned from a failure.
Just in case you’re curious, here are some of the Nerd Herder Methods Phil says he uses at Microsoft:
- TechFest – A technology trade show put on by researchers for the rest of Microsoft.
- Blitz – A 2- to 3-hour session, with new researchers or product groups doing demos every 15 minutes.
- Offsite – A 1- to 2-day meeting off-campus for the purpose of exchanging ideas about a topic that may lead to awareness of long-term issues, best used before initial product planning when groups are not talking to each other….need to have key influencers and key combatants there.
- Brainstorm/Collaboration – An exchange of ideas in a 1- to 2-hour meeting session, either to create new solutions or to discuss trade-offs between several alternatives.
- Heartbeat Meeting – Sessions of 3 to 4 “focused” researchers and product group staffers who meet every 1 to 2 weeks to drive action items within their respective divisions and monitor level engagement between the two groups.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Commercialization | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Innovation, General | New Products | Technology
September 30, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
More conference notes and ruminations, this time on the talk “Innovating Space Using Innovation Space” by Jason Heredia of Turnstone (a division of Steelcase) and Tom Mulhern of Conifer Research, a Chicago-based ethnographic research company.
Steelcase’s research, some done in conjunction with Conifer, asks these questions: What kind of spaces enhance innovation, and what kind of space detracts from innovation? And, even better: Where does innovation live [in the workplace]? Answer: In the linkages between people.
And yes, this is the very territory that the social networking folks are working on. One way to look at social software would be, does the software allow for the right kind of linkages between people, the right kind of access to the space where innovation lives? In their talk, Tom and Jason set forth some “Principles of Innovation Space, and I include them here because I wonder if these same principles would apply to the “space” that a group creates/accesses by using social software, or if the entire model would be different. Here are the principles:
- Persistence: Supports the continuous refinement of the team’s “shared mind.”
- Intent: Not just meeting space, but shared work space in which sustained, purposeful efforts take place and leave traces behind.
- Interaction: Encourages and explicitly drives interaction, bridges the digital and physical worlds.
- Dynamism: Purpose of the space changes as intentions and goals change.
- Flexibility: Supports change modes in innovation.
It seems to me that these would be excellent principles to apply to social software. But that’s not my field, so I’m totally open to comments there. And of course, if you talk about social software in terms of disruptive innovations, then at some point (perhaps already bubbling up now) there’ll be some kind of software that allows us to interact and work together in ways that we can’t even imagine yet. If it’s really disruptive, it will allow us to work together in ways that even its creator(s) didn’t imagine.
One other interesting thing I found out during Tom and Jason’s presentation: The material that’s best for group projects is actually that stuff I’ve always thought was called foam core but is really (so Tom says) fome cor. It’s better than easel pads or tacking things up on walls, because it allows you both to work in large format and to save your work while still in the large format.
So can a group accomplish with a wiki and a groupblog (such as this one) what they could accomplish with some fome cor/foam core and colored markers?
Finally, either Tom or Jason, I forget who, mentioned that the Steelcase site has a lot of information on space, design and workplace issues. They weren’t kidding. There I found an excellent Steelcase Workplace Report titled: "HotHouse Environments: Fostering Breakthrough Innovation," which presents the findings of two years of surveying more than 1,500 corporate executives, facilities managers, and design professionals from various industries on these questions: How can the workplace affect the way people work… and how satisfied they are? What keeps them from sharing information and being collaborative?” Steelcase also has an e-zine called 360, where I found this article based on the HotHouse research: "Unleashing Hidden Creativity: Does Place Matter?". Both are worth reading.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Innovation, General
September 29, 2003
Posted by Renee Hopkins Callahan
Let’s just get this straight upfront: I am not a real-time conference-blogging demon! For that reason I’m just now getting around to blogging my notes from last week’s Innovation Convergence. But what I lack in speed I hope to make up for in value! I’ve got lots of notes and impressions to share.
First, my overall main impression was that Capital I-Innovation has arrived. Last year’s Convergence had just 70 attendees. This year there were 220, and new conferences on the subject are springing up like mushrooms after a thunderstorm, including this December’s Return on Innovation, at which IdeaFlow contributors Joyce Wycoff and John Wolpert will both be speakers.
Convergence’s very first keynote speaker, Mark Turrell of Imaginatik, referenced a famous (in innovation circles, anyway) Gary Hamel quote that seems to be on its way to becoming reality: “Innovation must become what quality was 20 years ago.”
Turrell sounded another common theme in his keynote, “Measuring the Financial Impact of Innovation: Calculating Your Innovation Gap.” That common theme was to make a differentiation between innovation and creativity, and pretty much every speaker I heard did this. Boiled down to the basics, the difference seemed to be that innovation is a process and creativity is not. Devotees of a process approach to creativity might beg to differ, but for the purposes of this conference, the distinction allowed most speakers a productive platform from which to dive into their take on the innovation process.
My notes on Turrell’s innovation/creativity definitions: Innovation’s a much more corporate thing than creativity, much more of a process. People who don’t get creativity are the ones who control the budgets, the ones you must convince to fund innovation.
Innovation is the process of handling new things; creativity is a one-off, invention is a one-off. Invention and creativity are part of the innovation process.
The main point of his talk was to expound on IOI, or the financial Impact of Innovation. He defined this as the proportion of current and future revenue and profit that is dependent on the company’s ability to innovate, and defined IOI components as revenue growth, revenue protection, productivity, and disruptive change (unplanned activities, or risk).
He then said the innovation gap is the difference between the target level of innovation (IOI) and the current innovation capacity, which is based on the ability of a firm to handle new things.
Idea management is important, because too many new ideas block the pipeline. You could expect him to say that, since Imaginatik is in the idea-management business, but this was another theme that was sounded by many speakers, including the other opening-day keynote, Dr. George Land of the Farsight Group.
First, Land's innovation/creativity definitions: At the beginning of his talk, “A Systems Process for Innovation,” he defined innovation as “organized creativity.”
Land’s Advanced Innovation Method is a process for bringing innovation to a corporation. Most important is the first part, determining what strategic innovation would be for the company. Seventy percent of time and budget should go to the first three steps, he says, which doesn’t even get you to the generating concepts stage. The important first three steps encompass alignment, an innovation audit, and a determination of an innovation strategy. A big part of this is determining internal and external customers’ “deep needs” – what does the customer really want or need in the future? Land says his company actually puts a large number of resources into training a client company’s customers in creativity to get them to articulate their needs. I of course found this fascinating in light of our own consumer-based approach, which has been discussed here recently.
And, connecting to another discussion we’ve been having here lately, this time on the Copyright Wars, Land dropped something of a bombshell early on in his speech by declaring that “product innovations are very easy to copy, and patents are an invitation to a lawsuit.” Sure enough, the first question in the following Q&A was about this assertion. Land explained further: Patents are very easy to go around. The issue is a flow of innovation, and what’s in the pipeline to develop after what you’ve got now has been copied. Always assume you’re going to get copied, and try to discover where you can innovate that it will be invisible. Developing intellectual assets – documented current and past knowledge that can lead to the creation of new knowledge through systematic innovation -- is better than developing IP, which he defined as “knowledge with legal ownership.”
According to Land, only 15% of corporate innovation comes from R&D departments, so that’s not the most important place to be innovative in a corporation. The companies most successful at innovation are stealthily innovating their process, distribution, or some other aspect that’s hard for competitors to grasp and copy.
But in any case, he echoed Turrell by saying, “don’t bust the dam of ideas until you’ve got somewhere for the water to go. Innovation efforts must be targeted or they create chaos. It’s a duty and an obligation NOT to collect too many ideas, to be ruthless with idea management.”
Finally, and this is another theme that was echoed over and over again: The CEO must drive innovation, and financial gap analysis is essential on the front end. You must arm yourself with the facts. Land also felt that a company should have an EVP or C-level innovation executive heading an innovation department that would integrate all functions – marketing, technology, business development, etc. And a company’s biggest barriers to innovation, in his view, are lack of leadership to drive innovation, and lack of strategic alignment regarding innovation.
And this was just the first part of the first day!!! More to come.
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| Category: Collaborative Creativity | Commercialization | Conferences | Corporate Climate | Creativity | Disruptive Innovation | Innovation, General | Law & Policy | Marketing | Marketing Research | New Products | Open Innovation | Patents | ROI (Return on Innovation) | Technology
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