Innovation Engine

by Tina Seelig

  A key takeaway from this exercise is that space dramatically affects team dynamics and creativity. The space told a powerful story, and each team dutifully placed itself inside that narrative. On the side of the room with the tables, the story line is “This table is our kingdom. It is up to us to build and protect it.” On the side of the room with the chairs, the story line is “Our world is very flexible. With little effort we can reorganize the way we work together.”

  Despite the importance of space to innovation, it is still just a shell for the people inside that space. As a result, it is equally important to consider who is in your space. Each person in your habitat affects the culture. This doesn’t just apply to the people with whom you work directly but also to the people you bump into when walking around your building.

  There are many effective tools for preparing individuals to work on creative teams. One of my favorites is the Six Thinking Hats model, developed by Edward de Bono, the renowned inventor of the concept of lateral thinking. This model describes six different roles we tend to play when working in a team and shows the benefits of each role. In de Bono’s model, each role is represented by a different-colored hat. Most people have one dominant hat color, with one or two other colors close behind.

  • A person who is drawn to the facts and is very logical wears the white hat.

  • A person most comfortable generating new ideas wears the green hat.

  • A person who uses intuition to make decisions wears the red hat.

  • A person who is very organized and process-oriented wears the blue hat.

  • A “devil’s advocate,” who uncovers what won’t work, wears the black hat.

  • A person eager to make everyone happy wears the yellow hat.

  To demonstrate the value of this model, I ask my students to take a short “test” to determine their dominant working style. Even without the test, most people know what hat colors they typically wear. I ask the students to come to class wearing a shirt that matches their respective hat color, so they can easily see that they collectively represent the entire spectrum of working styles. I put them on teams of six, with others of different dominant working styles. Each student is given a real hat with six detachable tassels, one for each of the different colors. During the two-hour class, the students attach one or another of the tassels to the tops of their hats to represent whatever role they are playing at that time. The teams are given a challenging task to tackle, and each person gets a chance to try out playing different roles as the team discusses possible solutions. They gain a shared vocabulary about the roles they play on teams and realize that they can change those roles as easily as changing tassels on a hat.

  It is also important to institute rules, rewards, and incentives to reinforce the behaviors you want in your team or organization. Unfortunately, in many instances rules that are designed to improve overall performance turn out to inhibit innovation. A poignant example was showcased on the radio program This American Life, hosted by Ira Glass. In a 2004 episode, Glass followed an inner-city elementary schoolteacher, Cathy La Luz, in Chicago over a span of ten years.13 She was the most inspiring teacher Glass had ever met when he was covering education for Chicago Public Radio in 1993. She loved her second-grade students, and they adored her. However, ten years later, she was planning to quit. Glass went back to the school to see what had happened. He compared the school in 1994 to the same school in 2004. The differences were astounding.

  In 1994, Washington Irving Elementary School was a model school. It didn’t have much money, but its administrators had a plan. They wanted the kids to want to come to school and to enjoy learning. To achieve this, they gave the teachers a lot of autonomy and control over their classrooms. Teachers like Cathy La Luz had a chance to be as creative as they liked in order to help the students learn to read and write. They had frequent meetings with each student’s parents and were able to build strong bonds with the kids. Both the teachers and the students were happy with the freedom they had to experiment and learn together. The students were eager to learn and happy to be at school.

  However, over a nine-month period ten years later, this successful strategy fell into ruins. A new principal came to the school and started instituting rules that were designed to increase accountability but, in fact, shattered the creative environment that had motivated the teachers and students. For example, new rules required the teachers to craft detailed lesson plans for each day and write the specific learning goals on the board before each class, complete with references to specific curriculum guidelines. The positive environment at the school collapsed under the weight of all these constraints and guidelines, and terrific teachers such as Cathy La Luz cried as they debated leaving education altogether.

  In order to increase creativity, it’s important to pay careful attention to the habitats you build, because they have a powerful influence on how those in your environment feel, think, and act. There are many factors to consider, including the spaces you design, the teams you craft, and the rules, rewards, and incentives you institute. All these variables must be aligned to foster creativity.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RESOURCES

  Resources are all the assets in your environment, including people with different skills, natural resources, and financial support. The more knowledge you have, the more resources you can mobilize. For example, the more you know about fishing, the more fish you can catch; the more you know about copper, the more of it you can mine; and the more you know about venture capital, the more likely you are to get funding. Of course, if you live somewhere with a lot of fish, you will likely learn about fishing; if you live somewhere with an abundance of copper, you will probably learn about mining; and if you live in a place with a wealth of venture capitalists, it is much easier to learn about venture funding. As such, the resources in your environment influence your knowledge, and your knowledge allows you to access the resources.

  It is important to note that some of the resources in your environment are easy to spot, while others require physical or mental mining. In addition, sometimes the resources at your disposal can be used in surprising and powerful ways.

  An extreme example comes from the Apollo 13 disaster in 1970. Teresa Amabile and her colleagues at Harvard University describe this in their paper “Creativity Under the Gun”:14

  In 1970, during Apollo 13’s flight to the moon, a crippling explosion occurred on board, damaging the air filtration system and leading to a dangerous buildup of carbon dioxide in the cabin. If the system could not be fixed or replaced, the astronauts would be dead within a few hours. Back at NASA mission control in Houston, virtually all engineers, scientists, and technicians immediately focused their attention on the problem. Working with a set of materials identical to those on board the spacecraft, they desperately tried to build a filtration system that the astronauts might be able to replicate. Every conceivable material was considered, including the cover of the flight procedure manual. With little time to spare, they came up with something that was ugly, inelegant, and far from perfect but that seemed like it just might do the job. The engineers quickly conveyed the design with enough clarity that the cognitively impaired astronauts were, almost unbelievably, able to build the filter. It worked, and three lives were saved.

  This remarkable experience demonstrates that limited resources can be deployed with great effect. This idea is reflected in Eric Ries’s work on “lean startups.”15 He developed this approach during his tenure as cofounder and technical lead at IMVU, a successful online gaming company. Through this experience he learned that working with forced constraints leads to better products. The lean start-up philosophy advocates the creation of rapid prototypes of products to test-market assumptions by releasing a “minimum viable product.” By spending the smallest amount of time and money you can on a new product before it is released, you end up with much faster customer feedback. This allows you to develop and improve your products more quickly than if you use traditiona
l engineering practices.

  There are many everyday situations in which constrained resources lead to an outpouring of creativity. Twitter is a compelling example. With only 140 characters to get your message across, you need great restraint and ingenuity to put together a headline that grabs your audience’s attention. Over time, people have found remarkably innovative ways to use it. Like a haiku or a tiny blank canvas, it requires laser-focused attention and creativity to communicate anything meaningful.

  What if the constraints on your resources are even tighter? How about six words? Apparently Ernest Hemingway was once asked if he could write his memoir in only six words. He responded with the following sad tale: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” This challenge was embraced by SMITH magazine, which, in turn, has offered it to everyone via its website.16 It is amazing how creative and illuminating six words can be. Here are a few examples from the website:

  Stuck on repeat. Stuck on repeat.

  I was engaged for one day.

  I am disabled, but not helpless.

  Found on CraigsList, table, apartment, fiancé.

  Hobby became job. Seeking new hobby.

  I’m not lazy. I’m pacing myself.

  I’m the careless man’s careful daughter.

  In some cases, there is a great benefit to taking the opposite approach: removing all the constraints, or taking them away one by one. According to Diego Piacentini, senior vice president of international consumer business at Amazon.com, their directors often remove financial constraints when making a business decision. They ask themselves whether they would make a specific business decision in favor of customers if there were no financial consequences. If the answer is yes, they figure out how to make the solution work, even if the decision doesn’t make sense from a financial perspective in the short term.

  For example, before 2002, Amazon offered free shipping of its products during the holidays but not during the rest of the year. It was clear that customers loved this offer and purchased more products when they didn’t need to pay for shipping. On first inspection, there was no way the company would be able to offer this benefit year-round, because shipping is expensive, and giving it away eats into profits. But the Amazon leadership team asked themselves if this was something they would do if there were no financial constraints. The answer was clear: yes. So they figured out how to make it work. By finding ways to increase the volume of their shipments, they were ultimately able to negotiate for lower shipping prices, which made this decision pay off for everyone.

  Every habitat has its own unique resources, and it is up to you to see and seize them. You need to tap into your knowledge and your imagination to identify and deploy the resources in your midst.

  CHAPTER SIX

  CULTURE

  Thomas Edison tried thousands of different materials for the glowing filament inside a lightbulb before finding one that worked. He famously said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” He knew that every failure reveals a truth about the world, and unexpected results are often the most interesting in that they uncover brand new—and sometimes breakthrough—findings. Unexpected observations have led to a wealth of important discoveries, such as radioactivity, penicillin, and blackbody radiation in the universe.

  Most successful innovations result from trying lots of approaches to solving a particular problem and keeping what works. This necessarily results in a number of unexpected outcomes and discarded ideas. If you aren’t throwing away a large percentage of your ideas, then you aren’t trying enough options. Consider the fact that only a tiny percentage of the roughly 200,000 patents issued each year in the United States lead to commercial success. According to Richard Maulsby of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, “There are around 1.5 million patents in effect and in force in this country, and of those maybe 3,000 are commercially viable.”17 However, this still means that there are 3,000 successful products.

  Every successful inventor or entrepreneur can tell stories about surprising results and abandoned paths that led the way to their best successes. Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger started their company, Burbn, with an iPhone app that lets you share your location with your friends. The initial product wasn’t as successful as they had hoped, so they kept adding feature after feature to see if any of them would increase the popularity of the product. One of their many experiments included the ability to take photos, edit them quickly, and post them instantly for others to see. That feature was a huge hit. As a result, Kevin and Mike decided to scrap the initial product altogether and focus entirely on photo sharing, launching a new company called Instagram.

  Instagram, which allows users to take photos with their cell phones, do some quick and creative photo editing, and post the photos for the entire Internet to see, saw membership grow from a pilot set of one hundred users to one million users in only two months. Kevin and Mike eventually sold their company to Facebook for $1 billion, and they continue to build on the platform to enhance functionality and expand their reach around the world.

  Instagram’s success would never have happened if the company had not been willing to experiment and learn from all the surprising results along the way. Of course, Kevin and Mike didn’t want their early experiments to fail. But those failures were an important part of their learning process. Kevin admits that it was terribly difficult to throw away the parts of the product that weren’t attractive to customers, since they had worked so hard to develop them. However, they viewed each early trial as fertilizer for the next experiment.

  So how do you create a culture that fosters risk taking and experimentation? The key is to generate an abundance of ideas and get them out in front of others as soon as possible. The longer you work on an idea, the more attached to it you become. Therefore you need to be encouraged to show your work to others when it is still raw, to get their comments before your ideas become difficult to let go of if they aren’t working.

  A great example of a company that does this well is 1185 Design, led by Peggy Burke. They create branding materials, such as logos and websites, for all types of businesses. The company’s well-known clients include Adobe, Cisco, SAP, Symantec, and Zynga. Their team of designers listens to a formal client presentation, and then they each go off to generate dozens of logo ideas in only a few days. They all come back together and show their raw concepts to the entire group. After getting feedback, they throw most of the ideas out, and then go back to work on those that survived the cut. The key is that each designer comes up with a wealth of different solutions that can be tested, rather than polishing a single idea. Soon they are ready to show a large set of logos to their client, who gives feedback and suggestions. Again, the surviving designs go back to the drawing board for more refinement. This process of trial and error leads to terrifically diverse and interesting options, the best of which survives to the end.

  There are other ways to formalize this process. For example, Google is often cited for its 70-20-10 rule. It puts 70 percent of its resources into the core business, 20 percent into experiments related to the core business, and 10 percent toward wild new ideas that will play out over a long time horizon and have a high risk of failing. An example of a high-risk experiment at Google is the development of a driverless car. The system uses information gathered from Google’s Street View software along with artificial-intelligence software, video cameras, and vehicle sensors. The project is not only technically complicated, it would also require new laws to allow driverless cars to share the roads. It will be years before Google knows if this idea will succeed. But the company is willing to use a small percentage of its resources on this high-risk project. If it works, the benefits will be enormous. In addition, there are likely to be many fascinating, yet unexpected, discoveries along the way.

  These examples reinforce the fact that a culture of experimentation is important for innovation. Whether or not experiments work out as expected, they teach us something. Of course, nobody wants to fail, nor s
hould they. But failure is an inevitable part of the creative process when you are doing things that haven’t been done before. As Henry Ford is claimed to have said, “Failure is only the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.”

  Inside Out and Outside In

  Sangduen Chailert, also known as Lek, has always loved elephants. She grew up in the small rural village of Baan Lao in a remote part of northern Thailand and became passionate about elephants as a youngster. As she grew older, she saw how terribly most elephants in captivity are treated, and saving elephants became her mission in life. Her passion led her to learn as much as she could about these endangered animals. She found that the elephant habitats in Thailand are shrinking quickly and that as few as five hundred wild elephants remain in the country. In addition, most of the two thousand domestic elephants that entertain tourists have a grim future. Lek decided she had to do something meaningful to protect them.

  In the early 1990s, Lek founded the Elephant Nature Park near Chiang Mai, Thailand. She struggled desperately to raise the funds needed to take care of the elephants and to fight against fierce local critics who tried to prevent her from doing this work. Despite these obstacles, Lek was successful in finding ways to rescue and protect elephants that have been injured by land mines, have worked excessively in the logging industry, and have been mistreated as circus entertainers. The Elephant Nature Park is now home to thirty-five elephants and is open to visitors and volunteers, who are transformed by their experience with these amazing animals.