Creating Great Choices

by Jennifer Riel

  Those who doubted Apple’s Steve Jobs may look a little foolish now, but their reactions were natural. New ideas are unproven and risky. By and large, human beings prefer the comfort and safety of the status quo—an inclination that is only deepened when you get a group of us together in an organization. In most companies, when presented with a new, never-been-tried-before idea, leaders tend to shift to risk mitigation mode with a single, devastating demand: “Prove it!” These two words are deadly when it comes to innovation, because, of course, new ideas are not provable in advance. Even Steve Jobs couldn’t demonstrate definitively that his products would be successful before he launched them. If an idea is truly new, there will be no existing data that can prove it will work. All data, by definition, is from the past.

  Given that we can’t prove new ideas will work in advance of actually trying them, we find ourselves in the grips of another painful either-or dilemma. Do we stick with the tried and true? At least we can feel confident about the outcomes of such a choice, based on past data from existing models. Or do we take a leap into the unknown, blindly hopeful that the outcomes of this new idea will be better than those of the current model?

  It’s no surprise—neither of these choices is good enough.

  Sticking with what works now kills any hope of real innovation. It leaves the organization stultified, exposed to disruption from organizations with different risk assumptions and with less to lose from challenging the status quo. Moreover, it rests on a massive and flawed assumption: a belief that what we do now will continue to produce the same outcomes in the future. This assumption is true only if the future looks exactly like the past—a rarely seen state of affairs.

  But taking a blind leap into the unknown is as foolish as sticking stubbornly to the status quo; taking a “trust me” approach to new ideas prevents the organization from truly considering the implications of its innovations before implementation and leaves it ill equipped to plan for the consequences of its actions. If leaping without looking becomes the de facto standard, the organization will find itself lurching from initiative to initiative, with little rationale for choosing, or sticking with, any one path.

  Again, we face a choice we’d rather not have to make. And, again, we wish there were a better answer—a new model that could help us overcome the trade-off and get us what we really want: enough confidence to move forward with new ideas, not blindly but thoughtfully. For that to happen, we need a model for the consideration and implementation of new ideas that combines the ability to predict outcomes with the impetus to take swift action.

  Such a model is possible, but only if we think differently. It is possible only if, in this case, we realize that (1) just because something can’t be proven doesn’t mean it can’t be understood; (2) just because we can’t know for sure doesn’t mean we can’t know anything; and (3) just because we don’t have existing data to “prove” an idea doesn’t mean we can’t find ways to generate the data we need to improve our odds of success.

  As A.G. Lafley and Roger wrote in their book on strategy, Playing to Win, every strategy is a bet on the future.3 Some are big bets, others are small. Some are risky, others are relatively safer. But all strategies are about the future, so we cannot know in advance that we will be successful if we bet on one over another. The same is true with an integrative solution: any integrative possibility is a choice about the future that we make in hopes that it will be better than the status quo. We can’t know for sure that it will work before we try it, and we can’t really know, even after it is a success, whether some other choice might have been even better. All we can know for sure is that there is no perfect right answer, but some answers are better than others. Our job in stage 4 of the integrative thinking process is to sort out which of our possibilities are better than others—by running the experiments that will ultimately help us choose between them.

  This process, assessing the prototypes, has three main steps:

  Concretely define each possibility, more comprehensively articulating how it might work.

  Understand the logic of the possibilities, asking under what conditions each possibility would be a winning integrative solution.

  Design and conduct tests of each possibility, generating needed data over time.

  Let’s look at each of these steps in turn.

  DEFINE EACH POSSIBILITY

  A few years ago, Jennifer ran a summer camp on innovation for middle-school students, together with two of our colleagues: Stefanie Schram and Josie Fung. One of the youngest students at the camp, Gautem, was also one of the brightest children we’d ever met—a brilliant ten-year-old boy with a lively imagination. Using design thinking to generate new ideas for waste management and recycling at the University of Toronto, he came up with an inspired new way to sort and transport rubbish. He was so keen on the idea that he spent hours building a prototype of the machine using cardboard and Play-Doh. It was a work of art, detailed and complex. However, when we prompted Gautem to share the idea with the other kids, he dove straight into explaining the physical elements of his prototype, never really talking about why the machine was needed or how it would meet the needs of its users.

  The other kids had a lot of questions, concerns, and challenges about the design. The model was cool, to be sure, but how did it solve the problem of minimizing waste at the school? Deflecting each question, Gautem become visibly agitated as the feedback session went on. The machine was clearly a great idea, and yet all the other kids were attacking it! Afterward, Gautem was frustrated but defiant. He did not see any reason to change his idea, and he could not identify any problems with the way he had explained it. “I think they just didn’t understand the idea,” he said, shrugging. It was clear who Gautem believed was to blame for this lack of understanding: the other kids.

  Gautem isn’t alone in feeling defensive (and, after all, he’s ten years old). But when we adults propose an idea at work that gets killed, we tend to blame politics, other people’s lack of vision, and institutional cowardice. We rarely examine the role our own approach to sharing the idea played in its failure. What we endeavored to teach Gautem that week is a lesson we believe has much broader implications than a grade-school boot camp. The lesson was that, when our ideas fail to gain purchase with others and when others fail to understand them, the responsibility lies (at least in part) with us. It isn’t that our colleagues lack vision. It is that we failed to effectively share ours.

  Making Abstract Ideas Concrete

  The problem, of course, is that ideas are abstract. Given that we see the world through our own models and lenses, abstraction creates a lot of room for misunderstanding. When developing a new idea, we are prone to focus only on those elements of the idea that are most resonant, most exciting, and most clear to us—ignoring the murkier aspects, including the details of how it will all work together. Our ideas make perfect sense to us, so we don’t push the boundaries and challenge the connections that would make weak ideas fail or would extend good ideas into great ones.

  To change the way we understand and share new ideas, we can begin by striving to fill in the gaps in our thinking. This is a matter of seeking to understand the essence of each possibility, particularly focusing on how it works to integrate the existing models and to create new value. At this stage, gaps in logic aren’t necessarily the sign of a bad idea; rather, they are the hallmark of a new one. Gaps represent an opportunity to clarify and refine what a possibility could be. Possibilities become richer as they become more concrete, because there is less abstraction within which to hide.

  To gain clarity about a possibility, you can use many of the same metacognitive tools you used when you were first sketching your opposing models. Here, you ask explicitly, What is the core of this idea? How does it integrate between the two models? In what specific way is this new possibility better than the models initially under consideration? And, finally, how might I capture and communicate this answer most effectively?

  To clearly und
erstand and communicate a possibility, we suggest three approaches in particular: storytelling, visualizing, and modeling. In this step, we encourage you to use words, pictures, and objects to illustrate what each possibility is and what it isn’t.

  Storytelling

  Storytelling converts a possibility into a narrative—a tale of events that proceeds over time and has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story lets you explain what happens within the possibility—the plot points of your new and better world. Narrative is an effective way to capture and explain a new idea because humans are naturally drawn to stories; stories are the way people have learned and shared critical information since our ancestors were crouched around a campfire.

  Using stories lets you engage deeply with ideas, because you can fully picture the possibility in your mind’s eye. Once you do that, you will be able to communicate that picture to others. As screenwriting teacher Robert McKee puts it, “If you can harness imagination and the principles of a well-told story, then you get people rising to their feet amid thunderous applause instead of yawning and ignoring you.”4

  Our friend Claudia Kotchka, former head of design at P&G, is a master storyteller. To illustrate the impact of human-centered design to her peers at the sometimes-rigid consumer goods giant, she would tell a story about Altoids. Yes, the curiously strong mint introduced in the 1780s and now owned by Wrigley. Kotchka would illustrate the special appeal of Altoids by describing the process of looking at the cheerful metallic box with its nostalgic typeface and then opening the tin, hearing the liner paper crinkle, smelling the wafting scent of peppermint oil, and seeing the uneven little mints, seemingly handmade, lying haphazardly within.

  Kotchka would go on to describe what Altoids would look like if they’d been developed through P&G’s structured, rigorous, and highly reliable processes: perfect, uniform mints in a simple plastic container with a slightly garish sticker on the front. The “waste” of the liner paper and the expensive metal box would be eliminated. The “imperfection” of the varied mints would be remedied. The understated label design would be “livened up.” And voilà, all the distinctiveness of Altoids would disappear—along with the brand’s intense consumer loyalty and price premium.

  Kotchka called her imaginary new product Proctoids, after the irreverent nickname sometimes applied to P&G employees. Her vivid and funny story hit home with audiences inside P&G and out, illustrating her point more clearly than reams of data on failed innovations.

  Try This

  Think back to the invention of the iPod. Craft a short narrative that would explain the core of the idea and the way it works to create new value for users and for Apple. Try the same for one of the possibilities you generated in chapter 7.

  For each of your possibilities, think about the story you could tell about it, focusing on how each possibility would be experienced by real people. The story needn’t be long or obsessively detailed. The objective of the narrative should always be to help you, and others, understand the core value of the possibility.

  Visualizing

  Visualization converts a possibility into images. Using pictures to convey an idea lets us process and explain it in a wordless way. Like the construction of a narrative, visualization can happen naturally in our minds. You likely visualized the “Proctoids” box from Kotchka’s story, whether or not you intended to. We naturally use mental pictures to work through complex problems and to try to make sense of them; we picture how a system works now, imagine what a new system might look like, and build a new version of the system in our minds.

  But as we highlighted in chapter 1, your mind’s eye isn’t perfect, and it is inclined to take shortcuts. When we keep ideas in our minds, we tend to focus on some parts of the picture in detail and leave others obscure. We also skim over potentially faulty connections and assumptions that might make our new model break down. All this makes it difficult to deeply understand new ideas without getting them down on paper. So to effectively understand and ultimately improve our ideas, we need to get the pictures out of our heads and into the world. Drawing an image that represents the core of our new possibility is the most straightforward way to do so.

  In a real sense, drawing is a matter of transferring your mental images to paper. Famously, Texas entrepreneur Rollin King did just this to explain his idea of a point-to-point airline. He drew three points on a cocktail napkin—one each to represent Dallas, San Antonio, and Houston—and then added lines to form a simple triangle. In a few short strokes, he was able to communicate to his drinking companion, Herb Kelleher, the idea that would become the basis of Southwest Airlines, which King then cofounded with Kelleher.

  Simple drawings can convey things words cannot. The cliché that a picture is worth a thousand words is grounded in a powerful truth. So what stops us from grabbing a sketchbook and getting started? Often, it is a sense that we lack artistic ability. Thankfully, the kind of drawing we’re after doesn’t require great dexterity or artistic skill. We agree with Dan Roam (the source of the Southwest example), who says that “solving problems with pictures has nothing to do with artistic training or talent.”5 It turns out we need to know how to draw only twelve basic shapes in order to depict more or less anything: the shapes are a point, a line, an angle, an arc, a spiral, a loop, an oval, an eye, a triangle, a rectangle, a house, and a cloud (see figure 8-1).6

  Figure 8-1. The Visual Alphabet

  Following this foundational visual alphabet, created by Dave Gray, we can build increasingly complex drawings. It is similar to learning the letter alphabet and then using the letters to construct simple words and eventually to build complex words and sentences. For a simple exercise using the visual alphabet, see figure 8-2.

  Figure 8-2. Using the Visual Alphabet

  Try This

  Using the tools from the visual alphabet, challenge yourself to draw a truck, a helicopter, or a factory. Pushing beyond simple objects, try to draw one of the possibilities that came out of your thinking in chapter 7.

  Beyond simple drawings, there are of course more complex kinds of visualization. Of these, the one we use most is the storyboard: a comic-strip-like series of illustrations that includes both narrative and imagery (see figure 8-3). You can use a storyboard to help capture how an idea plays out over time or to show discrete elements of a new possibility.

  As with crafting a narrative, the key to visualization is to strive for effective communication rather than perfect form. If you worry that your drawings are not clear enough, add text labels and keep going. Again, the aim is to help you clarify your own understanding of a possibility and to make it easier to share your understanding with others.

  Physical Modeling

  Modeling takes a possibility from two dimensions to three dimensions (in the form of a physical object) or even four dimensions (as a lived experience such as role-playing). These physical models are something others can interact with in ways that are not possible with a written story or a paper-and-pen drawing. By literally adding dimensions to narratives and visuals, you can engage with and experience possibilities in new, potentially richer ways.

  Typical modeling materials in this step are colored cardboard, pipe cleaners, Play-Doh, and so on. But this isn’t kids’ stuff. To remind teams that the goal is to make the idea clear rather than to create a beautiful object, we encourage early modeling with rough materials. The more playful the materials, we’ve found, the easier it is to just start building. And building is a powerful way to learn.

  Figure 8-3. A Sample Storyboard

  Credit: Mark Leung, used with permission.

  It’s no surprise, then, that we see effective use of physical models in schools. In 2016, Laura Frew and Sharron Rosen, who teach grade 1 and grade 2 at Fairbank Public School in Toronto, gave their students a challenge related to the school’s playground. The school had recently expanded to include kids all the way up to grade 8. Older kids were now using the playground space alongside the younger kids; unfortunately, sharing
the equipment and the space wasn’t going smoothly. So the kids created new playground models that could include everyone. They then built physical models of their ideas and shared those models with the older kids for feedback.

  Models like these have much in common with the minimum viable product concept popularized by Eric Ries in The Lean Startup. Ries defines a minimum viable product as “not necessarily the smallest product imaginable; it is simply the fastest way to get through the . . . feedback loop with the minimum amount of effort.” The goal of a minimum viable product, he writes, “is to begin the process of learning, not end it.”7 Similarly, the role of physical modeling in the integrative thinking process is to gain further clarity about possibilities and to set us up to learn more about them.

  Using the Tools: An Example

  How might you use each of these three tools (storytelling, visualization, and physical modeling) to help define an integrative possibility? Let’s go back to Tennis Canada, from chapter 7. Recall that in 2005 the team had generated a possible model for tennis development that was new to the tennis world. If this new strategy didn’t work, it would be horribly embarrassing for Tennis Canada, and its failure would likely damage the organization irreparably. Press, donors, tennis players, and coaches—everybody would have asked, “What were they thinking?” So getting clearer about the possibility and determining how best to communicate it would be extremely helpful in moving forward.

  First, the team needed to articulate the core of its new possibility: combining, from the French model, the centralized control that drives consistency of purpose and, from the American model, room for customization to drive a sense of personal ownership. From there, the team might create a narrative. The story might articulate how a young player in, say, Edmonton would experience a controlled and coherent approach at weekend workshops and the U12 summer camp, while retaining her own coaches and customized routine at home the rest of the year.