Archive for February, 2008
Avoiding the 3 pitfalls of Innovation based on Insight
Don’t get me wrong – I’m a fierce proponent of innovation based on insight. How else would you be able to frame your innovation and understand whether what you are proposing is even relevant, unless you understand the competitive landscape in which you operate? The purpose of this post is not to question whether you need insights or delve into how innovation works
or how to fuel it, but instead, assuming you have a smooth running
innovation machine – and you work from solid consumer insight – how come things can still go wrong?
Interestingly, cognitive science can help us here, specifically the work of Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, who three decades ago explored the benefits and risks of heuristics, or shortcuts in thinking. Heuristics help to explain the time we get it wrong even when having been presented with all the reasonable information and insight, which presumably should have led us to make the right conclusions rather than the wrong ones. There are three errors, which are common when this happens:
Anchoring error - This is when you seize on the first bit of information and basically make your mind up before you have heard the whole argument, even when some subsequent findings may be contradicting what you seized on initially.
Availability error - This is when some surprising findings emerge that remind you of a dramatic past case and you mistakenly apply mental models or conclusions from that case to new findings and rationalise them in the same way, again leading you to potentially make the wrong conclusion.
Attribution error - Despite getting a ton of insight, it can sometimes be very tempting to group these findings into stereotypes and grossly generalise, to see information as ways of confirming what you already know, rather than seeing the little inklings that your stereotypes aren’t correct. Here again the information may be correct, but your use of it incorrect.
These mistakes are all very human and can easily happen, but research in other fields are showing just how dangerous these mistakes can be. In the engineering field these errors can lead to countless hours spent hunting for a technical problem in the wrong place, in the medical fields the very same mistakes can lead to gross misdiagnosis and potential patient deaths and of course in design, to redundant products and solutions. To err is human, but to err without learning from your mistakes is plain stupid.
Add comment February 13, 2008
Debunking Popular Myths about Creativity
Like innovation, there are plenty of misconceptions about creativity out there, which makes it all the more confusing when people are extolling the importance of creative skill in the 21st century. To continue my quest to unravel these complex topics this instalment is all about explaining what creativity is NOT.
- You have to be an artist to be creative There are many creative engineers, scientists, financiers etc. creativity is not a privilege reserved to poets and artists alone. Nor is it a characteristic of loners, misunderstood geniuses or crazy people. It is about invention and innovation, often by teams!
Creativity is a talent that some have and others don’t
Viewing creativity as a talent is one of the best excuses for doing nothing. True, some people have a natural curiosity; an active imagination; a relentless energy; and a desire to think differently. But these qualities can be learnt!- Creative people are mostly rebels (won’t play the game, play mostly by their rules) As we begin to understand the ‘game’ of creativity, we know how minds form patterns [in which they then get caught] and what it takes for people to move across patterns to generate new ideas (serious play). You don’t need to be a rebel to enjoy the sense of freshness that arises from unlocking stifling thought-patterns.
- Creative people are ‘liberated’, free-spirited and child-like. The ‘liberation’ myth is based on the notion that freeing people up from their inhibitions, and encouraging them to be playful and child-like will unleash their creative fibre. Comparing adult creativity with the playfulness of children is difficult. Children are endowed with a creativity bourne out of innocence because their minds have not yet formed as many stifling patterns. The minds of adults, on the other hand, are filled with many useful patterns to be cracked and bridged for the purpose of innovation.
- Tools and techniques are confining This myth rests on the notion that systematic tool-use is contrary to the nature of creativity, which must be ‘free’. According to this view, materials should be malleable (like clay) and user-friendly (like clay). Contrary to belief, however, materials with an integrity (a ‘logic’ of their own) are often more useful in boosting a maker’s creativity – provided, of course, the maker is a fluent user of that tool!
- Creativity occurs as a single burst of genius Despite the plethora of myths pertaining to this, extensive research into both artists’ most famous works and numerous inventions attributed to a single stroke of genius have shown that instead, ideas emerge through a process of fabrication that evolves over time and through hard work
Instead creativity:
- requires both divergent and convergent thinking
- is not a matter of left brain vs. right brain alone
- involves both problem-solving and problem-setting
- balances tradition and innovation, continuity and change
- combines/blends individual and collective contributions
- involves making the familiar strange and the strange familiar
For those interested in finding out more, have look at Explaining Creativity: The Science of Human Innovation by Keith Sawyer, which gathers all the most recent findings in the field of creativity research and also outlines how different disciplines view creativity.
1 comment February 11, 2008
Understanding Innovation
Innovation is one of those words that are very hip these days. Granted, even I have it in my title. Interestingly, it is also one of the most misunderstood words in business today, so perhaps it’s worth spending a little time understanding exactly where it comes from.
If you look for the definition of creativity on Wikipedia, you’ll find over 60 different versions – most will agree on the basic premises below and beyond that, the views are radically different depending on your scientific or cultural background. Summarising:
- At the simplest level, creativity is about bringing into being something that was not there before
- Creativity is a mental process involving the generation of ideas and concepts, or new associations between existing ideas or concepts
- Creativity occurs when a person thinks a thought that is outside the space of thoughts that is even conceivable to that person Margaret A. Boden
Now creativity is not innovation, although the two are frequently confused for one another. Innovation is actually made up of two halves:
- Imagination: No new ideas can be generated without a person’s abilities to ‘ think outside the box’ or envision alternative ways in her mind
- Creativity: No insights, however brilliant, will ever be realised unless they are projected out, i.e given material form
A person’s creative expression is the visible face of imagination at work.
Imagination and creativity are each faces of a coin called innovation
With this in mind, innovation becomes a process of fueling the imagination and using creativity to bring into existence the ideas at imagination gives rise to. The two go hand in hand and innovation becomes very hard if a) your imagination is stifled or b) you lack the creativity to bring to life the ideas that you’ve had.
Therefore fostering innovation is about a process to ensure that there is enough food and stimuli for individual and collective imaginations to engage and about creating avenues for creative expressions to materialise and be improved iteratively either by individuals or collectively. Some past blog posts to inspire you:
Why Innovation cannot remain in the realm of the few
How to Encourage Innovation in Business
The Conditions for Thriving Innovation
That is not to say that these traits all need to exist in a single individual, instead they can collectively emerge in a community, in an organisation, a film crew, and so on. Successful organisations, communities or creative groups accommodate both the acquisition of stimuli to inspire the imagination of members as well as individuals with an ability to creatively realise those ideas. Collectively or individually, an essential part of innovation is the social dimension that fuels imagination and creativity as well as the process of iterative improvement. None of us are as smart as all of us.
Add comment February 8, 2008
