His talk isn't the kind of thing you could whip up out of one's imagination alone, but it does depend on his intellect to synthesize the wonderful narrative we hear above. Taking the time to get out in to the world, and then having the ability to see clearly, are two keys to bringing great stuff to life.
At the end of the film Truth in 24, Howden Haynes (race winner Tom Kristensen's race engineer) admits that his team's victory has left him emotionally numb: he's not elated, he's not sad, he's just kind of there, hovering above his elated peers, not able to experience everything you'd expect him to be feeling after having guided his drivers to an underdog victory over the course of 24 grueling hours at Le Mans. I've seen the movie many times (it's my favorite bit of in-flight entertainment), but I could never quite understand why Haynes reacted that way to what seemed to be a peak life moment. But thanks to some friends, the last week of my life has been horizon-expanding, and to be honest, somewhat overwhelming from an emotional standpoint: which brings me to this past Thursday evening, where I found myself sitting in my Beijing hotel room thinking "how in the world did that just happen, and how come I feel this numb?". Now I have a sense of why Haynes felt the way he did, and let me tell you why.
A week ago I hopped on a plane to Beijing to be a spectator at the Race of Champions (RoC). My carry-on luggage consisted largely of one Arai helmet stuffed full of nomex balaclava, and one Amazon Kindle filled up with the latest and greatest reads in business and innovation. Truth be told, I was so excited to finally be headed to RoC that I could hardly read any of those books -- so instead I spent the flight with my eyes glued to the afore-mentioned Truth in 24, watching my heroes Kristensen and Pirro (who would be racing at RoC) race their way through the French countryside. I kept thinking about my helmet up top, too, because ever since I was a boy I had wanted a racing helmet, and now I had one, and thanks to my friends it looked pretty killer, too. Wasn't sure if I was going to get to use it in Beijing, and knew that it was overkill to bring my own when there were plenty of loaner helmets waiting there for me, but I just felt like I wanted it to be this way.
Upon landing, I embarked on a three-day blitz of totally engrossing automotive experiences. I met a bunch of my racing heroes, and even got to break bread with them. I made a bunch of new friends. I got to tour the Forbidden City with the future of Western capitalism. And I got some seriously good rides.
Jean Jennings, an automotive journalist I've been reading since the days when my mode of transportation was a pimped-out Mongoose BMX bike, once wrote that she took up being a co-driver in rallies when she realized that a professional race car pilot could give her a better racing experience than she could get at the wheel herself. That was certainly my experience in Beijing, where I was fortunate enough to ride along with the following kinesthetic geniuses:
For whatever, reason, all of the planets aligned at the end of Wednesday evening's Race of Champions shoot-out, and in space of five minutes I went from being a jet-lagged spectator to sitting beside a very focused Michael Schumacher as he warmed up our orange X-Bow in anticipation of the final against the amazing Mattias Ekstrom. After a couple of warmup laps, and then three laps driven in anger, "we" came in second:
Coverage of my race with Schumacher starts at the 2:56:00 mark on the video (my race with Priaulx is at 0:55:30).
The race itself was amazing, feeling like one seamless set of control inputs on the part of Schumacher as we flowed our way around the track. We lost by just a few tenths, but man was it a great run on this part. My abiding memory will be from our cooldown lap, when Schumacher turned to me with a twinkle in his eye and we both shared a laugh at the site of Ekstrom doing a massive stalled burnout against the barrier. Upon stopping, we shook hands and that was that.
So all of this is why I found myself in my hotel room getting ready for the post-race party, and -- somewhat Hayne-like -- simultaneously feeling ecstatic, happy, and dumbfounded. My heart was yelling "DUDE! TOTAL UNABASHED GEARHEAD GNARLYNESS!!!!!!!!!!" and my brain was saying "wait a second, did that just happen... and with these guys??!!???...". Soul-mind dissonance. Sitting at home at my keyboard today, of course, I'm totally happy, grateful and thankful to have had this amazing life experience.
My intent in writing this post wasn't to toot my horn in public about my blessings, nor was my intention to process my emotions in public. I just needed to write all of this in order to get to a point where I could express my sincere thanks to a whole bunch of special people, and to have you understand why they mean so much to me.
So, here is a public "thank you" to all of the folks who made my time in Beijing so special and memorable, in no particular order: Paul, Martin, Andy, Michele, Travis, Fredrik, Tanner, Owen, Marie-Helene, Tess, Cris, Mattias, Brian, and... many others.
Most of all, though, I want to give a big, heartfelt thanks to Jim Hancock. Jim was the one who invited me to RoC, and he did many things big and small make my time there truly remarkable. Jim and I met several years ago via metacool, and I've learned a tremendous amount from him since then. Not only is he one of the most intuitive, natural marketers I've ever met, he's also an extremely generous and fun person to be around. Above all, he's a pure racer, and I will be forever grateful for this Race of Champions experience, which let me feel like a racer, too.
Dreams can come true -- you just need a little help from your friends.
I bought a Breezer bike last year, and was really happy with it, but as I just can't leave well enough alone, I took to tweaking it. My objective? To turn it into a true object of hipster doofus lust, to make it a stealthy mountain-urban bike in Dutch city bike's clothing.
I'm kicking myself for not taking a "before" photo, but trust me when I say that the bike looks much better now: I've swapped out the stock seat, handlebars, and grips for some much tastier items from Brooks, Nitto, and a Portuguese cork farmer. And the grips are shellacked, natch. I'm still not totally satisfied with the seating position, however.
I took this quick photo today over at Stanford and felt like sharing it, ergo this Unabashed Gearhead Gnarlyness post.
And now for something not-so-completely-different, on Friday I'm participating in a Digital Think In for National Public Radio. A group of us are going to spend the day formulating and envisioning a digital media strategy for NPR. I'm really excited, as there's going to be some juicy business design involved, especially as we work with issues around the "social", "open", and "platform" aspects of their service.
Anyhow, if you have any ideas, I'd love to hear them -- please drop me an email or leave a comment. The official Twitter hashtag for the event will be #NPRthink, and of course you can always find me at @metacool.
I'm really happy to be able to point you to Living Climate Change, a conversation that we're hosting at IDEO.
Our goal with this new site is to expand and enhance the debate about climate change, and also to show what might be done about it using design thinking. While I didn't have a direct role in producing any of the video scenarios on the site, I did a modicum of work to support them coming to fruition (Principle 12), and I'm really happy with where we are with this rollout.
There's a lot more to come. Believe me, there's a lot of interesting stories and visions coming to the sight over the next few months! Most important, though, will be your contributions. If you're interested, please take a minute to subscribe to updates from the site, and contribute your thoughts and feelings here.
Over the weekend I spent some time fooling around with an iPhone app called ColorCapture Ben. The way it works is you take a photo of a color you like using your iPhone, and then this app from Benjamin Moore shows you the closest matching color chip from their collection, and then serves up a listing of complimentary colors and so forth. I found that it works equally well sampling a Barnett-Newman style solid color field as it does mixing across the various colors found in a Seurat-like shot of a lawn. Even if you're not in the market for some new paint, it's a wonderful source of quiet, adult entertainment if you ever find yourself, say, attending a live performance of music designed for the toddler-preschooler demographic. As I frequently am.
It's also a great example of Principle 3 at work. Principle 3 states that we must always ask "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?". If you've ever painted a room in a house, you know that there are many areas that could stand some improvement, and indeed there has been quite a bit of innovation lately in the areas of zero-VOC paint formulations, easy-pour paint containers, and new application tools. But those are all about the paint or conveying the paint to the wall, and when you think about it, there's so much more to the painting experience. The beauty of Principle 3 is that, by asking that you put yourself in another human's shoes, it forces you to consider all of the non-obvious aspects that make up an experience:
Another part of the challenge lies in thinking about usage through
time. We often design for those few moments that make up the core
value proposition. But what about all the other experiences? How does
it feel to start using it? What does mastery feel like -- is it
exhilarating or boring? How does using this expand our human
experience? How does it influence our environment? What does it feel
like to extend one's relationship with the offering? Does it help
someone get to a state of flow?
I don't know about you, but for me, the entire process of choosing a paint color is terrifying. Mistakes are expensive, and because it is difficult to sample paint colors accurately, iteration in a baby-step kind of way (Principle 10) is also tough. This is where ColorCapture steps in. For example, for a while I've been meaning to paint one wall of my bedroom green, but I'd rather go clean my garage than have to choose the right color of green amongst the hundreds of choices available to me -- the paradox of choice at work. With this new app, I can take a picture of my wood floor (the dominant color in the room that I need to play with), and then boom!, I have the green I need, or at least a handful of greens. And now I can start painting, and to start painting I'll go buy a gallon of Benjamin Moore Natura.
While I don't think Principle 3 is the most powerful of the principles, it certainly is one of the most foundational. If you can put it in to action, you're well on your way.
Earlier this year I wrote up a preliminary version of the sixteenth principle of innovation, Grok the gestalt of teams. In the spirit of Principle 16, my colleague John Foster just posted a great blog post about teams, called Another kind of team. Do give it a read.
Here are the four principles he outlines:
Proactive Self Disclosure
Conditional Statements
Interpersonal Congruence
Clarity of Purpose
It's a really good post, as you would expect from an subject expert like John! In the spirit of Principles 4, 6 and 8, I'm going to borrow and steal more of his thinking in order to push Principle 16 to a better place. Stay tuned for a revamped version.
As always, your comments, feedback, and ideas are not only welcome, but extremely valuable as I wade through this space.
BusinessWeek has a nice series called Five Questions For... (or 5Q4) where you, the reader/audience/world citizen get to submit a question, and then someone like Helen Walters asks your very question of a luminary. For all of us who think of calling in to a NPR talk show while driving but never do it, or who do call in to something like Car Talk, but never make it on, 5Q4 is a dream come true.
Are you getting the picture? My question got asked. I feel like a bouncy kid right now because Helen Walters asked Danny Meyer to answer my question. I love the web.
Here you go, Five Answers from Danny Meyer:
And do check out 5Q4. Lots of great interviews on there with people who make dents in the universe.
I really enjoyed listening to this interview of Adrian van Hooydonk by Tyler Brule of Monocle. It's a wonderful Director's Commentary, because in it van Hooydonk explores many themes that are relevant far beyond the world of BMW. Anyone engaged in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life will get a lot out of this video.
Some of the high points for me were:
his thoughtful exploration of how the 2009 financial crisis will shape user behaviors in the future
his thinking on what it takes to design remarkable experiences, and his emphasis on the importance of having a strong point of view. When he says that the BMW Gran Turismo is about "traveling in style", I really get what the car is all about. By the way, the Gran Turismo has officially replaced the Honda Ridgeline as the focus of all my automotive fetishistic energy (but Honda, if you're listening, I'd still be very happy if you delivered a Ridgeline to my house one Saturday morning. With a bow on top).
his clear focus on user experience as the wellspring of compelling designs. This worldview, of course, is what Principle 3 is all about.
My favorite part of the interview comes near the end, as Brule and Hooydonk discuss what it is like to bring designs before the board of BMW for approval. Here's an excerpt:
Design is an emotional thing. So, as a designer, I will lean to one or the other design in the final stages, and I can't completely explain why. But my responsibility is to advise the board on which design we should go with, and they don't even expect from me that I can explain it to the last millimeter. In a way, there has to be trust between a board of management and the chief designer.
I could not agree more. In my experience, trust in the informed intuition of talented designers is what separates the great brands from the also-rans. Informed intuition is what allows designers to make good decisions regarding intangibles. In the absence of trust in informed intuition, organizations are tempted to decode intangibles via metrics, surveys and other algorithmic devices, and all the poetry gets trampled.
When it comes to the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, this point is especially important:
As far as I'm concerned, the most important of all, the top of the
hierarchy is attitude. Why are you doing this at all? What's your bias
in dealing with people and problems?... Sure, you can start at the bottom by focusing on execution and
credentials. Reading a typical blog (or going to a typical school for
16 years), it seems like that's what you're supposed to do. What a
waste.
When trying to get something done that's been done before, it's important to look at credentials of execution: Dr. Heart Surgeon, I hope you've done this surgery many times before, and done it well, and had a chance to learn from your mistakes and those committed by others. But when faced by the challenge of creating value where none has existed before, what's important? As Seth points out, it's mostly about attitude and approach. Those are the lifelines to get you from here to over there when everything is foggy and unknown. Those are what get you to a viable strategy that makes certain executional tactics more or less relevant.
If you're trying to create the right team to go after something revolutionary, you can't ask "show me all the similar things you've shipped". You can only ask "how many times have you stepped in to the abyss, and what have you learned about how to do it better?.
If things have seemed quiet around metacool, that's because they have been quiet around metacool.
I was out on a vacation for the past couple of weeks, and took a fast from everything web-related (except for Twitter, which doesn't feel the same to me), including email and blogging and everything else I do via Firefox. I highly recommend it. I should have plenty of stuff coming out over the next few weeks.
Anyhow, the fast is now broken. The photo above was taken at Dirty Al's, home of some of the best fried shrimp I've ever had in my life. I highly recommend those, too.
“I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”
I'm happy to announce that I just joined the board of the Boulder Digital Works (BDW). At this time back in 2004, I was busy helping the Stanford d.school achieve lift off, so it's really cool now to be part of another design education startup. And now the idea of a design curriculum combining business, technology, and human issues is much more accepted in the mainstream, which to me makes the focused mission of the BDW even more exciting.
As John Maeda recently noted, the missing partner to STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) is IDEA (Intuition, Design, Emotion, Art). As a person who was trained on both sides and now works and plays across STEM and IDEA, I feel strongly that our education programs need to combine both in order to create the T-shaped people that can go out and make a difference in the world (Principle 6).
Finally, as a native of Boulder, BDW gives me another excuse to get back to the place where I came to love and admire the fine art of driving in the snow. Can't wait. Hope the board meetings are in February!
What do us three hunks have in common? The answer is easy and natural: we're all (former) proud owners of a Ford Taurus SHO.
Mine was an 89 with a chalky black finish. A good car with a fabulous, fabulous motor. The best device ever conceived by mankind for laying some patch. On a cold Oregon winter highway, in the dark and in the wet, I could shoot huge rooster tails of sparks out from the slipping studs of my winter Michelins on steel wheels. Oh, the romance.
Sadly, the Taurus brand isn't what it used to be. Years of being the default choice of rental agencies will do that to your brand equity. And at a personal level of branding, to admit in public that you loved an SHO is something akin to admitting that you used to play with GI Joe dolls. But hey, it's all true. I'm not afraid to say that I loved driving my SHO, and I hated parting with it. The day the truck came to my house to take it away, I made sure I was away for the afternoon so that I didn't have to be a witness to the act.
At what point do you release yourself from brand snobbery and just live your life, do what you want, buy what you want, consume what you want when you want? Hopefully one of the outcomes of this big economic reset will be a relaxing of our emphasis on brand value, with a shift toward intrinsic value. I think there will be more freedom to be you and me, with more acceptance of those of us with strange tastes or less appetite for consumption (I drove my SHO for 12 very good years -- and only one clutch).
I mean, look how happy Brad looked as he peeled out in his new whip. Isn't that what it's all about?
If you're going to reach innovative outcomes on a routine basis, you need to match the right team to the opportunity. Part of that means understanding Principle 7 so that you know what type of problem you're tackling, the other part involves understanding what kind of experience you need on your team.
When it comes to answering that last question, the right kind of experience profile depends on whether you're looking at a high or low variance situation. Examples of low variance situations are flying a 747 from San Francisco to Singapore, operating on a heart, or serving up burgers at In-N-Out. In each of those situations, we desire a predictable outcome delivered with a low degree of variance from a predetermined standard, and in this context, the right experience is expressed in terms of having done the same thing many times before. We want a pilot who can fly the 747 on, well, autopilot. We want a surgeon who has done hundreds of the same operation, and learned something from each one, not a surgeon who has done one hundred different surgical procedures once. As such, experience is really about tenure in a role, with relevant experience having a direct correlation to years in the role.
In a high-variance situation, where we are expecting an innovative outcome, but have little to no sense what the right answer might look like, we need a different definition of what "experienced" means. In this context, we want people who are experienced with the process of innovation -- in other words, people who have gone through the "understand - build - test" cycle of Principle 4 many times. We want folks with a lot of mileage under their belt, in other words, but that mileage need not be strictly correlated with years at work.
For example, one of the reasons why Honda cycles its production engineers through its various racing programs is to increase their innovation process mileage; designing a new component for a mass market automobile takes several years, so between the time an engineer graduates college and turns 40, they may have only shipped three to four designs to market (if they're lucky). Contrast that with a race engineer, who faces the challenge of optimizing a race car for a different track configuration every two weeks for eight months, as well as managing an arc of innovation for the entire car over those same eight months. During that short period of time, they may experience 10, 15, even 20 cycles of "understand - build - test". So when it comes to picking an engineer to go figure out the future of mobility, which one would you choose, the "I've shipped the same thing to market three times" person, or the "I've done 20 cycles every year for the past four years" individual? By my reckoning, in this world an engineer age 26 could have 20 times the relevant process experience as a person 14 years their senior.
Mileage really does matter when it comes to understanding the art and science of bringing new stuff in to the world. Many of the hottest Web 2.0 apps are springing from the agile fingers of lads barely past drinking age who are in fact hoary veterans of the coding wars, having been engaged in hacking kernels since they were eight. They have a tremendous amount of relevant mileage under their belt, and have a skillset that's perfectly tailored to the nimble world of innovation on the interwebs.
I'd like to propose a metric for assessing the innovation prowess of an individual or of a team. It looks like this:
innovation experience index = [market ships] / [years of practice]
In other words, how many innovation market ships have you experienced over a given period of time? And of those, what's your profile for incremental innovations? For revolutionary innovations?
It's all about mileage.
This is number 17 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. I really welcome your feedback, questions, and ideas.
Awesome post from Joi Ito today, talking about innovation process and government policy. An excerpt:
Generally speaking, it's probably cheaper and faster and more effective
to make a prototype than to make presentation deck. It's also probably
easier to test something on real users than to do lots of marketing and
guessing. My recommendation to just about anyone with an idea is to
just build the thing, iterate until you have some user traction, then
pitch angel investors based on that traction. This is very much in line
with the old IETF motto of "rough consensus, running code."
Joi's thinking is well worth a read (us usual, I'm not telling you anything new there).
When it comes to innovation principles, I'm a bit of a wooden stake looking for vampires these days, but in Joi's thinking I see the following at play:
This Porsche raced at Le Mans in 1970 and captured my imagination as a boy like no other race car. Beyond being a member of the ultra-gnarly 917 family of Porsches, this car sports a paintscheme like no other. Campaigned under the brand umbrella of Martini, those iris swirls were as arresting then as they are now, and are what lended this particular car the sobriquet of "hippie".
It's a beautiful design that's stood the test of time, and I'd wager it is a flexible one, too; if this pattern were printed on the side of resuable shopping bag from Whole Foods, none of us would bat an eye.
Here's where I need your help: I know that the design team behind the hippie graphics was headed by Anatole Lapine. Somewhere in the cobwebs of my memory I have a vague recollection of reading that a member of his design team was a graduate of the Stanford design program. If you have any information about this, could you please send me an email or leave a comment below? Design mysteries are few and far between, and this is a fun one.
As far as this art and science of bringing cool stuff to life thing goes, Maira Kalman really nailed it in today's NYT. You have to see it all. It's the triple distillation of pure awesomeness. Here's a quote:
Everything is invented. Language. Childhood. Careers. Relationships. Religion. Philosophy. The future. They are not there for the plucking. They don't exist in some natural state. They must be invented by people. And that, of course, is a great thing. Don't mope in your room. Go invent something. That is the American Message. Electricity. Flight. The telephone. Television. Computers. Walking on the moon. It never stops.
I simply love what she's created here and am totally inspired. Many thanks to my friend (and great innovator) John Lilly for pointing me to this.
Have a great week, everyone. Go make a dent in the universe.
And no moping! Always ask yourself, "What would Travis do?" Just do it, that's what. JFCI!
"The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari, don't think this is somebody who is greedy, think this is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love. In other words, feel sympathy, rather than contempt." - Alain de Botton
So in to the market vacuum left by BMW, I hereby nominate Hyundai as its successor. If you are laughing at that suggestion, take three minutes to watch this inspiring video of Rhys Millen setting a new Pikes Peak hill climb record in his Hyundai Genesis (albeit a modified one):
Great performance brands are forged in the heat of competition. Hyundai, your forge master is Millen.
I really like this site. From a functional perspective, it doesn't do anything that Amazon doesn't try and do for me. Based on a knowledge of what I've read, it dishes up future reading suggestions:
The list of book recommendations it cranked out here is very good, almost as good as what Amazon would dish up, because it does in fact use Amazon to generate the list of books to be read (though unlike Amazon, The Book Seer doesn't know that I already have three of these in my possession, especially the last one by Jeff Zwart, which is particularly gnarly and a treasured part of my stash. But I digress).
The difference for me lies in the beard. That beard. Oh my, what a beard! The kid in me just can't get enough of typing words in this gent's mouth and having him soothsay a future arc of literary interactions. It's so Monty Python, so retro yet right here, so not Web 2.0-ish. At the end of the day, The Book Seer makes me feel good by injecting a little dose levity and eccentricity in to my week, and one could do a lot worse than that. By comparison, Amazon is cold and clinical, and is always trying to sell me something. Helping me find a good book in a fun way feels a lot better than being on the receiving end of multple cross-sell offers crammed down my throat.
Over the past few months I've been writing up a series of 21 Principles. We're now 16 principles deep, with more to come soon. The feedback I've received so far has been very helpful, and has helped to push and improve my thinking in multiple dimensions (that would be Principles 4, 5 and 8 at work). For those of you new to metacool, I have a running roster of these principles on the right side of this blog window.
These principles are intended to underpin a general theory of innovation. They are not meant to be principles of design thinking, though some of them are obviously closely related to the theory and practice of design thinking. Inspired by the simplicity work of my friend John Maeda, I'm trying to figure out what I think and know at this point in my life when it comes to all things innovation. Hence my working through these principles in public in a messy kind of way (that would be Principles 9 and 10, with a little dash of 14).
So here's where I need your help, in triplicate:
What is missing? When it comes to innovating, what situations or dynamics or practices have I not touched on yet?
What is wrong? How am I being dumb, silly, foolish, pigheaded, idiotic, unintelligible... and just plain wrong?
What resonates? What matched up with something you've experienced in your life? And if it did, would you be willing to share your story with me?
Please leave me a comment or shoot me an email.
As always, thanks for all your help and for the conversations!
Here's a great view in to the design process of Jacek Utko. He's managed to take things that are "dead" and turn them around so that they're remarkable, moving, and cool.
I'm always amazed by people who are able to take a moribund category and turn it in to something wonderful. There are so many examples of this in action in our world:
selling commodity products: Zappos
helping people eat when they don't have time to cook: Dream Dinners
financial planning and tracking: Mint
And so on.
What ties of all of these together? As you can hear from Jacek Utko's talk, it's all about a commitment to really living Principle 3.
I really dig this interview that Helen Walters recently conducted with Alan MacCormack. In it, MacCormack uses the metaphor of a radar system to express a way of viewing the world that is quite consistent with behaviors I've seen expressed on a repeated basis by creative individuals and innovative organizations alike.
I particularly like his emphasis upon establishing "innovation radars" to tap in to high-variance information streams that will help you see and understand what is coming next. For example, MacCormack talks about taking R&D funds and spending them on external
organizations via mechanisms such as research grants. In that example, the notion of information streams comes to play not in the grants themselves, but in the array of grant applications you'll receive as a result of announcing that you're giving money away; the resulting stack of applications allows you to see future trend patterns emerge without having to leave the office.
In his book Weird Ideas that Work, Bob Sutton expresses a similar idea when he suggests using job interviews as a way to gain new information about how the world is working. Imagine the difference between viewing a lineup of ten job interviews with prospective employees as a task to plow through and seeing each of them as an opportunity to learn something new from a (potentially) interesting person. All of this is about finding creative ways to put Principle 1 in to action.
I was extremely fortunate to spend four semesters studying with Professor MacCormack at business school. I learned a tremendous amount from him, and consider Alan a leading researcher in the world of bringing cool stuff to life. He's a true guru of innovation, and I'm always inspired by his insights.
BusinessWeek just ran a good article about Mozilla's development process for Firefox. As readers of metacool know, I'm a big fan of Mozilla, and look to them as a living example of many of the organizational trends that will become more widespread over the coming years.
I particularly like the idea of "leading from behind" mentioned in the article:
How Mozilla channels those efforts is a model for a growing number of
companies trying to tap into the collective talents of large pools of
software developers and other enthusiasts of a product, brand, or idea.
"There's structure in it," says Mike Beltzner, who runs Firefox. "But
at the same time you allow people to innovate and to explore and [give
them] the freedom to do what they want along those edges—that's where
innovation tends to happen in startling and unexpected ways."
At Firefox, Beltzer calls it "leading from behind." His team makes
only the highest, direction-setting decisions, such as the date each
new version of Firefox has to ship. It's up to Mozilla staff and
volunteers to meet those deadlines through a process of identifying
specific tasks that need to be done and accomplishing them. A system of
recognition has formed among volunteers, who can be designated as
"module owners" and given authority over certain areas, such as the
layout.
Mozilla is a wonderful example of Principle 12 in action.
On a friend's suggestion, I just watched the DVD of the film Once. I really liked it.
It's a musical. A musical! But not in a South Pacific kind of way, with big production values and mountains of dollars behind each scene. Rather, the music is just there, and it is written and performed by the actors. I found the result incredibly moving and poignant, and meaningful in a way that a slick, over-thought production could never be. There's such value to be had in taking talented people and letting them do their thing, and taking what they do on the spot and accepting it for what it is. Not perfect. Not probably as good as it could have been on paper, but unique and meaningful in a way that would be impossible to replicate any other way.
Artful. Authentic. Inspiring.
For me this is important because I'm increasingly wary of the over-intellectualizing of things and processes where talent should in fact reign supreme. If the results are good, why try and distill out an algorithm? Heuristics rule, man.
You know, at the end of the day, most good stuff happens because someone good and talented sat down and worked really hard and kept on trying even as things kept breaking. Brilliant marketing schemes are the result of hard work. Innovative business models just happen... by being in beta over and over and pounding away. Heuristics rule. And sometimes you just get lucky.
If you're going to get innovative stuff done in the world, odds are you're going to do it with other people. If you haven't looked out the window lately, we're living in an ever more connected and interdependent world. If there ever was a time for lone inventors to thrive, this is not it: smart, action-oriented, high-EQ, multidisciplinary, interdependent teams are uniquely positioned to take on the broad, systemic challenges so in need of innovative thinking today.
So if you're going to do remarkable stuff, you've got to learn to grok the gestalt of teams.
There's an entire literature on effective team roles and dynamics that I won't go in to here, but based on all my years of battling on the front lines to bring new stuff in to the world, here are a few of my favorite insights in to behaviors that make for exceptional teams:
Build it out of T-shaped people: an effective innovation team is composed of people who are really good at what they were put on earth to do, but also share a common way of getting things done in the world. We want depth: an engineer needs to be an engineer's engineer, and we want the MBA to be capable of unlevering a beta in her sleep. But we want breadth, too. We need them both to not only get along, but to thrive in a symbiotic relationship centered on getting stuff done. In my experience, what adds that breadth to a team is a group of individuals who are versed in the ways of design thinking.
Know thyself, and let everyone else know, too: a high-performing team is no place for posturing or secrets. If you're good at something, we want to know so that we can you let you be the lead on that. And if you're not so good at something, we want to know that too so that we can help you get better, or keep you from wasting time on that front. The way this happens is for individuals to be proactive about disclosing this information through the course of the life of a team.
Be friendly, because the networked world is your oyster: imagine how powerful your small team could be if it were part of a vast network of experts and people wanting to contribute to your success, if only you'd ask. Well, guess what? Via the marvels of modern technology, you're already there. Need someone to hack some code? How about a coder in Bangladesh? Need an expert on nanotubes? Find her on Twitter. Need some help with that marketing plan? Why not befriend that VP that occasionally strolls by your team space? The network your team needs to hit the remarkable zone is already there waiting to be asked. Be friendly and invite those folks in. Because they want to be on the team, too.
These are only a few points. What matters to you when it comes to being part of an effective innovation team? I'd love to hear.
As the cliched saying goes, "there's no 'I' in team" (and you never want to be at the receiving end of the saying "there's no YOU in team", but I digress...), so get out there and grok the gestalt of teams. Be the team, good things will happen.
This is number 16 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. As always, your comments, thoughts, and ideas are most welcome.
I've started using Twitter again. I first began using it about two years ago, but did not manage to make a habit of it. But now I'm back on, and I'm really on.
I'm hoping that my Twitter stream acts as an extension of what already goes on here when things are running right at the metacool blog. I promise I won't use it to update you on the type of breakfast my dog just ate (I don't have a dog). I guarantee you I will focus on the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life, because at the end of the day all of this material has to come from somewhere, and I only have one brain to offer up (on a good day). Compared to this blog, my Twitter stream will be more concise, more cryptic, less considered, and will arrive on a more frequent basis. It will also be made up of a lot more questions than answers as I poke around for insights in an extroverted kind of way.
I hope you can come along. On the right side of this screen you'll find a new readout of my Twitter activity.
On Twitter you can find me under the name... metacool.
"What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a
man's breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring
to him? Discovery! To know that you are walking where none others have
walked; that you are beholding what human eye has not seen before; that
you are breathing a virgin atmosphere. To give birth to an idea -- to
discover a great thought -- an intellectual nugget, right under the dust of
a field that many a brain -- plow had gone over before. To find a new
planet, to invent a new hinge, to find the way to make the lightnings
carry your messages. To be the first -- that is the idea. To do
something, say something, see something, before any body else -- these are
the things that confer a pleasure compared with which other pleasures are
tame and commonplace, other ecstasies cheap and trivial."
I love this video because of the way it illustrates the necessity of considering the passage of time as we think about bringing new things in to the world. How will it look through the day? How will it look after 10 years? 20? 50? 200? How might future generations feel about the work we've done today?
As this video aptly shows us, Philip Johnson considered these questions in the design of his Glass House. For me, this is further validation of the importance of Innovation Principle No.3.
For an wonderful example of why it is so important to have a distinct point of view when one is trying to bring something new to life, look no further than this:
It's a daily dose of chutzpah, wit, and inspiration. The depth and breadth of expression to be found in the design of something as familiar as a pair of shoes provides this challenge to all of us: couldn't that thing you're doing be made even just a little better or more meaningful? Why keep doing the same thing without first asking why? Why look like everything else on the market?
When we attempt to bring new things in to the world, we will make mistakes and screw things up. That, along with death and taxes, is a certain thing.
So, for individuals trying to make a difference, or for organizations trying to be innovative on a routine basis, a fundamental question must be asked and answered: do we want to reward smart thoughts in the absence of action, or do we decide to celebrate the act of trying, even when it takes us to places of failure? I say that we need to err on the side of errors of commission. Doing must be more weighty than thinking or talking.
Errors of commission are less damaging to us that errors of omission... taking no risk is to accept the certainty of long-term failure.
Obviously we need balance, and not everything can be about charging in and apologizing later. It's good to listen to what the world is telling you and course correct as you go. But a bias for action, and ways of rewarding action and penalizing inaction, will lead to remarkable things happening over time.
We must celebrate (and learn from) errors of commission and stamp out out errors of omission.
This is number 15 in a series of 21 principles of innovation. Your feedback is most welcome.
Julia Kirby of Harvard Business Publishing has just written a lovely post about the Stanford d.school CIA team behind the push to turn part of downtown Palo Alto in to a pedestrian zone. It's titled Starting a Movement, Learning to Lead. Here's an excerpt:
So you tell me: is Creating Infectious Action a course in
leadership? To be sure, it doesn't focus on individuals' leadership
journeys. There's no competency model at its heart. But what is
leadership all about if not creating a vision of something different
and better, getting people excited about it, and mobilizing everyone to
cooperate in accomplishing it? If you can go out there and create
infectious action, I'm inclined to call you a leader. And if you can't,
you probably shouldn't call yourself one.
I asked Captain Hughes what he'd do next with the toolkit he gained in
Creating Infectious Action. Beyond Palo Alto and pedestrians, would the
course have a lasting impact? "I've always said that if I ever get to
be a General, I would definitely change a few things," he mused. Like
anyone down in an organization, there were some procedures and
policies--like aspects of the Army Physical Fitness Test--he
thought were downright silly. "But now I think maybe you don't need to
be a General," he said. "You just have to get a little movement going.
Then you start getting people on board."
As I wrote in my post about Seth Godin's recent talk at TED, you can't manage a movement, but you can lead one, even cultivate
one. So yes, Creating Infectious Action is a course about leadership, where leading looks a lot like cultivating a garden.
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