CPH127

Last summer I attended a class at Wharton Business School about Peripheral Vision – it was part of a Leadership Development Program arranged by LinKS here in Denmark.

The visit was great for several reasons, and one of the outcomes from my stay here was some great learning points about acting on the unexpected.

My teacher was Paul Shoemaker – GREAT authority in the field of strategic planning.

In my daily work I advice clients on how to cope with uncertainty, creating innovation cultures and helping them to understand how they can use multidisciplinary approaches towards better product- and business development.

Since my posting here at CPH127 back in the early 2006 I’ve been struggling with how I could link design thinking to the use of social software. In Connecta we are heavy users of Social Software as part of our problem solving process

But few months ago I got it – I think. Like the design-thinking ingredient I began to realize that social software provide several aspects which I believe is crucial for good development processes:

• Multi disciplinary input
• Open processes
• Ability to prototype
• Democratized dialogue 
• Rapid development
• Improved timing in product launch

And by seeing that I think I got the reason why start blogging here at CPH127 again

If you know about Social Software, innovation and design-thinking which similarities do you see - if any?

I had high hopes for Giles Slade’s Made to Break after reading a positive review of it that promised more than the doom and gloom critique of mass manufacturing by adding interesting back-stories of the development of a range of every day objects. Unfortunately, Made to Break didn’t live up to this billing. It never really does get beyond the doom and gloom, mixes it with a heavy does of conspiratorial paranoia, and applies this formula to every product it looks at. Even more unfortunate, Slade missed a chance to do a much-needed update to the time-worn critique to highlight the real issues we are facing today.

The author’s fascination (horror actually) with planned obsolescence (designing products to intentionally fail prematurely or fall out of style on schedule) follows in a long trail of critiques of the concept. Let me say that there’s little I find likeable about the idea of planned obsolesence - it’s a cynical, underhanded method of getting people to buy more products, more often. I’ll take Slade’s word that it was practiced as widely as he describes in the first half of the twentieth century. And let’s also agree that the early generations of industrial designers - Slade calls out Brooks Stevens for particular scorn for his invention and promotion of planned obsolescence - were instrumental in facilitating it.

At the same time there were also designers who truly tried to create long-lived, durable products that would have a timeless style. Charles and Ray Eames and Dieter Rams come to mind.

Scheduled style obsolescence was honed to perfection by the stylists of Detroit, led by Harley Earl at GM. But to imply this mentality is in place today, unchanged, is completely false in my experience. Never in all my years of practicing have I had a client tell me they want a product to fail after a certain number of months - without exception mechanisms are designed to last as long as we can make them (often designing under a number of constraints such as size, cost, material usage, etc. which perhaps gives the impression they are designed to fail after a certain time). I’ve never had a client say "Make this look good, but not too good. Leave some in reserve for next year so we can get people to buy it all over again." Everyone wants to make the best damn product they can at the time. Hyper competition won’t allow anything less.

Like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney fighting a Cold war in a terrorist world long after the Iron Curtain has come down, Slade persists in a world view that is decades out of date. That world simply doesn’t exist anymore.

(Slade doesn’t help his case by riddling the book with
small factual errors that add up to a sense that he didn’t do his homework. In the
chapter on the development of computer UI’s I lost count of the number
of basic errors: Alan Kay’s Smalltalk is referred to as a networking
method when in fact it was a programming method; the history of Jobs,
Raskin, the Mac and the Lisa is quite contorted; Raskin named the
Macintosh after his favorite eating apple, not because it grew around
Cupertino.)

But a subtler point lost on Slade is that it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t need to. Another world has replaced it, that of voluntary obsolescence, which serves the economic purpose even better. Like the transition of Cold war to ad hoc terrorism, this shift is also one from top-down authoritarianism to decentralized action. The approach of planned obsolescence has so pervaded and framed our consumption mentality that we (as consumers) don’t need to have products go out of style on a planned basis or have them fail on schedule for us to be more than happy to replace fully functioning products with new ones. This fact has saved Apple’s bacon and made them the darling of Wall Street again.

Three major forces are driving this.

1. Style: People are more aesthetically sophisticated and demanding than they used to be, and want more frequent sating of style fixes. When the first design shows were put together for the Museum of Modern Art in NY, the curators had to cast far and wide to put together enough well-designed products to make it worthwhile. Today an afternoon in Target would do the trick (well, perhaps a stop in Moss [LINK] wouldn’t go amiss).
2. Technological progress: Technology is obviously evolving rapidly, furiously, unpredictably, and at the same time becoming networked together in webs of products, services and software that were undreamed of in the 1950’s. This leads to dependencies of performance within the systems that drives updates (ie, updates to replace products that are fine in isolation but obsolete within the network)
3. Competition: The business world is far more competitive and complex than it was 75 years ago with many more players, and those players are more sophisticated. It is this hyper competition that is a major cause of ever more rapid product releases, particularly in the tech sectors, the antithesis of the conspiratorial tone that Slade relies upon.

Slade talks about style and technological obsolescence but doesn’t connect them together into a modern framework, instead adopting the old-guard "save the poor public from being duped by the big bad corporation" trope.

I don’t believe people are simple, unthinking "consumers" of all things provided. They (we) are thoughtful, discriminating, unpredictable, fickle, rational and emotional beings. If we were easy to push product to year after year, companies’ lives would be a heck of a lot easier. But we don’t just take what they give. Long gone are the days when companies could push the new tail fins and have the culture unanimously cry "And they are good!". Decisions now are more localized and individualized, thus less prone to predictability and more prone to churn.

Voluntary obsolescence has greatly sped up consumption from what it was under the days of planned obsolescence. This has led to a degree of ecological destruction (with much more coming from the wastestream yet to be made) that should be of major concern. Whereas the older critique of planned obsolescence was more of a moral crusade - prevent the helpless public from being duped out of its money! - the attention now needs to be on the ecological price we, our children, and our grandchildren will be paying for our current freedom to obsolete our posessions.

Which general was it that said "You always fight your last war"? Unforuntately Giles Slade is doing just that, and has missed an opportunity at an opportune time to critique the new world of voluntary obsolescence and the ecological damage that it is causing.

Design Observer has republished an article by Michael McDonough listing
the top 10 things they never taught Michael in design school. Design is
a fundamental capability in a complex world and I think you’ll find
Michael’s list useful. Here are the bullet points. For the explanations
I recommend you pop on over to Design Observer.

1. Talent is one-third of the success equation.
2. 95 percent of any creative profession is shit work.
3. If everything is equally important, then nothing is very important.
4. Don’t over-think a problem.
5. Start with what you know; then remove the unknowns.
6. Don’t forget your goal.
7. When you throw your weight around, you usually fall off balance.
8. The road to hell is paved with good intentions; or, no good deed goes unpunished.
9. It all comes down to output.
10. The rest of the world counts.

I got it from Anecdote

Over the
last years everything happens do be deployed in beta. Everything is launched as
beta, everything happens to be unfinished.

Is that a
good or a bad thing, and why is that happening right now?

It seems
that companies and individuals are in the need to be involved, to create
together, to find an answer on how to cope with speed, complexity and instant
change.
As I see it
– and I’m not the only one – beta is the answer.

And – I need
to say that – beta is very much a state of creation, innovation, creating
change, facilitating change with high speed and with the use of many of the
principles discussed here at CPH127.

Together with
good friends I’ve started to write on a beta-manifesto, where we until know
have gathered a few principles, please help us to make the list even more
complete…

1. being in beta is a natural state of life. Everything aroundus is either evolving or dying.
2. beta is playing. Experimenting. Trying.
3. beta is constant learning.
4. beta is profiting in the true nature of the word “profit”. Making progress.
5. beta is never perfect. Never
   completely without fault. Just like any human being. Everything can be
   made better. Allways. Achieving temporary perfection is better than
   aspiring for the ultimate perfection that is never reached.
6. beta is release as soon as it
   is safe. But never sooner. Only daredevils flies planes in beta or
   takes unfinished medicine.
7. beta is a natural state of things. Your body is in perpetual beta until you die (maybe..)
8. beta is evolution. Many small gradual changes. Suddenly they may seem like giant leaps.
9. beta is revolution. Not completely in control. Just like the real world.
10. beta is open. Ready for dialogue. Open for change. Positive for co-creation.
11. beta stands for things that changes. Change with consistancy.
12. beta creates feedback loops for companies, individuals and products.
13. beta is honest. Not superficial.

Please help us to make the list even more complete

The Omnium Creative Network [OCN] is a free, non-profit online global community of creative people (students, professionals, educators,
theorists writers and more). It’s aim is to encourage members from all over
the world to collaborate in a variety of ways, to focus their attention on more
socially aware and ethically responsible art and design projects.

Membership is made up of participants from a wide variety of countries worldwide; in particular countries less fortunate in terms of having easy access to creative interaction through conferences,, publications and exhibitions.

Check it out…and join in.

We Make Money Not Art (link via Boing Boing) has posted a wide-ranging interview with Peder Burgaard, the Event Manager of Denmark’s Innovation Lab, which organizes the annual NEXT conference on technology and innovation. For the next five months or so, Peder will be interning at the Institute for the Future
(IFTF), a Palo Alto-based non-profit think tank that is mapping the
future for large companies in the Silicon Valley as well as for
governments and companies around the world.

In response to one question from the interviewer about NEXT, Peder
explains how design is becoming an integral part of the product development process:

"The interaction art projects at NEXT are to be seen as an emerging
trend where involvement of artists and designers in the finishing touch
of consumer products will increase. So the gap between pure consumer
development and artist aesthetic expressions will be winding and
eventually join forces. Research studies have shown that more aesthetic
products have a correlated improvement on user interaction. And the
ever increasing demand on technology for ease of use will have artist
leading the way of innovation in the future. Perfect example of this is
the iPod which has a beautiful design and just feels nice and intuitive
to operate."

“Don’t worry about other people stealing your ideas. If you’re ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.” – Howard Aiken, IBM Engineer

This is my favorite quote at the moment, and it gets a smile from everyone. Why? Because we’ve all seen great ideas get squashed, misinterpreted beyond all recognition, or just plain lost in the bureaucratic cracks. The problem today is, there are lots of great ideas swimming around, the problem is spotting which ones are applicable to the business, and nurturing them past their seedling status to become concrete and actionable in a way that is broadly understood within the organization.

Innovation is currently the holy grail of many companies, but too often it is treated as an end rather than a means. Innovation is simply a tool, and as with any tool it can be used effectively and ineffectively, but simply having it doesn’t give you a competitive advantage. For the most part, I would argue, any company worth their salt has dramtically improved their innovation capabilities in-house, or they can easily acquire innovation from outside firms. Procter & Gamble until recently was not considered a particularly innovative company, but they executed better than anyone. Now they are ramping up their internal innovation capabilities, which when combined with their proven execution abilities, is making for a very powerful one-two punch.

This has raised the competitive bar significantly, and means that companies must work harder to identify new growth opportunities that will get them ahead of the competition. Everyone has improved, and all the "obvious" stuff has been done. This is why innovation is valued so highly today, but by itself it is not enough.

I’ll make a perhaps provocative statement: Innovation is not the hard part anymore, and we are in fact in a state of innovation surplus. The challenge now is less coming up with innovations, but identifying which of the available innovations best support new business opportunities, and seeing how those opportunities support top level business goals.

A common problem is that top-level business goals are stated so broadly or vaguely that they are less than helpful when trying to identify the best opportunities and innovations to pursue from a suite of available options. How do you decide if, for example, the top-level goal of “Create Growth” is best satisfied with a new technology that improves product performance by 20% and will allow you to take market share from your current competitors; or instead should you innovate new products or variants that will allow you to tap into new markets (though require new sales channels and brand positioning)? More clarity is needed.

At the About, With & For conference last October I gave a talk on “wicked problems”, which I’ve been thinking about recently as I believe they are what stand between accurately connecting top-level business challenges with selections of innovations.

I first came across this phrase over ten years ago in an essay by Richard Buchanan called "Wicked Problems in Design Thinking" (it originally appeared in Design Issues and was subsequently included in the anthology The Idea of Design. I was immediately intrigued, but over time forgot about the concept. I was reminded of it again about a year ago and started pursing the concept more vigourously, and was struck by the fact that a) with few exceptions such as Dr. Jeff Conklin, almost no-one had done anything with the idea, and b) that it had tremendous relevance to the types of problems I see clients grappling with in my work at frog design.

"Wicked problems" was a term first coined by an urban planner named Horst Rittel in the 1970’s, when he recognized a new class of problems arising from extreme degrees of uncertainty, risk, and social complexity. He was dealing with issues such as crime, poverty, and racial segregation that were the outcomes of the planned housing projects of the 1950’s and 60’s. He recognized that not only was there no clear answer, there was not even a clear understanding of the problem they were trying to solve.

This is in contrast to the other types of problems we are more familiar with, which Nancy Roberts, an instructor at the Monterey Naval Post Graduate School, classifies as:

Simple problems: Both the problem and the solution are known. Example: You have a leak under your kitchen sink. It’s obvious what the problem is, and two plumbers will likely agree on what the solution is.

Complex problems: The problem is known but the solution is not. Example: You need to design a higher capacity disk drive. The problem is clear (though defining “higher capacity” needs to be agreed on), but understanding how to solve that problem is far from clear.

Wicked problems go beyond these in terms of difficulty, largely because they are inherently social in nature. Rittel identified several key aspects which, once listed, you will likely recognize as features of your toughest business decisions (this is not an exhaustive list, I’m paraphrasing a bit):

1. There is no definitive statement of the problem; in fact, there is broad disagreement on what ‘the problem’ is
2. Without a definitive statement of the problem, there can be no definitive solution and therefore no “stopping rule” signaling when an optimum solution has been reached. In actuality, there are competing solutions that activate a great deal of discord among stakeholders
3. The only way to really understand the problem is by devising solutions and seeing how they further knowledge about the problem (thus reversing the normal flow of thinking: with wicked problems, a solution must come before the problem!)
4. Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong, merely better, worse, good enough or not good enough. There is a high degree of subjectivity and each stakeholder brings their own perception to the table, causing discord.

Because they are so difficult to identify and define, wicked problems tend to go unaddressed, even if there is an underlying sense that something needs to be done (though about what exactly no-one can say).

So how do you deal with such intractable problems? In my AWF talk I followed the theme of the conference - work and play - by using sports analogies to identify a number of capabilities and states of mind that are valuable in addressing wicked problems. These are:

• Having wide peripheral vision to spot opportunities and threats at the edges
  Using pattern experience to sense the shape of wicked problems before hard proof is available
• Treat solutions as questions
• Have a high panic threshold and don’t be tempted to "tame" the problem prematurely
• Treat wicked problems as a full contact sport - get the whole system in one room and hash it out, and stay close to your customers

My plan is to do follow-up posts on my own blog to explore each of these in more depth.

Since the very beginning of CPH127 my main interest has been on the organizational side of what innovations is all about. And yes, the design discipline has a lot to offer in that respect.

I have – and a lot of the other pilots at CPH127 too – mentioned several different approaches toward how innovation can be approached.

Back in December I wrote about Open Sourced Leadership – in that post, among others, I described the “term” pull as a factor – as a mindset – for growth, innovation, value-creation, future business development.

Last weekend I read a very interesting piece “From Push to Pull – Emerging Models for Mobilizing Resources” and it stroke me that everything I meant back then is written down in that article. Not that my mind was all set, is all set, but it’s very good put and definitely a worth read.

John Hagel & John Seely Brown seems to have set the lens on a “new” model for mobilizing resources. Rather than “push”, the new approach focuses on “pull” – creating platforms that help people to mobilize appropriate resources when the need arise.

2 X John state further that pull models emerge as a response to growing uncertainty. Did anyone say complexity?

They also state that pull models treat people as networked creators, even when they are producers or customers purchasing goods and services. Did anyone say weblogs, social software or Web2.0?

Read the article – it’s a good one

Mark just linked me to a great site about experience economy and design processes. It’s a MUST resource for the many of us, really great and with some thoughtful links an resources too.

I just read an article there about experience economy and creating sense/meaning. It refers to the development of an innovation or an experience concept which involves a process of thinking, doing and reflecting. It states that both parties can certainly work together in this process, and they will book more success through their collaboration than either one could do individually.

Important in this regard are four building blocks that the article find in the work of Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004). They speak of the DART principle:

1. Dialogue
Dialogue means interactivity, being engaged with each other and listening to eachother. Both parties (supplier and customer) intend to accomplish something. It also means that attention is given to the interests of both parties. This requires both a location in which the dialogue can take place and a number of rules with which both parties must comply in order to be able to hold a useful dialogue. The principle of ‘learning by sharing’ holds here: the company learns through the dialogue with the customer and vice versa.

2. Access
The traditional focus

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a heavy Flickr user and have over a few iteration re-discovered the possibilities in sharing photos. It’s amazing how easy it is to use, connect and share networks of interest.

Since New Year I’ve been working on a major innovation project for one of the truly market leaders in the food ingredients industry. As part of the project I’m considering using Flickr as an Anthropological tool, but I’m nor aware of the constraints or great possibilities, but can see a huge potential in using it..

Do you have any experience in doing so? Wanna share? How should I design this? Is it valid?

By the way – I see that Cheskin claims they invented Digital ethnography as a methodology. Did they really?