Посты автора Amnon Levav

Amnon Levav

Co-Founder and C-IO (Chief Innovation Officer) at SIT

The T-Puzzle

Published date: April 27, 2022 в 4:51 pm

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Category: Innovation Facilitation,Problem Solving

This is a puzzle that occurred to me about 30 years ago, inspired by reading Douglas Hofstadter’s collection of essays “Metamagical Themas” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamagical_Themas.

My colleagues and I have used it sporadically but extensively in innovation workshops throughout the years. We call it The T-Puzzle. I believe that it raises some interesting questions and thoughts, some more philosophical, others directly related to problem solving and innovation.

But, before discussing meanings and interpretations, would you first take a stab at solving the puzzle?

Have you tried? This is what happens:

Once you realize that the number is 21, you write “twenty one”, but, as you are instructed to count the t’s in the word you fill in as well, the number of t’s now grows to 23. OK, you say to yourself, and write “twenty three”, BUT this brings the count to 24 t’s. Annoying, but still manageable, you think, as you fill in what is now the correct reply “twenty four”. But here it starts getting weird, because NOW the right answer goes back to 23, and you know where writing THAT answer will lead you. So, basically, there is no way (that I’m aware of) to break this wicked loop and write down the correct answer.

UNLESS, that is, you start breaking some IMPLICIT assumptions about the requirements from the solution, while strictly complying with the EXPLICIT instructions themselves. Here are some possible solutions suggested by the public, on LinkedIn and in our workshops:

  1. Seven plus seven plus seven
  2. wenny-one or _wen_y one
  3. fifteen-plus-seven, or other arithmetical combinations
  4. “several”/”many” or “more than twenty-one”
  5. “Blackjack winning number”
  6. Einundzwanzig, עשרים ואחד and the like

Some practical learnings about innovative problem solving:

  1. Useful problem solving is usually not about breaking rules, but about finding novel solutions WITHIN the constraints, INSIDE THE BOX.
  2. Once you break the FIXEDNESS, or the mental model of how the solution should supposedly look, a floodgate opens for alternative possibilities.
  3. Solutions tend to come in “families” that share common PATTERNS. Once you recognize these patterns, you can follow each one to create variations (arithmetic, languages, slang, estimates, metaphors, etc.)
  4. One can be SYSTEMATIC about solution-searching. For “arithmetic” solutions, say, there aren’t many t-less numbers in the English language: one, four, five, six, seven, nine, zero are the only ones in the first 100 natural numbers (!), still enough to create quite a few combinations equaling 21, and combining them with t-including numbers you can reach other sums without falling into the wicked t-loop.
  5. Easy to CREATE ALGORITHMS churning out solutions for some patterns (arithmetic, languages), less easy for others (metaphors and slang) but probably not impossible.

Additional, more philosophical musings will be supplied on demand. Meanwhile, happy to hear your thoughts.

HOW TO BE PAST-READY

Published date: April 13, 2022 в 4:45 pm

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Category: Innovation

Yesterday it occurred to me that none of my girls actually knew what a letter even was. They knew the word but none had ever written nor received one. They had never lived the experience of running to the mailbox to see whether an envelope with a stamp was waiting, bringing news from a dear friend from which they had not heard for months.

I tried to convey this long-lost reality with its accompanying feelings and managed mainly to elicit laughter and ridicule, but also some genuine curiosity.

“So how did they know that you had received and read the letter?”

“Yeah. Imagine them sitting in a caffe in Brasil three weeks after sending it and suddenly hearing a buzz in their ear and saying, ahh great, they opened my letter.” LOL

“And then, when they received your response, it would say: last time she wrote a letter was on November 16th, at 13:45.” LOLer

“What?!? Then it could take like 6 weeks between the moment you wrote to tell her of the video you had just seen and the moment you received her response??? So why bother being in touch with people that far away, anyway?”

And so on and so LOL.

While they were laughing and making fun of us old-timers it suddenly occurred to me: we humans are not only limited in our ability to imagine an unknown future; we’re just as challenged when we try to overcome our fixedness about imagining unlived pasts! In fact, why should there be a difference? Why would it be easier for someone who doesn’t know what is, say, a letter, to invent the concept – that was once an obvious reality to all and sundry – than to invent the next WhatsApp or Telegram?

It somehow feels that it is more difficult, and I have some thoughts on why this is the case, but also the suspicion that the main difference is that we are simply more interested in future-looking-fixedness-breaking than in its past-looking sister, and that is why we invest so much effort trying to invent difficult-to-imagine futures rather than understanding just-as-difficult-to-comprehend pasts.

We tend to believe that innovation necessarily means advancing from iPhoneX to iPhone X+1, 2,3… But what if iP7 was actually better than iP9, say? Which innovation mechanisms do we have to help us correct our course by stepping back? Advancing backwards? Or, on a larger scale, from the perspective of say 1990’s McDonald’s – given that they were clearly selling a mostly harmful product, the obvious innovation strategy, which to a certain extent at a certain point they followed, was to try to make the product more wholesome or, at least, less harmful. This is certainly a worthy effort and a beneficial use of the company’s innovation abilities. From the perspective of the rest of humanity, though, wouldn’t the most effective and benign strategic innovation be to go backwards to a McDonald-less world? Or at least to scale it back in size and reach? In terms of our definition (click here to read the article) this course of action would undoubtedly count as a great instance of innovation, complying with our two criteria:

1)      Important impact has been achieved – less harmful food is being consumed;

2)     A fixedness has been broken – that the best course of action for MD is to grow and grow, regardless of its impact on society.

Innovation can, I am suggesting, work in both directions. It can mean breaking our fixedness to imagine futures that are seemingly inconceivable with our current knowledge, and it can also lead us to what is often the even more difficult task of realizing that we have forged forward on the wrong branch in the tree of possibilities and would do better to advance backwards to the last fork and select a different route to advance along.

So, as the world reaches increasingly more dead ends, those who have the skills to reimagine quasi-forgotten past-solutions and “invent backwards” to lead us to ways of being whose value we can now appreciate, with the benefit of hindsight, more than we ever did in the past, may become the visionary leaders of the future. Hindsight is given a bad rap because it is assumed that one cannot go back to make use of it. But what if one could?

Why Impact Investment is Useless but Why Not All is Lost

Published date: March 9, 2022 в 8:40 pm

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Category: Problem Solving,Sustainable Innovation

In August 2021, a 3-part longish article was published by Tariq Fancy, Ex-CIO for Sustainable Investing at BlackRock, considered to be the world’s largest asset management firm, with who’s-counting-many trillions of dollars under management. In the article, Fancy describes in detail why he decided to leave his well-remunerated and perkly-speaking-attractive job and denounce the practices which he was promoting during his 1 year and 9 months in the firm. It is a fascinating read which I strongly recommend:

https://medium.com/@sosofancy/the-secret-diary-of-a-sustainable-investor-part-1-70b6987fa139

The article develops an argument, which I will briefly expound here because of its importance, and will follow with a set of questions that I think are crucial to our thinking about solving the world’s most pressing crises. Some of the questions challenge Fancy’s argumentations, others aim to direct readers’ attention and thinking to its consequences.

The article is obviously way more detailed and nuanced than my brief exposition, providing the added pleasure of the author’s sardonically realistic descriptions of the financial milieu, from (literally) high-flying arrogant executives to well-intentioned svelte Swedes. So, make sure not to miss the original. The argument goes something like this:

1)     The climate crisis is probably the number one threat that humanity is facing, and it is inextricably linked to several other crises, including extreme and growing inequality.

2)     There is currently a strong effort to promote the idea that the business and financial sectors, through “sustainable investing… impact investing, ethical investing and environmental, social, and governance (“ESG”) investing”, are the ones who will extricate us from these crises.

3)     This is part of a wider concept that is being touted, which is that the business sector can and is mending its ways by adopting the principle of doing well by doing good. Or, as Fancy says, “a new worldview that purpose and profits are not in conflict and that companies need to serve society rather than just their shareholders in order to prosper.”

4)     Much of the article is dedicated to prove and demonstrate that this claim is utterly false, since the business sector is neither capable nor motivated to be guided by anything other than the quest for profit, which is in most cases strongly at odds with purpose. Fancy excels at enumerating some of the specific mechanisms of the hugely profitable (since it provides higher fees) but totally illusory business of “impact investing”, convincingly describing the lack of any known causal chain translating this kind of investment into even the slightest discernible change in environmental parameters.

5)     “Impact”, “Green”, “Responsible”, “ESG” investments, promoted as a solution, are, therefore, utterly useless. Worse, they only serve to exacerbate the situation (even in the rare cases in which they are practiced with sincere intentions), by greenwashing the true picture while distracting the public into believing that the crisis is being resolved, and thus delaying and defanging any serious attempts at applying the only viable remedy, which is a complete overhaul of the rules of the game.

6)     It should not come as a surprise that these “green” practices are useless: the business sector has no motivation whatsoever to solve the problem since the rules of the game are designed exclusively to incentivize financial gain at the expense of any other consideration. In fact, the game is set up to incentivize anti-ESG behavior. In addition – even if businesses were willing to solve humanity’s problems, why should we entrust them with our future? Their leaders have neither been elected to represent us nor naturally selected for their benign attitudes towards their fellow humans.

7)     There is therefore, only one player who can, should and must shoulder the responsibility: government. For this to happen governments must take the initiative, change the rules for all players, and strictly enforce the new rules, forgetting about voluntary compliance.

8)     In summary: it is unfair to the public, undemocratic, illogical and impractical to expect the leaders of the business community to extract us from the crisis they have led us into. Governments need to take the responsibility now!, change the rules and ruthlessly enforce the new ones.

To drive home his key message, Fancy utilizes an effective analogy: basketball players who are being paid for scoring more points than their rivals will use any means to do so if they can get away with it, even if this goes in the face of the generally accepted maxim that one should attempt to “play fair”. Acting otherwise would be irrational within the system in which they are embedded, and this holds for their coaches, managers and all other members of the “basketball ecosystem”. Back to the financial analogue, Fancy grimly states: “Unfortunately, many things that are lucrative are also bad for the world.”, which is, one supposes, why they are still happening despite humanity’s absolute necessity that they stop.

Why there may still be hope

1)     One of the strongest critiques of the reigning economic model is its reliance on the Homo Ecomonicus model, the perception of humans as rational agents motivated solely by self-interest. This vision is so obviously skewed, that one can only wonder how it has managed to hold so many economics experts and “experts” in its thrall for so long. Surprisingly, Fancy’s powerful criticism of the system makes the same erroneous assumption (or maybe not surprising, given that he is – professionally speaking – a fruit of this very system). His main argument as to why businesses will never be able to extract us from our crises, is that the actors in the business-game, by its very design and rules, will never be incentivized to do so, because they are financially incentivized against it. But what if they will be motivated to fundamentally change in spite of it being against their self-interest, in the narrow sense of providing them financial gain?

2)     To continue the previous point, why assume that human beings – even finance-sector-human-beings – will always seek only direct financial gain, while the (undoubtedly persistent) tendency to do so may be simply the result of a culture that could, in principle, be shifted through a combination of education, leadership, persistence, necessity and maybe some luck?

3)     In 2007, I was facilitating a conference for a division of a large corporation providing harmful and profitable products to the market. The division’s president surprised his managers by agreeing to my suggestion that we close the yearly management conference with a video of Severn Cullis-Suzuki, who in 1992, at the age of 13, spoke to the assembly of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro (as a “proto-Greta Thunberg”) against the preposterous state in which this generation was planning to leave the earth to hers. There was some discomfort in our corporate conference hall, but also a surprising amount of support and even empathy with the young speaker, and when I inquired about this surprising reaction, I was told that some of the managers were feeling uneasy lately because their high-school aged children were complaining that they were ashamed of sharing with classmates the information on where their parents worked. That’s one type of powerful, non-financial incentive, isn’t it?

4)     Recruitment – another incentive. This is a complaint we were hearing in various industries, even before the so called “Big Resignation”. It is becoming more difficult to recruit and retain talent, especially in categories that are considered harmful or unethical. Hopefully, with the right education, it can become harder still.

5)     The “Sting” argument, from the cold war, could be repurposed and (para)phrased as “I hope the CEOs love their children too”. One supposes they do, and that they also love their grandchildren. True, that if grandfather CEO amasses wealth today, future grandCEOchildren can be guaranteed a much safer existence than that of the regular grandchild-Joe, still the prospects for even a billionaire in 2060 seem quite grim, unless some profound change occurs.

6)     Assuming you agree with the entire argument presented by Fancy about the impossibility of trusting the business community to be our savior, how much can you trust governments? The record of governments to date in taking full control of national economies is dismal. Not to say, as capitalists are wont to do, that the economic failure of socialist economies is a proof that any government-controlled economy must fail. Still, the onus is on governments to prove that they are able to steer an economy, especially in times of crisis.

7)     Bernie Sanders’ analogy to WW2 comes to mind, re the ability of a country’s government and citizenry to unite in a no-holds-barred common effort to overcome a threat to its existence. Is it the lack of a “climate-Hitler”, someone to direct your anger onto and to focus your defensive aggression on, that is missing in today’s crisis, versus that of the Second World War?

8)     Back to the role of businesses. What if, discarding the misguided interpretation by which business leaders are motivated exclusively by financial consideration, we conceived of a global all-encompassing cultural and mindset shift? What if the same kind of childish egotistical impulse that drives the Bezo’s, Musks and Bransons of the world to spend their billions just to be the first, the biggest, the most famous, could be transformed into a genuine competition for who is more… good?

9)     The former point relates to the concept of “positive tipping points” i.e. the idea, as described for example by Timothy Lenton et. al., that “small interventions can trigger self-reinforcing feedbacks that accelerate systemic change” (Operationalising positive tipping points towards global sustainability). This challenges the maxim that only large-scale steps can tip the scales quickly enough to avert disaster and resonates with the intuition that complex systems can often be swayed by slight shifts to initial conditions.

10)  What happens to all the thousands of businesses toiling away in an effort to do good within the current system? Those that are sincerely trying to connect profit with purpose, some even successfully, others ceding chunks of profits to gain bits of purpose? Are we to discourage them from sustaining these efforts, since we believe, as Fancy appears to claim, that their efforts are useless or worse? Doesn’t it feel that our world is better off when companies place themselves on a trajectory of giving up toxic practices and adopting better ones, albeit too slowly?

Considering both the limitations of relying on the business community for solving humanity’s crises, and the huge potential that lies with these powerful players, one suspects that a comprehensive solution may therefore be a combination of much stronger government-led regulation, tightly enforced, with strong public support, accompanied by massive work on a cultural and mindset shift in which individuals, organizations and businesses will be driven through a wide range of incentives to replace current harmful practices with activities that contribute to the well-being of the planet and the species that inhabit it.

Listen to How you Listen to the Voice of the Customer

Published date: January 27, 2022 в 3:06 pm

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Category: Innovation Facilitation

By Nurit Shalev, CDEO (Chief Development & Empowerment Officer) and Amnon Levav, CIO (Chief Innovation Officer), in SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking

This post brings together two very well-known concepts, the first, a key topic in the world of marketing and the second, a technique that originated in the realm of psychology and self-help:

  1. Voice of the Customer
  2. Johari window

When Nurit came to me with the initial draft of this post, the first thing that occurred to me was: great stuff, but this combination must have appeared in dozens of publications already. A couple of Google-hours later I came to the following surprising conclusion, which is our rationale for sharing with you this application of the Johari Window technique to the practice of listening to the VoC:

This is the first time (as far as we’ve seen), that the Johari Window is used not to analyze how customers perceive the company but what the company knows about its customers.

AS we all know, companies very often embark on research designed to glean insights about their current or prospective customers, whether to identify “unmet needs”, drive design of new products or offerings, or better communicate their benefits in order to eventually sell them. Our suggestion (and novelty): Before setting out to ask your customers or observe them, ask yourself and map out what you know about them, using the Johari Window framework.

 

What can the company learn from these quadrants, and how can this be put into practice?

1.The company already knows plenty about its customers, and the first quadrant shows what the company knows that it knows, through a variety of sources: salespeople, customer service, complaints, social media, etc. Very often, the customer also knows that you know, so: a) why waste your energy on re-verifying, and b) why annoy your customers by demonstrating that you need to be told yet again? Unfortunately, we often find our clients exploring this quadrant, mostly because it is easier to cover familiar territory. Make sure you organize this type of existing knowledge well and avoid the practice of setting out to rediscover it.

2. The second quadrant seems enticing: stuff you know that you don’t know about the customer. Tempting because you know what you’re looking for, and you know that once you find it you have expanded your knowledge of your customers. But beware: make sure you figure out why you want to know what you don’t about your customers. First, maybe you don’t know because the customer doesn’t want you to know, maybe it’s not your business to know. Second, will this information be useful, operable? Take care not to spend time nor bother your customers for collecting information that will never be utilized – you will be breaking the informal pact by which your customer agrees to share their data in return for your making good use of it for their benefit. It can, nevertheless, be fruitful to imagine what you could do with data or information that is currently unavailable. Especially when thinking of Digital Transformation, uses for data are often invented or discovered only after the data has been collected. Explore this quadrant, therefore, but handle with care.

3. The third quadrant describes a blind spot with high potential for easy wins – what you don’t know that you know. This is all the data and information that the company has, but is not aware of possessing, usually due to one or several of the following:

  • Data, or even information are strewn around in an unstructured and unorganized fashion;
  • Your own assumptions or cognitive fixedness prevent you from realizing what you know;
  • Lack of communication and silos deny access to data to those who could potentially use it within the organization.

The danger in these cases is, again, disappointment among customers who feel that they have supplied information but have not received anything in return. The potential, on the other hand, is huge. No need to spend time and resources on research, no need to take up more customer’s time, only open your eyes and mind and enjoy the fruits of information that you already possess.

4. The fourth quadrant is the most intriguing. The assumption here is that there exists information out there that will probably not be accessible using your standard procedures. Since you don’t know that you don’t know, not only are you not cognizant of the answers, but you are even ignorant of the questions. You will, therefore, need to be creative. Perhaps you can engage your customers in a process of co-creation, while observing them and listening carefully. Or you can use empathic design or other anthropologically based techniques for observing customers with a clean slate, open to discovering information that you had not set out to look for, and the customer may not have even been aware that existed. Companies would do wisely to develop these kinds of procedures and abilities, for it is in this domain that competitively valuable insights can arise. A caveat is in place, though: there is much information for which you should not rely on your customers. They not only cannot tell you what they will need in the future, they very often are not even aware of what they need or could want now. One of the worst strategies for coming up with novel ideas is asking your customers to supply them.

The following short case study demonstrates how the Johari analysis plays out in this context. As we prepared for a pipeline development project with one of our clients, a credit card company, the VP Marketing asked that as a first step we conduct some consumer research: “Let’s learn from our customers, listen to what they want.” All members of his management team, sitting in the room, fell silent. Their unease was palpable. They needed very little prodding to explain why: “Not another research project!”, “We have so much data already that we’re not using.” “Same questions, same answers, same ppt presentation, report to the board, no action?” Our suggestion was, therefore, to kick-off by mapping out the company’s knowledge situation as explained above. This was the result:

The information collected through this analysis led to a variety of insights, such as:

The customer obviously lived a negative experience when their card was blocked, but this was exacerbated by the presence of others, such as the attendant at the checkout, the customer’s partner, bystanders watching etc. The experience was often described using expressions such as: shame, offense, impotence, anger.

  • Some of the customers turned to the call center in real time, but most reported that response times were inadequate to the situation, failing to resolve the embarrassing situation.
  • Emotional responses to the blocking of one’s card were pretty much universal across customer segments, but reactions differed widely, including the use of social media.
  • In most cases cards were blocked due to the customer’s failure to renew their card or enable its use abroad. In both cases, the customer had received notification of the need to act but had disregarded this communication.
  • Communication overload was the main reason for disregarding these important messages that were lost in the flood of less important ones.

Based on the insights garnered through this analysis, the team went on to ideate solutions, converging to two viable and complementary concepts. At this point the team felt that they needed very little customer validation, as the ideas had been based on a deep and solid analysis of the huge amount of knowledge they had of their customers.

Time and again we find that professionals have much more information about their customers preferences and needs than they are aware of. In these cases what is required is a comprehensive and structured analysis of the existing knowledge leading to a focused search for what is missing.

Remember:

  • Don’t ask about what you already know. The customer knows that you know.
  • Don’t ask about what you don’t need to know.
  • Don’t rely on the customer for what the customer doesn’t know (e.g. ideas, future needs).
  • Trust your professionals, especially those with frontline experience, and their knowledge of their customers. Listen to the VoP (Voice of the Professional), and don’t settle for their initial response.
  • Challenge your people to challenge what they think they know, to uncover what else they know.

Knowing your customer is the basis for the success of any business, hence the crucial importance of listening to the voice of the customer, but much depends on how you listen, what you search for and mostly – your awareness of what you know and what to do with it. Our variant of the Johari Window, applied to analyzing what you know about your customer’s knowledge of you, can be a useful first step.

No innovation please, we’re too busy

Published date: January 19, 2022 в 12:00 pm

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Category: Innovation,Organizational Innovation

A few weeks ago, I spoke to a high-level manager in a financial institution. We talked about his (truly) impressive activities in the field of innovation, and then he surprised me somewhat by saying: “Next year we plan to freeze innovation activities.” Since the company is not a client of ours, I wasn’t directly affected by this decision, but still, I was curious to understand the rationale. Another victim of “the Situation”, I said to myself, but to my surprise he went on to explain: “We have so many good ideas now that we need to pause with innovation and focus on implementation.” This is, in my eyes, a symptom of one of the biggest and most common misconceptions in the field; that innovation is all about coming up with ideas of what to do (products, services, whatever it is you do). The corollary of this erroneous concept is, obviously, that once you have these ideas you don’t need to be bothered with innovation any longer, all you need is to “just” implement.

In reality, the situation is nearly the opposite. The level of innovation that needs to be invested in implementation is not lower, and very often higher, than that which is required for coming up with the ideas in the first place. But this is hardly news for anyone who is involved in the day-today of innovation within a company, such as the manager mentioned above. Why, then, is the mistake so common? It is due, I think, to the fact that people tend to see innovation as a type of activity rather than a quality of performing activities; people see innovation as an answer to the question “what are you doing?” while in fact it is the answer to “how are you doing, whatever it is that you are engaged in?” To avoid this confusion, we use a practical definition:

Innovation is the ability to think and act differently to achieve your goals.

This implies, obviously, that innovation is not limited to certain kinds of activities or contexts. Rather, it is relevant, as an option, in any situation in which a person or group of persons are engaged in a mental activity of any kind. In September, I was talking to a lady who is a director-level manager in a large company. “The last thing I need now is innovation,” she said, “We’ve just finished a successful innovation project, resulting in an amazing new product idea, which I’ve been trying to convince my VP for the past 3 months to OK, but with no success. What’s the use of innovating if they are going to kill your ideas anyway?” To me, it sounded like what she most needed was innovation. From our point of view, this was a classic case of an urgent need for some problem solving, the problem obviously being the need to convince a stubborn VP. And examples of this type are abundant: a VP who doesn’t need innovation because he “just” needs to get his division organized since they keep failing at implementing the great ideas in their pipeline; and of course, the innumerable CEOs who can’t talk about innovation now, because due to “the Situation” (COVID, supply chain, whatever) they see a decrease in sales, profits disappearing, and immediate danger to cash flow. My conclusion: all those people who are too [busy, overworked, full of ideas, engaged in a huge project] to innovate, are precisely those who are most in need of a change in the way they are handling whichever “too” they are immersed in, i.e. they are in dire need of innovation.

How to Optimize both your Innovation Portfolio and your New Year’s Resolutions

Published date: December 29, 2021 в 12:30 pm

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Category: Innovation,Strategy

Trigger warning: this post is a bit silly. It is silly for two reasons, that I will explain in the sentence after the next. But before that, I want to claim that although silly, it may be worth your while reading the post for one single reason: the simple tool that I describe here is very useful. But, granted, it is silly, because:

  1. It uses as an example the tired cliché of New Year’s resolutions;
  2. Like so many other pieces of good advice, it is simply a piece of your grandmother’s common sense, neatly packaged for contemporary use.

An interesting aspect of the tool I present here, which we call NFS, aka Near-Far-Sweet, is that it was derived by us from a concept presented in the context of education by the Russian sociologist Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). The concept is called Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) and it relates (apologies for the simplification) to the level of potential mental development of an individual (in the original context, a child).

Borrowing somewhat loosely from ZPD, observe the process of landing on the right New Year’s resolution when you wish, say, to get in better shape and hopefully shed some weight while you’re at it. These are two versions of an idea that you may come up with:

  1. Take the stairs up to your 3rd floor office every day;
  2. Go out for a 3-mile jog three times a week, and a 5-mile jog every weekend.

Common sense immediately indicates that option 1 is too weak, since climbing two flights of steps once a day or even twice doesn’t really keep you in shape (and even less so if you must first get into shape), while option 2 is very powerful and can probably lead to a dramatic change in your physical conditions. But, alas, the probability that you will stick to option 2 beyond the first two weeks of January are pretty slim, if you can even get yourself to launch the plan.

Ideas of the first type we call Near, the second, not surprisingly, Far, and those we are seeking, are labeled Sweet: What you need is a New Year’s resolution that is far enough from current practices to make a difference, but near enough that it can be viable to implement.

This is the Near-Far-Sweet (NFS) model we use to map out ideas. We often use this model when working with companies on creating their idea pipeline, following an ideation exercise. But, what should one do once ideas are mapped as N or F or S? How can this help in actually creating and implementing valuable ideas?

As part of his Zone of Proximal Development model, Vygotsky also introduced the concept of scaffolding. When we aim to lead a child to live up to their potential, how high should we set the bar? Too low, and we are not challenging them to go beyond the obvious. Too high, and they will probably end up frustrated and lose confidence. The Sweet Spot (mixing terminologies here) is a place in which – with the help of scaffolding – the child can reach the maximum level that their potential allows. In Vygotsky’s educational context, scaffolding very often takes the form of an older person, with the capabilities and motivations to accompany the child on her or his challenging journey to the higher reaches of their potential for development. In the context of product development, we propose that facilitation, with the proper structures, can do the scaffolding job.

Back to your New Year’s keep-in-shape resolution: perhaps not every single day but two or three times per week, and maybe 2 miles rather than 3 may be your Sweet Spot? Better figure it out before you make a commitment,  and even this Sweet resolution will be more attainable if you enlist a personal trainer, or convince a friend and neighbor to join you and thus become each other’s scaffolding.

The next step after mapping your ideas, whether for leisure or work, is to turn your attention to the Ns and the Fs. When working on a pipeline of existing products or services:

  1. Near ideas are often created as variants on existing offerings. They thus tend to be easy to imagine, implement and also communicate to potential customers. But, given their similarity to known offerings, they seldom justify for the customer the cost of switching from their current practices. The objective, therefore, is to push the idea outwards, further away from the current version, and into the Sweet Spot. This can be done by applying tools that break mental fixedness about the current product.
  2. Far ideas are typically exciting for their intended customers, but lacking in a clear path to implementation. Or sometimes, even though they can deliver a strong benefit for the customer, it is hard to communicate clearly what this promise is. In these cases, we utilize the Closed World principle, focusing on resources that are already at our disposal that can help concretize the idea, make it easier to implement or assist in communicating its value.

Much of this is pretty obvious – remember, I warned you – but surprisingly overlooked more often than not, resulting in the following common mistakes:

  • Coming out to market with unexciting ideas, and then lamenting that “80% of product launches fail”. Of course they fail, if what you offer is so more-of-the-same.
  • Giving up on ideas because they’re perceived as not exciting enough in focus groups or other VoC gathering techniques, before giving them a chance by pushing them further out towards Sweet.
  • Giving up on exciting ideas because they either seem to be impossible to realize, or fall by the wayside in the attempt, rather than insisting on making them viable.
  • Trying to launch Far ideas, technically feasible but still out of scope for the imagination of existing potential customers, rather than pulling them inwards to the Sweet Spot.
  • Settling for Near ideas out of fear or laziness, and then brainstorming wildly to produce Far ideas, to prove that you’re “innovating”. And a corollary:
  • Claiming that “we don’t have a problem with ideas, we’ve got plenty of good ideas”, without noticing that this “plenty” is made of Near and Far ideas, with none in the Sweet Spot.

So, if you insist on making New Year’s resolutions, against all odds😊, maybe try some version of applying the NFS principle on yourself, your kids, your pipeline?

Happy New Year!

Innovating to Solve the Pandemic

Published date: December 23, 2021 в 4:49 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation

First published December 13, 2021.

“Seems that the amount of analysis published about the COVID19 pandemic is inversely proportional to the degree in which most of it can be trusted. So why spend 7 precious minutes reading what a self-professed medical ignoramus purports to contribute to this excess? It’s worth your while, only if you are willing to take my word that the latest Omicron-ic developments are a fascinating case study in the way our thoughts can easily flow down the same old paths, to the exclusion of potentially interesting novel possibilities”

These two paragraphs appeared in the New York Times on December 7th, 2021:

“The Omicron variant spreads quickly, but the resulting infection may be less severe than other forms of the coronavirus. Researchers in South Africa said that their Covid-19 wards were almost unrecognizable from previous phases of the pandemic, with few patients on oxygen machines.

A report from doctors at a major hospital complex in Pretoria, South Africa’s administrative capital, said that coronavirus patients with the variant were less sick than those they had treated before. Most of their infected patients were admitted for other reasons and had no Covid symptoms. The findings are preliminary, however, and have not been peer-reviewed.”

Similar references appear in the media daily this week. The jury, then, is still out, and will apparently deliver its verdict on the dangers of Omicron only within 2-3 weeks. But, for the sake of our thought experiment, let’s imagine that what seems to be is, indeed, the case:

  1. The Omicron variant is way more transmissible than Delta or other variants;
  2. The resulting infection from Omicron is less severe.

Regardless of one’s opinions on the pandemic and its remedies, it is a good opportunity, as a case study, to explore some common assumptions and thought processes one tends to follow more or less automatically, and how they can be challenged.

1) Assumption: The more transmissible a virus, the more dangerous it is for us.

1) Challenging the assumption: Can we decouple the parameters? What if the lethality of the virus would be independent of its contagiousness? What if “the more transmissible the virus” would lead to “the closer we are to solve the COVID problem”? As we will mention in more detail below, the opposite of this assumption is probably mostly the case: more transmissible viruses tend to be less harmful.

 2) Assumption: The virus is the problem. It is only the problem.

2) Challenging the assumption: Maybe the virus is also the solution. How can we use the virus itself to fight the virus? Fight fire with fire.

3) Assumption: Emergence of new variants is always bad news.

3) Challenging the assumption: On the contrary, very probably, the most common path for a pandemic to recede is by mutating to a relatively harmless series of versions through evolution of new variants. Luckily, modern medicine and especially modern hygiene and public health measures, can dramatically lower the cost in lives while this evolution-into-mildness occurs. Meanwhile, it would be beneficial for everyone’s mental health if the global public were not automatically thrusted into catastrophic mode every time a new Greek alphabet letter enters our lexicon.

4) Assumption: Dealing with the virus is a war, and therefore a zero-sum game. Either we kill it, or it kills us.

4) Challenging the assumption: Difficult enough to challenge this assumption (or reflexive position) when confronted with a human rival or enemy, so I can imagine how strange this may initially sound in the context of a virus, but – what if we searched for a win-win solution? A virus thrives and replicates only while its host is alive, so an interest in keeping infected humans alive may be common ground. A live virus, if not too damaging, is the best form of vaccination, in fact, this is exactly what vaccinations used to be about before new advances created alternative technologies – so can this be another interest we share with our “enemy”? A reasonable offer for a truce, from the human perspective, would therefore be: we help you replicate, you refrain from damaging us beyond an agreed-upon level. How could we set this kind of truce in motion, practically speaking? Or, in more scientific-sounding language: can we help less virulent strains evolve to create herd immunity?

5) Assumption: When the number of infections rises, hospitals are “overwhelmed”.

5) Challenging the assumption: Humanity has had 20 months to figure out solutions and has spent trillions of dollars on COVID-related expenses, including more than 50 billion dollars on the major vaccines alone. Can a fraction of these sums of time and money be used to upgrade public health, develop treatment in the community, redirect light cases away from hospitals and design a more robust hospital system that isn’t so easily “overwhelmed”? A good place to start could be improving the ability to distinguish, and help the public distinguish, between cases that require a visit to the hospital and those that don’t.

If we imagine a variant, call it O, which is highly and competitively transmissible, while being (for the sake of our thought experiment) common-cold-harmless, we may consider the following chain of hypothetical events:

  1. Our putative O variant is highly transmissible and relatively harmless;
  2. Authorities everywhere encourage the spread of the O variant, by asking its bearers to avoid social distancing measures, such as wearing masks in public, for example;
  3. A large percentage of the population is infected by O, and is treated for their light symptoms in a calm and efficient manner, without involving hospitals, except for the small percent of those with grave symptoms;
  4. The O variant becomes dominant, edging out Delta and other, more noxious, variants;
  5. The elusive “herd-immunity” goal is achieved at a relatively low cost in health and deaths, and an extremely low financial cost;
  6. The COVID 19 pandemic follows in the spikesteps of the Spanish and other flus, thus ceasing to monopolize humanity’s agenda.

Or, if this optimal scenario fails to play out as planned, and the O variant falls short of overpowering its evolutionary competitors, what about designing variant O* that does succeed in this task? While yet another, even grander jury, is still out on the question whether COVID19 is the result of a gain-of-function experiment set accidentally loose from a lab, maybe the scientific community should devote time and energy to developing a loss-of-function experiment, creating an O*, even more transmissible than O, but much less damaging to humans?

This entire chain of hypothetical events might be totally senseless. There are, as is usually the case when confronting fixedness and well-established assumptions, strong arguments against this type of approach. A key argument can be that the risks involved in letting loose a virus whose mechanisms of action are not very clear are too great. What if we encourage the spread of O and then discover it is actually more dangerous than we thought? What if O* proves to be deadly? What if increasing the number of infected human hosts increases the number of new variants, among them versions that are both more transmissible and more harmful than O*?

These concerns are valid, of course, and I recommend that you go through the exercise of considering how they can be mitigated (they all can, to varying extents). One assumes that at least some of these concerns have also been voiced in one version or another along the 35 or so years since transporting mRNA into cells was first attempted, and more so as the vaccines based on this approach have been deployed. And those concerns may as well have been valid, and yet, here we are, 50+ billion dollars-worth of vaccines into this great experiment. But, meanwhile, these concerns also express another common fixedness: the belief that not-doing, or sticking to the same modus operandi (even when results, as in our case, are mixed) is somehow inherently less risky than doing. Locking up populations in response to the apparition of Omicron is just as much “an experiment” as not locking them up, or even encouraging those infected by Omicron to run around mask-less. Mechanisms unleashed by lockdowns and quarantines and their effects on wellbeing are just as obscure as those that underly viral action, and therefore not less risky. In spite of the risks inherent in acting in this relative dark, steps should be taken, based on what is known. Social distancing, quarantines and even vaccines are all legitimate tools in the toolbox. But selecting not to use them in certain scenarios is a no less legitimate course of action.

Regardless of your views on the pandemic, I invite you not to discard the call to observe your assumptions – COVID-related or others – and challenge them. SIT obviously has no position on COVID related issues, but we do have strong positions on mental fixednesses and how to overcome them. Those who are familiar with the method, and/or have followed some of my articles and posts, may have identified some tools and principles that play out in this post, notably:

  • UDP Chains for Problem Solving
  • Qualitative Change
  • Attribute Dependency

If you are curious, or wish to refresh your memory about these tools, you may want to read “An Effective Tool for Problem Solving”, Part 1, here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/effective-tool-problem-solving-amnon-levav/

and Part 2 here:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/effective-tool-problem-solving-part-2-amnon-levav/

Or simply set yourself, with courage and sincerity, the task of reviewing some of your positions while challenging their underlying assumptions. You may find yourself coming up with some exciting novel concepts.

S.I.T. & Read – BUZZWORDS

Published date: December 22, 2021 в 5:05 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation

Posted by Amnon Levav, Co-Founder and C-IO (Chief Innovation Officer) at SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking®

Corporate-speak and writing are notoriously laden with meaningless language and buzz. But digital transformation is bringing out the best (or worst) of the genre. This week I received an email from a multinational with a link to, and an excerpt from, a recent interview given by one of their innovation leaders. The first comment to this post is the excerpt that appeared in the mail.

First thing that comes to (my) mind is how generic it all sounds. Except for a hint about the category (“life science experience”) the text could be relevant, as is, to about any business in the world that uses whatever digital device, from a cellphone and upwards. When a shopkeeper in Kenya uses her MPESA to receive payments from her fellow villagers and calculates how many bars of soap she needs to bring from the nearest town next week, she is doing exactly what this longish sentence is touting.

Second, how desensitized must a brain be to not recoil from this densely packed collection of buzzwords. Using data to analyze the sentence we find that out of a total of 36 words, 14-18 are either full-blown overused buzzwords such as “leverage digital technologies” or “digital first mindset”, or regular words set in a mind-numbingly-overused context, as in “using data to analyze and predict what our consumers need”. (Thankfully, not one mention of “disruptive”.)

Third, the recurring fallacy that one can innovate just “by using data to analyze and predict” consumer needs. Data can and is used extensively to predict human behavior, and therefore consumers’, but this is a far cry from creating innovation. It is at best a necessary condition but rarely sufficient.

Reading a few details of the interviewee’s record, she sounds like an intelligent, interesting and even innovative lady. Why then, does a large and resource-rich corporation decide to “quote” her uttering this string of banalities, most probably copywritten by some communications department, rather than make the effort to describe what she does by using real words and sentences that mean something.

One depressing hypothesis is that this really is what corporate readers want to read. Sadly, it appears that in the corporate world there are still many who need to signal to each other that they belong to the same tribe, by repeating formulaic expressions rather than figuring out how to express what they really mean. The effect is doubly ridiculous when this pseudo-communication is conducted in the context of innovation, of all subjects; in this case purportedly to update on “some of the exciting development underway” (my italics).

Basing my opinion on hope rather than data or analysis, I tend and wish to believe that most of us, even those who are guilty of interest in corporate matters, don’t enjoy or want our minds to atrophy through exposure to no-sense-language.

What if we rebelled and refused to play along? I would love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on how this could be done.

Managing the “Air-Time to Contribution” Ratio

Published date: December 8, 2021 в 5:14 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation

My mother liked to strike up conversations with strangers of all stripes, and it was one of my favorite childhood pastimes to listen in. But sometimes, when they babbled away uncontrollably, she would turn to my sister and me and mumble: “mental constipation, verbal diarrhea”. My professional life provides, alas, many occasions in which I am reminded of this indelicate quip. With a softer approach in mind, I have developed throughout the years a practical tool for managing the contributions of participants in a workshop that I would like to share with you.

First step: Mentally visualize the participants, each placed in one of four quadrants, defined by two axes:

  • Quantity – the amount of air-time they tend to occupy (how often and how much they speak).
  • Quality – your assessment of their potential contribution to achieving the goals of the session.

This segments your public into four groups:

Participants in each quadrant require different treatments. Your second step, therefore, is to interact with each group according to the following guidelines.

A’s (reticent with low contribution potential) – Balance OK, no harm to the dynamics, unless there are too many A’s in the room, which means that something is terribly wrong. But even if there are relatively few A’s, it is worth exploring: Maybe an A shouldn’t have been there in the first place? If so, is it too late to release them from this unnecessary commitment? Maybe they can be highly valuable elsewhere? But maybe all they need is to better understand their role in your workshop and what they could potentially contribute. I remember a Plant Manager in Mexico who was sure that the Marketing Manager and her team should be allowed to lead an enthusiastic discussion about new products without any spoil-sport manufacturing comments from him, until I explained that his professional considerations (provided that they were phrased constructively) were crucial guidelines within which the marketing team, and others, could let their imagination fly. He then transformed into a true partner of the marketing participants, helping them convert their ideas into implementable projects.

B’s (verbose with low potential contribution) – Need controlling, because they are misusing the team’s most valuable asset – time. There are many ways, some more subtle than others, to control a rampant B, and your task is as delicate as it is crucial to the success of the engagement. First, there is high potential for hurt feelings, and second, the possibility always exists that there is, in fact, more value in B’s contribution than initially meets the ear.

C’s (reticent with high potential contribution) – Can be easily mistaken for an A and left alone. Thus, their potential contribution is lost, with unfortunate consequences both for them and for the team. An important task for you as facilitator is to find a moment – probably during a break – to conduct your differential diagnosis: is the introverted engineer from R&D an A who shouldn’t have been invited in the first place, or is he an invaluable trove of coaxable, priceless information?

D’s (verbose with high potential contribution) are a facilitator’s best friends. They contribute. They sustain the energy. They give you the (positive) feedback you need. They will extract you from those uneasy moments of general silence. They are truly your allies. But beware of the trap of allowing them to lead the discussion uni-directionally, squelching other voices that may open the more innovative avenues you would like to explore.

In summary, all participants are potentially your friends and allies. A balanced management of “air-time to contribution”, with differential treatment for each and every one of them will ensure that this exciting potential is realized.

Metaphors We Work By

Published date: December 1, 2021 в 5:23 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation

The name of this document, as well as its content, was inspired by a thought-provoking book entitled “Metaphors We Live By”. The book was written by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, a linguist and a philosopher, respectively, and published in 1980. Lakoff and Johnson’s main thesis in the book is that “metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

When talking to people about SIT, whether in casual conversation or as part of a teaching or facilitation scenario, many of us have found that the easiest way to convey what we are about, and the best way to make the (metaphorical…) penny drop, is often by using a metaphor. Below you will find a brief description of some of the metaphors that I have found to be most useful. Here I will share four of the ten metaphors that I have identified – let us know if you would like to read about some of the others.

The Evolutionary Metaphor

Ideas are like species. There are many of them out there. They struggle for attention and resources, and only the fittest survive. In “idea nature”, random variations of ideas emerge through accident and luck. Some of these variations – the 3M Post It, Penicillin – turn out to be useful and successful while others (the majority) disappear. What SIT does is to create the variations non-randomly. Thus, SIT is about systematic or directed creation of “idea mutations” or “idea variations”. This means that the random factor is taken out of the idea evolution process. Some of the advantages, other than the obvious, are:

  1. SIT variations are created using the 5 patterns. Thus, instead of just speeding up the process by proactively creating variations, SIT leads to the creation of types of variations that have been shown to have a higher probability of survival.
  2. Through the FFF structure, SIT not only speeds up the generation of variations, but also accelerates the selection process by passing each variant immediately through the market and implementation filters.
  3. As the SIT method evolved (more evolution there), additional tools and practices have been incorporated to make sure that those ideas that have been non-randomly selected, get to be packaged in such a way that their survival is guaranteed, or at least supported.

The Yoga Metaphor

The mind, like the body, can be trained to be more flexible. Our thinking processes have numerous joints and muscles, and many of them are rarely flexed or stretched during the course of our everyday thinking. When one learns SIT and practices the SIT tools, one is rotating mental joints and stretching thinking muscles. If this is done consistently, the entire thinking system is positively affected. Yoga is not a random collection of bodily movements, but rather a coherent system that systematically covers all major body parts, with special attention given to areas and movements that are ordinarily neglected. This demonstrates the difference between SIT and brainstorming or the practice of solving puzzles and riddles. The latter activities also flex the mind, but do not necessarily reach the forgotten and neglected parts of the system.

The Yoga metaphor also helps answer the famous question: Does an SIT expert actually use the tools in real life? The answer is positive, but in a way similar to that in which a Yogi “uses” the Yoga postures in real life – it just makes any movement of the body more flexible, sure, and effective.

The Michael Jordan (Leonel Messi) Metaphor

Many people will counter any attempt to teach creativity-enhancing tools with some variety of the following claim: Creativity is an innate talent – you either have it or you don’t. The implication is, of course, that in the former case you don’t need instruction, while in the latter it will do you no good. This is a specific instance of the well-known nature-nurture debate, and our (biased, but well grounded) view is a specific version of its common-sense resolution. Yes, creativity is a talent, and as such has an innate component (nature). No amount of training would turn me (or you) into a Michael Jordan. On the other hand, MJ himself could never have achieved his legendary abilities without a huge amount of training, including a wide variety of techniques, exercises, and tips, given by experts whose playing abilities were much inferior to his. This metaphor also serves as a useful answer to the (childish, but still common) complaint that “how many inventions have you [SIT facilitator] come up with, that give you the right to teach me [the inventor] how to be creative?”

 The Firm/Marshy Ground Metaphor

The common conviction is that when individuals deal with everyday notions and ordinary activities, they are on firm ground, stable and safe. However, all innovative ideas live in “marshy terrain” and, thus, in order to achieve innovation, one must be willing to leave firm ground and wade through marshes in the hope of reaching undiscovered territory. Due to the buzz around innovation, people find themselves wishing to wade in the marshes but, intuitively, they fear the thought of getting muddy or, worse yet, not being able to return to the firm ground from which they ventured out.

SIT’s novel claim is that this underlying assumption, that innovation lives in the marshland, is misleading and altogether false. Rather, the innovative idea resides on ground as firm and stable as that on which current thoughts and modes of being are exist, and it is merely the path to this innovative idea that requires wading through the marsh.

SIT concedes that, indeed, to achieve innovation one must be willing to wade through these marshes. This wading process may be quite unpleasant and cannot, by any stretch, be considered as primarily entertaining (“we’ll have great fun”). There are, however, two consolations: first, a structured methodology goes a long way in guiding you safely through the marshy ground, and second, once the innovative idea is reached, one finds oneself, again, on firm and stable ground.

As you may have seen, metaphors not only help one understand a concept better, they can also lead to novel points of view on an oft visited theme. To pique your curiosity, these are the other six metaphors:

  • The Opening-a-Black-Box Metaphor
  • The Alexander Technique Metaphor
  • The Iyengar Yoga Metaphor
  • The Flowing Water Metaphor
  • The Jumping-the-Gap Metaphor
  • The Brazilian Lover Metaphor

Please share your metaphors or thoughts about ours.

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