Methodology

Closed World – Inventing Inside the Box

Published date: August 25, 2021 в 1:54 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Strategy

Legend has it that NASA invested millions of dollars in developing a “space pen” that would perform well in zero gravity conditions. At the same time Soviet cosmonauts simply used pencils.

Regardless of the fact that we now know this story to be a myth, it provides an important insight into the characteristics of inventive ideas and solutions. It is that most of us prefer simple inexpensive solutions over complicated costly ones. This is also true when we address new product development processes. Obviously, we favor ideas that are easy and inexpensive to implement over those that require the introduction of new technologies and heavy investment. All this may sound trivial. Yet the really interesting question is: why do we so often come up with needlessly complex ideas, and how do we get to the inventive, inexpensive solutions?

The Closed World condition – thinking under constraints

Dr. Roni Horowitz, one of the developers of the SIT methodology, indicated in his PhD thesis, that an inventive solution requires two sufficient conditions: the Qualitative Change condition and the Closed World condition.

The Closed World condition stipulates that in

the development of a new product or when

addressing a problem, one must utilize only

elements already existing in the product/problem

or their immediate environment.

This condition forces us to rely on resources

that are already at our disposal

instead of “importing” new external resources

for the solution.

 

The wetsuit

The wetsuit is a simple example of the Closed World condition. It functions in cold water environments, where body heat loss is a problem potentially causing hypothermia. Solutions that call for external resources, i.e. ones that are far from the Closed World, employ added elements such as external heaters embedded in the suit or thicker insulation layers. Indeed, when it comes to extreme diving situations, such as deep-water or ice-water diving, these types of solutions are in fact required. However, they are expensive, complicated and cumbersome. By contrast, the simple wetsuit utilizes a resource that is abundantly found in the scuba diver’s environment – water. The suit’s fabric absorbs water from its surroundings and envelops the diver’s body with a thin layer of water. The diver’s own body-heat warms the water in the suit, producing a layer of warm water insulating the diver’s body from the cold environment. The diver’s body is kept warm using resources from the Closed World of the problem, namely the diver’s own body heat and the water from his or her immediate environment. It is actually an especially elegant example of the condition, since the cold water, the original cause of the problem, is converted into a resource for its solution. This kind of reversal, in which the problem is transformed into a solution, is also an example of the Qualitative Change condition mentioned above.

The meaning of the “Immediate Environment”

The concept of the “Immediate environment” is relative, and depends very much on context. Nevertheless, there are several principles that help one identify elements from a product’s (or system’s) immediate environment:

First we look for resources that have physical proximity, i.e. are actually touching the product or problem system, or are close to them. Next we look for resources that have functional proximity, i.e. their function is similar to that of one of the resources found in the problem system or product. For example a pen and a pencil have similar roles and thus one can say that the pencil is functionally close to the pen. Last, we look for resources that have structural proximity, i.e. their structure is similar to that of resources found in the product or problem space. For instance, one could say that a cellular phone is structurally close to a calculator since they both have a key pad and a screen.

 

Inventing Inside the Box

The Closed World condition often provokes resistance as it runs counter to some of the most common intuitions about creative thinking, especially the ubiquitous notion of “thinking out of the box”. The essential claim of “thinking out of the box” is that in order to produce ideas that are new and different, you need to somehow move beyond normal thinking patterns, to a universe located outside the metaphorical box. The problem is that the imperative to “think out of the box” is not usually accompanied by clear instructions of how to actually do so. The Closed World condition, by contrast, forces the thinker to find a creative solution by heavily limiting his or hers space of possibilities. It forces one to wander down new thinking paths, with the constraint that these paths are found in the immediate environment of the problem, in its closed world. Since the scope of possibilities is artificially limited there is no choice but to reconsider the relations between elements found in the problem or product and pay closer attention to them: their arrangement in space and time; their assigned functions and their necessity. Thus, the Closed World condition sets us on a collision course with our fixedness, allowing us to arrive at solutions which are both innovative (different from the usual) and simple (since based on existing and known elements).

A Closed World brainteaser To round off this introduction to the Closed World condition, we’ll leave you with a problem to solve.

The problem – An engineer working at a metal processing factory encounters a problem. Hard metal pellets, used for processing metal sheets, are accelerated by an air jet in a bent pipe. The systems works continuously and the pellets abrade the pipe at the bend or “elbow”. As a result the bend must be replaced every four weeks. An attempt to install a tougher elbow did improve the situation but as the elbow had to be replaced every seven weeks, the solution was deemed unsatisfactory.

 

Your turn to use Closed World thinking!

Take a few minutes to try and solve the problem. Remember that in order to work within the Closed World of the problem, you must use only elements and resources found in the immediate environment of the problem space.

 

One Closed World solution – The engineer decided to create a cavity or pocket in the elbow (see diagram). Since the pocket is always full of pellets, the collision energy of the flowing pellets is absorbed. The result is that the elbow itself suffers little or no abrasion and is seldom replaced. This solution is an example of an inventive solution in the closed world since no new resources were employed, nor any new technical capabilities that were not easily accessible to the engineer.

How to become a Green Innovation expert by Breaking Fixedness

Published date: August 11, 2021 в 2:07 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Sustainable Innovation

Green innovation is an everlasting challenge, where many companies are looking for innovative ways to win this eco-marathon. Some industries are more active than others, affected by regulations and natural resources constraints. Sustainability goals provide many benefits to organizations. In addition to a company’s reputation, executives can enjoy an array of other benefits. But what are the best ways of achieving it? Read on to learn about how to achieve green innovation through breaking fixedness:

Cognitive Fixedness, first defined by psychologist Karl Duncker, prevents individuals and companies from creating new configurations in the systems they manage. This often blocks us from seeing potential efficiencies and material reduction, and breakthrough solutions to problems.

Check out these 3 main barriers to sustainable innovation:

1. Structural – The tendency to view products and systems as a complete gestalt. Many SIT’s tools help break this particular fixedness to achieve sustainable innovation. For instance, a water saving toilet was developed by Villeroy-Boch in an SIT workshop. Multiplying the water streams resulted in more pressure in each stream, therefore requiring less water. This product won the ISH Innovation Prize and was chosen by Deutsche Bank in its transformation of its HQ to become one of the most environmentally friendly high-rises in Europe.

2.  Functional – Seeing objects as capable only of fulfilling their original function. SIT uses the Task Unification tool to help innovators find new uses for existing resources, thus forcing them to find new functions for available objects and tackle functional fixedness.

 

3. Relational – The tendency to view relationships and dependencies between variables of a situation as static and permanent. Assif Strategies, our partners in a Greener by Design Conference, described the following case study during the event:

A bus company’s emissions were well above expectations.

They had 100 old buses and 50 new ones, and 400 drivers. Assif discovered that drivers were allowed to select both their buses and their routes based on seniority. Naturally, drivers chose the easier routes (that had fewer stops and shifts) and the newer buses. The relationship that resulted was that the older buses drove the “stop and go” routes on three shifts, while the new ones drove more continuously and were parked at night, obviously resulting in much higher emissions than necessary.

Breaking this relational fixedness required a

major cultural change in the company, and by

creating a new relationship within existing

available resources, the bus company was able

to reduce over 10 percent of its emissions.

Along with some other simple changes,

it achieved a total reduction of 50 percent.

How to overcome fixedness and break innovation barriers?

The challenge of breaking fixedness is threefold.

First, recognize you could be suffering from cognitive fixedness, and not seeing the entire potential “playing field”.

Second, identify underlying assumptions in the system in question and accept that even though “this is how we always did it” or “this is how it must be done” they can still be changed.

Lastly, be flexible about the structure, functions and relationships between the system’s elements in order to generate new forms that can lead to new thinking and new solutions.

 

This concept ties in well with the message of the keynotes in the Greener By Design conference; they all essentially break a critical underlying assumption about our industry or society: from William McDonough (Cradle to Cradle, MDBC) who questions why can’t a building be as smart as a tree, creating oxygen, food and shelter, to Tom Szaky (TerraCycle) who challenges the entire concept of garbage, to the point that he “no longer sees trash, only cash”, and to David de Rothschild, who endeavors to cross the Pacific Ocean on the Plastiki (homage to the Kon Tiki, of course) using the ocean’s most prevalent waste as means of transportation.

The green line

So what is the key takeaway? Breaking fixedness is a milestone for generating green innovation. Our innovation message for companies working on going greener is to focus on finding and tackling their fixedness.

How to Embrace Failure Without Falling on Your Face

Published date: August 4, 2021 в 3:30 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology,Strategy

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Many years ago, I presented what I considered to be a very cool project to an extremely smart VP of Marketing in a large B2C company on the East Coast of the US. Fortunately, she shared my enthusiasm, and the process of engaging us for the project was running along nicely. It was an ambitious and somewhat risky project in the sense that it required the involvement of about 20 high-level managers who were very skeptical about its chances of success. This put “my” VP in the stressful position of either ending up as the initiator of notable success or being forever remembered as the perpetrator of a huge mistake (could she embrace failure?).

At some point, she asked me: “Can we make absolutely sure this will succeed?”And, silly me, I answered with a big smile: “Of course not. Don’t you remember? One of our key messages in this project is that if you innovate you must embrace the risk of failure. So since we are designing such an innovative project, of course, there is a risk that it will fail.” Obviously, we didn’t get the project, because, regardless of the oft-quoted cliché, nobody really wants to “celebrate failures”. People want successes. And if there is one thing they will avoid at all costs, it is failure.

 

Embracing Failure, the Contradiction

 

There seems to be a contradiction: We want to think ahead. We want to try new things. We want to innovate and embrace failure as part of the inventive process. At the same time, we want to be in control of our outcomes. We cannot afford to make mistakes.

This leads to a dilemma: Companies encourage their employees to fail and learn. But they expect them not to fail.

Failures are at best unwanted – at worst systematically concealed, to avoid blame or punishment. Pressure is a means of control. The result: a fear of failure.

The prevalence of fear of failure in companies is alarming considering how paralyzing it can be for the companies’ development.

Three reasons for this troublesome effect:

1. Risk Aversion

Here is one cliché that is absolutely true: Failure is an essential part of innovation. When prototyping a new product, expect failure. That’s what prototypes are for, and that is why you will work on several consecutively, or even in parallel. Therefore, the maxim fails fast and try again.

But, if every failure is considered a mini-disaster, who wants to even consider risking it? Rather, the ultimate goal is to achieve full control of the process. Hence, any change or novel idea is treated as a potential threat.

 

2. Loser-phobia

If one strives to overcome one’s Cognitive Fixedness, a fundamental tool is the ability to reflect on one’s actions and to engage in metacognition (a reflection on one’s thinking processes). Every failure thus becomes a source of learning and a driver of change.

But, when your failures are perceived as a sign of being a “loser,” what are the chances that you will actually take the time to confront your failures, reflect on them, and draw useful conclusions?

 

3. Who? Me?

In cultures that do not truly accept failures, there is a strong incentive to underreport them and to avoid any public reference to them, let alone an open analysis.  This greatly increases, obviously, the probability that the same mistakes will be repeated. A good litmus test: Ask anyone who tells you that you should “embrace failure”, if they are willing to share a recent one of their own. Most chances are they won’t, and that tells you what you will be risking if you share yours.

You probably agree that it can be very beneficial to embrace failure in certain areas – in an honest and consistent manner. But in other areas, we cannot allow for mistakes. The point is, to make this distinction explicit and communicate it to everyone involved. Clarity is key.

 

Instead of pretending to universally embrace failure, you map out areas in which failing is acceptable. Then, you commit yourself to this map.

Here are some actions you may consider to embrace failure:

Mark your “control towers”

Imagine working in a control tower. There is obviously no way to embrace failures here. Imagine an airport with 5000 landings and take-offs per month. a mistake rate of 0.01% would imply 5 crashes per month. There are such “control towers” in every company. In some areas, even if a leader doesn’t care to admit it, failure is not an option. Being explicit about your “control towers” is crucial, if you want people to avoid these specific mistakes at all costs. Only then, everyone is on the same page: We give our best to prevent failure and if it happens, we report it. In other areas, the expectation might not be as clear. 

We suggest three mechanisms: define roles, draw lines and install safety nets.

When defining roles, you assign to a specific group of employees the role of innovators. It is then clear to everyone that this group will generate ideas, try new things – and occasionally fail. Your “innovators” will enjoy the freedom to explore and develop new ideas. At the same time, they will be accountable for their failures as part of the process.

Drawing lines means, defining which parts of a project are open to experimentation and those that are not. Within the defined lines, failure is acceptable. Innovation is welcome.

Safety nets are a similar idea, on a different level. To limit the impact of failures, you innovate in specific areas, e.g. those that are not part of your core business.

In defining roles, drawing lines and installing safety nets, we map out areas in which failures are acceptable. Only then we can truly claim: We embrace failure. Feel free to innovate.

In addition to the above actions, you can also utilize some advice from experts on the subject. 

Have a backup plan

Leon Ho says that it never hurts to have a back-up plan. The last thing you want to do is scramble for a solution when the worst has happened. “Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.” This old adage holds solid wisdom. Having a backup plan gives you more confidence to move forward and take calculated risks.

Perhaps you’ve applied for a grant to fund an initiative at work. In the worst-case scenario, if you don’t get the grant, are there other ways you could secure the funds? There are usually multiple ways to tackle a problem, so having a back-up plan is a great way to reduce anxiety about possible failure.

Leon Ho (https://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/how-fear-of-failure-destroys-success.html)

Identify the consequences

Theo Tsaousides says that in order to attenuate fear of failure, first identify the consequences of failing that scare you the most and evaluate your ability to deal with these consequences. Instead of talking yourself out of the fear by hoping that nothing negative will happen, focus on building confidence to deal with the consequences.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  1. Which of these consequences scare you the most?
  2. How much impact will they have on you? Are they merely unpleasant or life-threatening? Will they just make you feel uncomfortable, or will they hurt you deeply and irreparably?
  3. How quickly will you move on? Are the consequences permanent or reversible? Are they short-lived, or will they linger forever?
  4. How well can you handle them? Can you exercise damage control, or will you hide and disappear?

Theo Tsaousides (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/smashing-the-brainblocks/201801/how-conquer-fear-failure)

Now that you’re equipped with the knowledge, it’s your turn: Tell us about YOUR experience in dealing with a Fear of Failure and check out one of our latest article on how to manage airtime!

SIT: Israel’s Answer To Design Thinking?

Published date: July 14, 2021 в 2:38 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology

Written by: Giovanni Rodriguez. This article was originally published in Forbes.

Back in college, there was a little button — a collectible — that was popular among the more progressive folks on campus, and it would have been a meme if the age were not pre-digital. It was about the size of a quarter, black type on yellow, with the following words: “Question Authority.” Simple enough, right? But the joke among my friends – a young but already linguistically sensitive crowd, always looking for nuance and/or irony – was that the button could be read in two ways. Either the wearer was claiming to be a question authority – an authority on questions — or the wearer was advocating that everyone should join him or her on the mission of questioning people in power. In the end, we learned that the button worked like a Rorschach test. If you were prone to question authority, that’s the message you received.

I was reminded of the little button last month during a visit to Israel. I was part of a delegation of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs that spent a week there learning about how a typical – if not stereotypical – Israeli trait is to question everyone and everything. According to the authors of Start-up Nation – the unquestionably authoritative book on the rise of Israelis in the global tech market – questioning authority is one of the secrets to Israeli success. So it was no surprise when we met with the leaders of an Israeli consultancy that is challenging – though not overtly – the status quo in product development and innovation.

I’m talking about a methodology called Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) that was not quite invented in Israel, but has taken root here and is spreading worldwide. It is different – though perhaps complementary – to design thinking, but it’s what they have in common that, from my perspective, makes SIT worth watching.

Patterns

Inspired by the work of Russian engineer Genrich Altshuller, at the core of the SIT methodology is that there are known patterns behind all invention. SIT focuses on five principles based on these patterns. Perhaps the most instructive is the principle of subtraction. The idea here is to take a look at a product or service and ask what might be gained if a component of a product or service were removed? Remove the store from retail, and you get Amazon. Remove the display and most of navigation from an iPod, and you get the iPod Shuffle. These are obvious examples, but there are many others where the SIT methodology has actually been used to spark similar innovation.

Pedagogy

My delegation sat for about an hour with Amnon Levav at SIT’s home office in Tel Aviv. Levav is co-founder and (former ) managing director of the firm (now Chief Innovation Officer) and is also co-developer of the method. One thing that was striking about the meeting was the set-up, unlike any other on our tour thus far. We sat in chairs lined against the four walls of the room, theater-style. The SIT people provide us with nice looking pads and pens. It felt like we where getting ready to do an exercise based on design-thinking, a popular approach to ideation that encourages the inventor to co-create with the user. Instead, we got a great debrief on the principles. The fact that the principles for SIT and design thinking have both been codified is interesting. So is the fact that both have been grounded and supported in academia. More interesting is that they can both be taught, and are being taught, to a broad universe of laypeople – leaders in business, government, and the NGO world. That they are teachable, and are designed to be teachable, helps to expand their global footprints.

POV

But most interesting, I think, is that each feels like an expression of the culture from which it advanced. Even though you see it everywhere today, the design thinking brand feels like IDEO, and Stanford University, and Silicon Valley, a place that quickly comes to mind when you think about the genius of the user (the customer is king). Systematic Inventive Thinking got its big start in Israel, a place that quickly comes to mind when you think about the genius of the inventor, a person trained to question everyone and everything.

Truth is, the genius of both are everywhere, and there’s no shortage of genius inventors in the Valley. And the two methods are not mutually exclusive. But at a time when Israel is becoming known as the second most vibrant start-up economy, it’s refreshing to see a new take on thinking rise with so much authority. Message received.

A musical perspective on the origins of S.I.T.

Published date: July 7, 2021 в 2:58 pm

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Category: Innovation,Methodology

Written by Drew Boyd and Prof. Jacob Goldenberg, co-authors of Inside The Box: A Proven System of Creativity for Breakthrough Results (Simon & Schuster, 2013). An except from the book:

The most highly creative humans use

templates to produce extraordinary results.

Once they discover a pattern that is successful,

they stick with it.

Consider one of the most successful musicians in history, Paul McCartney, and his songwriting partner in the Beatles, John Lennon. In one of his biographies, Paul confided how he and John wrote music early in their careers: “As usual, for these co-written things, John often had just the first verse, which was always enough: it was the direction, it was the signpost, and it was the inspiration for the whole song. I hate the word, but it was the template”.

Paul and John discovered successful patterns in music and created a sophisticated set of reusable music-making templates that allowed them to generate one hit song after another. Guinness World Records calls McCartney the “most successful composer and recording artist of all time”. He has recorded gold records, with sales of more than one hundred million albums and one hundred million singles.

McCartney was not alone in using templates for music. The composer Igor Stravinsky used them. Writers and poets use them, only they call them forms – sonnets, for example. Poet Robert Frost, the artist Salvador Dali and Michelangelo – they all learned that templates boosted their creativity output. Mystery author Agatha Christie used them too: a dead body is discovered, a detective examines the crime scene, collects clues, interviews suspects, and only at the very end reveals the killer – the person you least suspected!

 

Once she had a plot, she filled in information and facts from the world around her – places, character names, and so on – all fitted within the same template. One would think that sixty-six murder-mystery novels using the same template would be dull and lose their appeal. On the contrary, Christie’s template constrained her in a way that made her more creative, not less. She is the best selling novelist of all time.

None of these achievements was an accident. Templates “limit” us in a way that boosts our creative output. Agatha Christie confined her stories to a similar sequence. Paul McCartney worked within his self-defined musical structure. Why don’t most other people know about templates? Perhaps because creative people didn’t realize they were using one. Perhaps they kept it a secret, worried others might steal it. Using a template, after all, might seem to lessen one’s creative genius. Either way, those templates exist, and there is nothing to stop others from using them. Imagine using the best and most productive creativity templates through the ages to invent something new!

This concept of templates is the foundation of the Systematic Inventive Thinking method, providing both the framework and clear instructions for how to work within the framework to create truly innovative ideas for just about any topic using resources close at hand.

Can you identify patterns or templates that work for you?

What do we talk about when we talk about innovation?

Published date: June 30, 2021 в 11:00 am

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Category: Innovation,Methodology

When I typed “definition of innovation” into Google the other day, it returned 1,710,000,000 replies, which means absolutely nothing, of course, raising the question why the arguably most influential company on earth has been consistently feeding us with this useless piece of data for so many years. So, I promise to use this very same opening sentence in a future post (repurposing, saving on first-sentence-emissions) about some common popular fallacies around indicators and measurement. But, for the sake of our current topic, the billions mentioned above do give something of an indication of the fact that a lot of words have been spent in attempts to define innovation, and indeed, a quick glance at Wikipedia’s contribution to the subject brings up mentions of various researchers who have compiled lists of 40, 60 or many dozen definitions.

I am going to go out on a limb here and claim that all the definitions that I have seen very much miss the mark, and that we at SIT have been using a simple definition that doesn’t, which I will present to you below. To assess the usefulness of a definition we should start by asking ourselves what we actually expect from one, assuming that “we” are not theoreticians who simply wish to publish a paper on the subject. A useful definition of innovation would allow us to, among other objectives:

  1. Decide if an activity or its result should be considered innovative;
  2. Measure our organization’s “innovation pulse”;
  3. Assess the success of our efforts to become more innovative, or drive our organization in this direction;
  4. Re-direct efforts invested in innovation that seem not to be achieving the desired results.

These are some of the first definitions you will find by googling:

  • Wikipedia: Innovation is the practical implementation of ideas that result in the introduction of new goods or services or improvement in offering goods or services.
  • ISO TC 279 on innovation management proposes in the standards, ISO 56000:2020 [2] to define innovation as “a new or changed entity creating or redistributing value”.
  • Based on their survey, Baragheh et al. attempted to formulate a multidisciplinary definition and arrived at the following: “Innovation is the multi-stage process whereby organizations transform ideas into new/improved products, service or processes, in order to advance, compete and differentiate themselves successfully in their marketplace”
  • Peter Drucker (yes, even the great PD can get things wrong, apparently – A.L.) wrote: Innovation is the specific function of entrepreneurship, whether in an existing business, a public service institution, or a new venture started by a lone individual in the family kitchen. It is the means by which the entrepreneur either creates new wealth-producing resources or endows existing resources with enhanced potential for creating wealth.

Why are all these definitions inadequate? Each has its particular deficiencies, but they also share a common defect. They all suffer, to a varying extent, from a series of nested biases:

A bias in favor of organizations —————> rather than human endeavors in general, individuals, families

Within organizations, a bias in favor of businesses ————–> versus communities, governments, criminal, educational

Within businesses ———————> in favor of products, rather than services

Within products ——————–> in favor of technological products

Within technological products ——————–> in favor of hi-tech

Within hi-tech ————————-> in favor of R&D

 

So, if you are an engineer in a hi-tech startup developing a product with the goal of entering the market and making money – plenty of these definitions can plausibly describe what you are doing or aiming to do. On the other hand, none of them is adequate for capturing or evaluating, for example, the following activities, in descending order of relevance (all of them based on personal experience in my role as innovation consultant and facilitator):

  1. A marketer in the same startup, rethinking their go-to-market strategy;
  2. The startup’s CFO, planning her presentation to a potential investor;
  3. The CEO, dealing with her difficulty in communicating a pivot in strategy to the company’s employees;
  4. All the above-mentioned functions in a traditional industry, manufacturing wooden furniture, for example;
  5. A project manager in an NGO, searching for a new way to effectively distribute contraceptives in rural India;
  6. An ad-hoc collective of activists figuring out their next steps in an equal-rights campaign on the streets of a large city;
  7. An ex-con trying to crack the code of a safe (this one I refused to collaborate on);
  8. A father trying not to repeat his regular response, that has obviously not been working too well, to his teenage daughter (this one was pro-bono, auto-pro-bono).

Try any of the definitions from the googled results on any of the items on this list and you will immediately note how increasingly inadequate they sound as you advance through the examples. Applying the same logic, you can easily imagine myriad additional examples excluded by the standard definitions, rendering the definitions useless for what are probably 90% of human activities that could, in principle, be innovative. Consider, however, the following definition, formulated by us at SIT and refined through years of use:

To innovate is to think and act differently to achieve your goals.

Let’s zoom into each of the four key elements of the definition, in turn.

  1. Innovation is first and foremost the fruit of a cognitive, thinking process. It requires conditions, both emotional and material, but the first and often-overlooked condition is supplying people with time to think. “Think”, not as in “how and what do I quickly answer to my boss’s complaint?” or “what 15 things do I need to do today and how the hell will I make time for them all?”, but “think” as in taking time off from one’s incessant race to reflect on it from above or from the side.
  2. Whatever you are doing, you’re not innovating if it doesn’t translate into action. Beware the shiny PPT presentation of elaborate organizational flowcharts describing “our new innovation process”: seek concrete actions leading to implementation.
  3. One of our key rallying cries is: Don’t do innovation – rather, innovate in what you do. Innovation is a means and not an end in itself, and therefore, an action can be considered to be innovation only inasmuch as it supports or accelerates your efforts to achieve one or more of your goals. Innovation leaders, units and consultants often flip this causal relationship and act as if innovating is the goal. This is only natural since it actually is the goal – for them. But an organization needs to remember that actions and initiatives can only count as innovations when they promote the organization’s objectives. This is true also of individuals or teams. Note that there is nothing in this definition that favors “value for the market” or the role of customers or any of the corporate-speak business-oriented language. If your goals pertain to the realm of business, then innovation should lead to business results. If your goal is, say, happiness then, for you, an action is innovative if – in addition to the other three characteristics mentioned in the definition – it increases happiness.
  4. Many actions require thinking and promote the goals of an individual or organization and yet it would not be useful or productive to consider them to be examples of innovation. In fact, most of what members of an organization routinely do falls into this category. Doing your job properly, improving your processes, using Quality tools, all these important and commendable activities can contribute much to an organization, and yet we would still not wish to define them as innovative. The last and crucial ingredient in our definition, therefore, is that your thinking-based and goal-promoting action must stem from thinking differently. This, of course, begs the question of what will be considered as different enough to count. We offer a simple and powerful answer: thinking differently means breaking one or more of your Cognitive Fixednesses.

So, introducing this concept into our definition we get:

You innovate when you think and act in a way that breaks your fixedness leading you to achieve your goals.

This working definition lends itself to numerous practical applications. It can, for example, be immediately translated into a useful pair of criteria when you are asked to approve submissions of ideas or achievements to an internal innovation competition in an organization. Those who submit an entry are asked to demonstrate:

  1. The impact of their project (potential impact if the competition is among ideas; measured impact if, as we prefer, prizes go to implemented projects rather than ideas);
  2. Which fixedness(es) had to be broken in order to come up with and/or implement their idea.

These two criteria, when applied jointly, easily filter out hairbrained schemes without demonstrable results (or the potential thereof) and on the other hand embrace candidates from any type of activity in the organization that supports its strategy and goals, without bestowing preference to R&D or other usual suspects. Our definition is not perfect, of course: definitions are notoriously elusive and slippery, and tend to circularity. One way of assessing a definition’s value is by evaluating to what extent it captures all phenomena one wishes to include under a term and how effectively it excludes those one doesn’t. The definition presented here performs well on both counts, I believe, including a very wide range of activities versus the organization-business-product-technologically biased alternatives. It also helps filter out useful but non-innovative activities and even points to a practical direction for those who wish to nudge their current activities towards a more innovative path.

A crucial element in making this definition operational is obviously a clear and communicable understanding of the concept of FIXEDNESS. In future posts, we will delve deeper into this concept, so central to the very essence of innovation.

The No-Forecast-Kit for Dealing with the COVID World

Published date: May 20, 2020 в 2:00 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Methodology,Problem Solving,Strategy

A Short Article, a Toolset and a Loooong List of Vectors

The purpose of this post-COVID Kit is to help guide your thinking and discussion about a crucial issue: how should one prepare for and live with the changes brought about by the global pandemic. In the first two pages, I describe a certain approach to the issue, of which the gist is: do not attempt to forecast what is going to happen, but pay close attention to certain forces, vectors or trends, and figure out how they can influence you and your organization, and then try to proactively engage with these developments. The second part is a set of questions, based on SIT’s methodology for innovation, that allow you to convert the list into a practical exercise in thinking about the future. The third, and last part is a list of 23 topics, each followed by 5-10 bullet points, each of them pointing to at least two directions, often contrary, in which some force or vector can play out in the coming months or years.

Contents

Article

Toolset

A. Exploring the list

B. Breaking Mental Fixedness*

1. Task Unification*
2. Subtraction*
3. Qualitative Change*

List

A. Individuals, Families

1. Mindset and Attitudes
2. Mental Health
3. The Family

B. The Collective

1. Society
2. Education
3. Communications
4. Government
5. Religion/Spirituality
6. The Arts
7. Travel and Tourism

C. Health, Science, Technology

1. Public Health
2. Science
3. Technology
4. Data

D. The Globe, the Planet

1. Sustainability
2. Global Politics
3. Global Economy

E. Work, Business

1. Work, employment
2. Business: General
3. Retail
4. Supply chains
5. Transportation
6. Manufacturing

Article

I am not a futurist, nor are my colleagues at SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking. As famously remarked by Niels Bohr, “Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. And much more so, when a cataclysmic event of global magnitude is unfolding as we write. What we specialize in, and what this document is about, rather than exploring predictions about the future, is attempting to shape this future, even if on a modest scale.

There are two confounding aspects of the attempt to forecast even the near future in 2020. The first is the well-known butterfly effect, but with billions of butterflies fluttering their wings simultaneously in an unprecedent manner. Thus, the Mozart of 2040 may have found her vocation when her mother, after 30 days of quarantine, out of desperation, downloaded a piano-teaching app to calm the noisy 3-year-old. The second is the appearance of strong and often opposing vectors that seem to cancel each other out, but, in fact, do not. So if a million couples who otherwise would have stayed together are driven to divorce, while another million couples about to divorce rediscover the bonds that held them together and don’t, in term of global statistics nothing has changed, but for two million families life’s course has swerved dramatically.

But, even though the ability to forecast with a high probability of success is very limited, it is still extremely useful, even necessary to pay close attention to some strong vectors or forces that are emerging as a result of the virus and, even more so, the various manners in which the world has chosen to deal with its effects. There are two prevailing views as to the changes: they, too, are contradictory, and yet both can prevail at one and the same time. One view holds that in the end, most people, and definitely businesses, are looking more than anything to resume life as it was pre-COVID. Expect, therefore, relatively small changes, mainly temporary adjustments. The other party claims the opposite: the pandemic, with its imposed restrictions and behaviors, has triggered changes so fundamental, that humanity cannot but evolve into a state of “new normal”. I use the expression “party” advisedly because I believe that both views have an element of “wishful forecasting”; those who wish to maintain the status quo are attempting to will reality to do so, and those who see an opportunity for – finally – a major upheaval, are loath to give it up. In this document, true to the spirit of our approach, we claim that both can, in a sense, be right at the same time. Each view represents a strong and potent force pushing in a contrary direction, and as reality will be shaped by the interplay between both, it would be wise for any individual, group or organization to consider the potency of both without trying to conjecture which will prevail.

Below, you will find a non-exhaustive list of 23 areas in which one can expect the world to change following the COVID crisis. There is no attempt here to predict what will eventually happen in any area, only to map some relevant vectors of potential change in each of them. In many cases, the vectors are contrary in their directions, which raises two questions: what is the value, or is it not tautological to claim that, for instance, people will either strongly yearn and search for the contact of other humans or will develop a defensive stance of distancing themselves from their fellow inhabitants of the globe. Our claims are that both vectors are very likely to be felt post-COVID, and that they will not necessarily cancel each other out. The way this will unfold is difficult to predict, but if your business or organization depends on prospects’ relation to other humans, for example, you would be wise to consider that many of them will probably be living with the conflict of both feeling strongly the need for human contact, and fearing its risks and consequences.

Another example: Say that you need to make decisions that depend on the future of shared rides globally. Do we predict an increase post-COVID, with a strengthening of the Ubers of the world, or rather a decrease, as new models emerge, or passengers return to pre-rideshare habits? The most useful answer may be a combination, or at least an invitation to consider at least two tendencies. The first is an aversion of potential riders to spending time in a confined space with people of whose health they have no information or guarantee, touching surfaces that have probably been in contact with other strangers not so long ago. The second is a set of economic pressures that may push both users and drivers to depend even more on shared rides, the former due to difficulties in owning a car and the latter as their only alternative for employment. In addition, the evolution of shared rides may be affected also by other tendencies, with their own combination of (sometimes conflicting) vectors: will the post-COVID world be (even) more unequal, or will this crisis be an inflection point, by exposing the perils of inequality and the interdependence of rich and poor, thus pushing towards creating a more level playing field?

Thinking about the food and beverage industries, to look at yet another case, can we expect a strong consumer tendency to seek healthy food, finally acknowledging that rather than trusting their fate to vaccines and antivirals one’s first duty towards oneself is to keep healthy, by, among other means, eating fresh and natural food? Or, alternatively, will we see a surge in consumption of fast (and junky) food, due to fatalism (“Why should I give up the food I like, if a random virus can kill me anyway?”) or to a habit created or strengthened by weeks upon weeks of ordering pizzas and hamburgers in quarantine? Our prediction: both. Recognizing these two highly probable and opposing vectors, a corporate player in this space could reach one or several practical conclusions, all logically, if not always ethically, valid. For instance:

a)      Gamble on the healthy option, using the opportunity to dare not only to supply the partly-met need of health seekers but also to lead the laggards into healthy consciousness.

b)     Play the fast food card, not necessarily cynically, but catering to the “new lazy” who absolutely refuse to cook, by competing with take-aways and expanding the variety of easy food for the home.

c)      Recognizing both tendencies, find ways to provide offerings that answer both the desire to be healthy and the tendency to outsource household tasks.

d)     Lead a revolution in the role of food manufacturers in society and the economy, by recognizing their critical share of the responsibility for public health.

e)     Disregard the health issue, and focus, instead, on convenience and/or safety as the greatest consumer concerns.

We see, therefore, that even lacking a crystal-ball-clear view of the future, one can engage actively in creating it. Disregarding COVID- related developments comes at a risk, since what can be expected with high probability is that COVID will cause a ripple effect of strong forces or vectors for change. But, contrary forces at play again, when imagining the unfolding of exciting and/or frightening (depending on one’s imagination and inclination) futures, one should never underestimate the strength of individuals’ and societies’ tendency towards homeostasis, a tremendous pull to what feels like the safe equilibrium of old and comfortable habits.

To summarize: trying to forecast – futile; but watching trends, interpreting them, figuring out possible effects and proactively attempting to adapt and influence the future – a must.

 

Toolset

There are multiple ways to use the list below, some of them are presented here, divided in two modules:

A)      A set of questions that help in exploring the list systematically;

B)     Several tools for challenging your assumptions and opening your minds to come up with inventive ideas to deal with the phenomena described in the list.

A. Exploring the list

  1. Read though the topics, enjoy entertaining your own thoughts, guesses and predictions about each area;
  2. Identify those areas that are relevant to you, your organization, your business, and ask yourself what the probabilities for certain futures are, and what would their emergence mean for you;
  3. Select one or two areas that don’t feel directly relevant to your organization, activity or business. Challenge yourselves to figure out whether and how these seemingly unrelated forces will in fact influence you;
  4. Most challenging, but potentially most rewarding: which futures do you feel strongly about, and what can you do to increase the probability that they, rather than their alternative, comes to pass.
  5. Focus on an area/topic and add vectors and forces to the list. Discuss them as well.
  6. Review the “positive” vectors: how can you strengthen them?
  7. Review the “negative” list: how can you overcome these?

B. Breaking Mental Fixedness*

In this section, a set of mental tools is presented, that allows, in addition to stretching one’s mind as recommended above, to tackle head on one’s “mental fixednesses”, the patterns that restrict a thinker to old and well-trodden paths. There are additional tools in the SIT method that can be applied as well, but these are some of the most obvious candidates.

      1. Task Unification*

a) Select a certain force or vector, which intuitively seems to be working in your favor in some way;

b) Ask yourself: can I see this vector as a resource? Meaning, can I make it work for me?

i) By acting to promote one of my objectives?

ii) By acting to promote something positive that I had not been aware of?

c) Now select a vector or force that intuitively feels as if it can affect you negatively.

d) Repeat the resource exercise (1b) with the “negative” vector, but this time you will need to overcome your intuitive negative sense of this vector, since you will be searching for ways to employ it in your benefit. Ask yourself:

i) Can this, supposedly negative vector, actually work in my favor?

ii) What would I need to do to make this happen?

       2. Subtraction*

a. Some of the vectors, trends or forces will cause certain elements which seem crucial to you, your activity or your business to simply disappear, or be radically reduced temporarily (e.g. tourists for an airline, during quarantine). By browsing the list, take note of these cases as they apply to you. This disappearance we call a Subtraction.

b. For each of these cases, ask yourself the counter-intuitive question: what can you gain, how can you benefit, and which opportunities will open up thanks to this subtraction? Can it be that, even when the temporary subtraction ends (say, tourists return), you can continue doing some or all that you put in place when they were gone?

c. Ask yourself the following counter-intuitive question: COVID is forcing you to do without element X (say, face-to-face meetings), and you are learning how to manage with this subtraction, and even find benefits in it. What if COVID would have forced you to do without element Y (say, without meetings at all, or without internet connections)? Can you think of benefits for that as well? Is it worth experimenting with this option?

        3. Qualitative Change*

a. Each force, trend or vector you review immediately conjures in your mind a certain chain: if A will indeed happen, so will B. Sometimes B will be negative, which means that you will automatically view A as negative as well (since it seems to inexorably lead to B). Identify an A that seems to lead to a negative B.

b. Create two sentences to use as triggers for invention:

i.           Given A, how can you prevent B from happening?

ii.           Can you imagine a context or situation in which: the more A the less B? Meaning, even though as A grows there normally is more of (negative) B, can you imagine a situation in which the relationship is flipped so that the more A the less B?

c. Repeat (3b) with other forces or vectors.

*These tools and principles are part of the SIT – Systematic Inventive Thinking methodology. Read more about them, and their use, in www.sitsite.com

List

This list of forces, trends and vectors covers 23 areas, that are divided into 5 general groups (A-E). It is obviously not exhaustive, nor is it meant to be, but rather covers a wide range of points of view that can serve as triggers for a productive discussion of the Post-COVID world, with or without the recommended Toolset. The list is long. Browse it at leisure, perhaps turning both to some areas that are directly relevant to what you care about, and some that initially feel further away. You will probably be surprised to find that contemplating some of the latter can turn out to be just as productive.

A. Individuals, Families

       1. Mindset and Attitudes

a. Work-life balance. Millions desperately returning to work after being kept away for months versus millions discovering the joys of spending time at home rather than at work.

b. Approach to nutrition: realization that the best way to protect oneself is by maintaining good health, and this is possible through nutrition, versus, health can always be maintained through medication, versus, live as you please and trust the system to treat you when you fall ill.

c. The natural quest for convenience maximized in certain societies where all basic needs are delivered immediately with a digital click, versus the need to factor in safety as the overriding consideration in consuming, and balancing these requirements with cost.

d. Invitation to humility – human beings cannot control everything, versus a deep-seated human hubris – the belief that in the end our science and technology prevail.

e. Belief in science: in times of crisis we can only trust our scientists, versus “science failed us when most needed, and scientists can’t even agree among themselves about the basics of the pandemic”.

f. Individuals feel debilitating uncertainty, living a situation akin to cultural shock, as regular assumptions cease to apply to reality: a strong urge to surrender your decision making to authorities, to those “who know”, versus an impulse to seal out disturbing information and trust one’s intuitions.

g. Impressively, extremely complex and multi-faceted problems can be broken down into sub-tasks and solved by a distributed multi-team effort, versus, even the combined efforts of global talent and technology could not overcome a simple virus.

h. Feeling of dependence on humans, versus dependence on technologies. When push comes to shove only our fellow humans can give us the strength and energy to survive, versus: distanced and split from our fellow humans, our reliance on technology is near total.

i. Apart from phenomena that defy the laws of physics, will we ever be able to say again, of anything, even the wildest scenario, that it is improbable, much less “impossible”?

j. Has this crisis completed the rewiring of our brains, creating humans who can capture and digest only the briefest and simplest twitterized communications, or have we benefitted from this time of relative tranquility and immobility to read, think and discuss profoundly about important issues?

       2. Mental Health

a. Immediate results of the crisis: depressions, anxiety, solitude, or recognizing one’s internal strength and abilities to adapt and overcome adversity.

b. Usage of psychiatric drugs: increased dependency, versus forced cold-turkey and freedom.

c. Addictions: increase due to stress and depression, discontinued rehab programs, solitude, versus forced rehab through scarcity induced withdrawal.

d. Stress levels at record high due to frightening messages and general feeling of impotence, uncertainty and lack of safety nets, versus finding calm in the tranquility of one’s home and proximity of family.

e. Solitude: for the world’s growing number of single-person households, for those whose families do not provide comfort or company, for those who find themselves far from their homes, others?

       3. The Family

a. Rethinking, re-feeling the importance of one’s nuclear family, if there is one, or of having one if you don’t, versus the oppressive feeling of being unable to physically break away from it.

b. Need for keeping close to other humans, versus benefits of social distance, overdose of proximity.

c. Baby boom with welcome/unwanted newborns, versus huge wave of abortions with related political/social conflict.

d. The elderly – their important role in one’s life, their importance and contribution versus the price one pays for their well-being, alternative modes of communication.

e. Violence within the family – rapid escalation following weeks of lockdown, versus exposure of the problem and large-scale treatment by society.

f. Children-parents’ relationship: parents discover their kids who discover their parents and love it, versus same and can’t stand it.

g. What have children learned from the crisis? About their parents’ ability to control their reality, about their family, about the importance of schools, friends, hobbies, or lack thereof.

h. Opportunity for adopting and accepting alternative family models (non-traditional, non-nuclear) by understanding the huge importance of belonging to a community, versus hunkering back to the traditional model of the nuclear family?

B. The Collective

       1. Society

a. The huge inequality challenge: the virus as universal equalizer (“does not discriminate by race or social status”), versus dramatic disparity in rates of illness and mortality along social and economic lines.

b. Realization that the well being of any member of society can strongly affect that of others, that social phenomena can become literally viral, can lead either to a strengthened sense of mutual responsibility towards all parts of society, or to even stronger separation and walling-in of the well off, as they separate and protect themselves from the masses.

c. Coming together or breaking further apart? Expressions and acts of solidarity with those regions or segments of society most affected by the illness, versus isolationist tendencies and blaming of the “other”.

d. Gender: reversal to traditional women’s role in the home accompanied by widespread violence in the family, versus full-time male presence and egalitarian sharing of all family tasks.

e. Gender: Men as weak sex, higher probability of infection, more liable to die, gap in average longevity grows in favor of women.

f. Gender: #MeToo post-CV: losing steam as humanity deals with a host of survival issues, versus returns with vigor, fueled by pressure cooker of quarantines and crisis.

g. Societies with high Gini Coefficients find that a crisis strains the fault lines, bringing to the fore suggestions like universal basic incomes on one hand, versus a reflex of the rich to prepare and protect themselves for future adversity.

       2. Education

a. The role of the kindergarten. Massive realization of the crucial importance of this less prestigious and less budgeted step in the educational ladder, versus experiencing the huge advantage of young children’s spending many hours with their parents and siblings.

b. Homeschooling: the new wave or backlash. Waiting anxiously to re-deposit the kids into educational institutions, versus realizing that having them at home and spending time with them can be an enriching and feasible model for many.

c. Higher education: years of slow ascendance of MOOCs and other online courses accelerated to near-universal adoption of remote learning models vs. finer identification of those aspects that do require person-to-person interactions.

d. General reconsideration of the principal roles of education: transference of knowledge that is deemed important, creating good citizens or enabling individual development (as per Zvi Lam) – when education is decentralized to families.

e. Accelerating (finally) remote digital learning: leveling the playing field through more egalitarian digital education, versus a widening gap driven by high-cost superior digital content and platforms.

f. Opportunity to (finally) adapt pedagogy to technology. When teachers have no choice but to teach remotely, they are forced to adapt their pedagogy rather than falling back on traditional methods and skills, versus total collapse in pedagogy as traditional teachers give up and leave education totally to kids and their families.

g. Will disparity rise when/if a bigger part of education happens at home? Difference in parents’ ability to support home education can lead to focus on parent education, or extra support to counterbalance this effect, or it can lead to widening of the gap.

h. Widespread adoption of the flipped classroom model? Alternative model vying for widespread adoption for the past ~15 years, requires strong abilities of learning at home utilizing digital resources.

i. Education will be perceived by governments as a tool for creating obedient citizens for the next crisis, and therefore will receive extra budget and (at times repressive) attention, versus governments will prefer less educated populations, easier to control in times of crisis.

       3. Communications

a. Role of social media explodes as the only option for maintaining social proximity while socially distancing, increasing the number of people for whom a “friend” is someone you exchange written messages with, and a “meeting” is virtual. Or, social media is mentally associated with lockdown and crisis, driving traumatized users to search for real-life contact.

b. Fake news vs. facts: establishing standards. It is no longer a game; fake news can kill you. Therefore, standards must be established. Versus, no one believes in anyone any longer – there can be no standards since there are no agreed upon experts.

c. Solitude. With technology, even when alone, we are not alone if we can communicate at a distance. Communication has always been crucial, but this has never been so evident. But for some, long stretches of lonely existence revealed how over-saturated they usually are, and how stress decreases when they are less communicated.

d. Decline of face to face interactions versus rebound and consciousness of how much we all need them

e. Growth and importance of independent (from government and business) media. Strong incentive to create and sustain independent outlets but, in parallel, stronger intervention of governments in setting media agenda and controlling media.

f. Digital media thrives as bored viewers are glued to the various screens, increasing exposure to advertising of all kinds, printed media on one hand has increased attention and demand, and on the other hand starved of advertising (plus dealing with logistics and distribution challenges) turns to digital or closes. Will a new model emerge, that can save print?

       4. Government

a. Failure of democracies and advantages of authoritarian regimes in managing crisis situations and enforcing compliance versus failures of totalitarian systems due to lack of transparency, lack of initiative. Jury still out.

b. Local versus national. Only strong central government can deal with magnitude of crisis, versus local leaders and communities taking independent steps as required by their specific conditions.

c. Leadership and lack thereof: rise of the need for strong leaders vs. obvious weakness of relying on the wrong “pseudo strong” ones.

d. Alternative leadership roles: leadership vacuum creates need and opportunity for non-official or non-elected-officials to become the leading voices, or military figures to impose restrictions justified by “emergency measures”.

e. Balance between technocrats and politicians: strong need for politicians to closely consult with professionals on topics in which they have no idea, versus inaction due to endless discussions between experts and lack of authoritative professional answers.

f. Elections by digital platforms become necessary to avoid congregation, but fear of vulnerability and possible interference increases

g. Opportunity for autocrats to dismantle democratic norms and institutions vs. democratic popular backlash through digital platforms and “socially-spaced demonstrations”.

h. Governments’ responsibility to create safety nets for their citizens and population in general becomes obvious (even to “small government faithful”), versus individuals understanding that they can trust only themselves to prepare for next crisis.

i. Who do taxes belong to? Huge unprecedented spend of public money by governments with no clear source of funding, versus fear that this centrally directed spend will allocate resources unjustly and inefficiently

j. Governments must assume responsibility for well-being of immigrants, refugees and itinerant populations out of self-defense, versus migrant populations bearing the price of being away from home and family, and lacking support fro their host governments.

k. Smart cities – huge opportunity to build on existing infrastructures and accelerate development because of need for surveillance and tracking compliance, versus strong backlash due to privacy concerns.

l. Lockdown enforcement creates precedents of mass control over public behavior, especially in cities, versus shift of population back to villages and the country where isolation is easier and more convenient.

       5. Religion/Spirituality

a. Role of faith for people dealing with crisis: huge win of science over religion for many, versus many others who find fortitude precisely in their faith and religious leaders.

b. Decision makers interact with scientists and rely only on data and hard facts, or realize the comprehensive nature of a crisis and carve a space for spiritual and religious leaders.

c. Role of moral leadership in determining strategy: place around the decision making table, versus support for their followers in reality that is a given.

d. Widespread belief in religious or spiritual interpretations of the pandemic (“God’s punishment for our sins” etc.), versus a division of labor between science as explanation and religion/spirituality as guides to behavior.

e. Moral reckoning driving people to organized religion, versus disappointment with minor role of religious establishment in preventing current sorry global state of affairs (pre-COVID).

       6. The Arts

a. Halls and museums will fill up with thirsty art lovers kept away for a long time, versus persistent fear of agglomerations.

b. Public discovers that art can also be consumed from afar, leading to increased appreciation and interest in visiting museums and concert halls, versus leading to lazier habits of art-couch-potatoes.

c. Artists, musicians, dancers have all performed for us at home, many for free, and whetted our appetite to see them live once we can, expanded our horizons and made us better audiences, versus, we are spoiled now and want it for free and on the couch.

d. Variety of models for monetizing art emerge, as desperate artists find way to live from their art in the absence of live events, versus artists give up and find employment in other professions.

e. Collaborative art, facilitated by digital sharing, emerges as the new 21st century medium, or disappears as a fad post-CV.

f. Cross cultural art, free of geographic constraints, grows in importance as part of globalization, versus art follows xenophobic and nationalistic tendencies.

g. Free time at home serves as major opportunity for exposure to art, thus expanding the “base” of art-lovers, versus masses opt for low brow and less demanding activities in their CV-home-hours.

h. Future of museums and concert halls: adapting their physical spaces and installations to pandemic and post-pandemic requirements, versus expanding their strategies to reaching out and distance engagement with their publics.

i. Artists retreat into survival mode, versus celebrity artists follow Cardi B’s (and others’) example to take a strong stance in front of their followers.

       7. Travel and Tourism

a. Visiting other countries will have lost part of its charm for some, but perhaps become a lifeline for the more claustrophobically-inclined.

b. Return in droves to beloved patterns of travel after lifting of bans, versus appearance of new models of tourism (socially-distanced? More local? Remote and isolated? Ecological?)

c. Technological solutions as enablers of travel: screening travelers for fever, filtering and protection in flights and other confined spaces, navigation and translation to minimize contact with strangers, etc. versus technology as a replacement for physical travel, as in VR and AR tours.

d. Post Corona border control using a variety of technologies to enable or restrict travel, by scanning, comparing data to data bases, identifying travelers’ conditions and more.

e. The future of Airbnb – crash as travel contracts, as does trust in the cleanliness and safety of private homes, versus rebound as the company adapts to new realities with novel measures.

f. Tourists prefer sea and sun tourism, away from the masses, versus tourists flock back to cities, thirsty for human contact.

g. Airplanes taking off dangerously after being grounded for weeks or months, versus fleets in best shape ever due to planes finally resting and receiving plenty of maintenance and attention.

h. Importance of hygiene on planes, passengers avoid confined cabins, preference for private flights.

C. Health, Science, Technology

       1. Public Health

a. Discovery of fault lines: weakness emerges in supposedly robust health systems. Low correlation between national health expenditure and readiness of countries to confront the pandemic

b. Strong drive for change of a health system that is perceived as having failed in its main role, versus glorification of the health system that saved us all.

c. Gearing up for new strains and mutations: focus on solving the immediate legacy of CV-19 and its aftermath, versus searching for a universal solution to all future types of virus.

d. Change of priorities: investing heavily in hitherto impoverished national health systems, versus changing the paradigm and rethinking the entire model.

e. Recovering from damage wrought by distancing strategy: keeping the social-distance mentality with a stepwise approach to relaxing constraints, versus identifying the perils of distancing and finding ways to be safely together.

f. Immunization and vaccines: huge emphasis on search for an ever-expanding arsenal of vaccines, versus opting for alternative strategies to combat illness, given the obvious limitations of the vaccine strategy for influenzas.

g. Resource allocation: dramatic increase in budgets for public health, versus widening the gap between poor public services with a parallel system for the wealthy.

h. Scenario planning: strengthening and reopening of forecasting and preparedness units vs. perception that it is impossible to predict so better focus on generic preparations.

i. COVID-19 as “dry run”” for catastrophic scenarios: pandemics of a global scale and grave risks have occurred on average every 300-400 years, so the probability of another one soon is low, versus this was just a mild version of what we can soon expect to be hit by.

j. The ascendance of telemedicine. Necessity has proven that telemedicine is far more effective and accessible than anyone predicted, leading to rapid acceleration of the genre, versus CV exposing the dire need of personal and close primary care to maintain health and thus protect the population from future pandemics.

k. Importance of digital health: the huge importance of data, its analysis, translation into insights and rapid deployment of conclusions, versus the limitations of too much data leading to inconclusive or multiple recommendations and therefore paralysis.

       2. Science

a. In the COVID global theater, science plays lead role of savior, only carrier of hope to billions, and is vindicated as the exclusive approach to dealing with any important challenge, versus powerful pull of religion and spiritual beliefs as only answer in a world devoid of certainties of any kind.

b. The sight of scores of highly esteemed scientists viciously disagreeing on what feels like hard facts erodes the credibility of science as arbiter of truth.

c. Science is fully harnessed to practical purposes, further strengthening the tendency to prefer applied science over theory, versus deep understanding that underlying basic science and theory are the basis of all the anti-COVID wizardry.

d. Countries find that organizing their efforts to confront the crisis requires a cross-disciplinary approach, as do scientists in search of cure or vaccine. Silos, once broken, will remain porous, versus a tendency, as problems become more complex and the need to solve them more acute, to specialize in ever narrower mini-fields enabling an even deeper understanding of limited phenomena.

e. Role of data as a leading tool in the process of science, often replacing the need for “wet” science, serving both as creator of hypotheses and their confirmation or refutation, versus anecdotal evidence that the clinician or experimenter in the field is privy to certain types of insight that the “cold numbers” will never reveal.

f. Even as huge collaborative data-driven science is being performed, a rise in the importance of good old observation, with scientific insights stemming from anecdotal clinical evidence accumulating in real time.

g. Enthusiastic embrace of cross and multi-country collaboration with science as the universal language of truth, versus enhanced competition between countries and realization that only few countries have the budgets and resources to conduct state-of-the-art research.

h. Cuts in funding for science and research as part of general tightening of budgets, versus increase in scientific spending as only defense against future pandemics and catastrophes.

       3. Technology

a. Accelerated pace of technological development was already a cliché pre-COVID, but the dramatic need for immediate solutions, expressed in the towering price, both human and financial, of every day of delay, have pushed technology to hyper-agile tactics, even in traditionally cautious fields such as medical devices and pharma.

b. In parallel to the hubris brought on by a truly overwhelming display of technological prowess, humanity discovers the limits of its power in confronting nature. Specifically, Silicon Valley, the standard bearer of technologic dominance, disappoints in its inability to contribute much to crucial issues.

c. New synergies discovered and collaborations forged between experts in medical devices, various branches of drug development, public health specialists, physicists, computer scientists, mathematicians and others will evolve and expand, accelerating the trend for creating multi-disciplinary labs, projects and companies.

d. Regulation rises to the occasion, relaxes constraints and enables accelerated development, learning that it is possible and opening doors that will be hard to close in the future, versus regulation learns its lesson the hard way after irresponsibly relaxing in its role as gatekeeper resulting in faulty equipment, errors in tests and raising of unrealistic expectations for cures.

e. Technologies at the service of human and social control proliferate, for detecting, monitoring, controlling, nudging, tracking and analyzing behaviors, are accelerating ever more, while raising and confirming concerns over privacy and disregard for human rights.

f. A host of technological enablers of digital transformation, seen pre-COVID as promising but still out of reach, thrusted into public consciousness as they are harnessed for anti-COVID purposes.

       4. Data

a. Dramatically ubiquitous, from popular media to sophisticated algorithms, nobody will ever doubt its importance, versus backlash that human phenomena, feelings, well being are irreducible to numbers and therefore data-based decisions should be limited in certain crucial domains

b. Data is a resource that grows in value when shared, and therefore huge push to share one’s data, versus data as scarce and most valuable of resources, and therefore tendency to greedily hoard it.

c. Citizens have become aware of the amount of data that governments possess relating to them. The good news: they are being listened to, their needs can be analyzed and treated, solutions can be customized. The frightening news: all the above can be converted to control and suppress.

d. New models emerge for sharing and ownership of data to allow both sharing and monetizing.

e. Crucial role of data in decision making: leaders realize that they need a dashboard of data to reach rational decisions, but the predominance of certain types of data (number of ill, number of dead) in public discourse also skews decisions towards simplistic approaches (e.g. decrease number of COVID casualties at the price of disregarding all other casualties and costs).

f. As the world’s reliance increases, so does the importance of mechanisms to validate their source, integrity and precision, but as the barriers to publish data diminish so does its fidelity.

D. The Globe, the Planet

       1. Sustainability

a. COVID provided a demo of the planet resting, air quality, animals resurging – maybe this experience will make it harder to fall back to our old polluting ways?

b. An opportunity for global collaboration to save ourselves by slowing down the pace, versus each country frantically throwing itself back into the race to make up for lost time compared to others.

c. Can the world agree on Global Sabbaths? We saw that we can withstand weeks of time-out and even enjoy some of the consequences, so can we decide on a day per week? A week per year?

d. Heightened consciousness of the situation given the dramatic impact of the global pause, and therefore: Opportunity for a Global Green New Deal? Or backlash to put aside sustainability in favor of “more pressing” issues?

e. Remember that while we humans put ourselves on pause for the CV, global warming and related negative phenomena have (mostly) continued. Will this serve as an argument for or against human made global warming?

       2. Global Politics

a. Humanity has finally united against a common, non-human enemy, and, realizing the huge potential of this unity, organizes itself to deal with the major global issues?

b. Nationalism and racism are further stoked by autocrats and shamed governments in search of scapegoats, while opportunities for “catastrophe diplomacy” abound, as traditional enemies express their solidarity sending materials and volunteers or sharing crucial information.

c. Xenophobia arises from fear of the other, the foreigner: “the virus” will always arrive from the outside, confirming deep seated fears of those who “don’t really belong here”, or “eat weird stuff”, etc.

d. New global organizations will be founded and existing ones strengthened as countries understand their crucial importance in defeating enemies that transcend borders, versus fatal weakening of global organizations as a chain effect of the US pulling out, cancelling its contribution to the WHO, blaming these organizations for the initial failure of global response to COVID.

e. As the role of data both increases and becomes more evident, and in parallel the most important challenges are recognized to be global, the need for a data sharing on a global scale is inescapable. The world creates the United Nations for Data.

f. Tectonic shifts among world’s superpowers: the US continues its decline, or proves its strength in rebounding and supplying the (bio?)technological solutions to the pandemic; Russia hit hard by plummeting petrol prices combined with what seems like inadequate and totally opaque treatment of the crisis; other BRICS in general in bad shape; EU while dealing with Brexit exposed as the elderly inefficient continent (in the south) or a model safety network for post-capitalism (in the north).

g. As traditional wars are put on pause, the rise of soft power in international relationship, expressed not in tanks and warships but through scientific, industrial and social strengths vs. rapid re-flame of numerous local and regional wars and fighting.

h. Increase in power of China and Asia, the “winners” of the crisis, vs. shrinking export from China and Asia due to CV trauma in rest of world

       3. Global Economy

a. As countries and peoples realize that GDP does not ensure real prosperity, an opportunity arises to break away from GDP as the god of indicators, replacing it with more subtle and complex measures that capture well-being and are therefore better guides for national strategies.

b. What will happen with the huge and growing debts of governments, businesses and individuals?

c. Widening of the inequality gap between countries (those who won from the crisis vs. those who lost), or the crisis as equalizer, where giants fall to their knees and smaller, poorer countries forge ahead with minor injuries?

d. Trigger to scale down globalization, the great pandemic accelerator, versus opportunity to create a more fair, transparent, equitable model of globalization, increasing collaboration and interdependence.

e. Will international alliances and organizations impose criteria about readiness for crisis on their members?

f. Huge government bailouts: exacerbating inequality (taxpayers funding corporates), versus fairer models in which taxpayers share rewards of the bailouts as well as their risks.

g. Unprecedented stock and commodity market volatility leading to strong disillusionment with current investment mechanisms and corresponding losses as the public’s money flees to safer options, versus opportunity for even bigger gain for a connected minuscule minority.

E. Work, Business

       1. Work, employment

a. Working from home, now proven to be effective, becomes widespread, versus emphasis on all we couldn’t achieve without physical presence will strengthen demand to be present. Will hybrid models proliferate?

b. Influence on home/office design and therefore on real estate?. Will offices become smaller and homes larger? Will this affect prices? Locations? Architecture?

c. Workplaces hygiene will become a dominant concern, versus the apparition of a “magic chemical” that will make efforts to maintain hygiene appear quaint in retrospect.

d. IT becomes even more important than it is today. It converts into your partner, holding your hand for all your remote activities. Dependence on IT grows – the worst thing that can happen to an employee is to be left without a connection.

e. The gig economy – exponential growth of the perfect format for digital experts, deliveries, nomads, minimizing proximity to co-workers, services for lockdown, outsourcing for cash deprived businesses, only solution for many employed and more.

f. The gig economy – dramatic weakening: fear of proximity to variety of strangers (Uber, AirBnB), workers yearning for the safety of a salary, pensions, safety net.

g. A great gap between how “essential” a worker is considered and how much they are being paid. Will essential workers be able to leverage the crisis to improve their lot, or will society search for and find ways to continue their exploitation?

       2. Business: General

a. Values: a tremendous opportunity for businesses to live up to and showcase their values, accumulating loyalty points in the eyes of customers and prospects, versus moment of truth when values are shelved in favor of cost cutting and survival mode.

b. Recovery from the crisis. Most businesses will bounce back rapidly thanks to: pent up consumer demand, loans and grants injected by governments, benefits of low oil prices, accelerated COVID and health related activity, large government projects and contracts, or: Catastrophic slow recovery due to: huge debt, businesses who failed to survive the lockdown, furloughs converted into unemployed, unemployed failing to rejoin workforce, chain effect of businesses hit by low oil, inconsistent and insufficient governmental recovery plans, deflationary effects of uncertainty and fear.

c. Emerging and declining businesses (winners and losers from the crisis). Obvious winners and losers from lockdown: hand sanitizers, Zooms, take-aways, Netflixes, healthcare, analytics for the former; airlines, tourism, car makers, art industry in the latter. But, also, suppliers of the abovementioned and others influenced indirectly. In some of these “losing” categories, survivors may surprisingly end up way ahead of their pre-pandemic position thanks to the disappearance of competitors who did not survive COVID-death valley.

d. New and old competitors: united against the common enemy, companies frantically and generously opened their knowledge and markets to newcomers in order to jointly supply, say, masks or respirators, which may lead to a beautiful future of collaboration, or, to a fight to the death with newcomer competitors.

       3. Retail

a. Buyers’ behavior post weeks/months of remote buying and limited budgets (for the majority): trend towards buying less, sticking to the necessary, versus hoarding mentality to prepare for any eventuality.

b. Limited movement drives shoppers back to small shops close to home, or strengthens large retail outlets that can offer and deliver bulk discounts.

c. Barriers broken for the pre-CV non-digital-savvy, leading to dramatically increased share of online shopping, or nostalgic impulse to return to the “good old shops” pre-CV.

d. Shopping centers, malls – will they survive the need for social distancing even months after the first wave abates? Will they evolve, in terms of interior design? Opening hours? Activities for shoppers (to keep them from running back home quickly)? Hybrid models of collaboration with digital channels?

e. Shops and independent retailers animated by close to home shopping, versus massive closures due to cash flow, loans, competition from large players?

f. New models of retail will sprout and grow, such as smart subscription retail (for those who can afford it), while the trend for locally sourced produce increases because of distrust of the far and foreign.

       4. Supply chains

a. Push for cost saving and efficiency leads to leaner distribution structures, while worries about maintaining supplies in times of crisis drive preference for distributed supply chains, with hubs nearer to end users.

b. Strong push for 3D printing and on-site manufacturing or last mile assembly to skip steps in distribution, versus recognition of the limitations of these technologies.

c. Manufacturers will put a premium on old and trusted relationship with suppliers, who can be trusted to deliver under any conditions, or widespread search for alternative suppliers, and the safer redundancy of multiple suppliers.

d. Companies opting for large inventories vs. just-in-time with close-by reliable suppliers.

e. As commercial flights and other means of transportation are prohibited, their providers close and/or their prices rise, alternative options for delivery will appear: drones, finally?

f. The benefits of globalized supply chains have been emphasized by their absence, but so have the dangers of relying on them. As local governments invoke various versions of the “Defense Production Act”, will globalization continue or will there be increased focus on localization and supply chain continuity?

       5. Transportation

a. Public transportation in pandemic times: increase in usage with alternative models, hygiene and spacing of passengers, versus decrease in usage per limited movement in public.

b. Rebound for autonomous shared vehicles, as users prefer to avoid proximity to drivers, vs. preference for own cars, with full control of access to strangers.

c. Uber and shared rides: surge as people avoid mass transport, versus crash as gig drivers without safety nets go bust vs. shift to drivers as employees

d. Strong adoption of alternative non-polluting fuels following rising consciousness of the damaging effects of oil-based, vs. return to oil guzzling habits due to record low prices.

       6. Manufacturing

a. Increased automation to minimize dependence on virus-sensitive humans vs. increased use of humans for remote operation of manufacturing equipment.

b. Versatility – proven ability to switch to manufacturing totally different products in crisis mode may lead to adoption of this flexibility in commercial contexts.

c. On-shoring backlash to off-shoring trend driven by: governments’ efforts to “bring back jobs”, fear of geographically long supply chains and increased automation.

d. Focus on redesign of plants for distancing and hygiene? And/or emphasis on workers’ well-being and health? Voluntary or driven by legislation?

From Nano to Mega Sessions: 9 Tips for an Innovation Coach

Published date: February 14, 2019 в 12:31 pm

Written by:

Category: Innovation,Innovation Facilitation,Methodology

When SIT started teaching coaches to facilitate internally in their organizations, we taught them to facilitate SESSIONS. But very quickly we realized that this could be– and was –misunderstood, which led us to add the qualifier and coin the expression, still used today, 14 years later: MINI-SESSION. It soon became apparent, though, that even this newly minted term did not solve two opposing but strongly related problems:

 

1. Plenty of coaches did not dare to assume the responsibility of running a SESSION, even if it was only a MINI session.

And, on the other hand;

2. Quite a few coaches took it upon themselves to run what we could only describe as MAXI or MEGA-SESSIONS, involving up to 50-60 participants, for as much as 2 consecutive days.

Both phenomena have a certain charm, but both pose some serious challenges that merit careful consideration.

Type 1: Not daring to jump in.

We respect these coaches very much for their modesty and responsible approach but are obviously worried that they are not utilizing their new knowledge to its full extent. Conversations and observations show that, in most cases, coaches in this group find it difficult to take the first step for the following reasons:

  • They are not sure they possess the skills required to apply the tools successfully;
  • They are wary of encountering resistance among their colleagues;
  • Their bosses think the course was a waste of time, and therefore do not support them in spending more time on this “extracurricular” activity;
  • They are not sure how to translate real-life situations into a script for conducting a mini-session;
  • The Coach Training did not build up their confidence to a sufficient degree.

Type 2: Daring to find a cure for cancer and/or achieve world peace

We are obviously impressed with these coaches’ confidence and ambition. We are concerned, though, that the probability of success in these efforts is fairly low, since the coach obviously lacks sufficient skills, experience, and usually also time and resources to perform the task successfully.

Key reasons for this phenomenon are:

  • Great enthusiasm at the end of the course, combined with an exaggerated sense of one’s power;
  • Pressure from the coach’s boss, who figures if they already invested 3 or 5 days of their associate’s time, they might as well make up for it by getting a huge benefit from their newfound skills;
  • The coach training did not indicate clearly enough what the criteria are for selecting a topic, and how to delineate its scope properly.

Rising to this double challenge, here are some helpful tips and recommendations:

 

1. Remind yourself, your boss, and/or your topic owner that this is a MINI Session, not a maxi-nor mega-session. This means that you do not chew off more than you and the team can swallow (type 2). It also means that you (type 1) can be much more relaxed about taking on the responsibility of facilitating since you are not really facilitating a SESSION, just a MINI session.

2. Very often, we encourage coaches to change the name of the Mini Session and replace it with Micro Session, or even Nano Session. This helps in communicating the correct scope and align expectations.

3. Communication with the coach’s boss is crucial. This can and should be conducted by the SIT trainers, by Corporate Innovation, and by the coach him/herself. Bosses often fail in supporting their coaches by expressing either under- or overwhelming expectations from them. They usually drastically improve in this respect once the situation is pointed out to them.

4. Pay special attention to the exercise of converting a story into a session (read the document as well). Also, we recommend taking full advantage of remote support given to coaches to help them plan sessions.

5. Work both in “pull” and in “push” modes: coaches should be trained to identify opportunities for offering their coaching services and, in parallel, encourage line managers and other stakeholders to turn to coaches and ask for (reasonable) support.

6. Coaches, remember, your first 1-3 or 1-4 or to 5 (depending on your feelings) mini sessions should be

  • conducted with a small number of participants, carefully selected to be supportive and constructive in their participation style;
  • about a topic you can understand without too much preparation;
  • no longer than 3 hours, but also no shorter than 2, so you have time to execute your script properly.

7. Coaches’ supervisors or Innovation Managers: if you want your coach to tackle a relatively large or challenging task, it should definitely not be their first mini session. If you absolutely must challenge them in such a way, make sure you first invent 1-3 small opportunities for them to practice on in order to gain confidence. Don’t hesitate too much – give them whatever small task comes to mind that they can tackle relatively easily.

8. Coaches should work in pairs. A co-coach helps in preparation, offers support during the session, and helps extract learnings after it. The co-coach can and should then also provide hugs, encouragement and – if needed – consolation.

9. A crucial step in preparing a session is defining and sharpening the brief with the topic owner. Special emphasis should be given to the question of scope, so that:

  • It does not require knowledge beyond that of the session’s participants, whose number should not exceed (4-6-8 according to the Coach’s experience);
  • The topic can be explained in no more than 7 minutes, with a corresponding number of slides;
  • The owner can define what kind of results are required, and why they think it is reasonable to achieve them;
  • The session is not used to solve a problem that has been tackled repeatedly over the years without success.

In short…

A motivated coach, with a supportive boss and environment, usually develops his/her skills and capabilities swiftly and consistently. But the first steps are crucial. The key is to start out gradually and raise the bar to always be challenged slightly beyond one’s comfort zone. It is the best way to ensure the coach’s personal development and to create valuable results for their managers and colleagues.

5 Top Workshop Icebreakers

Published date: July 16, 2018 в 9:39 am

Written by:

Category: Innovation Facilitation,Methodology

Leading a workshop, and participating in one, can be a rewarding experience for both the facilitator and the participants. It is no secret that knowing who your audience is, and catering your icebreaker or energizer to your audience, can make the workshop/facilitation that much more engaging and meaningful. Creative workshop icebreakers are a great way to engage with your group and break the ice at the beginning of a session. Energizers can also help increase the energy of the group after lunch or in the middle of the day. SIT has over 22 years of experience leading and hosting workshops, using a variety of icebreakers and energizers during sessions.

These 5 workshop icebreakers will surely help you break the ice in your next workshop, facilitation, or meeting.

Top 5 Creative Workshop Icebreakers

Workshop Icebreaker #1. One Truth, Two Lies

Workshop Icebreakers

Each participant must introduce themselves with three statements, one statement must be true and the two others must be a lie. The rest of the participants must guess which statements are which.

Which stage is it used: To open a workshop/icebreaker

 

Workshop Icebreaker #2. Five Things in Common

Workshop Icebreakers

Divide the group into partners. Tell the partners that they need to find five things that they have in common with one another. Then have each pair present the things they have in common to the group.

Which stage is it used? To open a workshop/icebreaker

Workshop Icebreaker #3. One Word Relay

Workshop Icebreakers

Begin by getting everyone in a circle and explain that you will collectively construct a story.  This will be done by each choosing one word. The words will string together to form a story. Ideally, each word chosen by participants should grammatically fit the sentence structure and logically fit the story, but also be fairly random. With each pass of the object and new word addition, the story should get more and more interesting. Have someone document the story and send to workshop participants. Everyone can laugh and share!

Which stage it is used?  To increase the energy of a group

Workshop Icebreaker #4. Snowball Fight

 

Workshop Icebreakers

Gather your group in a circle and hand each participant a piece of paper. Ask each participant to write a funny fact about themselves on the piece of paper. After they finish writing, tell participants to crumple up their papers and start throwing their ‘snowballs’. For a whole minute, everyone can continue to throw ‘snowballs’, but when the time is up, everyone should end up with a ‘snowball’. After one minute, everyone recreates the (now surely misshapen) circle, reads the funny facts aloud, and tries to guess who each snowball belongs to.

Which stage is it used: To open a creative workshop or to enliven the energy of a group.

Workshop Icebreaker #5. Doodle Portraits

Workshop Icebreakers

Everyone receives a sheet of paper, sits down and draws someone in the room.  After everyone has completed their drawing or time is up, everyone takes turns showing their picture to the group and the group can vote on who is depicted in the drawing. 

*The weirder/funnier the drawing, the more exciting the icebreaker.

Which stage is it used: Can help increase the energy of the group

 

These workshop icebreakers will help you get a solid start at any event.

Share your experience in the comments below using these icebreakers or contact us to facilitate your next workshop or project.

How Effective is Design Thinking as an Innovation Methodology?

Published date: April 16, 2018 в 12:02 pm

Written by:

Category: Methodology

My First Impression of Design Thinking

 

A few years ago, I took part in a Design Thinking workshop. My first impression: the room was a mix between an atelier and a day-care facility for children. So, initially, I thought, this is going to be fun!

Our task was simple – we split into groups of two. We needed to design a new wallet for our partner. First, I interviewed my partner. Then, I came up with a variety of different wallet models, which I then presented to him. Based on his feedback, I built a prototype of my best idea and consulted with him again. My result was an impressive and futuristic wallet – a piece of advanced technology – and indeed, the process was enjoyable.

Like most people that apply this innovative method, I enjoyed the process. The wider question, however, is: How useful is Design Thinking for generating ideas?

 

So what is Design Thinking (DT)?

Searching for “Design Thinking” on Google, we get 32,700,000 hits. But you don’t need to see more than the first few results to get the gist.  Although there are quite a few definitions, the majority are based on the following five steps: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test.

And indeed, it’s not surprising then to see that these five steps are the core of Design Thinking. According to the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, the birthplace of this innovation methodology, this is how the steps are defined:

  • Empathize: In the first step, you “view the users and their behavior in the context of their lives.” You “engage” with the users and “experience what they experience.”
  • Define: In the second step, you “unpack and synthesize your empathy findings into compelling needs and insights.” Based on a deep understanding of the user, you come up with an “an actionable problem statement.” That is, we clearly define what we wish to create.
Design Thinking Innovation methodology
  • Ideate: Now it is time to ideate and “generate radical design alternatives.” Similar to brainstorming, the goal is both a “large quantity of ideas and a diversity among those ideas.”
  • Prototype: Prototyping means “getting ideas and explorations out of your head and into the physical world.” The idea is to perceive and interact with your idea. In the beginning of a project, prototyping goes “rough and rapid” and later becomes more detailed with your progress.
  • Test: The fifth step includes testing your prototypes and getting feedback about your solutions. This is a chance to “refine your solutions to make them better and continue to learn about your users.”

Two Tough Questions

 

These five steps constitute the basic formula of the Design Thinking innovation methodology. Due to its apparent simplicity and clarity, the method is extremely appealing. It’s no wonder then that Design Thinking has become such a buzzword, so much so that it is often used as a synonym for innovation.

However, two essential questions arise:

  • Do users of DT compare it to alternative innovation methodologies and find it superior? Or is it selected for merely being the only game in town? We claim that the latter is the case, i.e. DT is more placebo than remedy.
  • Let’s assume then that DT is fun, easy to use, and provides useful customer insights. However, is it effective for changing the way people think and helping them generate new ideas? As we explain below, the answer is negative: DT is not designed to help create novel concepts.

To the first question, here is our recommendation. One must not compare Design Thinking to a complete lack of systematic methodology. Rather, one should consider other innovation methodologies and evaluate DT in relation to them.

Does Design Thinking Have a Flawed Core?

 

Empathize: Engage with users and view their contextual behavior.

Define: Come up with insights and understand the user.

Ideate: Brainstorm, get a large number of ideas.

Prototype: Perceive and interact with your idea.

Test: Test and get feedback, refine to make better.

innovation methodology design thinking

Reviewing the five steps in this innovation methodology, it is immediately obvious that the central element, the core of the entire process, is the middle step: Ideate. At the end of the day, the entire point of the exercise is to think of new things, right? So, what does Design Thinking tell us we should do in order to generate new ideas?

We’ve collected plenty of useful insights in the first two stages of the process, and we have everything we need to develop great ideas except for one thing: a method to come up with the ideas. Behind all of the Design Thinking hype, there is a disappointing reality that Design Thinking’s ‘method’ for generating ideas is (not-so) good-old brainstorming.

The Weak Link in this Innovation Methodology

 

Of the five steps, the ideation phase is the only one where ideas are actually generated. The instructions are simple: Brainstorm. Try to think unconventionally. There is no bad idea.

But as is repeatedly established, brainstorming is not an effective way to generate ideas. Much is written about this topic by us and many others, so here we just mention three of the most common arguments:

  • Participants in BS sessions are encouraged to freely say what comes to mind, eliminating critical filters. As a result, sessions end with a large number of ideas. Of these ideas, very often, none turn out to have any practical value. In addition, those participants who could have raised objections in real time are (by definition) strongly encouraged not to do so.
  • Participants are instructed to associate freely. This means there is no mechanism to overcome functional fixedness, a natural bias of human thinking. This also happens to be the strongest barrier to creativity and innovation.
  • Group dynamics, such as groupthink and social insecurity, are well researched. They have consistently shown to inherently inhibit the creation of truly radical ideas in the absence of a structured mechanism.

With such a flawed core, DT cannot be an effective approach to innovation or innovation methodology. We, at SIT, are of course partial, since the very essence and entire trajectory of our past 22 years includes designing and refining a powerful alternative to brainstorming. And, indeed, we propose today a combination of the useful elements of Design Thinking paired with a powerful and effective method to generate ideas.

We promise to come back with more on this topic. Meanwhile, we invite you to share with us your experience using DT versus other innovation methodologies.

 

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