Never say no to someone that is looking for a mentor. Most of the time, the limitation is not your time, but the ability of the protégé to consume the coaching and advice you impart. Almost always there is time between when you listen and share to when they come back looking for more. I also believe that it is the job of everyone to support others, regardless of their relative position in the community. Often people filter that they are willing to mentor, as to prefer only the absolute top talent. If we spent more time developing everyone, we might have better talent all around.
There is no shortage of ideas. This is one of those statements most do not agree with. Maybe we do not all come wired with this confidence, but I know it to be true. Being free with your ideas is the simplest way to enable the best thinking to flow into innovation. It also makes it irrelevant who owns which ideas – there are so many more it really does not matter. Secrets are the same way. There is no shortage of secrets to learn and sharing them does no harm.
Almost always, a protégé needs to have a certain level of experience to understand and make use of relevant secrets. It takes some time to make sense of the words you use or the situations you share. As a mentor you likely cannot practically compress everything for easy digestion. In fact, the simplest of lessons is often distilled to the point that it needs dilution. In the end, more often than not, the protégé is the gas pedal. When that pedal gets stuck, it will be your own inability to communicate at high enough bandwidth – help these folks get strapped to the fastest rocket ship you know.
People think that if they share what they know they will lose their power. This is the absolute wrong way to think about things. Creating a legion of individuals everywhere that grow to be giants is the ultimate in success and likely power. It transcends the walls of your organization and is the right thing to do for humanity. We need to take better care of each other.
Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.
N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)
The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”
N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)
For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.
Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.
In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.
There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.
Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?
Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.
What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.
The last day of the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Whitney delivered many surprising moments of genius. Visionary and inventor, Buckminster is an innovator’s innovator. He saw the value of drawing upon interdisciplinary fields to inform a unique and faceted view of the world. His work is grounded in helping people with a do “more with less” attitude that extended to environmental impact. While it is easy to hand wave this exhibition as an old time futurist, his philosophy alone was worth absorbing.
There are many ways to go about change. Over the last couple of years, innovation has become all the rage. It is seen as the fundamental approach to growth. Companies exist to deliver value to customers through the creation of products and services. Through the innovation contributed by products and services companies compete for higher sales, larger market share and if they are lucky the hearts of their clients and customers.
Companies also consider innovating on their business a key model for transformation. Many change makers push against the system to get it to change, to innovate and evolve. In the end, the fastest and most exciting opportunities are those that usurp the existing establishment. They politely and subtly thumb the current way of thinking, in favor for an alternative approach, one that could change the landscape completely. Apparently, Buckminster Fuller saw this approach as the only viable approach to change.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
The resistance to change, even from the most progressive is an adversary that drains the innovator directly. More time is spent talking than doing. People argue about subtle points to maintain the current course and speed. My father taught me at a young age that if you always do what you always have done, then you always get what you have always gotten. What is difficult here is that it takes the majority of workers to deliver on today; after all, it brings in the money to create for tomorrow. In order to remain viable companies need to invest just as heavily in inventing and innovating for tomorrow. Traditional R&D organizations are no longer the primary source of innovation and there is lots of research that suggests answers is in the masses. This is an area where maybe only a few are required to institute change.
Never doubt that a small group of dedicated people can change the world. In fact, it is the only thing that ever has.
No one wants what he or she has today, but if that is all the people of a company spend time doing, then how could any expect anything more than a game of catch up? Something far more radical would be to create an organizational structure that enabled the pursuit of both present and future with equal vigor.
Change is a critical part of business. Fuller’s attitude toward creation, focused on his contribution without regard to if the world was ready. The world catches up and regardless of success is influenced by the doing.
Mark Detweiler from SAP has an exciting article – Managing UCD within Agile Projects – in the May / June issue of interactions. Last year I used SCRUM to manage a small development team on a high-profile project and one of the lessons we learned was that agile development does not work well with disciplines that are not also agile. The development is managed and completed in a series of sprints (we worked three, 30 day sprints) and the application was twitching before any formal UCD work had completed. This challenge applies to more than just User Centered Design (UCD); accelerating development is only so valuable. Detweiler’s UCD centric view offers a series of tips on making a better go at it, but the truth is this problem needs a more radical conception.
Detweiler offers three iterative UCD phases, Understanding Users, Defining Interaction and Designing the user interface. One observation is that UCD teams need to focus their energy on work that influences the current development sprint. Every profession has more they want to do. Delivering it apart form the product development positions their brilliance it to be ignored.
Understanding users is important, but it is not going to hold up development, so what is the minimal amount of work that needs to occur in order to have the development team be more considerate of the user context. Since we are iterating, maybe each sprint has a refinement of the user definition. One thing for sure, the developers will create a user persona if one is not provided.
Defining user interaction has to happen in a more collaborative manner with the development team. It is often just as easy to code the application, as it is to write the use case documentation. This does not mean use cases are a waste of time, but we need to ask what about the document is going to influence development. The time may be better spent with the UCD professional in the initial task breakdown meetings to help define interactions in detail. Having access to a UCD professional as the development occurs helps accelerate decision-making, but the goal is not to have the solution be perfect – it is to have a thoughtful solution, where lessons learned inform the next sprint’s interaction design. The UCD professional needs to own their role representing their stakeholders, but not constantly checking in to see if they are meeting expectations – there is simply no time for checking in and reporting back at every turn.
Designing the user interface as part of an agile development project is difficult. Short of starting this work prior to development, we need to find the opportunity in having the user interface be quick and dirty. An existing design system can address the developer’s need to assemble the application without having to worry about the overall application style. Assuming that a custom user interface is required, the designers need to be in the boat of iterative design. Save the Mona Lisa for a few iterations from now. If you want to influence this sprint’s user interface, worry less about the pixels and more about the styles. Design elements that telegraph where the design will be going. Development is iterative – it is assumed things will change so influence at each point, but save the masterful work for a time when it is not needed yesterday. Great work often takes time; why pretend it can be done in less?
All of this feels a little sloppy and this is why I think what we need is to revisit UCD and maybe the larger thought of user experience and how it is most affective in an agile development environment. This issue is exacerbated in innovation teams where often prototypes catch like wildfire and suddenly a solution with little to no formal UCD thought is at Version 1.0, causing pause to the value and role of UCD. We need to do more than apply more resource or slow down development to accommodate external dependencies. We need to do more than just the same thing in a slightly modified way. To be successful, we need to reinvent UCD or stop being agile.
On the first of February, I accepted a new assignment managing an IBM innovation team – WebAhead. This new opportunity came as part of a reorganization where the Technology Adoption Program (TAP) and WebAhead came under the same manager. My previous work, conceiving and co-founding TAP, is still with me and has become invaluable in understanding the challenges of inventing and innovating and having those outcomes impact the company broadly. Managing technology adoption or as some like to refer to it as technology diffusion is a key part of the mix – both are part of managing innovation, but a smaller part. In my case, I am managing the software development side of an innovation team – a group of developers that sit alongside systems administrators on a raised floor lab with an impressive amount of infrastructure and connectivity. What we work on, how we work on it, which people we collaborate with and when & how we deliver a given technology all determines the gait of innovation and our ability to transform the company – not just through new technology, but through leadership and cultural change. The creative outlook for this team is critical in its evolutionary output and certainly fundamental to its ability to invent completely new systems. Both the managing and creation of innovation is art.
As part of my drink from the information fire hose, I reviewed an article by Lars Erik Holmquist, “Inventing the future.” He presents the notion of predicting the future by inventing it (Alan Kay) and that one way might be to use user-driven innovation, where unlikely (extreme) users are engaged with new technology. (e.g. Find a group of fire fighters and show them a miniature wireless video camera intended for bank ATM monitoring) It is an interesting idea, a brainstorming technique that focuses on a group of like minded people that might think differently about a given technology. The seductive part is that it is an outside perspective that is irrefutably valid, because while they are engaged around the technology they are users of their ideas. Now, of course, this gave me some interesting thoughts around how we might approach some of our resources as define what we work on and how we innovate.
One of the key aspects of the Technology Adoption Program is helping identify, understand and interact with early-adopters, the users of early work. They tend to be a engaged and vocal group, willing to contribute in exchange for access to the latest stuff. Early data analysis confirms our ability to herd cats (early-adopters) and I wonder, what we might find if we repeated Holmquist’s user-driven innovation technique with segments of our early adopter community? This raises the flags of all the usability professionals, “do you even really know what kind of people make up your community?” The answer is sort of, but yes, I agree, we would need to do a deep dive on this. The second thought was, could we build a process and set of measurements around this technique to help articulate the value this method brings? Could we end up being able to compare its relative value to other methods of focused invention and innovation and then correlate when which technique provides the best output?
On any given day the lab is buzzing with the team understanding what it is we are building and the architecture and development that paves the way to get there. I am a believer in the idea that managing innovation is largely an art and in that way excited by the notion that we might create, discover and integrate other “paintbrushes.” While the brush does not make the painter, it can inspire and participate the creation of the painting and the development of the painter.
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As part of my drink from the information fire hose, I