Within these two posts, I want to provide my thoughts, bridging the present and pointing towards a better design thinking future, one that in my opinion, is urgently needed.

These two posts are not intended as a mapping of the present DT landscape, they are reflective posts coming from what I researched.

The ‘product of my work’ itself is presently being worked through to be available as an e-book in the coming weeks. It has not been easy and often I found a level of confusion that kept forcing me to dig some more and I’m still not sure I have the answers, perhaps just lots of open questions. I think design thinking seems presently fairly messy and I feel is in need of a complete reset.

The intent of the e-book- direct link here ( design-thinking-improving-potential-innovation) is to offer a practical, direct takeaway of design thinking, more of the present practices and then where it is possibly heading. I tried to go linear, gone circular, gone holistic and at times ballistic and sought out tactical and strategic design, recognizing how its orientation has moved through product, service, experience, business model and is lifting design into new ways of orientation at tactical and strategic levels.

As I found out from my research, there is an awful amount of “noise” and “hype to work through to find the past, present and future positions of design thinking. In summary, I think design thinking is undergoing a revolution, a certain maturing but it is littered with a very messy, highly competitive present.

I would suggest that design thinking is a current ‘burning platform’ and the term ‘design thinking’ is so loaded it might need to be reworked under different banners to allow it to evolve but it needs to be restated and deepened in its skills, practices, and methodologies.

I certainly get the impression that there is an immense interest in design thinking as being a valuable contributor to being part of a solution within organizations but for the majority of interested parties, it is difficult to sort through the good from the bad in design thinking. Often you miss that certain clarity of knowing where DT can contribute, what it all means to achieve better solution outcomes.

It needs to break free of the magic ‘black box’ and evolve into its promise of being increasingly important to use, open and transparent in what it can achieve and its limitations. It is to balance this out and point to the need to be integrated with other skills, capabilities, and methodologies that tackle real, often complex problems within organizations.

So part two of my reflective summary:

Design thinking becomes the best friend to innovation, strategically and tactically.

When DT is applied to business or social issues it is by making creativity logical, you have its power of contribution, it can transform our innovative solutions. Design thinking is a highly creative problem-solving approach with a toolkit of methods but more a specific mindset where adapting is constant. By doing the same just over and over again brings the same results or dampens the potential to spark different ideas and solutions. Design thinking as something far too prescribed ‘dulls’ the process.

There is hope, actually, it is well beyond a glimmer, we are seeing design thinking recognize it needs to step up and take design thinking into a more strategic position. This will mean that design thinking will change in the future, into a greater, fuller “thinking” mindset that can be applied to these more complex problems at an organizational level and contribute this creative thinking to numerous challenges organizations are facing today. It needs to evolve, otherwise, it simply fades away, into the background of being just ‘helpful and useful’

Where Design Thinking Can Earn its Place

Where design thinking makes its contribution is through a good understanding of the users, making sense of ambiguous information, reframing opportunities, ecosystem conceptualization, prototyping to fail early and often. All this adds up to a creative process. Creativity is one of the key essences contributing to innovation.

Much of DT is working in a parallel space with many different paths to work through broad phases of investigative work. This makes DT seem “fuzzy, ambiguous and strange to many who are more trained in being analytical, often with backgrounds in science and engineering. It is bringing a degree of art and creativity to science and rational thinking. This combination must constantly search for a common language.

The need is for deeper immersion, for synthesis, for conceptualization, for constant evaluation, for exploring prototyping and it is seeking the right combinations that help blend all the different thinking into those valuable solutions. This is why DT can stand alone but is better in a broader system thinking approach. It can be so simple to tackle a specific customer problem, product design or service need, no question, where its design lies in its four elements to work through: of define, create, refine and repeat (as optional but likely) to eventually move towards a winning solution from the work of the combined thinking. The point is today organizations are asking for more out of their design thinking to tackle complex issues as well.

The constant danger is these different “open” steps or stages are equally a strength but also a weakness. For so many, these steps seem so insufficient and unconnected to their past reality. It is the need to connect this all up, to show it is real, it is the intuition, chaotic, divergent, naturalistic inquiry form and we need to offset our current more linear, sequential and reductionist inquiry mindset, so dominate in organizations today. Design thinkers need to tack on this challenge.

Lastly here, as complex problems become ever-louder in need to solve at both tactical and strategic level we must recognize their root causes are:  “often multiple issues, all tangled together, often hard to identify the critical parts and more than often hard to extract from the effect as solving one part often can worsen another or have greater consequences. Breaking up complex problems is tough as they are dynamically linked and deeply nested” (Quote from Chris Lawer in his paper on design thinking and healthcare)

Strengthening our thinking through processes.

The strength of thinking needs to be constantly working at creative blending a design and business thinking,  each time that will need to be different applying different techniques and frameworks. We need to move from that ‘one’ correct answer, often blindsiding us, into the many solution possibilities that take innovation out into new realms of solutions that meet a more integrative thinking that connects ideas more to customer needs.

It is that search for involvement from the diverse voices of users and inventors, it needs to be analytical and intuitive, it needs a blend of deductive, inductive and adductive thinking and that needs huge space and time to allow the thinking to work through. This divergent and convergent thinking, to zoom out, zoom in and connect all the diversity within the thinking and design of the ultimate solutions. The ability to connect, to manage this is the ‘art’ of the design thinker leading the facilitation process.

We often lose sight that if we lack customer or outcome focus we are more likely to fail, and if the construction and framing of the design thinking are not well stated it simply becomes a failure potential before any investment is made.

We move from consuming the idea of design thinking into a deeper participation as it synthesizes our thinking by allowing us all to have imaginations, thus feeding the roots of creativity that leads to innovation that tackles those complex issues we all face. We get equipped to bring all those cross-disciplinary thinkers together to break down the problem in a human-centered design construct.

Presently we are in the middle of this change, seeing how it evolves.

As I have finished in my e-book, I really feel design thinking is about to evolve. I feel I’ve not captured that change sufficiently but the e-book was constructed as more to assist in current DT understanding giving a background to why we need to change within the framing, so it built on a better understanding of the foundations of design thinking.

Within the e-book, currently in the ‘production works,’ I have taken the work of two different design thinking consultants or organizations to ‘cast’ out design thinking into a possible future. They offer more upstream strategic design thinking or take the view that that design is increasingly circular. Both are trying to shift the current race-to-the- bottom narrative you see in many design thinking suggestions into more strategic and broader system thinking levels, recognizing the need for greater change to tackle a growing complexity and mounting frustration that design thinking can’t stand on its own.

One is the collaboration between Ideo and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, focused more around the concept that design is increasingly circular.The Circular Design Guide is a collaboration between the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO

The other is Humantific who are taking design thinking out and forming it around a more robust set of thinking methodologies, way beyond ‘just’ design thinking but more into “sensemaking” through these different approaches and framing and methodology techniques.Humantific takes a  hybrid approach that looks to integrate the best of human-centered design thinking, strategic problem solving, and information visualization.

Pointing towards a future.

That future can happen if design thinking wants to evolve itself and I think we would all want that, it needs to move beyond its current present often caught up in a “fad” and “hype”. We need to develop it out and put it to use as more advanced problem learning capabilities, that challenge the desire for quick, handy “quick fixes” and think more deeply in strategic design terms to achieve better, more sustaining outcomes. Today, many of the outcomes get ‘push back’ as they did not account enough on the broader context, the system impact, they defined the challenge in far too limited ways and the results were limited, even though their was a lot of creative energy.

In this recent report by RSA an action and research centre called “From Design Thinking to System Change”

“Great design doesn’t always generate impact. As we show in this report, innovations attempting to scale and create systemic change often hit barriers to change, sending them catapulting back to square one. We call this the ‘system immune response’. The particular barriers will differ dependent on context, but might be cultural, regulatory,  personality driven or otherwise…..

“Design thinking alone will not be enough. The core insight of this paper is that solving our most complex problems will require augmenting design thinking with a systems thinking approach as the basis for action”

I think this is our present problem with design thinking as outlined in the RSA report:

“In reality what happens all too often is that the route from innovation to scaling, and thereby systems change, is fraught with obstacles”…..and we create system immune response”

“The point is that scaling is usually far from a linear inevitability and the development of a product or service innovation may be just the beginning of a process of generating impact”

“While design thinking alone provides a compelling process for idea development, it fails to recognize that without due consideration of systemic complexity and power dynamics, even the best ideas can lie on the shelf unused, and thus without impact”

We fail to gain the impact we wanted or identified as we did not fully account for all the system dynamics and all that was necessary to make sustaining change. We end up often just moving the needle just a little and today, that is not good enough.

The recognition of change within design thinking is growing momentum

In a forthcoming online festival, called the Disruptive Innovation Festival organized on November 6^th to 24^thby the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, this might be interesting. They have three main themes. One of these will be on the Future of Design where you can join from anywhere for free, sign up by clicking on the above link.

To quote : “Design has changed forever. Rather than just creating a single product for a single customer, designers of today have a new challenge: to create better systems adapted to a world of connected citizens, unpredictability and digital disruption.”.

There is this increasing need to understand the systemic conditions, the interconnected dynamics at play, the impact on the value chain and the ecosystem, on the business model and understand the organization and societal conditions in which this problem and challenge plays out. These need this deeper thinking so design thinking can marry the impact and understanding these more complex challenges require.

Summary

Design thinking has become a major methodology, it is presently running ahead in the expectations of what it can deliver and does need to re-think on how it is going to take this concept forward. The (real) design thinking community is racing to catch up and respond. The challenge for it is it has multiple voices all offering a wide choice in the past, what ones will emerge to give us a different design thinking future?.

We are presently in need of “buyer be (very) aware” otherwise you end up with a result that does not do the job you had in mind or more critically did not help solve the problem in your or worse still your customer’s eyes. Investing time in knowing what you expect as outcomes mean designing the problem or challenge in far more thoughtful ways, before you embark is critical in any design thinking journey.

Yet be even more ready if it evolves in ‘sudden and amazing’ ways you never expected but to have a clarity of original purpose ever-present keeps design thinkers in that constant analysis, to then be able to embrace the synthesis.

“Holding the course” or “breaking out of the mold” both need the courage and a real trade-craft to systematically test and iterate concepts until they ‘feel’ right. To both ‘conceive and make stuff’ can be really exciting.It is so human-centered and that is what design thinking is all about. How design thinking evolves will determine its position in our innovating world.

Get comfortable with this thinking alternative and what it can potentially give you in tackling your challenge or problem. Also remember DT is increasingly needed to be a more worked at a system level, beyond ‘just’ product, customer experience or service level. This is where the future of design is focused and where much of the current confusion lies, we are in the middle of these changes and they are being worked through in multiple ways, it seems.

Part one of design thinking is here

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The post The limitations, criticisms and new pathways for Design Thinking – Part two first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

This is part one of my thoughts that came out of investigating and researching design thinking Part two link is here.

In these two posts, I want to provide my outcomes, bridging the present and pointing towards a better design thinking future, in my opinion urgently needed.

The ‘product of my work’ itself is presently being worked through to be available as an e-book in the coming weeks.

The intent of the e-book with a direct link here ( design-thinking-improving-potential-innovation) is to offer a practical, direct takeaway of design thinking, the present practices and where it is possibly heading. I tried to go linear, gone circular, gone holistic and at times ballistic and sought out tactical and strategic design, recognizing how its orientation has moved through product, service, experience, business model and lifting design into new ways of orientation at tactical and strategic levels.

As I found out from my research, there is an awful amount of “noise and hype” to work through to find the past, present and future positions of design thinking. In summary, I think design thinking is undergoing a revolution, a certain maturing but it is littered with a very messy, highly competitive present.

I am suggesting that perhaps design thinking is a current ‘burning platform’ and the term ‘design thinking’ is so loaded it might need to be reworked under different banners to allow it to evolve as it equally needs to be restated and deepened in its skills, practices, uses, and methodologies.

I certainly get the impression that there is an immense interest in design thinking as being a valuable contributor to being part of a solution within organizations to tackle their tougher problems as well as those that need a level of creativity to move through in understanding.  For many though, I feel it lacks a real understanding of its value for the majority to sort the ‘good from the bad’ in design thinking or design thinkers, along with the what and where it can really contribute to achieving better solution outcomes.

It needs to break free of the magic ‘black box’ and evolve into its promise of being increasingly important to use, to balance out and integrated with other skills, capabilities, and methodologies that tackle real, often complex problems but more importantly, to be generally understood as a creative, human-centered methodology to get fully behind.

So part one of a two-part reflective summary:

I believe design thinking has a great role to play in contributing to solving problems and challenges, yet we have a series of problems to bring it back to a valuable order, we need to rein in the hype and the lack of a deep design thinking skill-set.

Far too many people are claiming to be design thinkers, after simply attending very limited “crash course” or “boot camps” and do not have the deep investment and experience to be true ‘design thinkers’. If this continues design thinking will fail in its potential to be a really good creative problem-solving approach.

Design thinking has raised a lot of expectations as well as its fair share of controversy. Why are organizations so caught by DT? Often it became the promise of having creative ways to solve solutions and work in harmony with all the rational thinking that dominates much of business thinking today, DT sounded so appealing, it quickly became “oh, we need some of that.”

The ramping up begins

So, the marketing of Design Thinking kicks in, looking to capitalize and add a real momentum. DT got heavily promoted. It quickly became simply sold as a process, just like Six Sigma, it became limited by those jumping on the latest concept not being true design thinkers, apart from attending a short course or two.

Then this new process became a little uncomfortable living alongside more established rational ones, it was difficult to integrate, so as this ‘new kid on the block’ struggled, questions started to raise their head on how does this compliment and add to all the efficiency and effectiveness that is expected around an organization’s dominating mindset. Most lost the plot that design thinking was different. It was so different, it was human-centered, not process-centered.

What was soon realized that extra “fuzziness” can sit uncomfortably in highly organized and rational structures? Design thinking was looking for those “leaps of faith” and lots of ‘being creative’, seeing failure and diversity was actually something akin to being hard to accept and conflicting in ‘being judged’. Fun and engaging perhaps but it needed to be separated and contained.

Organizations have come up against this growing recognition that there is no one “plug and play” system for design thinking.

When you are asked to be flexible, agile, willing to experiment and often fail, sometimes publicly, this can take you into some very uncomfortable territory. You might like the idea but will the boss? When you do not have a clear definition of design thinking of where and how it can actually fit, how it works or means, it continuously suffers from a lack of clear assignment, it makes it feel a little bit of an oddball.

You are left wondering who executes this and how it might be applied and implemented at scale. What answers to what, what links into what? Yet it feels useful and needs to be more embraced for its creative value. So, the short answer is to give everyone a short exposure and let everyone embrace design thinking as the creative avenue for all to explore. It suddenly gets broken down so it can be repeatable, a step-by-step process. Then easy, we all become suddenly design thinkers, or are we?

Then we get the “let’s systematize this” into a familiar, easy to use and follow process

Organizations suddenly turned design thinking into a linear, often gated, by-the-book methodology and suddenly it is not true design thinking anymore, it becomes just another too linear, too slow and not as bright a way to be ‘so creative’ but hey, we are design thinkers, that’s not bad, is it? The dominating thinking about ‘process’ suddenly starts to screw up the ‘freedom’ within true design thinking. It quickly became boiled down to aiding and supporting the incremental innovation.  It loses its real powerful edge of harnessing creativity to solve problems in highly imaginative and insightful ways, it becomes just the encouragement to help thinking along.

Design thinking so often then gets reduced down to supporting small project-related work, happily working at the periphery of the organization, it becomes simply a friend to incremental innovation and change. Leaders start to ask a question about all this design thinking ‘hype’ and began demanding far more from a design thinking process to tackle their complex problems.  Then it is suddenly “Huston, we have a problem.”

Enter the need for a new design thinking way that is emerging.

Design thinking can play a richer role and be a more powerful contributor to bigger problems but it needs to evolve and be seen in a wider context and not seen as specialized, narrow and limited. It can connect to a wider universe of problems and complexity of design itself, over the centuries has broken out of past confines. Design thinking makes us all design-conscious if we allow it too. It is the human-centered design that can draw out the best of our thinking if we do allow it too.

DT encourages us to abandon the linear thinking and keeps us constantly undergoing that looping circularity as the accepted process and that needs resetting mindsets significantly.  DT to evolve in all our minds, away from those past experiments limited to narrow, linear paths of design thinking understanding is highly liberating, sometimes scary but deeply satisfying when you truly break through a complex problem.

We need to connect multiple thinking, diversity and different experiences that so often diverge initially to then collectively find the path to converge, in a common understanding, to translate the combined creative thinking into real action, achieving valuable outcomes.

There is a different pathway ahead, otherwise, Design Thinking in its existing form alone will fail.

Design Thinking will not be evolved if we step back from this wrong path that many have been following in recent years, it will get pushed back and sink into the background, occasionally turned too, in a world far more dominate and schooled in detail-orientated highly rationale process methodology and thinking. Design Thinking can be increasingly integrated towards business and becomes both stronger in the human consciousness for process and culture contributions.Yet to get to this point there is this need to firstly, go back to the design thinking drawing board.

Design Thinkers should restate their value proposition before it becomes too late, to deepen the techniques and avoid moving out of their specialized role of being great facilitator to connect others to thrive and build solutions. Otherwise, there is this risk that DT fails in its real potential as a real creative process to search out imaginative solutions that DO solve complex problems. It is up to the design thinking community to come together on this, as today it is a real mess of conflicting message and extremes, some offering snake-oil solutions, others keeping design front and focused from experience, exploring all the design thinkers options and honing their practice.

Design Thinking should be seen as a specific creative, human-centered process all our thinking should pass through. It needs a new lifting up into both tactical and strategic design thinking.

We need to allow the ‘creative flow to emerge’

Design and good well-trained design thinkers are ‘schooled’ to be naturally creative thinkers, that is their space. They need to extend their toolkit of methods and tools to produce new value through the approaches they undertake. They thrive in the ambiguities recognizing in growing complex problems there will never be a concrete set of predictable answers.

Design thinkers work through the messy and unpredictable business, so typical of innovation and discovery doing analysis and synthesize to push more those unpredictable, surprising creative outcomes. To achieve this DT cannot be a prescribed step-by-step detailed process, it simply passes through stages, loops back when needed and moves forward when it ‘seems’ right.

I recall one comment I read: “thinking does not convey action”. If constructed well, through experienced, trained design thinkers have the ability to draw out all the diverse thinking present, through a fuller inspiration, ideation and implementation mindset. It can offer a creative pathway that promotes a messy, sometimes conflicting, failure allowed, ‘full on’ set of emotions, to energize and tackle complicated problems.

The search is even more centered around strategically connected value creation

As we all are faced with the task of solving more complex problems that are strategic in need, it is for design thinking to step up and become more a key component on how to ‘do’ this. These as relating far more to the customer needs, to solving organizational challenges or market challenges and those more ‘knotted problems’ that corporations and society are grappling with. The ability to extract from design thinking methodologies can significantly help in the future.

Today what is being increasingly demanded is to solve more complex problems in creative ways as essential, then design thinking needs to work in harmony with many other thinking skills to make its contribution.

It certainly needs to mature way beyond a ‘one frame thinking concept’ to achieve this, to be central to finding solutions.

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The post The limitations, criticisms and new pathways for Design Thinking – Part One first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The problem or challenge with this focusing upon ‘breaking’ practices or new methodologies, are they can be so much harder to master and build them into established positions and practices, without the right amount of debate, understanding and assessing the implications and impact.

This often needs different perspectives to form the final position. We fail to constantly review and re-engineer the innovation process and tend to layer more upon it, without a consistent reassessing what we are trying to achieve.

The excitement of ‘breaking innovation’ is in the pioneering, experimenting, discovering, sharing and exchanging. If you are always open to this new thinking, it does enrich and advance innovation understanding and that makes it so valuable but so demanding.

Many of these for me have been utterly enjoyable to explore as they advance our understanding of the emerging management practice of innovation but you can’t ‘gloss over’ the basics of innovation.

The ability to translate innovation understanding is a constant challenge. The ‘lead- lag’ time is sometimes very long and tortuous to make the necessary changes within established organizations to achieve the necessary ‘buy-in’ and understanding of the impact and return and establish a certain rhythm and return.

Doesn’t the innovation needle keep shifting constantly?

Often we were missing the constants that are required to ‘set in place’ for innovation, I call these those anchor points, otherwise, we often are simply increasing the layering on, more and more, not giving enough emphasis on how to integrate these into a newly emerging practice of innovation that builds on a solid foundation.

The basics of innovation still form around building the engagement, leadership, and involvement, in constructing a culture, the climate and environment needed, so as to allow innovation to evolve and thrive. Then there is that need for a constant investment in people, in our networks and relationships, that all need to come together. These are the foundation to build innovation capacities.

Then, we have the investments in structures, systems, and governance, making sure these are flexible and robust enough to make what we work upon, as responsive, agile, adaptive, exploitative and exploratory. All coming together so we can end up with great new ideas, things and most importantly, in winning successful concepts that grow our business.

The shifts taking place around innovation have been significant in their impact

The shifts taking place has been hugely shaped in how digital transformation continues to grow in its importance. how it is influencing much that is surrounding innovation, as it continues to disrupt in faster, demanding ways, where it deconstructs and then, it is forcing us to reconstruct our innovation thinking, so as to gain from all this transformation occurring all around us.

The other real forces of innovation change in this relatively short period have come from a great explosion of Lean Management principles and practices and the incorporating of Design thinking into our work. Both of these are being rapidly embraced by our organizations, large and small. How these are fully and successfully integrated remains a challenge for most to resolve today.

The understanding of relating more to individual customer needs, building new business models has been greatly encouraged by the real need to “get out of the building” and learn to pilot, experiment and build a growing system of prototyping on what we learn from these engagements and testing, many emerging from innovation labs, encouraging an intrapreneur spirit, set up on entrepreneurship principles.

Then you have the emergence of platform and ecosystems to build around that are about to massively change the way we collaborate and build solutions that are more complex and require many parties to come together and attempt to solve greater challenges. The movement towards the different crowdsourcing techniques and all the variations (or derivation’s) of ‘crowd’ and co-creation’ have changed the game.

Innovation is constantly opening up when you combined  diverse thinking with all the ramifications of the network and relationship building effect we need to leverage. It is this ‘raw’ power of technology that is transforming much.

The raw power of knowledge needs harnessing and translating

It is this ‘raw’ power of technology, pushing the flow of knowledge and exploiting the different social mediums that are swirling around us, with many suggested designs and frameworks that need deeper capture and translation, so as to extract new value.

We all need to think through the value of the pivot, prototype, the constructing of minimal viable products and rapid experiment and design to increase in focus, so as to accelerate innovation discovery and delivery.

We are learning faster, shutting down what does not work as we go, adapting faster than before with our innovation concepts, by being engaged and constantly informed by customer needs.

It has moved well into the “how” from the “what, why and where”. The “when” still is subjected to different levels of impatience it certainly still seems. Speed is dominating at present then we all are in need to “Scale” and resolve the constant worries over the “Execution” of the new value proposition.

There is this constant, pressing need, to absorb, synthesize and translate what is constantly coming towards us in innovation thinking.  It becomes a constant task to manage just this new understanding, translating it and embedding new practices as difficult, time consuming and tough.

Reflecting on all of this – so what does this all mean?

There is this need to be reacting to this in new framing ways, building this into a new innovation road map for our businesses.

It can be a dangerous assumption that we ‘think’ innovation is well understood; often it is not, it continues to be a serious source of frustration and disappointment, at all levels. This essential ‘fixing the basics’ still needs a clear focus to resolve, coupled with new emerging practices to forge a pathway for others to understand and feel comfortable to use. It needs a constant balance between extolling the old, exploring the new; that blending of practice, existing, new and breaking.

Our need is to ask is how can we blend this emerging thinking into core aspects of the innovating beliefs and structures in place, so they can build and contribute to the ongoing building of innovation capabilities, competencies and capacity, surely a key focal area?

My work entails being reactive, reflective and responsive.

Sometimes as we take stock it does surprise you on how the innovation needle had been moved, again and again. This sometimes makes navigation sometimes difficult

It is clear innovation is constantly advancing, yet, offering my reflective thought here, it can have countless layers of fresh paint but if the basic foundation is not solid, it only hides the truth underneath, that much is simply “rusting away¨.  Innovation needs a clear, strong core that needs constantly re-calibrating to the changing market conditions we are finding ourselves in.

We so often miss this fundamental addressing of the urgent need for peeling away these old decaying, rather rusty layers and fixing the basics on a new design, reflecting where innovation is today (not in the past) and where we believe it is heading for in the future by balancing out the portfolio and equipping ourselves with the capabilities and capacities to build these in progressive ways.

May I ask?

Have you ever had an independent assessment of your innovation process simply because the basics around innovation are not common knowledge? I would argue that so often senior teams are somewhat paralyzed in terms of being able to move forward strategically, despite the need and recognition of innovation’s importance

The challenge is how to unlock this often conflicting set of innovation pressures and bring everyone to a common point of understanding of today and where all need to head in the future.

I certainly believe we are in need to conduct some vigorous analysis of the innovation system as we have understood a lot but much does need to be challenged as the future will be managing innovation in a very different way; more collaborative, more open, more reliant on technology and customer involvement

I’d certainly recommend starting with both an Innovation Work Mat discussion and a Three Horizon framing of the future from today’s understanding of where we think it is heading and how can we plan out how to get there, in sensible steps, as part of any comprehensive review.

We do need to not only embed innovation practices we need to strive to update these- can I be of help?

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The post Reflecting on our innovation practices first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The post Seeking fresh winds and new directions first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

You often hear of volatile trading conditions, a more complex market and situations changing constantly and moving faster than ever. ‘Much’ seems to be closing in on us.

We do know we need to re-equip ourselves for constant disruption; we are really beginning to see a shift from the classic bell curve into more of a shark fin for adopting change.

One that is characterized by sudden, even violent success or an event, some moments of brilliant dominance, followed by a dramatic change in conditions as others have spotted the same opportunity and you hit a rapid decline, the race to the bottom of competition constantly negating one another.

Market are segmenting, the life cycle is shortening or having an even longer tail of dealing with slow decline and constant erosion of any competitive position. The sharks are arriving even earlier and in a greater need to show their dominance.

It does seem “creative destruction” is a central force in many of our activities. Activities where innovation is continually replacing not just in products and new services but in designing radically different business models, searching to replace less adaptive competitors in the marketplace at faster rates.

The post The sharks that prey are arriving a lot earlier now first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

There are seemingly so many intervention points it can get bewildering.

The innovation environment can be made-up of how well you collaborate and network, the level of the group and individual interactions, the presence and commitment of leadership towards innovation, as well as the organizational set-up and structures.

You can explore the make-up of the innovation environment in so many ways.

So what makes up the environment to innovation?

It is the culture, management and its people who have a mutual dependency. Culture can enhance or inhibit the tendencies to innovate, it certainly has a profound influence on the innovative capacity and provides the rich nutrients to nurture innovation or kill it. Culture has always been regarded as a primary determinant of innovation.

To foster innovation and its environment, key levels of management and individuals must be committed to creating an environment and culture that promotes creativity, be engaged and promote the ability to promote change in nimble, agile and flexible ways to meet changing conditions in the market place and with customers.

It is this creativity through the innovations that are flowing through the organization that often needs a critical focal point to create a change that has an impact.

Triggering stimuli for change

The job of any change initiative is to give stimuli in the actions, transactions and interactions in the pursuit of innovation. These come from changing practices but focusing on the critical interaction between people and the situations that delivering innovation demands.

Altering an organizations workplace environment comes from focusing on the person’s creativity and the organizations climate conditions to deliver on its innovation need.

From what I gather, there are over 40 different assessments you can use for creativity and innovation. Within the best known, most cited and researched two still stand out for me as tested and valuable. These have stood the test of time and I believe provide a great place to start assessing your climate and what motivates a more creative / innovative environment.

There are two climate assessments for creativity assessments that stand out

The first is the Climate for Creativity (KEYS) developed by Terisa Amabile and the other one is the Creative Climate questionnaire developed by Gören Ekvall. Both came out in the late nineties but seem to have stood that ‘famous’ test of time.

I have shown in Ekvall’s model a modified version introducing the split between the attitude for work and its five part make-up and work atmospheres five parts.

I’m going to focus more on Ekvall’s model as it is the one I have used more and it ‘feels’ more comfortable for me.

Amabile’s model contained 17 factors, whereas Ekvall’s model has only ten factors. There have been a number of comparative studies on these two. One argument being that less factors allows for a more open aspect but less controversial.

To be honest I like them both as they each have slightly different ways to look at creativity.

Firstly though, let me outline Amabile’s model.

It comprises three key elements: resources, management practices and organizational motivation. Each of these elements interacts with one another and has an impact on the resulting level of innovation.

In Amabile’s structure the assessment breaks answers down into two criteria of measuring current performance and seeking perceived importance and attributed 100 points per section to gauge relative importance using a simple Likert-type scale with anchor phrases at each extreme.

For her Organizational Motivation section, a questionnaire is broken down into

• 1) Explicit value of creativity,
• 2) Attitude to risk,
• 3) Pride in Employees,
• 4) Enthusiasm for Employees,
• 5) Forward-facing strategy and
• 6) Management systems.

Then for her Resources part:

• 1) Time to innovate,
• 2) Staff Expertise,
• 3) Access to Funds,
• 4) Material Resources,
• 5) Information Resources, and
• 7) Training

Then her Management Practices, it is broken down:

• 1) Project autonomy,
• 2) Team Selection – Skills,
• 3) Definition of Goals,
• 4) Supervisor Support and
• 5) Team Selection – Personality.

Ekvall’s model

Ekvall’s model was divided into two halves, each comprising five factors. This also allowed Ekvall’s model to be split over two pages, with the first entitled ‘atmosphere for work’, and the second entitled ‘attitude to work.’ Maybe this is why I like it for this defining split for deepening the conversation.

Again to use this you attribute 100 points per section to gauge relative importance using a simple Likert-type scale with anchor phrases at each extreme.

Organizational Climate for Creativity and Innovation (1996) is the article that sums up all of Ekvall’s research within organizational climate and creativity throughout the second half of the 20^th Century.

This was where Ekvall formalized his ten dimensions of creative climate (challenge, freedom, idea support, trust / openness, dynamism / liveliness, playfulness / humor, debates, conflicts, risk-taking, and idea time) as well as described the implications of the Creative Climate Questionnaire (CCQ).

The ten dimension factors from Ekvall’s creative climate questionnaire.

Attitude to Work dimensions

Idea Time: amount of time people can use (and do use) for elaborating new ideas. In the high idea-time situation, possibilities exist to discuss and test suggestions not included in the task assignment. There are opportunities to take the time to explore and develop new ideas. Flexible timelines permit people to explore new avenues and alternatives. In the reverse case, every minute is booked and specified. The time pressure makes thinking outside the instructions and planned routines impossible.

Risk-Taking: tolerance of uncertainty and ambiguity in the workplace. In the high risk-taking case, bold initiatives can be taken even when the outcomes are unknown. People feel as though they can “take a gamble” on their ideas. People will often “go out on a limb” to put an idea forward. In a risk-avoiding climate there is a cautious, hesitant mentality. People try to be on the “safe side” and often “sleep on the matter.” They set up committees and they cover themselves in many ways.

Challenge and Involvement: degree to which people are involved in daily operations, long-term goals, and visions. When there is a high degree of challenge and involvement people feel motivated and committed to making contributions. The climate is dynamic, electric, and inspiring. People find joy and meaningfulness in their work. In the opposite situation, people are not engaged and feelings of alienation and apathy are present. Individuals lack interest in their work and interpersonal interactions are dull and listless.

Freedom: independence in behavior exerted by the people in the organization. In a climate with much freedom, people are given the autonomy and resources to define much of their work. They exercise discretion in their day-to-day activities. Individuals are provided the opportunity and take the initiative to acquire and share information about their work. In the opposite climate people work within strict guidelines and roles. They carry out their work in prescribed ways with little room to redefine their tasks.

Idea Time Support: ways new ideas are treated. In the supportive climate, ideas and suggestions are received in an attentive and professional way by bosses, peers, and subordinates. People listen to each other and encourage initiatives. Possibilities for trying out new ideas are created. The atmosphere is constructive and positive when considering new ideas. When idea support is low, the automatic “no” is prevailing. Fault-finding and obstacle-raising are the usual styles of responding to ideas.

Work Atmosphere dimensions.

Conflict:  presence of personal and emotional tensions in the organization. When the level of conflict is high, groups and individuals dislike and may even hate each other. The climate can be characterized by “interpersonal warfare.” Plots, traps, power and territory struggles are usual elements of organizational life.  Personal differences yield gossip and slander. In the opposite case, people behave in a more mature manner; they have psychological insight and control of impulses. People accept and deal effectively with diversity.

Debate: occurrence of encounters and disagreements between viewpoints, ideas, and differing experiences and knowledge. In the debating organization many voices are heard and people are keen on putting forward their ideas for consideration and review. People can often be seen discussing opposing opinions and sharing a diversity of perspectives. Where debate is missing, people follow authoritarian patterns without questioning them.

Playfulness/Humor: spontaneity and ease displayed within the workplace. A professional, yet relaxed atmosphere where good-natured jokes and laughter occur often is indicative of this dimension. People can be seen having fun at work. The climate is seen as easy-going and light-hearted. The opposite climate is characterized by gravity and seriousness. The atmosphere is stiff, gloomy and cumbrous. Jokes and laughter are regarded as improper and intolerable.

Trust/Openness: emotional safety in relationships. When there is a high degree of trust, individuals can be genuinely open and frank with one another. People count on each other for professional and personal support. People have a sincere respect for one another and give credit where credit is due. Where trust is missing, people are suspicious of each other, and therefore, they closely guard themselves, their plans, and their ideas. In these situations people find it extremely difficult to openly communicate with each other.

Dynamism / Liveliness: The eventfulness of life in the organization. In the highly dynamic situation, new things are happening all the time and new ways of thinking about and handling issues often occur. The atmosphere is lively and full of positive energy. There is a kind of psychological turbulence that is described by people in those organizations as “full speed”, “go,” “breakneck,” “maelstrom,” “and the like. People get caught up in the excitement and energy. The opposite situation could be compared to a slow jog-trot with no surprises. There are no new projects; no different plans. Everything goes its usual way.

Over the years the Ekvall questionnaire has been collected and benchmarked.

The value of seeing a significant part of an organization of 7,000 take this test and then be compared against others completing the CCQ can be valuable.

Taking one example between a group designated as innovation organizations against those regarded as stagnating would deliver a spider web visual showing the difference and where the gaps are to focus upon.

The discussion from producing such a view can become very telling. Of course this is a snapshot but it can become a powerful enabler to change. Improving the climate, over time changes the culture and conditions for how an organization views innovation.

Perceptions need to be broken down, clarity on a pathway forward navigated and negotiated with a leadership that is providing consistent and determined support so that the climate and conditions are constantly improving the environment for innovation – the culture learns to adapt and recognize this as the everyday ‘way of working.

Summary

There are many variables that influence people’s perception of the working environment and by focusing on understanding the climate and the possible potential to change this, in what it can provide the prime contributor to providing a huge impact within your innovation environment.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission, I have republished it on my own site with some small adjustments. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Making an impact on an organization’s innovation environment first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Can these be valuable and be associated to the portfolio situation within an organization’s need, in seeking different viewpoints of product or service change?

Opening up our thinking to change can drive our business offerings very differently.

Often within these drivers, we do need to explore what is the underlying force behind them, it allows us to pause and think. As you think through what these different change drivers on what it might mean to extend your new product or service developments, these can prompt radically different and imaginative solutions to consider..

Using the different drivers can give you new insights into your innovation activities plus also can prompt significant changes to freshen up your innovation portfolio.

They are certainly a good place to start to get the creative juices flowing even more.

It is worth constantly working around different drivers of innovation change.

Periodically I would suggest you work through each of these and see if this changes your thinking or approach and you can then see a different angle or opportunity that might emerge that changes the thinking.

So let me share my opening nine identified drivers for innovation change:• Emotional Drivers – as we learn, dream, create and get into a ‘free’ spirit, it often opens up our thinking. I sometimes associate heroes and champions or relate to recognized mentors and facilitators and look for what makes the emotional connection, then I ask: “can I use this or be inspired by them” to drive something within my innovation activities or not? What triggers different sentiments, warmth, excitement or feeling?

• Social Drivers – The more we seek interactions, they become (or should become) meaningful and enduring. These connections allow us to think and relate, deepen the association.

As we also seek out others’ accomplishments, can this trigger ideas, principles or actions that we can apply in what we are doing. What can we offer that meets different desires, and aspirations, prompts dialogues and might reflect for instance, a more caring and sharing viewpoint. Drivers that make us more socially relevant and connected.

• Technology Drivers – These tend to be better leveraged and understood, in collaborative methods and techniques, ones where we can demonstrate, and connect the physical and virtual world, that moves us to better, clearer, even faster transactions. Technology is a really powerful enabler of innovation if you tune into the four fast-moving disruptive forces of social, mobile, cloud and analytics that are all driven by an explosion of data and fuelling a new era of innovation for many.

Imagine if you can harness technologies application and ‘raw’ power, there becomes a higher chance of finding the needle of useful innovation insights that lie within in the binary haystack. As you learn to analyse and sort these technology drivers, can give you new insights into different trends, patterns and needs, that might even radically alter the meaning within your business and how and what you offer, with even new business models emerging from the evaluations.

• Environment Drivers – these become critical. The more we encourage the right environment the more we create a culture that others can relate to. A climate that encourages, and underlines the determination of bringing in diversity, collaborative and distinctly different behavioural patterns that encourage even more to join in, relate and participate in generating ideas and solutions. By providing a welcoming environment you can drive growing awareness, trust and shared understanding that builds a very powerful set of innovation drivers if the Environment thinking is right and tuned in to the world of what needs to be reflected within your products and services..

• Measurement Drivers – We are all familiar with the classic input, process, outputs and outcomes we strive to find measures for, good or bad. I tend to look for measurement in the knowledge that is being driven through an organization in its absorptive capacities of accessing, anchoring and eventual diffusion. If we measure actual utilization or assimilation then can we explore these in deeper ways to draw out the aspects that make up both tacit and explicit outcomes.

We also need to keep focused on time-related activities, speed of innovation to market as well as project deliverables and make different connections on what this might possibly mean. Measures can drive change if they are well thought through and connected, both to the business need and more importantly, to the individual’s own understanding of its relevancy. Make your measurements more dynamic, less static by ‘seeing them differently’

• Marketplace Drivers – Today it is all about speed and pace, accessing the changing conditions and pressures coming from the marketplace. The a constant need in understanding the rate of change dynamics to work out your fit in new innovation offerings.

We need to become far more tuned into pattern recognition, contexts of the forces at work. We need to appreciate the rivalry and competitive hunger. Above all it is figuring out the customer’s unmet needs and non-stated ones, so all these market force complexities can be worked through in your mind and ongoing evaluations.

Tuning in to the market forces gives an abundance of new thinking to work into your products and services.

• Design Drivers – approaching issues and challenges with more of a design thinking hat can help identify a number of hidden drivers. The more we experience and experiment, the more we tune into the power of stories, narratives and experiences. This heightens our awareness the more we practice looking ahead.

Equally looking back it can reveal much more in our designs and what made up our thinking (at that time). Fashions and traditions, how we work today, how we worked in the past – and how different in the future – will influence much in our innovative thinking. We need to open up to experiences far more.

We need to look for improving flows and reducing barriers, making different combinations of potential richness and innovation promise, we need to focus on function and form far more, that more human-centred need and always look for improving the degrees of freedom and ease of purchase. For example, working towards the ‘one-click away’ concept for our customers in making their transactions easier.

• Rational Drivers – Organizations survive by their rational drivers, be this strategic architecture, management systems and innovation processes. Those processes and procedures are where you are always looking to achieve and drive execution and results through improving productivity and creativity as well as working constantly at clarifying the interventions, controls and monitoring.

The rational drivers, if well set up, can make such a difference to being ‘in control of all the innovation activities or not and should constantly be challenged for redundancy or improving upon. Innovation Governance is a classic place for constantly working through the rational drivers and keeping faith in the decisions made and guidance given.

Having a rational opinion within your team has great value in keeping random thoughts more ‘grounded’ to the task at hand.

• Intelligence Drivers – The whole focus is on knowledge generation and recognition, in awareness, competencies needed and seeking diversity of interpretation.

The underlying collection of intellectual capital, our intangible source, needs to keep feeding in the knowledge stock to allow ideas, concepts and outcomes to flow. Ones that drive to transform intelligence into tangible outcomes are so important to yield fresh value and lead to improved commercial outcomes.

Sadly it is often under-appreciated and not allowed ‘it’s’ right amount of digesting time to allow all the connections to be made to piece together something completely different and potentially valuable in new innovations. Listening to different people’s views values intelligence.

Looking around these drivers of change can yield very different thinking, prompt different actions and produce different innovation results. Get your team to discuss each of these change drivers to unearth new innovation possibilities.

Why not go and give these a ‘team test drive’ in exploring, focusing on each of these individually. Ask what can they do to alter your current thinking on your approach to your products and services.

By getting into this regular habit of working around these different drivers of change will keep your innovation engine in much better shape, more in-tune to accelerate away with better innovation outcomes. These can be designed to stimulate and really trigger the imaginations, often with the result of you making some unexpected connections.

Finding new spaces that differentiate your product or service offerings as radically differently perhaps, that improve on the ones that are presently within your existing portfolio and development process. The end result is a significant improvement in both the quality as most important and also the number of your options, so new concepts can emerge from this exploration of the different drivers of change.

Perhaps you just even simply ‘drive away’ leaving everyone else just watching you pull away in new competitive ways, with you knowing where and why you are making real change within your innovation activities and what prompted this. Recognizing the need for different innovation evolution is a big part of the ongoing battle we are all needing to discover..

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and has been significantly revised. With their permission, I have republished this original concept by deepening the thinking on this within this post here.

I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Exploring the Drivers of Innovation Change first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

Do I throw myself off the building or decide to listen a little longer? It really is forcing me to think.

Today it seems whenever I pick up a business book each chapter has a section on it.

Also, I seem not to be able to not fall over all the articles extolling its virtues, I mindlessly “Google it” and you can see your whole life flash before you, if you decided to investigate this seriously.

What am I talking about? 

Well, nothing other than Design Thinking. I know, most of you are so heavily into this you feel you might as well ‘flip’ over to the next article but are you, really?

Design thinking is a mindset

If we believe we can make a difference and even have gone that one step further, many never seem to get there, where we have an intentional process to get us to new relevant solutions that do actually create a positive impact. Then we are getting closer to that ‘magic point’ of transforming ourselves and those complex challenges, into opportunities to be designed and developed to make that difference. Now that would not be such a bad place to be.

Someone has talked me off the ledge, I give in and I want that embracing mindset

• One that allows me to be human-centred where empathy and understanding of others’ needs take precedence.
• One that allows me to be even more collaborative, where I can link my (great) mind with the views of others, those who can bring multiple perspectives into my own thinking.
• A place where optimistic thinking prevails, where you chase for solutions that overcome multiple constraints and the work becomes an enjoyable process.
• Finally, somewhere where it is allowed that you become ’experimental’, given permission to fail and learn from your mistakes. Why? Because you become resilient, you bounce back with different ideas, you seek out important feedback on them, and then you learn to iterate even better than before.

You are a work-in-progress of that forward momentum. You become an experimenter and this ‘magic pill’ called design thinking is all about learning by doing. You begin to believe and gain new confidence that new, better things ARE possible and you can make them happen. That gives you real optimism.

So I’ve come off the ledge, have you?

What will design thinking get you? The chance to be more involved in collaboration, one that permits me to be more creative to boost my confidence and where I can learn new ways to engage with others in a defined process and a process that will help me get unstuck, sounds like it is more fun than where I have been. Maybe somewhere near you, there is a Design Thinking AA group all chanting “one day at a time”.

So what does this Design Thinking process look like?

(Image source: IDEO)

So we need to start learning how to put this design thinking into more everyday practice

Design thinking really is ‘design doing’ or ‘design making’ than simply just thinking. It leads to the upfront framing before solutions are explored. The framing and solutions need to be separated. The pleasure of design thinking is it’s an iterative process, it wants you to experiment, build prototypes to develop your knowledge, go out and test them, talk about them and progressively validate the concept.

It brings ambiguity into a sharper understanding that eventually moves from all the divergence that initially surrounded it, into a growing convergence. It allows you to move from a concept or initial idea, through a number of working hypotheses, eventually into a final product, business model or service, that is not just new to the world but seen as valuable and an improvement on the existing solutions.

The great thing about design thinking: it’s evolving itself
We are relating design thinking to a great set of tools that can help identify and execute opportunities for growth and innovation. Darden Business School has been leading from the front in this, alongside Ideo and if we just consider ten of these, can you within your organization feel comfortable that you are actually applying these in your innovation practices?

These are:

• 1) Visualization
• 2) Journey mapping
• 3) Value Chain analysis
• 4) Mind Mapping
• 5) Rapid concept development
• 6) Assumption testing
• 7) Prototyping
• 8) Customer co-creation
• 9) Learning launches and finally
• 10) Storytelling

How many of these practices are you building into your innovation process to explore and exploit?

I’m very much into Divergent and Convergent thinking
You need both to explore and exploit the multiple possible solutions.

Divergent thinking is the ability and opportunity to offer different, unique or variant ideas adherent to one theme, while convergent thinking is the (eventual) ability to find the ‘correct’ solution to the given problem. You encourage and ideate many solutions, both possible and impossible, and then use convergent thinking to move towards a realizable resolution or solution.

I use this ‘divergent and convergent’ structure for many of my workshops, it allows for broader engagement and involvement and that eventual drawing together from this process. Once or twice you have to be nimble on your feet to move from one to the other but the discipline comes from timing these as shared spaces.

The focus becomes one on Validity

Seeking valid answers is the crux of Design Thinking. The process really is a “knowledge funnel” according to Roger Martin, ex Dean of Rotman School of Management. You keep ‘driving’ towards this eventual ‘validity’ by encouraging a future-oriented view. To think in the ‘future’ we do need to think differently, as most of our minds are caught up in the here and now and that tends to keep us locked in the status quo.

We need to design in a different mindset. Envisaging a future state is not easy, it requires observation, imagination and potential for configuration. We need to seek out patterns; we need to keep re-framing our thinking. Design thinking becomes an essential part of that set of abilities.

So to be relevant, you need design principles

(Image source: IDEO)

If we think about inspiration, ideation and implementation we already lift ourselves out of our everyday. What does it take to seek out and strengthen those higher-impact connections and relationships? What does it take to move beyond the existing and strive to define some more high-impact challenges, then how do we amplify the potential impact?

We need principles, and design thinking can allow you to follow a clear pathway to the realization of better innovation. Can you feel it is beginning to surround you too?

Jump but this time jump into design thinking, it might help you turn your ideas into those things that can really have an impact on your future and your organization.

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Publishing note:  This blog post was originally written on behalf of Hype and with their permission I have republished it on my own site. I recommend you should visit the Hype blog site where they have a range of contributors writing about a wide-ranging mix of ideas and thoughts around innovation, its well worth the visit.

The post Inspiration, Ideation and Implementation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.