Earlier this year I was very fortunate to have a conversation with Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design. You can read the complete interview here at Aol Autos.
… at the end of the day, I do not tell them to move a line exactly 50
mils lower or higher or more to the left or more to the right, because
if the boundaries are too narrow you really kill all the creativity. I
try to motivate people to think for themselves about the solution and
how they could achieve the goal… Even if I have a solution in my
mind, it is just one possible solution. There might be ten other
possible solutions that are maybe much better, but by giving a
direction that is too detailed or showing a solution, a way to the
solution that is too detailed, I kill all the creativity. One of my
major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of
creativity.
This feels very much to me like a "cultivation mindset". Instead of trying to push his ideas through the system at Porsche, Mauer is trying to develop the ideas of others. He is a curator, a director, a cultivator. As you can see from the stunning new Porsche 918 Spyder pictured above, his approach speaks for itself.
It's just hard to have robust answers about an unknown future state.
Too frequently, taking the time to answer "What about…" questions
doesn't bring you any closer to achieving the goal of creating booming
growth businesses.
I like his essay because it is a nice way to frame the importance of Principle 10: Baby steps often lead to big leaps. By asking too many questions, Scott says, firms avoid taking the kinds of small actions which would actually yield answers. As I noted in my writeup of Principle 10:
As obvious as it may seem, starting something is essential to its
completion. But often times people can't accept the challenge in front
of them, and so they find myriad ways to avoid doing something: budget
reviews, scoping meetings, taking sick time, eating pizzas, buffing
that feature on your last project, surfing Facebook… all fine ways to
delay dealing with reality.
The problem with shifting from "smart talk" to "right action" is that you may end up not looking so smart, at least in the short run. You may do everything right, but you'll still fail, at least in the short term. The trick is to be able to take a longer-term view in which each small failure becomes part of a stairway to success. We learn a lot when things go wrong, because we're forced to reexamine our beliefs and assumptions about how the world works, and in doing so we are more likely to arrive at a hypothesis which, when acted upon, will create value in the world.
For the solo entrepreneur or inventor, this is as easily said as done. For the rest of us who live in large organizations, we can't expect to fail over and over and succeed unless the larger organization is set up to understand. For that we need another innovation principle, which I will discuss here soon.
This talk by Bill Gates was by far the most important given at TED last week (if not my favorite one).
The equation he presents is extremely powerful in the way it structures the conversation around energy and society. Simply put, something has to go to zero, but only one thing can realistically go to zero.
I also found fascinating his discussion of a nuclear power plant which burns depleted uranium as a fuel. Audacious and of a level of complexity which is hard to fathom, this "nuclear Yule log" could offer the kind of radical step-function we need to meet the needs of the equation he presents.
This is twenty minutes well-spent. My hat is off to Bill Gates for helping all us become more informed citizens, and for equipping us with a formidable tool for critical thinking. This was TED at its best.
There were a couple of other talks which also knocked my hat in the creek, so I'll post those as soon as they go up.
"Ship early, ship often, iterate and listen to all of the feedback. I
think that if you have the courage to listen and the ability to take
the feedback and iterate on your product, you will better off than
waiting and trying to deliver something perfect. Imagining your product
or project as a way of communicating with people and thinking of
product development as a conversation might be one way to think about
it."
Things have been a bit quiet here at metacool over the past few weeks. While I've been busy dealing in gnarlyness over at my other blog, I haven't forgotten about the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life.
In fact, I've recently written two articles which might be of interest to y'all:
I'll be writing more about metacool-ish topics in the world of transportation for Aol Autos in the coming months, and maybe more at BusinessWeek, too. Writing essays like these is not at all like the process of blogging (at least for me), so it was great to have great editorial help from Helen and Reilly to help me along the way.
"Today, what defines the most
innovative, and the most successful, people is their willingness to fail. And,
that’s especially true in journalism, media and advertising…
This is the key to the future for all of us. It’s not how we
deal with success but how we embrace and learn from failure that will define
all of us during the Great Inflection…
Instead, dare to fail. Fail fast. Learn from failure. Build
on failure. Share failure. Understand failure.
Most of all, enjoy failure. Life is so short. Hold nothing
back."
Earlier this week I made the following statement on Twitter (if you're interested in following, I'm @metacool):
Innovating takes courage and faith. You've got to jump from the plane believing your chute is going to pop.
Having thought about it more this week, that statement isn't right. Parachuting out of a plane is not a good metaphor for the act of innovation. Instead, it's all about being able to jump out of planes in a way that's more akin to this:
Don't try this at home, kids. Or this, for that matter.
The reason the parachuting metaphor doesn't work for me is because it makes innovating out to be a solo activity based around a linear, I-have-safety-net process. But, in my experience, jumping out of the plane without the parachute seems closer to what actually happens in the art and science of bringing cool stuff to life: when you start the process of bringing something new in to the world using design thinking, you don't know where you'll end up or what is going to be like getting there, but you do know that you can always rely on an iterative, intersection-focused design process achieve your end goal. This concept is illustrated well by three key elements of this video.
First, in this jump, Travis makes the leap knowing that he has a premeditated process for landing safely. There's quite a bit of on the spot improvisation happening in those long seconds after he jumps, but clearly he has a rough sense of what needs to happen and when. In a similar way, innovating with a design process to guide you feels much the same way — beforehand you don't know exactly when you'll put each component part in to play, but you certainly are intimately familiar with all the tricks and tools at your disposal. And practice makes perfect.
Second, it's all about the team. Innovation may start with an "I", but the reality of making it so given a problem of even mild complexity calls for a team effort. It's a team that gets Travis to the ground safely, and in the same way, a tight, interdependent design team can do things that would be impossible if undertaken alone. In the course of the design process, we become each other's parachutes, as it were.
So, allow me this opportunity to rephrase my original statement:
Innovating requires courage and optimism. When making a leap in to the unknown, you must have faith that your team and process will take you to where you want to go.
Having the courage to leap in the first place is the third and final lesson to takeaway from Travis's parachute-less jump. Without the courage to engage with the abyss with the audacity to believe that you can create something beautiful and valuable for the rest of the world to use, nothing valuable can ever happen.
So, with optimism as your co-pilot, figure out who can help you pull off those jumps you want and need to make in 2010, and go for it!
I hereby propose a new (un)holiday. I'm calling it an (un)holiday because it won't be an occasion for grilling meats and drinking spirits (though that could happen, I suppose). It's not a day of vacation, for it is meant to remind of us to be mindful of our approach to working through certain types of problems. It is not a day for celebrations, but it is celebratory in nature: it celebrates not just an event, but an entire way of being.
I hereby declare December 17 to be Innovating Day.
Innovate. Take action. It's about the verb — innovating — and not the noun. Personally, I'm tired of talking about the noun innovation and reading books about that noun, and only want to help people and organizations get in better touch with their creative confidence so that they can go out and innovate. Trying to understand how to get to innovative outcomes via a process analyzing the inputs and outputs of innovation is akin to trying to understand love by reading textbooks on biology and genomics. I'd wager that the best lovers in history didn't read books on the subject. Much better, methinks, to go out and do it in order to understand it. Love, innovate, do, live: you'll come to understand your own self and process in due time. Which is the whole point.
Today is Innovating Day because December 17 marks the anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright completing the first controlled flight of a heavier-than-air machine. The Wrights were nothing if not intuitive innovators, deeply in touch with a personal design process which allowed them to go where no man had gone before. I won't pretend that the Wrights followed any of the principles of innovating which I've been discussing here over the past year, but I will declare that those principles are largely inspired by the lives of the Wrights. In particular, the events of December 17 helped inspire these specific principles:
I'd like to ask you to do one thing today: as you work your way through a situation that's new within the context of your own life experience, be it big or small, try to mindful of your approach to the situation. Try to see of you can apply any of the principles of innovating to your task at hand. If you're stuck, I highly recommend proceeding with Principle 3 as a starting point.
So, please spread the news and let your friends and loved ones know that December 17 is Innovating Day.
One final thought: as the great Gordon MacKenzie wrote, "Orville Wright didn't have a pilot license". You don't need a degree from a fancy program in design thinking or engineering to start being innovative.
I've had the pleasure of hanging out with Sean Bonner recently, as we've both been participating in Neoteny Singapore Camp 1 for the past few days.
We spent a fun afternoon on Monday having some design reviews with entrepreneurial student teams at Nanyang Technological University (if you want to see a cool example of some killer startup thinking and doing coming out of Singapore, check out Phokki ). We wrapped up the afternoon by debriefing with faculty members over some bubble tea in the student canteen, where Sean shot this photo:
This placard is affixed to each and every table in the canteen. I like it because it comes off feeling okay and not too big-brotherish relative to what it could have been. The messaging here is very subtle, and its author would make a great brand manager. The use of the word "hog" makes it feel less institutional than these things usually sound like, and the quote in bold is a nice signoff. This small sign felt friendly but focused, just like all the folks at NTU. I maintain that, at that end of the day, the power of a brand comes down to how you make people feel, and that those feelings are driven much more by the sum of many fractal interactions than by the positioning statement on your website.
"The future of the planet is becoming less about being efficient, producing more stuff and protecting our turf and more about working together, embracing change and being creative.
We live in an age where people are starving in the midst of abundance and our greatest enemy is our own testosterone driven urge to control our territory and our environments.
It's time we listen to children and allow neoteny to guide us beyond the rigid frameworks and dogma created by adults."
