Category Archives: innovating

The Five Ways of Pulse

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I really like this overview of the creation of the Pulse iPad app.  Written by Lisa Katayama of Fast Company, it succinctly captures the big things you have to do to bring something remarkable to market.  I especially appreciate the second of the five ways noted in the article:

Define: Are you focused and open to what your team
needs in order to thrive? Define your personal point of view in pursuing
your venture, and then think about what your end user, your team, and
your business need. Even if your end goal is to reach all 6.7 billion
inhabitants of the earth with your product or service, key in on a niche
user to start and identify what works best for him. By observing and
empathizing with the tech geek, for example, Kothari and Gupta were able
to define his need: a better way to catch up with older news and other
treasures that might get buried in linear feeds like Google Reader or
NetNewsWire.

Over the past year, I've outlined 18 of the 21 principles of innovation I've been hacking on.  The nineteenth principle happens to be "Have a point of view", and I think the expression of this principle above is just wonderful.  Knowing what you stand for, and what you don't, and what is important, and what is not, is fundamental.  Without that knowledge, I believe it is impossible to manage the tensions that come with bringing something new to life.  Having a point of view not only helps you make decisions, it helps increase the odds that you'll make good decisions — at least decisions that will feel good to the people you're designing for.  I suppose I should get my act together and write up those last three innovation principles…

I also dig this article because of what it says about the Stanford d.school.  First, I have to give a tip of my hat to my friends and colleagues Michael Dearing and Perry Klebahn, who created and taught the Launch Pad class wherein Pulse was created and launched.  They're incredible guys, and I consider myself very lucky to get to learn from them on a routine basis.  Second, when George Kembel and I wrote up the "napkin manifesto" for the d.school back in 2004, we had a vision of using "… design thinking to inspire multidisciplinary teams".  We thought it would be cool if the next pair of Hewlett and Packard, Filo and Yang, or Sergey and Larry found each other via the d.school.  Now, I'm not saying the Pulse is the new Yahoo, but it's very satisfying to see people at the d.school meeting each other, learning with each other, and working together to bring things to life which make a real impact out in the world.

Now that's way cool.

D.school kembel rodriguez manifesto

Some sage thoughts from J Mays

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I'm always looking for feedback on my evolving list of innovation principles.  What works?  What doesn't?  What's missing?

Last year Esquire ran this list of aphorisms from the mind of J Mays.  I've been holding on to this list since then, and this afternoon I took another look at it.  Seeing them afresh made me feel that a few fell naturally into some of my framework of innovation principles.  Is it narcissistic to take the thoughts of another person and put them into buckets of your own making?  Yeah, probably. 

Anyway, here I go… thinking by Mays, buckets by Rodriguez:

Principle 1: Experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world

"A designer is
only as good as what he or she knows. If all you know is what you've
garnered from fifteen years of living in Detroit, it's going to limit
what you can lay down. If you've had experiences around the world,
you'll be able to design a much richer story for people to enjoy."

Principle 2: See and hear with the mind of a child

"If you go into a
person's house and look at his surroundings, you'll see exactly who he
is. If you look at the same person in his car, you'll see who he wants
to be"

Principle 3: Always ask: "How do we want people to feel after they experience this?"

"What does the cutlery look
like? What's the plate look like? How's the food laid out on the plate?
Has the environment been completely thought through? Part of the reason
I go to a nice restaurant is to get the entire vibe."

Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't

"There have been more
not-quite-right Mustangs than Mustangs. It had gone a little bit off the
rails in the seventies, came back in the eighties, and went a little
off the rails in the nineties. We did a lot of research before we
designed the 2005, and we came to the conclusion that the ones that were
really important, the ones that everybody logged in their heart, were
between '64 and '70. I wanted the 2005 to feel like we were picking up
in '71. So I basically erased thirty-five years of Mustangs in order to
get the story focused in everybody's mind again."

Principle 18: Learn to orbit the hairball

"Success has a lot of fathers."

"Clichés are more correct than we give them credit for."

Principle 20: Be remarkable

"Believe it or not, there's an art to plowing a
field. My father had an exact way he wanted it done, a laser-straight
line over the length of the field. I just had to train my eye. If you
lay out the first line wrong, then all the other lines that you disc
will turn out crooked. There was a precision in those fields that I took
into automotive design."

Who says you can’t prototype software?

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Sometimes it's easy to dismiss the idea of doing some prototyping when the "thing" we're working on is as ethereal as a service offering or a software interface.  The usual suspect excuses are very predictable:

  • We can't prototype it because prototyping it is tantamount to building it
  • We need to design the entire interface if we're going to interact with it on the device, so why prototype it?
  • We don't have an interaction designer
  • We don't have a graphic designer
  • It'll take a few weeks to mock up the interface
  • We don't have time

But, as the video above shows, where there's a will, there's a way.  If you believe you can prototype it, you can.  Warning, shameless plug approaching: Elmo's Monster Maker was designed by some of my colleagues here at IDEO, and it's awesome.  Not only is it one of my kid's favorite apps, but it's one of mine, too.  It's fun, social, wacky, will make you giggle, and in the way of all good games, you just can't put it down. 

None of this happened by accident. Perhaps Mozart could dish out an entire perfect opera based on the music in his head, but for the rest of us, there's no substitute for getting something out quickly, and then improving it over and over and over until we have to ship it. Iteration makes perfect. Starting is the springboard to perfection.

Some relevant innovation principles:

A conversation with Jörg Bergmeister about interface design, the new Porsche 911 hybrid, and making green more red

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If nothing else, working on metacool over the past half decade has helped me meet a ton of people I would never have encountered otherwise.  And thanks to another friend I met via metacool, I recently had the great pleasure of meeting Jörg Bergmeister, one of the most talent racing drivers working today.

Those of you out there whose eyes roll back in your head whenever I talk about cars can rest easy (relaaaxxx — let those eyes roll baaackkk), because when Jörg and I met, we didn't talk about automobiles so much as about human-machine interface design and how new technologies may reshape the dominant paradigms of automotive design surrounding us today.  Our specific topic of discussion was the amazing new Porsche 911 GT3 R Hybrid, and yes we did geek out a bit on gearhead stuff at the beginning of our interview, but on the whole I think we ventured in to some very interesting territory.  In fact, we touched on many of the themes I surfaced in this post I wrote a while back about making green red.

By the way, have I mentioned how totally gnarly Jörg's 911 looks?

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My favorite part of our conversation came when I asked Jörg about how he stays inspired, and his answer was just wonderful:

Racing is the one thing I love — well, not the only thing, but I've
done it my entire life and it has been my hobby and I made it my
profession. I'm very fortunate to make my hobby my profession. I think
that's enough inspiration. I just love, love racing.

Words of wisdom.  Can you make your hobby your profession, and achieve a "cold fusion" state of permanent personal inspiration.  What a way to remain always inspired!  I love it.

By the way, have you ever noticed how much the nose of a modern 911 looks like the skull of the ur-land animal Tiktaalik? 

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Yeah, me too.

Innovation Principle 18: Learn to orbit the hairball

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If the process of bringing new things to life were a living, breathing organism, it would be a nasty beast!  It would be unpredictable.  It would consume as much as you dared to feed it.  Some days, it would really stink.  Yucko!  And it would have a tendency to chew up people and spit them out.  Most of all, though, it would hairy.  Really hairy — think dense forests of tangly, greasy, matted, hair, the likes of which make people run for shampoo, scissors, clippers, straight razors, and a blow dryer.

However, if you shave a hairball, there's nothing left.  You know, it's just a ball of hair, right?  But in that fuzziness is an unpredictable wellspring of creativity, which — if left to do what it will in in its own nonlinear way — is the source of the new and the wonderful.  Consequently, one must never give in to the temptation to shave the fuzzy hairball that is innovation.  As institutions and individuals, we have to learn how to live with the hairball and respect it.  If we get enough mileage under our belt, we may even come to relish being in situations of great ambiguity and fuzziness.  I know that I can't get enough of being there, which is why I do what I do. 

Organizations need to find a way to let the hairball be a hairy mess. The fuzziness of the innovation hairball makes its very presence uncomfortable for mature organizations.  Successful organizations have gotten to where they are by being able to sell, ship, and support things on a regular basis.  If the honest answer to the question "When will this be done?" is "We have no idea!" (which is what the hairball always says), a mature organization will be sorely tempted to lend clarity and structure to the hairball.  "Let's put you on a firm schedule with staged checkpoints!", it says.  "Here, let me clean up that mess of hair."  Instead, we have to be able to let the hairball be greasy and stinky, and learn how to celebrate it.  This is a hard thing to do, as leaving a pool of ambiguity unmopped rarely not squares well with meeting your quarterly numbers.  As to where and how to do that, well there are many books written around those subjects, so let's just leave it that we need to let the hair be fuzzy.  Don't shave it.  Find a place for it to grow.

To that point, my friend Bob Sutton wrote a wonderful post about his own experience of learning to respect the fuzzy front end.  In it he quotes Bill Coyne, who led innovation efforts at 3M for many years:

Finally, don't try to control or make safe the fumbling, panicky,
glorious adventure of discovery. Occasionally, one sees articles that
describe how to rationalize this process, how to take the fuzzy front
end and give it a nice haircut. This is self-defeating. We should allow
the fuzzy front end to be as unkempt and as fuzzy as we can. Long– term
growth depends on innovation, and innovation isn't neat. We stumble on
many of our best discoveries. If you want to follow the rapidly moving
leading edge, you must learn to live on your feet. And you must be
willing to make necessary, healthy stumble.

I really like Bob's post because of the way he relates the need for organizations to build up muscles around grappling with fuzziness with his own personal journey as a design thinker. 

As I've said earlier, at a personal level, being comfortable with the innovation process is largely a matter of learning by doing.  The more you're in hairy, fuzzy situations, and the more you find your way out of them, the more your confidence in your own creative process will grow.  At an individual level, if you want to be able to live in more innovative ways, you need to learn how to orbit the hairball.  That phrase, of course, is the title of Gordon McKenzie's masterpiece Orbiting the Giant Hairball: A Corporate Fool's Guide to Surviving with Grace, which occupies a hallowed spot on my bookshelf.  For me, McKenzie's masterpiece is a valuable personal "owner's manual", as it helps you find your own ways to avoid the temptation to shave the hairball.  It teaches you instead to find ways orbit it when necessary (which may be almost all the time for some folks).

Know thyself.  Understanding how to deal with ambiguity at a personal level is the key to unlocking one's creative confidence.  An organization which understands how to resist shaving the hairball, populated by people who know how to orbit the hairball, will be capable of bringing amazing things to life.

Know thyself.

This is number 18 in a series of principles of innovation.  It is an evolving work.  Please give me your thoughts, suggestions, and good ideas. 

Yeah, like he said…

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Yesterday I wrote about serendipity, purpose, and some words of wisdom from Joi Ito.  It just came to my attention that my friend John Lilly wrote a great blog post a while back dealing with many of the same themes, plus he ties them to the importance of living within a strong network.  Or in a less techie way of putting it, by surrounding yourself with great people and opportunities.

Here's an excerpt — I just love this stuff:

..for most of the important
turning points in my life, I treated them with a little less seriousness
than, you know, buying my next iPod. Now, I’m not saying that I didn’t
recognize that sometimes decisions would have effects, or that I didn’t
take them seriously. What I’m saying is that a bunch of decisions that I
thought were really important turned out to be not important at all,
and some things I decided to do just for fun changed everything (like
when I went to visit an old high school friend in Jamaica who would
eventually become my wife.)

Here’s a quick story to illustrate a turning point that I didn’t
realize until much later. When I was a junior in college, I had decided
to major in computer science, and was starting to get interested in
something called Human Computer Interaction — designing systems for
people to be able to use them effectively. I went to a lunchtime seminar
by a guy named Robert Cailliau — a physicist from Switzerland of all
places — and he brought with him a giant black computer called a NeXT —
Steve Jobs’ creation that would eventually turn into the Macintosh that
we know today. He started giving a demo of a program where you could
bring up a page full of text and pictures, and click on blue underlined
text to get to other pages full of text and pictures. And I remember
saying to myself, “Huh, I guess that’s sort of neat — text &
pictures, click click click.” And the next thing I remember was waking
up when everyone was gathering up all their stuff to leave — I had
fallen asleep — and missed, of course, the first demonstration I’d ever
seen (or most people had ever seen) of the World Wide Web. So there you
go — one of those powerful inflection points in my life — and I slept
through it.

…you
never know when a decision you make is going to have a profound effect
in your life. At least, I’ve never been able to tell. So my coping
strategy — what I do to make everything work for me — is try to put
myself into situations where there are tons of great choices, tons of
great people, tons of great outcomes possible — so that it makes the
odds that I make some really important & good choices that much
better.

Of course, it also helps to be smart, well-educated (formally and informally), and willing to work hard.  But obviously context and what you make of it really matters.

Focus on everything!

photo credit: Joi Ito

Do both, and focus on everything

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Joi Ito has taught me so much since I started reading his writing around seven years ago.  More recently I've been able to collaborate with Joi on some stuff, and I can now safely say that the only thing better than Joi on the web is Joi in real life!

Recently at IDEO we've been talking about the difference between having a vision and having a purpose.  A vision is something you shoot for, a point in the future, while a purpose is a point of origin, something that guides you.  We're of a belief that visions are tough to go after when you desire innovative outcomes because they tend to reduce emergent behavior and serendipity.  A single, defined point in the future may be better suited to a top-down, variance-eliminating organization trying to reach a single goal, rather than for one trying to exist in certain way, believing that a guiding purpose will ensure that the outcomes that do arise will be not only appropriate, but likely extraordinary.

Against that context, I just read Joi's latest blog post, Focusing on Everything, which is just wonderful.  Here's an excerpt:

One of the great thoughts in the book is the idea that you should set a
general trajectory of where you want to go, but that you must embrace
serendipity and allow your network to provide the resources necessary to
turn random events into a highly valuable one and
that developing that network comes from sharing and connecting by
helping others solve their problems and build things.

I heartily recommend reading the rest of Joi's post — it is powerful stuff.  As someone who took John Maeda's advice to "do both" to heart a few years ago, I find Joi's philosophy of life very reassuring. 

Focus on everything.  Yes, I think I will.

photo credit: Mizuka

When in doubt, just do good stuff

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Metacool Just Do Good Stuff

I found truth in a cup of yogurt today.

I was fortunate to have breakfast with my friend and collaborator Ryan Jacoby today, and he reminded me that, at the end of the day, it's all about making good stuff.  Yes, everything else in your business ecosystem has to be in place, but you need to sell good stuff.  An Apple Store without Apple products would be… not so good.

Back to the cup.  Having intended to purchase a cheap(er) lunch, I just walked out of Whole Foods with a more expensive lunch, natch.  Actually, at around six bucks for a frozen burrito and a couple of yogurts, it is not bank-breaker meal, but I am a semi-Mid Westerner and have a kids to send to college and I'm living in the land of massive taxation… but I digress.  Back to the cup: while wandering the isles, I fell prey to a pricing promotion, and though I can never justify a container of Siggi's yogurt at $2.49 per unit, I certainly was up for two of them being promoted at $2.00 a lid.  Yes, it would seem that I need to turn in my MBA, but I am not a perfect person nor do I want to go through life making rational purchase decisions.

And how very happy I am right now with spoon in mouth and a wallet $4.00 lighter.  Siggi's, for those of you who have not had the pleasure of sampling yet, has exquisite mouth feel.  It is thick without being clompy, smooth without feeling excessively processed.  It comes in some of the standard yogurt flavors — vanilla, blueberry, etc — but also in some unexpected ones, like grapefruit.  Love that grapefruit.  And none of the flavors feel like they feel off the back of a truck destined for IHOP; they are light and complex, not syrupy and bright.  There's a wonderful backstory to Siggi's, too:  the company is led by a passionate, entrepreneurial Icelander named Siggi who is crazy about his native skyr yogurt and so found a bunch of wholesome cows in New York and started cranking out skyr.  The packaging is eco-friendly and the graphic design meets my psychographic needs.  With all of this, $2.49 starts to feel reasonable.

There's no big punchline to this post.  Just do good stuff.  Just do good stuff.  When in doubt, repeat that under your breath:  Just do good stuff.