When we attempt to bring new things in to the world, we will make mistakes and screw things up.  That, along with death and taxes, is a certain thing.

So, for individuals trying to make a difference, or for organizations trying to be innovative on a routine basis, a fundamental question must be asked and answered:  do we want to reward smart thoughts in the absence of action, or do we decide to celebrate the act of trying, even when it takes us to places of failure?  I say that we need to err on the side of errors of commission.  Doing must be more weighty than thinking or talking.

In the words of Bob Lutz:

Errors of commission are less damaging to us that errors of omission… taking no risk is to accept the certainty of long-term failure.

Obviously we need balance, and not everything can be about charging in and apologizing later.  It's good to listen to what the world is telling you and course correct as you go.  But a bias for action, and ways of rewarding action and penalizing inaction, will lead to remarkable things happening over time.

We must celebrate (and learn from) errors of commission and stamp out out errors of omission. 

This is number 15 in a series of 21 principles of innovation.  Your feedback is most welcome.

I saw this video clip earlier this week. I love it.

In it I see the following principles we've been discussing over the past few weeks:

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

Principle 6: Life life at the intersection

Principle 8: Most new ideas aren't

Odds are your innovation efforts will fail.  Bummer.  Big, big bummer.

It's tough to bring something new in to the world.  Your chances of survival improve with a process informed by design thinking, but it's very likely some key factor — across desirability, viability, or feasibility — will not quite be there, and things will go pear-shaped. 

This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to win, to make things happen.  Quite the opposite: because the odds are so low, it means working even harder, pushing as much as you can to get things right.  I don't know about you, but I really hate failing.  It feels bad when it happens from a big-picture point of view; I have no problem with a prototype failing (that's a good thing, per Raney's Corollary), but I loathe the idea of something failing at a systemic level.  Yuck.

But acknowledging that failure is a likely outcome enables us — if we work with the end in mind — to make a leap to a more productive state of being.  That state of mind is the focus of Principle 14.

This is number 13 in a series of 21 principles of innovation.  Your feedback, ideas, and comments are greatly appreciated.

Leading people to innovative outcomes has much more in common with the successful cultivation of gardens than it does with traditional, top-down, centralized, command-and-control management techniques. Whereas the later is concerned with efficiencies, coping with scarcity, and always being on top of things, cultivating is about embracing variance, abundance, and the idea of living at the bottom of things. A leadership model based on a cultivation mindset can be found in the following four defining behaviors of cultivators of innovation:

1) Being at the bottom of things

Flourishing gardens come from being at the bottom of things. Instead of pursuing the traditional management goal of being on top of things — with the lucrative by-product of being at the top of things — the leader-as-cultivator makes it their job to live simultaneously at the bottom and in the middle and on the edges, dealing with things that might seem like plain manure to outsiders.

It’s not lonely at the bottom. The bottom can be a messy place, but it is the wellspring of success when it comes to fostering creativity. With plants, as with people trying to act in creative ways, you can’t tell them what to do, but you can try to support what they need to do, matching essential resources to tasks at hand. This is not traditional, I’m-the-heroic-boss leadership. Instead, the creative cultivator takes satisfaction from tending to the health of the overall garden, and wisely leaves the kudos for smelling great and looking good to the roses.

2) Trusting what is there

Creative cultivators trust what is there. A wise cultivator resists the temptation to “dig up the seed as it is growing”, as it were, to check if people are being creative enough. Many breakthrough innovation initiatives are stifled by linear project timetables more appropriate to incremental efforts. The paradox of cultivating innovation is that confidence in outcomes is itself an enabler of innovation; a wise gardener knows that roses are the best authorities on the creation of rosiness, and until they bloom, only checks in to see if they need more food and water. Furthermore, creative cultivators trust that the right answers — though not necessarily the ones they would have thought up themselves — will emerge from their gardens. So much about what makes a creative organization tick is tacit; it is about what’s there and what it creates in an emergent way, rather than what a few brains wish to have happen via explicit processes and goals.

3) Embracing the ecosystem

By their nature, gardens are part of larger ecosystems. Healthy gardens readily accept inputs from the outside world. Rain, seeds, nutrients, soil: we needn’t worry where they come from, we just care about their integrity and how they help us grow good stuff. Encouraging variance — the generation of weird or unexpected ideas — is a key goal for someone cultivating a creative culture. Anything that encourages variance through the cross-pollination of ideas from outside sources (very much the function of bees) should be reinforced. And as we’re sadly seeing out in the world, gardens without the benefit of bees soon stop producing.

Thinking about the long-term health of all stakeholders in an ecosystem is also a signature act of a cultivator. Innovating is a long-term endeavor and requires a great deal of patience, investment, and fortitude. Actions that value short-term productivity over the long-term health of the garden and its larger ecosystem are not conducive to lasting success.

4) Taking a bird’s eye view

Finally, creative cultivators do all of the above while simultaneously curating the garden from a bird’s eye view. Managing a portfolio of creative endeavors requires knowing how many plants a certain piece of land can support and then pruning or culling as need be. As Principle 9 states, sometimes you have to prune (or kill) ideas and projects. Doing the most with the resources at hand,listening to what works and what doesn’t, and guiding growth to be something unique and wonderful – that is the essence of strategy, and of gardening as well. Most importantly, by taking a bird’s eye view, a creative cultivator creates the context for plants to grow in accordance with a strong vision of how the garden should evolve. In organizations, this means having points of origin that can inspire individuals to be creative in certain ways, and not others, and to innovate in the right directions.

Taken together, these four ways of leading should help innovations flourish. Instead of trying to manage innovation, we must move to a model of leadership that’s all about cultivating it.

This is number twelve in a series of 21 principles. Your feedback is most welcome.

Given all the challenges we face in the world, we need to everyone to innovate.  Everyone is potentially
creative and able to bring something new in to the world.  The idea that there two types of people: "creatives" and
everyone else, is but a myth, albeit a damaging one at that.  Up and down an organization, everyone needs time to innovate.

If you're sitting at the top of an organization, or in a position with a high degree of gravitational pull, you need time to innovate.  To get the most out of it, your time spent innovating should take the form of helping other people grow and setting things up to be successful.  Your innovations will deal with setting the stage in the right way for the right things to happen, and with architecting systems, teams, and structures so that appropriate behaviors emerge given the innovation challenge at hand.

If you're working on the front lines of an organization (where some might describe you as being at the "bottom"), you need time to innovate.  Because you are doing the critical work of the organization, you're the most in touch with the people who benefit from its offerings.  You can use the tools of design thinking to start making a difference today in how you make those people feel.  Figure out what they need that you're giving them, make some prototypes, and start testing them.  Cycle though that and improve the way things get done.  It takes time, but the potential benefits are enormous.

Note well that I'm not saying that everyone should be creative all the time.  Far from it: we need people to be executing when they should be executing.  Land that 747 safely, mend that broken leg, receive that shipment of returned goods, and file that tax return.  But for the critical questions of how, let's give everyone more time to make it all better.

This is the eleventh of 21 principles.  I really do appreciate your feedback and ideas.

When operating in the realm of the blank sheet of paper, where assumptions about how things might work outstrip the things you know will work, baby steps are a way to learn your way to success.  Granted, a big leap can also get you to your end goal, and will do so very quickly if you're lucky, but a leap into the darkness is very likely get you hurt.  Smaller steps allow you to assess the best path forward as you move forward, recognizing that for trailblazers, the path is of your own design. 

Baby steps are appropriate at the start, middle, and end of things.  This applies equally to individuals, teams, and entire organizations.

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.  By taking a huge problem statement and breaking it in to smaller chunks, baby steps make it easier to get going.  If you're stuck in foggy, uncharted waters, you can spend a lot of time trying to to shoot the stars to chart a course, or you can raise the sail and move a bit, then reassess and move a bit more.  Baby steps help you get going, fast.

In the messy middle of an innovation initiative, baby steps allow you to quickly explore multiple directions in parallel, rather slaving to polish one idea before you know it is The One, or even The Best One We Have Now.  Big leaps make for expensive bets. Baby steps, on the other hand, are by their nature cheaper to pull off, so you end up spending less money per unit of learning, and that learning comes sooner.  And it's easier to kill off ideas when they're expressed as baby steps, because there's no huge sunk investment tempting you to spend more time and money in order to save the project or your career.  Most important of all, per Boyle's Law, baby steps increase the frequency of feedback you receive, because you can bring  a lot of baby step prototypes to quick meetings.  You learn a lot this way.

Many "overnight" innovation successes are actually the result of years of baby steps which added up to a big leap.  That  E Ink screen in your Kindle is the result of years of incremental innovations in the marketplace that took the technology from something best suited to department store signage to its current form, which is a truly remarkable breakthough. Those years of patient baby stepping at E Ink allowed them to accumulate a huge amount of explicit and tacit knowledge about how to design and make these displays; the more they learn, the harder it will be for others to duplicate their efforts with one big leap.  Baby steps can also lead to capability growth.  If you look at the product launch history of a firm like Honda, you see a steady beat of incremental product launches scheduled with presidential election regularity.  Every time Honda launches a new Accord, they not only put a better product in the market, but their people and systems evolve as well.  Stack all those launches up, and you can see why car companies that default to a "big leap" strategy are not doing so well.  Finally, baby steps can open up unforeseen opportunity streams in the guise of real options.  The folks behind Guitar Hero and Rock Band didn't set out to create the world's biggest ever living room music entertainment system — they were just MIT guys interested in making the music performance experience more accessible to all.  Via fourteen years of patient experimentation and baby stepping, they got there, big. 

Baby steps often lead to big leaps. This is the tenth of 21 principles.  Your feedback, comments, and ideas are most welcome.