Here are four big questions to ponder:

1. What is the most pressing problem to solve?  Why?
2. Your biggest fear?
3. Three global leaders who will set next decade’s course?
4. Your most cherished value?

All four questions were asked of people attending Brainstorm 2006, including yours truly.  Here are my answers:

1. Reversing the trend of environmental degradation and moving to a new paradigm of consumption.  Efforts to slow the decline only delay the inevitable and fail to acknowledge the growth of prosperity-driven consumption — not necessarily a bad thing — across the globe.  e need to establish new ways of creating and supporting prosperity that enable growth without destruction.
2. Our seeming inability to prevent genocidal behavior.
3. John McCain, Hugo Chavez, Linus Torvalds
4. Optimism

See more answers from other bloggers at the conference, including Ross Mayfield, Dan Gillmor, and Rebecca MacKinnon

The WSJ ran an article the other week about the flaws of brainstorming as a way to generate new ideas.  As someone who has been formally trained in the art and science of brainstorming, and who has been a passionate practitioner of the process for over 15 years, I found the article disappointing.  I’m not a brainstorming fanatic — I only use it when it’s appropriate to the task at hand, just as I wouldn’t use a baseball bat to whisk egg whites — but it rankles me when reporters don’t do their homework and write about something when they’re clueless.

And what should that homework have been?  For a comprehensive and wildly entertaining rebuttal to WSJ’s argument, I must turn to my Stanford d.school colleague Bob Sutton.  He points out the flaws of the WSJ article on many levels.  Here’s my favorite part of his critique:

Not one one of these experimental studies on "brainstorming
performance" has ever been done in an organization where it is work
practice that is used as a routine part of the work.  Paulus wrote me
some years back that he tried to recruit some "real" organizations that
did real creative work, but had no luck. To put it another way, if
these were studies of sexual performance, it would be like drawing
inferences about what happens with experienced couples on the basis of
research done only with virgins during the first time they had sex.

I’m really happy that Bob has started blogging.  He brings a wise yet fresh voice to the dialog on innovation, organizations, and design thinking:  www.bobsutton.net

I’m a big fan of knowing by doing.  I’m an even bigger fan of CEO’s who know of what they speak because they know by doing.  If you haven’t read it yet, Bruce Nussbaum has written a great post about how a CEO who doesn’t "get" technology might not be able to command a towering compensation package in the future. 

True Story: in the process of coming up with the Firefox design project for my Creating Infectious Action class at Stanford, Mozilla VP John Lilly and I held many of our working meetings using virtual networking tools — call it Web 2.0 if you want.  Our killer app?  World of Warcraft.  Beyond just being The New Golf, the private chat feature in World of Warcraft was a great way for the two us — busy people with young families — to find some time to talk on a Friday night without the overhead of conference calls, mobile phones, etc…

Plus, it’s more fun than being in a conference room.  Don’t ever underestimate the fun factor.  (or my ability to rationalize my subscription to World of Warcraft)

Where are you learning by doing today?

Asa Dotzler from Mozilla has written a nice post celebrating the achievements of student teams from the Creating Infectious Action (CIA) class I’ve been co-teaching this quarter at the Stanford d.school.  Here’s a nice excerpt:

After some initial brainstorming with Diego in March and an afternoon in April talking to the CIA class, we saw the first round
of work the student teams put together. At that time, there were about
six projects and each one had something really cool going on. I
especially liked the Faith Browser project because they took the
challenge of reaching a niche audience with Firefox extensions —
something I think we should do a lot more of.

The class has moved to other CIA assignments but many of the student
teams continue to iterate on their approaches to creating infectious
action around Firefox — and some have even launched entirely new
efforts.

What’s really exciting to me about all of this is how these small
teams (just a few people each) were able to come up with novel ways to
create attention and action around Firefox quickly put those plans into
action. That a dozen projects were designed and put into the wild —
generating thousands of Firefox downloads, in just a couple of weeks
time should be a huge motivator to all of us.

Mind you, this Firefox work was done in just two weeks by six teams with four students each.  And these are Stanford graduate students from the schools of business, engineering, education, and humantities, so they each have three or four other classes assigning work.  And the teams had to start with scratch — all they were given was the goal of "find a way to spread Firefox to audiences not currently consuming it".  They had to start with ethnographic research to understand why people don’t use things like Firefox even though they’re better and cheaper (read: free) than any alternatives.  Then they formulated ideas of what could spread and how to spread and then and went, as we like to say in CIA, and "prototyped ’til they puked".

I’m so proud to be associated with this group of people! 

What I love about this class is that it isn’t school, if school is a state of mind where everything is theoretical and abstract, up to and including the "real world".  If anything, being in class felt like being the front lines of any "work" project I’ve ever been associated with.  The downside of that classroom environment is that, as I heard loud and clear from students last week, it’s difficult to provide crisp and clear performance feedback.   The upside is that CIA is a weekly reminder that none of us are really able to "know it when we see it".  While we did spend time in class discussing formal theories of how memes diffuse through populations, those formal theories couldn’t tell us which, if any, of the Spread Firefox projects would hit it big.  As it turns out, Firefoxies has been generating an order of magnitude more downloads than any of the other solutions.  FaithBrowser, a very, very clever solution which I would have said was going to blow everything else out of the water, hasn’t hit volume yet.  But it could well do so — all of these projects, I believe, are following different S-curves. 

The point is, you’ve got to build it before you see if they’ll come.  And if they don’t, you can keep on building…

When it comes to innovation, it’s sexy to think about how to make disruptive innovation happen, but it’s routine innovation — making
mainstream offerings better for existing users — that brings in the cash that
keeps the lights on.  Autoweek recently ran an article about what it feels like to develop new products at Honda.  I think it’s a valuable look inside a high-functioning organization designed to serve up innovation on a routine basis. 

Here are some of the key things that Honda does to increase the odds of making good cars, year-in, year-out:

1. Know how to turn bubble-up ideas into tangible offerings:  the Ridgeline wasn’t something that popped out of a strategic planning initiative, but came from passionate people cobbling together a prototype which proved it could be a viable, mainstream offering so that Honda’s decision making process could then allocate the resources needed to get it to market.  Many organizations don’t know what to do with good ideas which don’t come out of their strategy group, even if they recognize them as good ideas.
2. Make clean, efficient decisions:  fly to Japan with a solid business case which points to a proof-of-concept prototype.  Make a quick decision.  Spend little if any time ever debating or defending that decision again.  Focus scarce energy instead on making the Ridgeline or the Civic as good as it can be.
3. Practice evidence-based management: when the Civic development team believed in a specific product feature (summer tires instead of all-weather tires), but knew that a senior manager did not value those tires, they were able to put together a case which was not only heard, but allowed to lead to a favorable outcome.  This is an example of management relying on evidence and not just opinions to guide decision making.  When management forces its opinions even though real marekt evidence exists to the contrary, the odds of creating good stuff really drop.
4. Know by doing:  as the leader of the Ridgeline project, Gary Flint wasn’t isolated from reality by layers of managers.  He lived the details of the project to the point where, as he says in the article, he would even dust the office.  If you’re in there dusting, you’re probably also walking around, hearing and seeing the realities of the project.  And if you know those, you’ll know the critical things to focus on.  Honda has a long culture of knowing by doing, and of putting people in leadership positions who know — really know — the nuts and bolts of the business.
5. Solve for happiness:  Honda has long believed in creating an environment where people who design, make and market things can be happy.  When it comes to innovating on a routine basis, I think the biggest thing an organization can do is set people up to be happy — routinely — as they go about their work.

My latest BusinessWeek Online column is now live. It’s titled Think Big, which isn’t a reference to the size of my skull (which is rather large), but to the idea of designing market offerings from a larger point of view which includes — but is not limited to — the surrounding business context.

I wrote it to accompany a story called On the Real Cutting Edge, which looks at the work of ten leading design thinkers across a variety of domains.

Another example of the Director’s Commentary for design thinkers:  Lutz on the Saturn Sky

One could do worse (a lot worse) than to spending a few minutes learning about what makes the Sky tick from The Man.