Take a minute to scan the montage of images I've collected above.  What emotions do they evoke, and what thoughts do they bring to mind for you?

As I look at them, here are the adjectives bouncing around my head:  alive, vibrant, crisp, beautiful, engaged, dynamic, iconoclastic, memorable, deep, intriguing, ingenious, timeless. 

To pull this montage together, I made quick list of the people, ideas, and objects which have made an impression on me over the years, and then I selected a subset which represented the whole of the list.  If you ask me about any of them, I could spend the better part of an hour explaining how they've created meaning for me, how they've influenced the course of my life, how they represent what's good in the world.  Your list is undoubtedly different — it should be different — and you may question my taste (yes, I do have an abiding fascination with cars shaped like an Air Jordan shoe), but I'd encourage you to take five minutes now (yes, now!) and jot down your own list.

(tick tock)

Are you done?

I'd love to hear about your list.  Even without being able to see it, I'd argue the following:  every choice on your list represents a person who made choices.  A person who knew what they wanted and what they did not, what mattered and what did not, a person who was able to listen to everyone but then do what they thought was right.  In other words, a person with a point of view.

What is a point of view?  Simply put, it is a crisp accounting of what matters which allows one to say no.  In the process of trying to bring cool stuff to life, it is so easy to say yes to everything.  It's much harder to say no to the things that don't matter in the end, and that's where the art part of the equation plays out.  But I can say one thing definitively:  if you don't have a firm point of view about what matters, your chances of doing something remarkable drop to zero.  Great things happen when we make choices, and we make good choices when we know what we want.

Above all else, you must have a point of view.  Don't leave home without it.

This is number nineteen in a series of evolving principles of innovation.  As always, I humbly seek your feedback, critique, and better ideas.

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 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. 

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