success

Tom's Inferno reflects many of the definitions of failure that the team had identified during a separate exercise. In the idea cloud buzzing around 'success' I saw:

Launch ~ work as a team ~ Red Stripe 2.0 ~ 100,000 users ~ confidence ~ GMC (Group Management Committee) happy ~ make money ~ gain respect ~ healthy ~ do it in six months ~ being hired permanently by Red Stripe ~ learning ~ making something cool

And around 'failure':

No product ~ fighting ~ getting fired ~ leaving the team ~ GMC don't like it ~ goes bust ~ egg on face ~ boring ~ incremental ~ old business model ~ shame

At the end of March Javier, the team coach, asked them each what success would look like.

Tom: 'Success would look like a really, really, really great website which kicked ass and set me up with doing something at The Economist or fun elsewhere. A kickass website.'

Mike: 'getting the green light from The Economist to do whatever we want to do.'

Steven: 'To have created something innovative, new, where peers and colleagues stood up and took notice... something that we'd get recognised for.'

Joanna: 'A thing, most likely a website, that impressed internally because whilst appearing to be something seemingly simple (we only have 6 months) it was clear it had significant future potential for The Economist Group, whilst paradoxically outsiders might see it as a fairly small development, unaware of its potential.'

Ludwig: ' Something fun to implement where people say "wow", that gets recognition. Something that's useful to the target group and useful to The Economist Group, that guarantees Project Red Stripe is not just a one-off.'

Stewart: 'Something I'm a serious part of.'

As always, recognition, visibility and making an impression were important for them. And why not? Why come up with an idea that nobody rated? But important to notice that one person's success is getting somewhere, another's is being recognised for it and a third's is being involved along the way.

Clearly, by their own definitions, Project Red Stripe failed. But what if the definitions were wrong in the first place? As Scott Anthony says in a thoughtful piece:

The Economist actually got exactly what it asked for: an innovative idea
that was ready to launch quickly. Had it been clearer up front that a critical
success factor was the ability to generate some kind of economic return, it is
possible that the Red Stripe team would have developed a vastly different
idea.

And that's exactly right. In the weeks they spent developing first the idea known as Bavaria (relating to universal primary education) and then Lughenjo (a broader, philanthropic, not-for-profit) the team were deliberately turning away from commercial innovations. Let The Economist Group, they said, make its next reputation as a doer-of-good and the core business can only benefit. They had come up with a radical innovation in a complete departure from the company's publishing past. They had a product in their sights but moved away from it in large part because of the reaction from the Group Management Committee (GMC).

Nothing they came up with was boring or incremental. Clearly, for the team members individually, the six-month stint was an extraordinary learning opportunity, which they took every advantage of. For The Economist the lessons and opportunities potentially emerging from the project are huge (there's more on this in the practical visionary). As Scott Anthony goes on to say:

Who knows? Perhaps The Economist will learn enough from its failures that
its next autonomous effort will have clearer directions and will follow a more
iterative path. Then Red Stripe will be hailed as a critical learning moment...

And, besides all that, if it is classified as a failure - and we do have a seeming appetite to classify things somehow - Professor Amabile, whom we meet in the last fart of the ferret, says that, 'if people do not perceive any "failure value" for projects that ultimately do not achieve commercial success, they'll become less and less likely to experiment, explore and connect with their work on a personal level. Their intrinsic motivation will evaporate.'

Dilemmas:

Almost everyone writing about creativity and innovation would agree on the importance of allowing, and attaching value to, failure. It's where the greatest learning takes place. But, if you have a one-off project like this and it fails it's almost by definition impossible to be pleased about that: personal learning may thrive on failure; innovation teams don't. So what is your position on failure honestly going to be?

motivations

The team had a conference call with Javier. Javier asked them about their personal feelings and motivations about the project.

The following extracts from their unprepared answers give a distorted and wholly unfair view of why the team were there. I quote them for several reasons:

Steven (who is wearing jeans): 'I'm hoping that my work will provide potentially an out from Beijing [after the six months of the project, he was due to return to his job there].... I'm interested in the glory. I think it's going to look really good on my résumé.'

Stewart (who is wearing jeans): 'I wanted to learn what it takes to start something... Part of it is to guide me on whether to leave my existing job. I'm a classic geek... Should I develop a separate work personality? My intention is to learn about how to be me.'

Ludwig (who is wearing jeans): 'For me it's also a personal development thing. I want to learn whether I can work in a team... Shall I go on being a journalist?'

Tom (who is wearing a cravat and waistcoat): 'I wanted to learn how to do start-ups... My big dream is to be a stand-up comedian and to write comedy... There's a revolution happening in media. It's one of the most exciting times you can even imagine.'

Joanna (who is wearing black and a very high collar and later said, 'I tend not to wear jeans because I like a degree of formality to get my head in the zone'): 'I think what I really like is being part of a process... I love this sort of exercise: making things come together... I do like belonging to something. Being part of this thing, with such kudos, is so good on your CV and a real privilege.'

Mike (who is wearing jeans): 'I wanted to do something I enjoyed more than my old job. I wanted to do something that proved that I can do something other than what I'm currently doing.'

Now, my reasons for quoting them:

First reason: the team made much of honesty and openness. One of the ten draft recommendations, which were then whittled down to seven for inclusion in the 'not a white paper' was: Be honest with each other. There were often times when team members felt that they didn't achieve this goal, which Stewart had named during the first week thus, 'We should be able to say to each other, "You're a bit slack."'

At the end, Mike summed this feeling up by saying, 'The unsaid stuff exploded a few times.' The unsaid stuff was what Tom had stuck under the table in Inferno early on. Mainly, what was unsaid, I think, were negative feelings that they had about each other. But, in situations like this one, I was struck by the team's remarkable frankness about themselves.

Learning to say the negative stuff about each other in a constructive way, and learning to hear it in an open and non-defensive way, is one of the toughest skills, in my opinion. We have very few role models for it. Few families can manage it. It's a skill that's intrinsically alien to children, politicians, journalists and even most teachers. Yet it's probably at the heart of almost any successful team. This team had that skill in very good measure.

Second reason: there was some debate later on about whether the team should have been offered a financial bonus for a successful outcome, or a share in the resulting business. Everyone except for Ludwig said that some kind of financial incentive would have helped:

Steven: 'It would have been different if we'd all had a financial stake, for sure. Much different.'

Yet, it was clear from the conversation and the websites and blogs that the participants had created as part of their applications, that the opportunity to work on a groundbreaking project like this for The Economist, to get away from the routine of their usual jobs and to have a chance of coming up with the next Google was already a massive incentive.

So what was it that led people to look for a further financial incentive? What was it that led Mike to say, 'I got the sense at one point that people were just turning up for work.'?

Probably it was connected to how the project was going. Had the team members felt that they were on the verge of creating the next Google, they would all probably have been happy with the kudos and happy just to be part of it. Mike had various thoughts on this, including blaming himself and a helpful suggestion which only Tom really took up:

I didn't make it big enough, aspirational enough. It should be people saying 'this could change my life, this is the thing I'm going to be remembered for'.

[I don't agree with him on that. Everybody knew it could change their life. That was the whale thing. If anything, in my opinion, it was too aspirational.]

Maybe people were too comfortable. I don't think it's anything to do with incentivising. If people had been out of a job at the end of the six months, that would have been an incentive. That's how most start-ups work.

[I don't agree with him on that, either. If people had been out of work, they would have come up with a business, for sure. But The Economist didn't need a business. They had a very good one already, thank you very much. In this case, the team found they had to do far more than come up with a business. Which is why, in part Lughenjo and HiSpace didn't happen - The Economist didn't need them enough.]

When you talk to other people about the idea, that's when you feel good. You feel more fired up and energised. We needed to get out and do that... Tom's good at that. He gets that anyway.

Third reason: people at work are just like people at home. They're not very grand. They want to feel OK about themselves, feel wanted, find out what sort of a person they really are, do something they can be proud of, make people laugh, have fun.

When I said in an early blog about the team that they needed a mother, I think that's what I meant. Because work has always been a very chilly business. Where do you go for a hug and a wail? They did need someone to make tea for them, but mostly they needed someone to ask them if they were OK and to find out what they wanted. Perhaps I meant that they needed a grandmother. Not like my grandmother who used to wander round the house with a steaming potty. A wise old babushka. Every team should have one.

Dilemmas:

Honesty, in many situations, including a marriage and an innovation team, can be a two-edged sword. In principle, it is highly to be prized. In practice, it may be carefully avoided.

If an innovation project is set up well, the drive for success 'should' be sufficient motivation for the participants. At the same time, not to give participants a stake in the project's eventual success can seem inequitable. Then again, trying to work out an equitable way of giving them a stake in something that hasn't even been thought of yet is almost impossible.

A classic conundrum: companies that really need to innovate are often the ones that don't have time for a project like this one. Those that have the time and resources and are already very successful are probably not motivated to implement the ideas their innovation teams come up with. How do you motivate a company (rather than its individual members) to be innovative?

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Credits:
Samovar: eye of einstein

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open innovation

Dr Henry Chesbrough had a good idea about innovation and wrote a book about it. In fact, the idea was so good that he wrote three books, several articles and launched a website about it. Along the way he interviewed hundreds of people who confirmed his hypothesis that there are two sorts of innovation: open innovation and closed innovation. These can be given capital letters thus: Open Innovation and Closed Innovation. Both can also be followed with the word paradigm, for good measure.

To save time, I'll use his own summary of the Open Innovation paradigm:

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.

Dr Chesbrough's idea is described as 'pathbreaking' on the jacket of his book, where several wise people are quoted fulsomely endorsing his idea. Scott Cook, Chairman of the Intuit Executive Committee, goes so far as to say that the book is both seminal and practical and 'provides the how-to for revving up your innovation engine for leaps of profitable growth'. I'm hopeful, confident even, that no-one will describe the present book/blog/Brain in that way.

On the strength of all this, I bought the book and read it on the train back from a birthday party in Oxford. At the party, important people like Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, Professor Robin Grove-White (former head of Greenpeace UK and Director of the CPRE) and Professor Richard Macrory, who was appointed by the UK Cabinet Office to lead a review on regulatory sanctions, talked about important things. I thought 'this is the sort of place where change begins really'. Surely it has to be as much about people as paradigms?

Anyway, in the Closed Innovation paradigm, a company uses insiders to have ideas, some of which it develops and commercialises in-house, using the profits partly to fund further research and idea-generation in-house. In the Open Innovation paradigm, in case your attention drifted during the bit about purposive inflows, the same company gets ideas from wherever it can and takes them to market through a combination of internal and external channels.

Red Stripe used a combination of both paradigms: insiders drew ideas in from outside, but then had their own idea, which they discussed widely with outsiders, before setting about commercialising it internally. It could, of course, have done any of those things differently. I don't have a view on whether it should have (though Dr Chesbrough does). I just think that innovation teams may find it useful to think carefully about this question at the outset.


Mike Seery's own conclusion was similar:

Some people had thought that our public call for ideas would yield the
killer idea. Others thought that they had it already. And the rest thought that
a decent dose of inspirational brainstorming would be needed.

Learning by doing ~ learning while waiting

But another thought in Dr Chesbrough's book caught my attention. In the foreword, John Seely Brown talks about two sources of learning: learning by doing and learning while waiting. John Seely Brown clearly likes this idea too, because he's put the whole of his foreword on his website, which is indicative of the closed loops in which this kind of discussion takes place. But it's another revealing thought for an innovation team. Certainly the Red Stripe team found and had ideas while they were waiting to decide which idea to take to market and while they were soliciting ideas from outside. But their Bavaria/Lughenjo idea evolved considerably in the course of 'doing' the business plan, talking to partners and getting ready to make their formal presentation to the GMC. It's from this 'doing' process that the final HiSpace idea emerged.

I think it's fair to say that some of the ideas that emerged from doing were more practical and practicable than many of those that emerged from the earlier waiting process. So, there's perhaps a case to be made for 'doing something', even at the outset, because it may reveal ideas of a different order.

Once again we can view the Red Stripe approach as a combination of the two. But the outcry (scroll down when you get there) that greeted their decision not to publish the ideas that were submitted by outsiders (and which was generally speaking based on an objection to a private company soliciting money-making ideas and then keeping them to itself) may have concealed a more important issue - namely that if they had allowed the 'world' to kick around and discuss the ideas that were submitted, they might have found that much of the process of evaluation, sifting, analysis and development of those ideas could have been done for them by people who, collectively, knew more about their viability than the Red Stripe team ever could.

But then, of course, the problem remains that Red Stripe would never have actually owned any of the ideas.

The Delphi Technique

While we're on the subject of learning while doing and the team's conversations with NGOs and other experts who were likely to be involved in the Lughenjo idea, I should mention the Delphi technique. I was alerted to it by a Harvard Business Review article called The Wisdom of (Expert) Crowds by Robert Duboff. The technique, which is not unrelated to scenario planning, is rather like an amplified focus group. You recruit two dozen or so experts on a particular topic and ask them to evaluate possible developments/trends/outcomes in a chosen business or technology area. (There's a lot more to it than that - an independent facilitator then summarises their thoughts and they have another round. And so on. There are lots of rules, which necessitate the hiring of expensive consultants to oversee the process.) I suppose it's also related to the Prediction Markets idea, which the Red Stripe team had discussed at the outset and were encouraged to pursue during their idea harvesting process.

As I've said elsewhere, involving the experts eventually led Red Stripe to reject Lughenjo and it's possible that the earlier, formal involvement of such a group might have helped them home in on a workable idea. But, of course, that would require that they had first decided which mountain they were going to climb. For sure, Red Stripe were in the lucky position, as an Economist team, of being able to get the attention of experts whom others might have found it more difficult to talk to.

Cathedral and bazaar

Before we leave the Open Innovation paradigm, I'd like to mention another way of thinking about all this that's been around a lot longer. In 1997, Eric Raymond, talking about the open source software movement, came up with the term 'the cathedral and the bazaar', which is constantly evolving into a book. The former represented the conventional method of using a group of experts to design and develop a piece of software (though it could apply to almost any large-scale creative or innovative work). The bazaar represented the open source approach. This idea has been amplified by a lot of people, notably Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in their book Wikinomics and on their website and blog of the same name. Wikinomics, being the commercialised arm of The Wisdom of Crowds, of course has its opponents and detractors. It's not a panacea and plenty has been written about the foolishness of crowds. Bruce Schneier's essay on the psychology of security is one elegant example of this. But Eric Raymond himself is also quoted in a compelling article by Nicholas Carr as saying that 'one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug, and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode.' In the same vein, Raymond is also quoted as saying, 'The individual wizard is where successful bazaar projects generally start'.

Project Red Stripe had six fine individual wizards, unsure of how far to trust their own wizardry and how far to turn to the wisdom of the crowd.

Dilemmas

Open vs. Closed. You can use insiders or outsiders; your own ideas or other people's; your own money or other people's. With the latter, there's always going to be less ownership and less control. But more room.

Thinking vs. Doing. Trying to implement one idea may inspire other ideas, but settling on an idea too soon may close down other options. Time-tabling is important.

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Credits:

Paradigm bottle: Michael Calore

Innovation Camp: Theis Kofoed Hjorth

Innovation mosaic: Roland Tanglao

Delphi: Jay Galvin

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