Work Matters

Category: Innovation

  • Little Bets: Peter Sims’ Delightful Masterpiece is Shipping

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    About 11,000 business books a year are published. Most of them aren't worth reading, either because you've heard it all before, they are badly written, not especially useful, and — perhaps the most common flaw — they are just no fun to read.  But, even though they are business books, there are always a few gems that you owe it to yourself to read.  Peter Sims Little Bets is one of those rarities.  I was blown away when I was asked to write blurb for the book, as I wrote:

    “Peter Sims buries the myth that big talkers with brains and big ideas move industry and science forward. This modern masterpiece demonstrates that the most powerful and profitable ideas are produced by persistent people who mess with lots of little ideas and keep muddling forward until they get it right. Little Bets is easily the most delightful and useful innovation book published in the last decade.”

    As the book is now out, I  took some time to visit with it again this morning –  I remain impressed.  Ye3s, Peter is a friend of mine, but most of my friends don't write books this compelling.  The first thing that struck me was the power of Peter's writing voice.  He exudes curiosity and optimism, which as I read the pages, provoked a feeling of joy that I've hardly ever experienced when reading a business book — I guess for me, Orbiting the Giant Hairball and The Art of Innovation had this effect, but it does not happen often.

     The second thing that struck me was the range of examples and the deftness with which Peter applies them to make points about small bets and in his lovely chapters (I especially like "Problems are the New Solutions" and "Questions are the New Answers.")  He uses everything from Chris Rock, to architect Frank Geary, to Pixar's Ed Catmull, to a U.S. Army General in Iraq, and many others.  He does this with such skill that I occasionally had to stop and admire how he had written a sentence or paragraph — I struggle to do this kind of thing day after day,it is a lot harder than it looks.

    Third, although Small Bets has many twists and turns, perhaps the core idea is the power of small wins, Karl Weick's powerful concept.  This is a message that comes through in other business books (including Good Boss, Bad Boss — see this post –  and in at least one other forthcoming business book I just read called The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer).  The power of small wins is not only supported by strong empirical research, it provides an antidote, and at times a useful companion, to all the management theorists who spew out stories of big hairy goals, bold vision, exciting futures, and all that without providing resources or specifying just what people need to do day after day to achieve such magnificent ends.  Little Bets is so useful to read because it shows, on page after page, what you can do and how to think day after day about things like problems, solutions, failure, and fun to make great things happen. 

    I could go on and on… but you would be better off using your time reading the book than reading more of my words about it!

    P.S. You might also want to check out Peter's website.

  • Guest Column for CNN: On The Virtues of Drinking at Work

    I have been getting emails now and then from the folks at CNN.com asking if I would like to do a guest column.  I have not been blogging anywhere much because I've been traveling a lot (I did a workshop on design thinking in Singapore a couple weeks back and just got from giving speeches in Brazil on The Knowing-Doing Gap and Good Boss, Bad Boss)  and using my available time to focus on the scaling project with Huggy Rao. 

    As often happens to me, however, I ended-up writing something fun when I was "supposed to" be doing something else.  I was thinking about drinking in the workplace because I had been interviewed for Bloomberg about the subject where, although I was quoted as talking about all the evils (and there are nasty evils), I had actually spent much of the conversation with the reporter talking about how sharing a drink with colleagues can sometimes strengthen the social glue in a workplace.  This is an experience that many of us have enjoyed. And. more broadly, there is some interesting academic research here as well, notably a charming book called Drunken Comportment by Craig McAndrew and Robert Edgerton, which uses anthropological and other evidence to challenge to notion that drinking always changes things for the worse.

    The final motivation to write the column came after I had a lovely time sharing a drink with some colleagues one Friday afternoon a few weeks back.   So I wrote this little piece from CNN called "Drinking at Work: Its Not All Bad," which just came out today.

    Here is how it opens:

    At about 5:30 on a Friday afternoon a few weeks ago, I was running out the door to get home when I ran into several colleagues sitting in a circle and drinking some Scotch. They invited me to celebrate the end of the week with them, and after hesitating a bit, I joined the little group. Yes, I enjoyed the single malt they gave me, but I enjoyed the conversation much more. These are people I see all the time, but nearly all of our interactions are rushed and task-oriented.

    We talked about an array of topics — a sick friend, kids, a cool wireless speaker the IT guy had set up and our preferences for different brands of Scotch. Then we went our separate ways. I was struck by how much the brief interaction affected me. I felt closer to my colleagues, more relaxed from the great conversation and the Scotch, and I felt good about working at a place that allows employees to take a prudent drink now and then.

    That little episode illustrates the role that alcohol plays at its best. In addition to its objective physiological effects, anthropologists have long noted that its presence serves as a signal in many societies that a "time-out" has begun, that people are released, at least to a degree, from their usual responsibilities and roles. Its mere presence in our cups signals we have permission to be our "authentic selves" and we are allowed — at least to a degree — to reveal personal information about ourselves and gossip about others — because, after all, the booze loosened our tongues. When used in moderate doses and with proper precautions, participating in a collective round of drinking or two has a professional upside that ought to be acknowledged.

    You can read the rest here.

    I am curious to hear your reactions to this idea.  What are some of the other advantages of drinking at work? What can a company or boss to do maximize the virtues and minimize the dangers?   It is one of those complex subjects that, while there are times when it is clearly dead wrong (like when airline pilots drink on the job), there are many other times when complaints about imbibing some more like misguided morality plays than constructive objections. 

     

  • The Power of Observing and Talking to Real Humans

    Although Good Boss, Bad Boss focuses more squarely on the relationship between bosses and their immediate charges, one of the main themes of the book — following a design-thinking view of the world — is that the best bosses go to great lengths to develop empathy for both the people they lead and the customers served by their teams and organizations.  Managers and executives sometimes tell me that just looking at sales statistics, aggregated demographics stats, and — now and then — reading compilations of customer complaints and compliments is all they need to do to understand their customer's needs.  There is no need to go out and waste their time watching and talking to customers or potential customers first hand.  

    I am all for quantitative data, but there is a story in Chapter 5 of  Good Boss, Bad Boss that I believe shows there is no substitute for the power of first hand observation:

    When bosses make concerted efforts to understand what it feels like to be a customer, it is remarkably useful for making gaps between knowledge and action vivid and identifying possible repairs.  To illustrate, SYPartners (SYP), an innovation firm based in San Francisco and New York, worked with up-and-coming executives from a big company to develop new financial services for immigrants. The executives arrived with armloads of binders packed with data-rich PowerPoint decks –and were excited about how well they had mastered the charts and statistics.  They got nervous when SYP told them they weren’t going to use that stuff, and instead, would be shadowing customers.   

    SYP broke the team into trios, assigned each a Spanish-speaking translator and Spanish-speaking undocumented worker, and sent them out into the Mission District in San Francisco.  Each team was asked to cash a check in a bank, wire money to a Central American country at Western Union, and observe the undocumented worker do the same things.  Before the observations, these executives knew from their quantitative data that these untapped customers represented a huge opportunity.  But their impressions of what these customers wanted – and would happily pay for – were far off the mark. The shadowing, hands-on efforts, and discussions with undocumented workers provoked them to transform and broaden the offerings they suggested to their firm.  One executive called it “life-changing” and said he would never look at a marketing opportunity the same again.  The executive who initially felt most uncomfortable about following around an illegal immigrant came away most transformed  – arguing adamantly that reams of data aren’t enough, that you need to understand what your customers do and how it feels to do be them.

    In other words, the best bosses know what it feels like to work for them and what it feels like to be one of their customers too!  The closer you can get to an unvarnished and uncensored perspective of the humans that you lead an serve, the better you can understand their needs and what you can do to feel those needs.

    P.S.  Toward that end, a couple years back I was talking to an executive from a major airline about how crummy the experience was of flying coach — how everything from the legroom to the rude staff made it an awful experience. He dismissed my complaint, but eventually admitted that it had been years since he flew coach on any airline.   Perhaps that is one reason that Southwest has stayed so successful for so long — there are no first class seats for their executives hide in!

  • More Reasons Creativity Sucks: Creative People Seen as Having Less Leadership Potential

    Ever since the days when I was writing Weird Ideas That Work, I have been careful to point out various ways that creative people suffer in comparison to their less imaginative counterparts.  My focus has been largely on the differences between doing creative and routine work (see this post on why creativity and innovation suck).  Much theory and research suggests a long list, including:

        1. Creativity requires failing most of the time; routine work entails succeeding most of the time. So doing creative means screwing up constantly, while doing routine work means you are usually doing things right and well. As Diego and I like to say, failure sucks but instructs.

         2. Creativity involves constant conflict over ideas, although that can be fun when it is done right, even the most healthy groups struggle to avoid having conflict over the best ideas turn very personal and very nasty.

        3. Creativity is messy,scary, and inefficient. Routine work is clean, comforting and efficient.

        4. Doing creative work right means generating a lot of bad ideas, it also means that most of your good ideas will get killed-off too.

    I could go on and on. But the best quote I have ever seen on the probabilities and emotions associated with doing creaitive work is from James March (I quote this in Weird Ideas That Work), quite possibly the most prestigious living organizational theorist. Rumor has it that he has come fairly close to winning the Nobel Prize in Economics once or twice:

    "Unfortunately, the gains for imagination are not free. The protections for imagination are indiscriminate. They shield bad ideas as well as good ones—and there are many more of the former than the latter. Most fantasies lead us astray, and most of the consequences of imagination for individuals and individual organizations are disastrous. Most deviants end up on the scrap pile of failed mutations, not as heroes of organizational transformation. . . . There is, as a result, much that can be viewed as unjust in a system that induces imagination among individuals and individual organizations in order to allow a larger system to choose among alternative experiments. By glorifying imagination, we entice the innocent into unwitting self-destruction (or if you prefer, altruism)."

    I don't mean to bring you down even further, but a study with more bad news for creativity — actually an academic paper containing three intertwined studies — just came out by Assistant Professor Jennifer Mueller at the University of Pennsylvania. It is called "Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?"  The upshot is that people who are seen as more creative are judged by others as having LESS leadership potential than their unimaginative peers UNLESS they are also seen as charismatic. 

    This bias against creative people is first demonstrated in their study of employees of a company in India who were in jobs where they were expected to do creative work.  It was then replicated in a controlled experiment, with about 200 students, half of whom were assigned to be idea generators or "pitchers" and half to be "evaluators." The pitchers were then divided into two groups.  As the researchers, they were asked to either '1) prepare a creative (novel and useful) or 2) a useful (but not novel) solution to the following question: “What could an airlines do to obtain more revenue from passengers?"' 

    The results are pretty troubling. In short, although the judges saw no significant differences in the usefulness of the ideas generated, and did construe that subjects who were instructed to generate creative ideas did, in fact, come up with more creative ideas than those instructed to come-up with ideas that were not novel, the judges also consistently construed the more creative subjects as having less leadership potential, measured with this 3-item scale: “How much leadership would this applicant exhibit?”, “How much control over the team’s activities would this member exhibit?”, “I think the applicant is an effective leader.” (α = .86).

    The bright spot, or perhaps the warning, is that, int he third study, where the "charismatic leader prototype was activated" (this was done by asking judges to list five five characteristics of a charismatic leader), things changed.  Here is how the researchers described their findings from this third study: "when the charismatic prototype was activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative idea condition (M = 4.08) as having significantly higher leadership potential than the candidate in the useful idea condition (M = 3.41; t = -3.68, p < .01). Conversely, when the charismatic prototype was not activated, participants rated the candidate in the creative condition (M = 3.08) as having significantly lower leadership potential than the candidate in the useful condition (M = 3.60; t = -2.03, p < .05)."

    BNET asked first author Mueller to explain these findings, and I thought she came-up with a pretty good answer: 

    'Muller notes that leaders must create common goals so their groups can get things done. And the clearer goals are, the better they tend to work, which means leaders need to root out uncertainty. One way leaders can do this is to set standards and enforce conformity.  But when asked to describe a creative person, words like “quirky,” “nonconformist” and “unfocused” often take their place right alongside “visionary” and “charismatic.” Says Mueller: “The fact is, people don’t just feel positively about creative individuals-they feel ambivalent around them.”'

    Yes, this is one just paper. But it is done carefully and uses multiple methods. And it is instructive as I do think — and there is evidence to show — that our stereotypes of the hallmarks of creative people do often see at odds with our beliefs of great leaders.  In particular, to add to Mueller's list, creative people are also often seen as inner focused (not just unfocused), inconsistent, and flaky.  That is not the boss that most of us want.  It is also interesting that charisma seems to be the path to being seen as both creative and having leadership potential.  It certainly has worked for the likes of Steve Jobs, Francis Ford Coppola, IDEO's David Kelley, and Oprah Winfrey. 

     This research suggests that if you are a creative type, and want to lead, do everything you can to get your boss and other evaluators thinking about charisma — "activate" the charismatic leader prototype by talking about well-known charismatics, and perhaps engaging in actions congruent with the "prototype" of a charismatic person — articulate, inspiring, setting forth an emotionally compelling vision, and touching on themes and stories that provoke energy and passion in others. 

    On the other hand, there are plenty of successful creatives who have achieved leadership positions who seem to lack at leasst some of these qualities — Mark Zuckerburg, Bill Gates, David Packard, and Bill Hewlett come to mind.   And there are still other successful creatives who led wonderful and important lives despite having little if any interest in leading others — Steve Wozniak and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman appear to qualify. Indeed, although we need great leaders, it seems to me that — especially at this moment in history — we need creative people even more.

    To me, the upshot is that these findings are intriguing and some people may find them useful — especially creatives who are trying to get leadership jobs. But it also strikes me that presenting a false front usually backfires in the end, and perhaps the most important implication is that, if you are in a position to judge and select leaders, keep reminding  yourself that you will probably be unfairly biased against creative people — unless you think they are charismatic (or you are just thinking about charisma), in which case you may be giving those creatives too much credit for their leadership potential!

    I love a careful and creative study like this one.   No it is not perfect or the final word, no study is or can be, but it is pretty damn good.  If you want to read the whole thing, here is complete reference, including a link to the PDF:

    Jennifer Mueller, Jack Goncalo, Dishan Kamdar (2011), Recognizing creative leadership: Can creative idea expression negatively relate to perceptions of leadership potential?, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

     

  • New Research: We Are More Creative When We Help Others Than Ourselves

    There is an interesting set of findings from psychological experiments that suggest we see others' flaws and strengths more clearly than our own (I wrote about this in Good Boss, Bad Boss) and that, on average, human-beings make more rational decisions when make them for others rather than themselves.  As Jeff Pfeffer and I advised in Hard Facts:

    See Yourself and Your Organization as Outsiders Do

    A big impediment to evidence-based management is that human beings, especially those with good mental health, often have inflated views of their own talents and prospects for success. This rampant optimism is a double-edged sword. The upside is that it creates positive self-fulfilling prophecies, which increase the odds of success. The downside is that excessive optimism causes people to downplay or not see risks, and to persist despite clear evidence they are traveling down the wrong path. One study found, for example, that over 80 percent of entrepreneurs surveyed estimated that chances were over 70 percent that their venture would succeed, and over 30 percent believed that their firm was certain to succeed—even though only about 35 percent of new businesses survive their first five years.  Max Bazerman’s book on managerial decision making shows that outsiders often make more objective judgments than insiders do—so having a blunt friend, mentor, or counselor can help you see and act on better evidence.  This is one reason why Kathleen Eisenhardt’s study of successful versus unsuccessful Silicon Valley start-ups found that in companies that survived and thrived, the CEO usually had a trusted counselor on the team—while CEOs of unsuccessful firms usually did not. These counselors were typically ten to twenty years older than the CEO, with broad industry experience, and were most valuable for helping CEOs recognize when they were traveling down the wrong path and a shift in strategic direction was needed.

    This finding that it is better to rely on others than ourselves is also seen in a new study described at one of my favorite blogs, BPS research.   Here is the summary at BPS:

    Across four studies involving hundreds of undergrads, Polman and Emich found that participants drew more original aliens for a story to be written by someone else than for a story they were to write themselves; that participants thought of more original gift ideas for an unknown student completely unrelated to themselves, as opposed to one who they were told shared their same birth month; and that participants were more likely to solve an escape-from-tower problem if they imagined someone else trapped in the tower, rather than themselves (a 66 vs. 48 per cent success rate). Briefly, the tower problem requires you to explain how a prisoner escaped the tower by cutting a rope that was only half as long as the tower was high. The solution is that he divided the rope lengthwise into two thinner strips and then tied them together.

    For the complete description, go here.  The implication of these diverse studies are quite instructive.  If we want to make better decisions, make faster decisions, have a more realistic picture of our strengths and weaknesses, and now, apparently, be more creative, we need to ask others for their opinions and assistance.   There is even a kind of weird implication that rather than working on our own problems, we should always be working on others.  So, despite the cynicism about consultants, they actually do serve a moreimportant  role than many of us have recognized. Certainly, this research suggests the importance of having mentors and colleagues who will give you help, advise you on decisions, and point out the flaws in your beliefs and actions– and that the world would be a better place if we did so in turn for others.  Another cool implication is that consultants need outside advisors when it comes to tackling their own challenges and problems.  In any event, these studies certainly provide interesting evidence of how much humans we need one another.

    The citation for the creativity research is:

    Polman E, and Emich KJ (2011). Decisions for Others Are More Creative Than Decisions for the Self. Personality and social psychology bulletin

     

  • Do you want to DO design thinking? Start with the d.School’s Bootcamp Bootleg

    Last year, I wrote about the first Bootcamp Bootleg here, a compilation of materials and methods assembled by the team that teaches our introductory course on design thinking at the Stanford d.school, which we call Bootcamp. As with last year's model, you can download the latest version free, courtesy of the d.school.  The team has outdone themselves this year, the content is just awesome — fun to read, detailed, useful, and great pictures and drawings to guide and inspire anyone who is applying design thinking (from novices to veterans). 

    I love the opening paragraph:

    Check this out —
    It’s the d.school bootcamp bootleg.

    This compilation is intended as an active toolkit to support your design thinking practice. The guide is not just to read – go out in the world and try these tools yourself. In the following pages, we outline each mode of a human centered design process, and then describe dozens of specific methods to do design work. These process modes and methods provide a tangible toolkit which support the seven mindsets — shown on the following page – that are vital attitudes for a design thinker to hold.

    Then the fun begins.  Here is the crisp summary of the d.school philosophy:

    Show don't tell.  Focus on human values. Craft clarity. Embrace experimentation. Be mindful of process. Bias toward action. Radical collaboration

    Then it goes through the fives "modes" of the design process (By the way, note the term "mode" rather than "step" or stage"  is important here because we never mean to convey that this is a clean and linear process):

    Empathize. Define. Ideate. Prototype. Test.

    To me,while philosophy and process are important, the real stuff, the material here that really makes the Bootleg so valuable, are the dozens of methods it contains.  These have been tried and fine-tuned for the six or seven years the d.school has been around, and for decades before that at places including IDEO and the Stanford Product Design program.   In d.school speak, these methods help you DO TO THINK.  Here are a few samples, there are many more:

    Assume a beginners mindset. Use a camera study. Interview for empathy. Extreme users. Team share and capture. Journey map. Empathy map. Fill-in-the blank character profile. Why-how laddering. Point-of-view want-ad. "How might we" questions. Stoke. Facilitate a brainstorm. Bodystorming. Impose constraints.

    Try the Bootleg. You will like most of it — and will probably get frustrated and fail along the way too. That's part of the process too.  Please let us know what did and did not work for you. Let us know you changed or, as we say "flexed," these methods so they would work for you.  And please let us know other methods you have used, and perhaps invented, to do design thinking

    Once again, a big thanks to the team that developed the first cut at the Bootleg last year and the team that cranked0out this lovely revision.

  • Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment: A Beautiful Business Book Cover

    I just started reading Guy's new book, Enchantment: The Art of Changing Hearts, Minds, and Actions. I will do a post about its content around the publication date, which is March 8th 2011.  But I could not resist putting up the cover, as — thanks to Guy's doggedness, good taste, and fantastic social network — the result is one of the most beautiful business book covers I have ever seen.  It would have been aweseome even without that Woz quote, although that quote (especially given the source) is every business book author's dream!

    Enchantment1
     

     

  • My First Time Attending the World Economic Forum at Davos

    I am in the final throes of getting ready for the World Economic Forum, which takes place this week in Switzerland.  I have never attended before and some of the famous people on the list are rather daunting.  There will be sessions involving world leaders like David Cameron from the UK, Angela Merkel of Germany, Bill Clinton from the U.S., lots of CEOs including Google's Larry Page to Heinken's Jean-François van Boxmeer, and a session by "miracle on the Hudson" pilot Sulley Sullenberg.  You can read about it here in the The New York Times, which has a wonderfully cynical opening paragraph.  

    I am among the many academics invited and will be participating in three sessions. First, I am moderating a session on design thinking and business, which should be interesting as it is becoming ingrained in the positions and practices of so many organizations now.  Second, I am participating in a session on what leaders of the present can learn from leaders of the past.  Third, I give a talk on "the no jerk rule."  The WEF is sufficiently respectable that the organizers thought it was best to refrain from using the world "asshole" in the title.  But I plan to use it a few times in the talk, although perhaps fewer times than usual.   In addition to the sessions I am part of, I am going to focus on learning about scaling, my current primary project, as several sessions focus on the topic and there will be a lot of people there who have a lot of experience with this challenge.

    The place is just buzzing with interesting people and sessions, but I have been warned by the people who run the event and by experienced participants like IDEO CEO  Tim Brown to pace myself as it can get overwhelming.  They also have warned me to bring warm clothes and good snow boots as it is a ski resort.

    I will do some tweeting and blogging.  I don't know quite how much, as I expect I will be busy and distracted. But let me know if there is anything you are especially interested in hearing about, and I will try to address it.

  • Building a Better Boss: A Webinar With Polly LaBarre and Me

    Labarre2007-bw Polly LaBarre has been developing, sparking, and spreading ideas about innovative companies and people for about 15 years now, first as one of the most insightful (and downright fun) editors of Fast Company in its early days, then as a TV personality who did cool innovation stuff at CNN, co-author of Mavericks at Work, a great speaker at events of all kinds, and now at her latest adventure, the Management Innovation Exchange (or MIX) — which she is  leading with Gary Hamel, Michele Zanini, and David Sims.  I love the MIX Manifesto:

    Why Not?

    What law decrees that our organizations have to be bureaucratic, inertial and politicized, or that life within them has to be disempowering, dispiriting and often downright boring? No law we know of. So why not build organizations that are as resilient, inventive, inspiring and socially responsible, as the people who work within them? Why not, indeed. This is the mission of the MIX.

    I've known Polly at least 12 years, as I was involved a bit in the delightful madness of Fast Company conferences and other things in its crazy early years, and she wrote one of the best stories on Weird Ideas That Work. Polly is also, as many of you will recall, the person who I learned the phrase "Jargon Monoxide" from, which I still love. 

    As part of the MIX adventure, Polly and I are doing a webinar on bosses on this Thursday, December 9th at 11AM Eastern.  The basic plan is that I will spend about 25 minutes or so presenting core ideas from Good Boss, Bad Boss.  Then Polly and I will spend 15 or 20 minutes have a more rollicking a no doubt less linear conversation about it, and then the last 15 minutes or so will be more general Q&A. Polly is fun and always imaginative; I hope you will join us — and yes, it is free! Once again, you can sign-up here.

  • Harnessing Ignorance to Spark Creativity

    I just got an email from a writer who was checking to see if I had argued — in a talk long ago — that true innovations come from people who ignore customers.  As I told her, I don't recall saying exactly that, but as I argued in Chapters 12 and 13 in Weird Ideas That Work, there are many virtues of ignorance and naivete in the innovation process.  At IDEO and the d.school, we talk about "the mind of the child" (see Diego's great post on this at Metacool).  Also see this old article I wrote that draws on these chapters.

    Invisalign-questions   Indeed, radical innovations do often come from people who don't know what has been or can't be done.  I once had a student who worked as an earlier employee at Invisalign (those clear braces that replace the ugly wire things), and he told me that none of the members of the original design team had any background in traditional braces or dentistry.  Indeed, at least one history of the company suggests the initial idea came from one of the founders, who had no background in dentistry at all:

    The company was founded in 1997 by Mr. Zia Chishti and Ms. Kelsey Wirth, who — as graduate students at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business — realized the benefit of applying advanced 3-D computer imaging
    graphics to the field of orthodontics. Like many breakthrough inventions, the idea for Invisalign® grew from happenstance.Mr. Chishti wore braces as an adult when working in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, which was awkward and embarrassing. When his braces were removed he wore a clear plastic retainer. He noticed that when he neglected to wear the retainer for several days his teeth would shift back and upon reinsertion his teeth would shift back to their desired, straightened state. It was the observation that a clear plastic device was capable of moving his own teeth that led to Chishti’s conceptualization of a process that became the Invisalign System. A background in computer science gave Chishti the insight that it was possible to design and manufacture an entire series of clear orthodontic devices similar to the retainer he wore, using 3- D computer graphics technology. He and Ms. Wirth started Align Technology in 1997 to realize this vision. And the rest – as they say – is history.

    In this vein, Chapter 13 of Weird Ideas That Work offers some guidelines for harnessing innovation:

    • During the early stages of a project, don’t study how the task has been approached in the company, industry, field, or region where you are working.
    • If you know a lot about a problem, and how it has been solved in the past, ask people who are ignorant it to study it and help solve it.  Young people, including children, can be especially valuable for this task.
    • Ask new hires (especially those fresh out of school) to solve problems or do tasks that you “know” the answer to or you can’t resolve. Get out of the way for a while to see if they generate some good ideas.
    • Find analogous problems in different industries, and study how they are solved. 
    • Find people working on analogous issues in different companies, fields, regions, fields, and industries, and ask them how they would solve the problem or do the job.
    • If people who have the right skills keep failing to solve some problem, try assigning some people with the wrong skills to solve it,
    • If you are a novice, seek experts to help you, but don’t assume they are right especially if they tell you    they are right. 

    What do you think?  Do you have more ideas for harnessing innovation?  Do you know of other instructive cases?  When is ignorance dangerous and destructive?