We stand sideways.
We work in corridors and abandoned spaces.
We get up early and go to sleep late.
We’ve been mocked.
We’ve been turned away by people that won’t have us.
We are relentless.
We dream it, we make it, we break it, we fix it.
We create.
We destroy.
We wreck ourselves day in and day out and yet we stomp that one breakthrough or find that one line that keeps us coming back.
We progress.

These words, with one or two small modifications, come direct from the mission statement of an innovator. A disruptive innovator. Jake Burton, one of the pioneers of the snowboarding world.

I know a lot of skiers and I know quite a few snowboarders. For the most part, they don’t get along so well. For me, the antagonism between the two communities says a lot about the difference between Innovation World (the underdog snowboarders), and Operation Excellence World (the elitist, have-all-the-right-equipment-follow-the-rules skiers).

The world needs both types. And both need to get along.

Snowboarding is now an industry. It is also entering Operational Excellence world. The antagonism with the skiers dissipates…

…And leaves a growing vacuum for the dis-affected, the under-resourced and the unpopular. The next mutiny of sideways-standing rule-breakers.

There seem to be a lot of people in and around the TRIZ community with the mistaken impression that the 40 Inventive Principles are some kind of a magic shortcut to innovation.

Anyone that checks out the ‘Not So Funny’ section in our monthly e-zine will have noticed a theme over the years. The 40 Inventive Principles map just as well to really bad solutions as they do to the 2% of good ones that will end up being called ‘innovation’.

To be clear: there is absolutely no correlation between evidence of an Inventive Principle having been (explicitly or implicitly) used to generate a solution and the future commercial or value-delivering success of that solution. The driver in the above photograph could be said to have exploited Inventive Principle 17 to solve his contradiction, but its unlikely that anyone else would necessarily see it as a ‘good’ solution.

The 40 Principles are merely a collection of ‘provocations’ that enable problem solvers to break out of their current ways of thinking to hopefully derive ‘better’ solutions. The fact that the list is a comprehensive one – i.e. we haven’t been able to add anything meaningful to the list since the 1970s – is one of its main attributes over other solution-triggering taxonomies. If we haven’t generated solutions we like from any of the 40, it’s either because we haven’t thought hard enough, or that there aren’t any.

Some people, when they realise that the Principles will just as likely deliver bad solutions as good ones tend to then make the incorrect follow-on conclusion that ‘TRIZ is no good’.

This is a big mistake. Sadly, it is also a common one.
On some level, I find it difficult to motivate myself to argue against such people these days. The more people that don’t use TRIZ, the bigger the playing-field of breakthrough opportunities for those of us that do. On the other hand, I don’t think rectifying the erroneous thinking demands too much effort.

Here goes:

1) The 40 Inventive Principles offer a comprehensive suite of solution directions that point just as much to ‘bad’ solutions as ‘good’ ones.

2) The Ideal Final Result tool within TRIZ offers a clear compass heading describing what ‘good’ looks like for any given situation.

3) The Contradiction Matrix provides a ranked list of Inventive Principles that specifically do point in the direction of the ‘good’ solution directions for any given conflict situation.

4) There is strong causal evidence to show solutions derived from the use of two of the Matrix-recommended Principles are more likely to be successful than those using one. Similarly, solutions derived from three will do better than those derived from two. And so on, at least up to five.

5) For those that don’t wish to take advantage of the Matrix, it is perfectly sensible to use ‘all’ the 40 Principles to help provoke new ideas and directions, provided that solvers bring to bear a clear idea of the IFR compass-heading when evaluating and combining those ideas and directions into the eventual solution

For some reason I’ve had a flurry of conversations lately with organisations thinking about setting up some kind of sexy innovation ‘centre’ or ‘lab’ or ‘hot-house’. The conversation quickly devolves into ‘it depends’ territory. Sometimes it’s a good idea; sometimes it’s not. The answer depends on the Level of Innovation Capability Maturity of the enterprise. At Level 1, it’s usually a really bad idea; Level 2 and it potentially becomes a good idea; Level 3 and it’s probably a bad idea again.

The usual model for these kinds of innovation early learning centre is the Lockheed Skunk Works.

When it was set up, in the late 1930s, Lockheed was a Level 2 Capability innovator. Actually, they probably still are. The aerospace industry has some particular innovation challenges to overcome that make it very difficult to evolve past Level 2, not least of which is the need to be able to re-assure customers that you’re the safest industry on the planet (no-one likes it when aeroplanes fall out of the sky), and that you’re simultaneously able to do exciting new things.

Skunk Works solves the contradiction by physically separating production and development activities. Different rules, different protocols, different procedures, different reward systems. Different pretty much everything. Operations World and Innovation World are literally two separate worlds.

What’s often lost on Level 2 ICMM enterprises contemplating their own Skunk Works is the significance of the name chosen by Lockheed.

First up, ‘Skunk’. Which is deliberately a very non-aspirational kind of creature. When someone calls you a skunk, they’re probably not being complimentary. Very few people want to be tarred with such a non-attractive label. Which turns out to be a terrific way of separating the innovators and the operational excellence people in an organisation. Innovators know that they’re looked down on by the rest of the enterprise, and they don’t care. They’re people with a different perspective on why they come to work each day. Ego means nothing; doing exciting stuff means everything.

Second comes ‘Works’. This is slightly more subtle than ‘Skunk’, but it is nevertheless a critical part of Lockheed’s success. Skunk Works is a place where work is done. It’s not a ‘lab’ or an ‘incubator’ or a ‘centre’ or any other pretty name for a physical space full of bean-bags and motivational creativity posters. A Works produce real aircraft that are going to fly in the real sky. It is an innovation factory.

The two words form an important contradiction that prospective innovators need to embrace and work through:

I was fortunate enough to spend the first fifteen years of my career in the aerospace industry, and even more fortunate to visit Skunk Works at a time close to its peak days. At the time it was quite literally a place where people with real grit consistently delivered the impossible, impossibly quickly and at impossibly low cost. Not a bean-bag  or delicate managerial ego in sight.

The previous Facebook Mission Statement, “Making the world more open and connected” had one fundamental flaw: it didn’t push for any specific positive outcome from more connection. Technically, it could encompass digital voyeurism via the News Feed, trading in-person friendship for online acquaintanceship or the filter bubbles and echospheres that have further polarized the United States.

So last year, as Facebook approached 2 billion monthly users, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed a new mission statement, to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Zuckerberg announced the change at the Facebook Communities Summit for top Group Admins where it announced new Group management tools. “For the last decade or so we’ve been focusing on making the world more open and connected. But I used to think that if we just give people a voice and help some people connect that that would make the world a whole lot better by itself,” Zuckerberg admits. “Look around and our society is still so divided. We have a responsibility to do more, not just to connect the world but to bring the world closer together.”

Rather than have the new mission be just a philosophy, Zuckerberg says Facebook is turning it into a goal. “We want to help 1 billion people join meaningful communities. If we can do this it will not only reverse the whole decline in community membership we’ve seen around the world… but it will also strengthen our social fabric and bring the world closer together.”

It all sounds so great. Until you actually think about it. Until you bring some actual knowledge to bear. But then, isn’t that the problem of so much of the Silicon Valley story these days. A fatal Ignorance-Arrogance delusion. Naïve good intentions ending up in horrendously harmful and damaging consequences for everyone else. (Although not necessarily for the Facebook share price. Hmm.)

Let’s look at a quick example. I happen to be a fan of anthropologist, Robin Dunbar, most famous these days for the Dunbar Number: the maximum number of people we are able to maintain relationships with. Which turns out to be around 150. Plus or minus, depending on the way your brain works.

Now, for me, if Dunbar is anything close to right, the Dunbar Number alone tells us there is no such thing as a world-size community (see also my blog, ‘The Plural Of Community?’). And that as soon as we create a 150-strong community of ‘us’, we, by definition, create another much bigger community of ‘thems’.

As if to prove my point, I knew I wouldn’t have to look very hard in order to find a community of people who didn’t believe in the Dunbar Number. ‘The Fallacy Of Dunbar’s Number’ popped up at the top of my search (https://www.fullcontact.com/blog/maintaining-relationships/). A better example of exception-proving-the-rule I’d be hard pushed to find. Brad McCarty is the author of that blog. He has a ‘solution’ to the Dunbar number that involves building a personal taxonomy of contacts for all the different topics he’s interested in. Funnily enough, each of these topic-communities seems to end up containing around 150 contacts, but hey, once some people have made their mind up that something is wrong, they’re not going to change no matter how much evidence they’re given. Now, if I imagine that every person on the planet follows Mr McCarty’s advice, and, let’s say each of us is capable of juggling a dozen or so of these topic communities in our fragile, overloaded little heads, then what we’ve also contributed to are a dozen topic communities with the opposite view to our own.

If we reduce everything down to first principles, the human brain has thus far evolved to categorise three types of people: me, us and them. For every ‘us’ we create or participate in, one of the things that unites ‘us’ is our rejection of the nearest ‘them’. Zuckerberg’s naïve desire to create ‘meaningful communities’, laudible as it might be, is utterly – utterly – inconsistent with ‘bringing the world closer together’. Point one, there is no plural of community. Point two, every meaningful community that gets built sparks the creation of its opposite. It’s very possible to create ‘communities’, but when you do that, you don’t bring the world together, you create lots and lots of polarised views that make it progressively less likely that people are able to talk to each other any more.

Unless you know how to recognise and solve the contradictions you’re creating. Which delusional, ivory-tower-based social media oligarchs like Mark Zuckerberg, sadly, appears to be heading further and further away from. Good intentions often create terrible outcomes. Good intentions that fail to understand the first principles of human behaviour, simply create terrible outcomes faster.

I must admit when I saw this pie-chart breakdown of US companies I found it a bit shocking. How did the ‘FAMGA’ Big Five get so much bigger than anyone else so quickly? I’ve been saying to clients and anyone that will listen that ‘the integrators will win’ for quite some time now, and I think that’s part of the Big Five story. The ones that own the data have the best opportunity to reach the top of the pile, and certainly these five organisations appear to have the majority of it.

So, I then figured, how does all this tie up with Jagdish Sheth’s classic management text, ‘The Rule Of Three’, a book that says every industry will eventually converge to three players. Maybe the five ‘integrators’ are merely part of the divergence that comes for any new industry before the convergence takes place?

Actually, I think it’s a bit more complicated than that. Complex even.

Another of my unproven, largely unexplored, hypotheses is that the industrial world will ultimately converge according to the TRIZ Law Of System Completeness. There will be three Engines, three Transmissions, three Tools, three Interfaces, and three Sensors. And, with the whole ‘integrator wins’ idea in mind, eventually, three higher level Coordinators.

It seems clear to me that each of the Big Five are trying to capture that ‘Coordination’ position. But, positioning them on the various elements of the Completeness Law, I was struck by how they so neatly split across the other five elements:

Each is already the biggest (by some considerable margin) of their respective Law element players. They, of course, have competitors within these elements. Thus Apple – who’s still largely in the device business (hence, ‘Tool’) – experiences increasingly fierce competition from Samsung, LG and, catching up fast, Huawei within their ‘Tool’ world. Apple, I’m sure knows this, and hence their desire to climb to the top Coordinator position.

When the markets value you at $1T and you have almost as much sat in the bank waiting to spend, you’re probably well placed to achieve any goal you set your mind to. That said, whether they will be able to out-compete the other four Big Five players to take one of the three available coordinator places I’m not sure. When we look at this kind of upward migration move at lower levels in the global systems hierarchy, the eventual three winners tend to come from Engine, Transmission and Sensor elements. Which, if this part of the theory holds true, probably means I should be putting most of my eggs in the Alphabet basket. Plus they seem to be the player with the highest Innovation Capability Maturity of the Five. So they might just have to do a bit more actual innovating before they lock the whole global industrial system down and kill wide-scale innovation for the next fifty years. Have a great day.

I’ve always been a sucker for inventive strategy taxonomies. One that’s been on my radar for a while has been the ’55 Business Model Patterns’ output from the University of St Gallen (https://www.thegeniusworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/St-Gallen-Business-Model-Innovation-Paper.pdf). Essentially, each pattern the St Gallen authors identified represents a step-change jump strategy made during successful business innovation attempts. As can be seen from the above image, the authors have done a really nice job of mapping such innovations.

Finally – thanks to a fortuitous parallel job – I’ve had the opportunity to compare the 55 St Gallen patterns with the TRIZ Inventive Principles. Of which, of course, there are only 40… meaning that there must be some kind of taxonomy mismatch contradiction. Especially in light of the fact that the patterns and the Principles are intended to do the same basic job. Here’s the result of my analysis:

…from which it is possible to conclude that what the St Gallen researchers have found is a somewhat partial subset of the total number of step-change jump strategies that are (so far) universally known to exist. Thirteen of the forty Inventive Principles have no corresponding entry in the list of St Gallen Business Model Patterns.

One possible hypothesis we can draw from this discrepancy is that none of the thirteen is relevant in a business model step-change context. This one can be rather swiftly dismissed since it is eminently possible to use any of the thirteen unused Principles to provoke business step change ideas that seem, following a short experiment on my part, to be self-evidently valid.

Another possible hypothesis is that the St Gallen work provides us with some kind of prioritisation model based on the number of times each strategy has been used to deliver a successful business innovation. This is perhaps more credible, albeit, the St Gallen research appears to have considered hundreds of case study examples rather than the millions that can be found in TRIZ. Following through this frequency correlation hypothesis, nevertheless, reveals that the most commonly used Patterns are strongly correlated to the most frequently used Inventive Principles (35, 2,13, 25), so there may well be some useful insight here.

From a TRIZ perspective, finally, we might question whether the St Gallen work adds anything to the story. They certainly haven’t found anything provocation-wise that the TRIZ researchers hadn’t picked up on several decades previously. But one thing I think they have done well is created some short, punchy titles for the patterns that are somewhat more evocative than those found in the TRIZ Inventive Principle taxonomy. The parallel job I’m trying to finish off is a re-issue of the TRIZ playing cards we did a long time ago. Just before we go to print with those cards, I’m wondering whether there’s any merit in exploring the ‘evocative name’ direction. If only because my deck of cards requires a taxonomy structure of 52 rather than 40 or 55.

While our work on the Innovation Capability Maturity Model (ICMM) has not so far taken off in the way I thought it would (biggest problem: people don’t like bad news), we continue to have lots of discussions with senior leadership teams on the subject of building innovation capability. A common question is, ‘what are the top five things we should do to build our capability?’ To which the answer is, ‘it depends’. What it depends on is your ICMM Level. That’s why we built the Model. So we can give meaningful answers to the question.

Far less frequent is the question, ‘what are the five worst things we should do?’ Probably, I believe, because most manager have a (correct) instinct that the answers I’m going to give them are closely aligned with what they have been doing. Or are about to do.

As to be expected, the Top Five Worse things also depend on ICMM Level. Here’s what I think the five different Top Five’s look like, based on the sorts of things I usually and frequently see enterprises doing or not doing. While, I might add, simultaneously striving to be seen to be doing something in order to satisfy the CEO’s request that something be done, and ensuring there is some kind of plausible deniability when it all (inevitably) goes wrong.

So, in the vain hope that by publishing this we might take away some of that plausible deniability, here are my ICMM Level-based Top Five Worst Innovation-Capability building Ideas, ranked in increasing levels of harm:

ICMM Level 1
5) Hold a Dragon’s-Den/Shark-Tank type internal innovation competition
4) Instigate big, sexy high impact innovation targets
3) Set up a centralised ‘idea management’ system
2) Bring in a ‘creativity consultant’ (‘lack of ideas’ is never the problem to be solved)
1) Establish an ‘Innovation Manager’/’Innovation Centre’

ICMM Level 2
=5) Seek to ‘add’ innovation tools to existing operational-excellence toolkits (Lean/SixSigma, etc)
=5) Embark on widespread teaching of innovation tools across the organisation
4) Set innovation-related KPIs based on commercial return
3) Embark on technical innovation projects that also demand a corresponding business innovation. Or vice-versa.
2) Embark on cross-silo innovation projects without cross-silo KPIs
1) Operate innovation projects under operational excellence rules and protocols (KPIs, hourly rates, quality standards, career progression, etc)

ICMM Level 3
5) Not knowing prevailing industry step-chenge pulse rate
4) Not having an disruptor-observatory actively looking for out-of-industry threats
3) Instigating projects that fail the ‘critical mass @ critical point’ test
2) Assuming the same person can have the requisite skills to lead the project from start to finish
1) Not having a CIO/person with a main Board position

ICMM Level 4
5) Are not recruiting/training/placing according to requisite OpEx/Innovation ratio
4) Have not established ‘systems coaching’ for innovation project leads
3) Have not deployed widespread TRIZ/contradiction-solving training
2) Still have matrix-management organisation structure
1) Have not integrated Complex-Adaptive-Systems/OODA thinking into Senior Leadership Team

ICMM Level 5 (NB: there are very few Level 5 enterprises on the planet, and those that do exist are so far ahead of everyone else it seems almost churlish to find fault in what they’re doing. However, for the sake of completeness…)
5) Failure to introduce mechanisms for influencing industry pulse rates
4) Not managing R&D activities according to ‘contradictions-solved/remaining’
3) Failure to maintain step-change scenario opportunity map for target markets
2) Succumbing to hubris
1) Failing to build ‘meaning’ into project design opportunities

Jordan Peterson turns out to be yet another 2D, cardboard cut-out ‘thought-leader’. It took me a while to work out what his two dimensions were, but I unravelled the not-so-mysterious mystery sitting on a plane this week. I know early on that ‘meaning’ was one of the dimensions. That one was easy because I believe my ‘meaning’ radar has been very sensitively tuned since I started reading Edward Matchett’s work. Plus, there’s a whole rule in Peterson’s 12 Rules For Life (7: Pursue What Is Meaningful (Not What Is Expedient)) devoted to the topic. It took me a while, though, to work out his second dimension. Or maybe I was hoping to discover it wasn’t what my initial impressions feared it might be. At first, I thought it was just an annoying feature of 12 Rules For Life. Peterson’s argument building formula. Which seems to go something like this:
1) Assert a hypothesis
2) Illustrate it with a compelling case study or two
3) Make a usually decent stab of describing the surrounding science – usually human psychology- or physiology- based.
4) Quote the Bible
5) QED the point is proven

The contrast between steps three and four being the annoying bit. I have no problem with Peterson – or anyone for that matter – believing in fictional deities, but when they lay their beliefs side by side on equal terms with the accumulated mass of scientific data as if they’re comparing like-with-like it betrays all the tenets of scientific research. And specifically the awkward evidence and proof related bits. Faith can be a wonderful thing, but it can never be proof.

Anyway, that’s none of my business. What is my business is now realising that Peterson is nothing more nor less than a fire-breathing religious preacher, and that religion is his second dimension.

As soon as I had that insight, I was able to draw this 2×2 matrix:

Peterson’s two-dimensional thinking fallacy is all about believing the blue dotted line is a spectrum that people must sit somewhere along. At one end of the spectrum is a person that has zero religious life and zero meaning. The nihilist. At the other is someone who devotes their life to religion and religious study and therefore leads a highly meaningful life. The heart of the fallacy is the word ‘therefore’, since Peterson sees meaning and religion as unbreakably tied. In his terms it is only possible to live a meaningful life if you are religious. By which he specifically means ‘believe in God and study the Bible’. Followers of Peterson are encouraged to live their lives in the bottom right-hand quadrant of the Matrix. There seem to be so many of thee people these days that we can probably safely label the box, ‘Petersonism’.

The whole point of drawing the 2×2 matrices, however, is to make the point that the world always allows for a third dimension, and that – if we’re smart and creative – we’re able to leave the cardboard cut-out 2D world, solve the contradiction and enter the best-of-both-worlds third dimension described by the top-right-hand box. Meaning and religion are, in other words, correlated but not causally. It is perfectly possible – if we think hard and seek to design a better way – to leave a highly meaningful life in the complete absence of religion, God or the Bible. Something a group of far more effective psychology scholars, building on the work of Clare Graves, called ‘second tier’ thinking.

All Peterson is doing in his angry-foghorn rants is encouraging people to move from one end of the spectrum he wrongly (or duplicitously) assumes is fundamental. He’s one of a number of phenomena happening in the world right now that are doing nothing more nor less than inducing a societal pendulum to start shifting back in the direction it came from. About six hundred years ago.

Humans are better than that. The most powerful human trait – the thing that makes us stand out relative to any other living form on the planet – is our ability to design our future. Which is not the same thing at all as seeing the problems of today and in effect saying, look how much better it was yesterday, we all need to go back there. Anyone that understands complex adaptive systems (something Peterson claims to do) knows that you can never step in the same river twice. There is no such thing as ‘going back’ in a complex system. There is only thinking hard, trying things out and – here’s where I absolutely agree with Peterson – have an intention to make our lives of inevitable suffering just that little bit better. One day at a time we have the ability to design a better future for ourselves and – more importantly – for those around us. But to do so we have to put away foolish things. And top of that foolish-things list is the fallacious ‘either/or’ thinking Peterson seems unable or unwilling to escape.

“You could take Michael McIntyre home to meet your granny. You couldn’t take Frankie Boyle home to meet your granny… McIntyre articulated things you hadn’t realised you thought. Boyle articulated things you thought but didn’t feel you ought to articulate.”

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed a flurry of 2×2 matrices recently. They’re becoming a bit of an addiction. Mainly, I think, because they’re as good a way as we’ve yet found to talk about contradictions, and their importance in the innovation story.

I’ve also been reading a lot about comedy in recent weeks. It was a merely a matter of time before the two threads crossed. The link came from reading Stewart Lee’s very excellent book, ‘If You Prefer A Milder Comedian, Please Ask For One’. If you ever want to get a real insight into the mind of someone at the very top of their stand-up game, as far as I can see, this is the place to start. It’s where the quote at the head of this short article came from. Any time I read about this kind of either/or spectrum these days, I’ve learned to recognise that a contradiction, and therefore a 2×2 matrix, isn’t too far away.

First up though, a health warning is perhaps in order. One of the best ways to take the joy out of comedy is to try and deconstruct it. To a large extent the same problem exists in the world of innovation. It’s something the SI research team is acutely conscious of. Many ‘innovators’ and the vast majority of ‘creatives’ I’ve noticed, actively don’t want to ‘destroy the mystery’ of their craft. The more sensible ones – the ones that get the idea that once we unravel one mystery there’s always going to be the ‘next one’ – have a different problem. And that’s the problem of never being able to step in the same river twice. Every complex case is different from every other one, so how can you ever be sure that when we’re reverse engineering previous case studies we’re not finding patterns that don’t actually exist. One of the answers is that you need to be looking at the world through a ‘first principles’ lens. And part of that means, in at least part, looking for contradictions.

That said, it is – as Stewart Lee manages to prove both in his book and on stage – not necessary to destroy the humour by deconstructing the humour. If you get it really – first principles – right, you can get the best of both worlds: analysis of funny stuff that is funnier than the original funny stuff.

I’m not sure I’m good enough to achieve that kind of feat, but I think that, by decoding Lee’s comedy spectrum I can help see why he’s so much better than other stand-ups (apart, maybe, from his wife Bridget Christie who blew me away when I saw her at a gig last month), and as a result, help innovators to see the sort of – first principles again – things they might usefully translate across from the comedy to the innovation world.

So, to the 2×2 matrix. On one end of Lee’s spectrum is the observational comedy of people like Michael McIntyre. Observational comedians ‘articulate things you hadn’t realised you thought’ (“there’s no love in homes any more because everyone’s fighting for the one phone charger in the kitchen”). The other end is Frankie Boyle-type taboo comedy (try https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDBjoSSzI1Y for Boyle’s ‘Top Ten’) – articulating things we were all thinking but daredn’t say. The two ends give us the top-left and bottom-right corners of a matrix with ‘articulated’ and ‘thought’ as the vertical and horizontal dimensions:

Placing the spectrum onto a 2×2 forces a recognition that there are two other boxes to think about. The bottom-left box in this case is the situation where comedians talk about things that people at large have neither thought about before, nor tried to articulate. For me this is the surreal comedy of people plike Reeves & Mortimer (“eranu/uvavu”). The bottom-left corner is rarely a good place to be in 2×2 matrix convention. Reeves and Mortimer have sustained a fairly long career, but very few other surreal comedians have.

Top-right is the place to be if you can. Getting into this box is difficult because it means solving the thought-articulated contradiction. This is the ‘third way’ solution that delivers the best of both worlds. For me, Stewart Lee and Bridget Christie are the two best (only?) exponents of comedians that achieve this feat of magic. They talk about things that we all think about and all talk about, but do it in such a manner that we are exposed to ideas that reveal a higher level meaning.

The top-right box of this comedy matrix is, I believe, the only, part of the 2×2 where new meaning is created. The other three boxes all deliver output that is at best meaningless, or at worst a destroyer of meaning.

A few months ago I wrote an article for the SI ezine all about meaningful and meaningless innovation. 98% of all innovation attempts fail. That’s pretty bad. But what we thought was worse was that 70% of the 2% of ‘successful’ attempts had done so by negatively impacted meaning.

The 2% number tells us that no innovation is easy. The 70% tells us that, if you want to make it as easy as possible, do meaningless stuff. Which predominantly means observing (Michael McIntyre-like) what people didn’t know about themselves and give them a faster, simpler, more convenient, solution that, the moment they think about it they realise its just what they always wanted. Or, if that doesn’t work, do something tasteless or something surreal like a pet-rock.

Personally, though, I think I’m happier working with teams that want to be in the top-right box. Looking at the world we can all already see and already articulate, challenge the contradictions and create a more meaningful, 1+1>2 solutions. You need to watch out for the hecklers though, they can be mean.

I guess, like a lot of country roads, the one that connects our house to the highway is troubled by drive-by litterers. Or at least it has been since a certain fast-food ‘restaurant’ opened six miles down the road.

In our village, we’re lucky that a medal-deserving, 80-year-old hero walks up and down the road once a month filling a carrier bag with discarded fast-food packaging, losing lottery tickets, empty cigarette packets and confectionery wrappers  so that the rest of us don’t have to look at other peoples’ detritus everytime they leave the house. In the spirit of ‘doing my bit’, I thought I should take a turn this week. This is what I collected in the first 100yards:

One of the nice consequences of doing something mindless like picking up a mile’s worth of litter (5 carrier bags when I’d finished) is that it offers plenty of time to think about why people throw things out of their cars. I did it for long enough that I ended up with a whole Perception Map’s worth of thoughts. Here’s what happened when I plotted them out:

95% of the litter is the remains of what looks to me like ‘guilt’ purchases. People – mainly men, I’m guessing – that took a sneaky diversion to fast-food-sin-land on their way home and decided that the small feeling of guilt they felt when the threw the packaging out of the car window was lower than the guilt they would be made to experience if, instead, they did the ‘right’ thing and discarded of the litter when they got home. You can probably imagine the scene: he sneaks the Happy Meal debris into the bin, only to find that, even though he thought he’d buried it, the wife still finds it. And then confronts him with it. ‘I spend all day making you dinner, only to have you leave half of it… because, we now see, you’d already filled yourself up with crap before you got home’. Not that I’ve ever been in this situation myself.

According to the map, meanwhile, it is precidely this lesser-of-two-evils issue that sits at the core of my country road litter problem. So now I know what I want – no more litter – and what’s stopping me. I’m not the only person in the world with this contradiction. The Contradiction Matrix tells me that the most frequently used strategies others before me have used to resolve similar conflicts are:
Principle 9 – Prior Counter-Action
Principle 23 – Feedback
Principle 24 – Intermediary

I thought about these for a while. Then I made a phone call to a local farmer. One of his fields borders the road. He laughed. And now we have a plan…