“The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson’s aphorism is one I find myself using a lot these days. The fact that I find myself having to do it is fairly depressing. But then again not nearly so depressing as realising that, after I’ve said it, most people don’t seem to understand what it means.

Sure, I think they nod sagely and are able to get the intended meaning from an intellectual perspective. The problem seems to come the moment we’re asked to contextualise that intended meaning. Then things seem to go awry fairly quickly.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing I see going wrong: The Hype Cycle:

It’s a lovely model of how an innovation attempt made today is likely to progress. Because it’s a lovely model, it gets turned in to a not-so-lovely book, ‘Mastering The Hype Cycle’. And an even less lovely ‘method’ that supposedly allows innovators to navigate the various stages and phases of the Cycle.

I’ve seen lots of them, in fact, commiting ever larger amounts of time and resource to precisely that task. I’ve even seen some bring in Gartner – the discoverers of the model – to run the method for them. No doubt compounding the money part of the resource dimension by an order of magnitude.

Sometimes ‘running the method’ may be the expedient thing to do, but what Ralph Waldo was trying to get us to think about was that we also need to dig deeper. Principle beats method. And in this regard let there be no mistaking the fact that the Hype Cycle is all about method and not about Principles. There are no principles involved in the Hype Cycle, it’s merely an empirically observable characteristic of most modern-day innovation attempts.

Show the Hype Cycle to a control system engineer, however, and they’ll very quickly tell you what the underlying principle of the Hype Cycle actually is. What you have there, they’ll say, is an archetypal under-damped system.

Utilising the Hype Cycle ‘method’ allows a team to manage the Hype Cycle. But only if they understand this underpinning under-damped system principle will they ever come to realise that they’re actually managing something that really doesn’t need to be there. The system only oscillates because there’s not enough damping in the system. If you want to avoid having a Hype Cycle at all, the underlying principle tells us the simple answer involves adding the critical level of damping to the system.

Without wishing to spend too much time attacking the Hype Cycle, when I look at the management literature these days I see an awful lot of method and barely any first principles any more. No, in reality the problem is worse than that. Surely, I thought, someone, somewhere must’ve compiled ‘all’ of the first principle knowledge of the world into a single tome. Turns out they haven’t. Perhaps that’s the next thing I need to add to my job list?

Asked to name the biggest innovations to arrive into the world of cricket in recent times (i.e. the last 30 years – this is cricket, remember) and in most people’s Top Five will be the doosra. A doosra is a particular type of delivery by an off-spin bowler. The doosra spins in the opposite direction to an off break (the off-spinner’s default delivery), and aims to confuse the batsman into playing a poor shot. Doosra means “(the) second (one)”, or “(the) other (one)” in Hindi and Urdu. The delivery was invented by Pakistani cricketer Saqlain Mushtaq. A variety of bowlers have made considerable use of the doosra in international cricket once Mushtaq started having success with the technique in the early 1990s. Users today include Sri Lankan Muttiah Muralitharan, Indian Harbhajan Singh, and South African Johan Botha.

For me it represents a lovely example of what real innovation looks like. Firstly, just looking at the dismayed expression on a batsman that’s just been dismissed by a doosra, it is successful. Second it made a step change (Inventive Principle 13 – the ball unexpectedly moves the other way). Third, it happened while remaining within the tightly controlled rules of the game. And fourth, regarding this compliance issue, like a lot of true innovations, the incumbent’s (i.e. the bowlers that don’t know how to bowl a doosra, or the batsmen that have to face them) frequent response is to try and get the bowling style banned.

Then there’s a second reason I like the doosra. It makes for a lovely simple acronym for the innovation process:

Direction

Outcomes

Obstacle

Switch/Shift/Surprise/Step-change

Resources

Action

Direction – any innovator needs a clear big-picture idea of where they’re heading. A compass that points in the direction of success. In conventional innovation terms that means ‘increasing value’. Which in turn means giving a customer more of the things they like and less of the things they don’t. In cricket terms, the big-picture direction for the team is to win the game, and, bigger still, to reach the top of the world rankings.

Outcomes – once we know the overall compass heading (‘win the game’), we need to zoom-in to look at the specifics of a situation where we think there is an innovation opportunity. If I’m a bowler running in to bowl the very clear outcome I am trying to achieve is ‘get the batsman out’. If I was being really smart, however, I’d recognise that alongside every tangible outcome need is a parallel intangible one. Tangibly my job is to get the batsman out; intangibly my job is to do it in such a way that I make my opponent fearful of facing me next time. If we think about these ‘intangible’ outcome requirements in terms of a competitive game like cricket, it’s all about making the ‘ABC’ (Autonomy – Belonging – Competence) get worse for the opponent. In an innovation environment where I’m trying to make my customer happy rather than take their wicket, my intangible outcome objective is to make ABC get better. Plus, of course, also deliver the very clear tangible outcome benefit. People need their ‘good’ (tangible) reason and their real (intangible) reason for making any kind of change.

Obstacles – once we have a clear idea where we’re trying to get to both at the high-level and in detail, the next job is to focus on ‘what’s stopping us?’ from getting there. This is perhaps the most counter-intuitive part of the innovation process for most people. We tend to veer towards trade-off and compromise. Mainly because that’s what life (and our school systems) have taught us is the optimum strategy. In innovation-world, however, we know that ‘optimum’ is merely a least-poor compromise and that our job is to avoid compromise altogether. Hence we deliberately and purposefully run towards the obstacle in order to ensure we devote our precious time and energy to the most important improvement opportunities. Typical obstacles preventing us from achieving our desired outcomes might be that ‘it costs too much’ or ‘it will take too long’ or ‘it will reduce quality’. The easiest way to find the obstacle is often to listen to the words that come immediately after the word, ‘but’ when we listen to someone commenting on our idea. As in, ‘I want to get the batsman out, but because I’m a spin bowler and therefore bowl quite slowly, the batsman has a longer amount of time to think about how to respond to whatever I do’. (In TRIZ terms, we might think of this situation as a Controllability-versus-Speed contradiction – you might like to look up what the Contradiction Matrix says about that to see how the doosra fits what TRIZ would have recommended!)

Switch/Shift/Surprise/Step-change (I’m not sure which word I like best yet) – having identified the obstacle, the next job is to solve it. Coming up with solutions means making some kind of a step-change to relative to the usual way of doing things. In TRIZ terms this step-change is going to come from one or a combination of the 40 Inventive Principles. Each one represents, in effect, a provocation that says to the problem solver, ‘how would segmenting the problem help you to solve it?’ or, ‘how would ‘doing it the other way around’ help you to solve it?’ With the doosra, the clear switch/step-change involves getting the ball to bounce in the opposite direction to the one the batsman expects. Whether we use the 40 Principles or any other ideation strategy, the job in this ‘S’ stage of the DOOSRA innovation process is to generate our solution ‘clues’ and ideas…

Resources – once we have our provocation-originated solution clues, the next job is to look at what resources we are able to bring to bear to help turn those clues in to a practical reality. Resources are things or sources of energy or sources of information in or around the current system that are not being used to their maximum potential. For Saqlain Mushtaq it was working out how to hold the ball in a different way, and how to apply the necessary switch of the wrist at the right moment during the rotation of his arm that would still allow him to keep his arm – per the rules of cricket – straight.

Action – it’s all well and good to have a good solution to a problem, but we can probably well imagine that Saqlain Mushtaq didn’t just magically dream up the perfect doosra during a live match. Rather, he spent long, hard hours in the nets experimenting and no doubt failing before he got his technique to a point where he thought it was good enough to try in a competitive game. Those ‘hard yards’ of failing, re-thinking, failing again, trying again, failing again, wiping away the tears, and relentlessly persevering through the blood and guts, and stress and frustration is what we might think of as the Action stage of the innovation process. Thomas Edison famously said that innovation was 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. The Action stage is where all the perspiration is going to happen. Most innovation attempts fail here. They fail because many people fall into the mis-apprehension that once they have a good idea, that’s the hard bit over with. ‘Action’ means recognising that the hard work has barely started yet.

So there’s DOOSRA innovation. The only thing left to think about, just like Saqlain Mushtaq, is that real success comes not just from innovating once, but from going back and doing it again. Doosra becomes teesra (‘the third one’). Which, one day soon, might just turn out to give us a whole new innovation acronym…

Given the enormous acceleration in the corruption of the word ‘innovation’ in recent months (the stupid and dangerous ‘Investors in Innovation’ scheme from the UK Government being something of a last straw), the Systematic Innovation team have been spending a lot more time thinking about the reactive version of innovation, ‘organisation resilience’. It’s often difficult to get a senior leadership team to engage in actual innovation activities. Sure, they will nod sagely and say that they want an ‘innovation culture’, but the bottom line is the vast majority only want it if it doesn’t require them having to change anything.

Talk to them about organizational resilience, on the other hand, or rather the lack of resilience in their organisations, and they’re – thus far at least – much more inclined to actually listen. And then actually do something when they learn they’re not a ship-shape and Bristol-fashion as they thought they were.

It turns out that measuring the resilience of an organisation (actually, we’re probably going to go a step further and call it an AntiFragile Index) requires a very broad lens indeed. Not only do we have to think about each of the (six) essential elements of a system for resilience, but we also have to look at what effectively becomes a hierarchy of such systems. Right at the top of that hierarchy sits the CEO of the organisation. They are the ones that in effect determine the attitudes towards the resilience of an organisation, and not just from the words they use to communicate the importance of resilience, but from the way that they themselves behave. Do what I say not what I do, much as some CEOs might think otherwise, really doesn’t hold true when it comes to organizational culture.

Take the UK Environment Agency.

One of the worst aspects of the first week of January is that I almost inevitably find myself stuck in the UK. Which in turn means I end up listening to the UK news. Aside from the swelling cocktail of global catastrophes, the prevailing news story inside the UK for the last few weeks has been flooding.

Enter head of the Environment Agency, Sir Phillip Dilley, the man responsible for coordinating things when flooding occurs.

Or rather, when we learn that Sir Phillip is on vacation in the Carribean while the floods are happening, we quickly realise his ‘entry’ into the situation is largely going to occur by phone.

Strike One. By choosing to stay in the Carribean Sir Phillip fails a very basic organizational resilience test: failure to understand the importance of basic (ABC) human emotion. I’m pretty certain Sir Phillip was sitting happily in his deckchair offering up sage advice to his troops thinking that it made absolutely no tangible difference whether he was sat in the sun, or next to a collapsing bridge in Tadcaster. In this regard, he was absolutely right, it made absolutely no tangible difference at all.

But this was never an issue of tangible reality. People make decisions for two reasons, the good one and the real one. The tangible one and the intangible one. And in forgetting – or being blindly unaware of – the second reason, Sir Phillip failed a very important test. Perception is reality. Tangibly it made no difference where he was physically located. Intangibly it made all the difference in the world. People – the flood victims for example – want to feel that ‘the authorities’ are empathizing with their situation, and when you’ve just been flooded out of your house, the last thing you want to hear is that the person responsible for putting things right is over 4000 miles away sipping tequila on a beach.

Failing to grasp the importance of intangibles is a naïve mistake in resilience terms. Sir Phillip’s second strike is somewhat more serious. Also a tad less visible in the media at the moment because the media tend not to understand resilience either.

This week, now he’s back in the UK, he was called to London to explain his actions and the actions of the Agency during the floods. And in particular why the flooding has been so bad so recently after the last round of flooding a few years ago. Here’s what he said:

“Everyone that I’ve spoken to in the affected communities said the same thing: something is different, we have never had something like this before. “That means we have to think differently.”

And then, to para-phrase, ‘if I’d been asked these questions before the floods started, everyone would’ve said we were ready’.

Now some people might look at these statements and think, aah, poor Agency, the situation was unprecedented, and therefore there was nothing they could be expected to do about it. While that might have been true (in reality, the situation wasn’t unprecedented at all), the bigger issue is the statement reveals a very non-resilient attitude to natural disaster. The statements reveal a glass-half-full attitude to the world.

When it comes to someone serving me ice-cream in my favourite ice-cream parlour, I think it’s important that the server has precisely that kind of glass-half-full positive view of life when they approach me carrying my usual order of too-much ice-cream. I’m about to enjoy myself and I really don’t want a grumpy, negative person coming along to remind me how many calories I’m about to consume.

When it comes to protecting the country from natural disasters, on the other hand, I really don’t think that a glass-half-full perspective on life is appropriate any more. Ask any aerospace engineer, and they’ll tell you the reason it’s the safest industry on the planet is because everyone takes the opposite glass-half-empty view of the world. If you want to design resilient systems, you take a very keen interest in worst-case scenarios. And then, typically, you double whatever you find, just to be sure.

There aren’t many rules in the Mann clan, but one of the very basic ones is ‘don’t live in a house that’s less than 200m higher than either the sea or nearby rivers’. It’s a rule that comes from that kind of beyond-worst-case-scenario thinking. The thought of being flooded sounds terrible, so don’t allow yourself to ever get put in that situation. It’s a rule that comes with a downside, of course. My current one being that, unless I stand on top of my chimney stack, I have no sea view. Somehow, though, it feels like a small price to pay. Especially now I’ve put a webcam on the chimney.

So No-Resilience-Strike-Two to Sir Phillip. If the CEO of the organisation is walking around thinking optimistic thoughts about how well they’re doing, they just instilled a culture of everyone else doing the same. It’s all very well to say, ‘we need to think differently’, the resilence issue is you should have known to be thinking differently twenty years ago.

‘It’ll be all right on the night’ is classic glass-half-full thinking. Except in this case it wasn’t, was it. The Environment Agency has such a glass-half-full view of the world, it seems, one might say the glass runneth over. Mostly over the Northern half of the country.

But the worst is still to come. Strike Three is perhaps even more subtle than Strike Two. But also more profound still in terms of organizational resilience or the lack thereof. It comes in two parts: the first not understanding the difference between robust and resilient; the second in not take advantage of already existing wisdom.

It has also become clear in the current flooding that the Environment Agency has taken a very robust attitude to flood defence. We know this is true because all of the language they’ve been using – and that again goes particularly for Sir Phillip – pretty much boils down to making flood defences higher. This represents a classic robust attitude to the world: make it higher, make it thicker, make it stronger. It’s a dumb way of looking at things. I can say that with confidence because – and here’s the real sin – there is very clear and widespread evidence from many previous cases around the world that it’s a dumb thing to do. Like in The Netherlands. They too adopted a very expensive, very robust, (‘Delta Works’) ‘build the dykes higher’ view of the world in the 1950s when they suffered very bad flooding from the North Sea. That worked fine until 1993, when the flood water very inconveniently decided to arrive from the non-Dutch mountains in the East instead of the sea in the West. Now those wonderfully robust dyke walls served only to keep the flood water in and 250,000 people found themselves flooded out of their homes. Robust very definitely wasn’t the same as resilient, and finally the Dutch government understood the difference. Enter the resilience-centric ‘Room For The River’ strategy. Which works on the basic assumption that when ‘unprecedented’ amounts of water arrive, the water has to go somewhere, and hence the job is to manage where that water goes. It turns out to be a very effective and proven strategy. Sir Phillip’s Strike Three sin is not instigating the adoption of a similar resilience-based approach in the UK.

Now, if I understand the rules of baseball correctly (I have no idea why I even started the baseball ‘strike’ analogy at all, thinking about  it), three Strikes means you’re out.

I think if the British press had their way, Sir Phillip should’ve been kicked out of his job after Strike One. It’s still not entirely clear that that won’t happen anyway.

Personally, I think it’s very important to avoid these kinds of knee-jerk reaction. Three Strikes – especially such fundamental ones – is a lot, but the bigger question right now ought to be ‘is there a better person for the job than Sir Phillip?’ Is there anyone else in or around the Environment Agency that understands these Three Strikes of Resilience?

At this point in time, if there is, they’re keeping their head well and truly below the flood defence wall. Which, if its right there really is no-one else better qualified to do the job,  means Sir Phillip should get to live another day. And in so doing get to face the Resilience ‘Strike Four’ test: does he have the humility to understand and accept that in complex situations – like weather – the most important thing is learning. Learning about how complex systems work being a pretty good start. My (PanSensic-driven) assessment of Sir Phillip Dilley is that he does not possess the requisite level of humility. I don’t see him understanding that what got him to where he is now, will not keep him there. The problem is I don’t think he understands – or has the bravery to understand – what that really means. I hope I’m wrong. PanSensic, meanwhile, rarely is.

Very occasionally, somewhere on the planet, a rare individual with a unique way of looking at thinks reveals an insight that develops into a big new idea. Edward de Bono’s conception of how the human brain works and ‘lateral thinking’ for example. Or Taiichi Ohno with the Toyota Production System and ‘Lean’. Taguchi method. W. Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge. Or Genrich Altshuller and TRIZ.

Sometimes these ideas seem to take off very quickly, while others, important though they may be, end up discarded in a locked cupboard. Why should this be so? If something is inherently a good idea – like TRIZ – why doesn’t it get adopted by everyone?

We thought we’d explore the reasons.

What we found was, to say the least, a tad depressing.

The good news, though, as with so many things in life, is that there is a very repeatable pattern of evolution.

One of the inevitable ‘next stages’ of the evolution of a Big Idea is that it needs some kind of a ‘real-world’ proof point. DeBono’s work with Shell, for example. Or the rise of Toyota. Or Samsung saving $91M on their first TRIZ project.

This ‘proof-point’ results in a wider awareness of the Big Idea. Success acts like a magnet. Managers in other enterprises look at the success and say (or are told), ‘we want some of that’. And so a Hype Cycle kicks in. The Big Idea gets oversold and quickly starts to create a backlash and assorted cries of ‘foul’. At least that’s what we can visibly see happening. Perhaps the bigger unanswered question is why does it happen? If the world knows about the Hype Cycle, why doesn’t it do something about the Hype Cycle?

Here’s why. An unholy Trinity of Dysfunction. First up a growing cohort of anxious and uncertain managers who know where they want to get to but don’t know how to get there. This knowledge vacuum leads to the second part of the vicious cycle, hungry, bandwagon-jumping consultants. Which then, thanks to the way publishing and copyright law works, results in a myriad variations on the initial Big Idea.

Think, for example, about how DeBono’s insights about lateral thinking and ‘parallel thinking’ have been turned into a thousand shade of ‘Design Thinking’. Almost invariably, these variations involve simplification of the Big Idea. So TRIZ gets devolved into a dozen versions of SIT. 15 Wastes get trimmed to 7. 14 Points gets stripped out to 4. And so on.

Looking at the vicious cycle that results, these ‘simplifications’ can perhaps be seen in a new light: Managers don’t understand (and probably don’t have time to understand) the full intended implications of the Big Idea, they just want something that’s easy to grasp. At the same time the cconsulting community has its own learning problem: how to teach large numbers of consultants to sell and assist their clients to adopt the Big Idea? They have profit margins to think about too. So they have every imperative to strip out the inconvenient ‘difficult bits’ of the Big Idea – they have less to learn, and it’s easier to sell the simplified idea to their gullible, give-me-anything-that-sounds-vaguely-like-what-I’ve-been-told-to-go-do clients.

And so we end up with this horrible self-fulfilling cycle of doom:

Which in turn leads to the next ‘inevitable’ evolution stage of the Big Idea: Corrupting Simplification. Classic example: one of the key tenets (we now know) of the Toyota Production System is the elimination of waste. One of those wastes is ‘the waste of a lost customer’. That’s a difficult one for many companies because the ‘customer’ is to all intents and purposes outside their control. Especially so if you’re the manager in charge of a production line. Far easier to strip out waste from the production line than some ethereal, invisible, and fickle customer. And so ‘Lean’ gets corrupted to mean ‘stripping out waste from the factory’. Which, as most companies get to experience, works fine for a while, but then quickly devolves into elimination of ‘waste’ that later transpires to have not been waste at all. Leaving the factory looking like an embarrassed Dodo: too late to re-evolve wings.

Many Big Ideas fail to make it through this Trinity-of-Dysfunction-driven ‘Trough of Disillusionment’ part of the Hype Cycle. TRIZ is on the cusp right now. It could make it through or it could find itself in the cupboard of lost ideas.

The Big Ideas that do make it through the downward spiral do so because, out of all the failures that the spiral produces, what we might think of as the ‘true DNA’ of the Big Idea emerges. In many cases, ironically, what emerges doesn’t look too far different to the initial rare individual’s initial conception of the Big Idea. But, importantly, what the world now gets to see is precisely why the Big Idea was expressed in the way that it was. Deming ended up with ’14 Points’ in his Profound Knowledge System because that’s how many turn out to be necessary. Companies (and consultants) get to see evidence that stripping out the rather inconvenient, say, Point 1 (constancy of purpose) was very demonstrably a dumb thing to do. We can all intellectualise these things, but, weird, contrary creatures that we are, it’s only when we live through the actual consequences that we finally accept a truth.

More importantly still, by understanding the ‘why’ the Big Idea is the way it is makes it much easier to engage people – managers and consultants – in the process of learning it. Which in turn means that it’s easier all around to learn it.

Hype Cycle-wise, the Big Idea’s ‘True DNA’ triggers the final climb up the ‘Slope Of Enlightenment’. Slowly but surely the Big Idea finds its way into the collective unconscious. Eventually to the point where it reaches what we might think of its final evolutionary state of ‘MetaStability’.

And so, finally, here’s what we think the overall Big Idea evolution pattern looks like:

Given the rather unfortunate ‘Trinity of Dysfunction’-driven ‘Corrupting Simplification’ stage of the trend it is perhaps tempting to now ask the same question we might ask of the Hype Cycle: if we know the problem is there, why don’t we just solve the problem.

To answer that question it is perhaps helpful to bring in to the story another Big Idea. J.P. Morgan’s ‘people do things for two reasons, a good reason and a real reason’. The good reason for adopting a Big Idea is that it derives a tangible benefit. The real reason why Big Idea’s tend not to get adopted is that humans have evolved, let’s not beat around the bush, to be lazy. We like staying inside our lovely, warm comfort zone cocoons. Whenever someone brings us a new problem to work on, the very first thing we do is ask ourselves, ‘have I seen this problem before?’ We ask that question in the hope that we have already seen the problem, such that we can then save ourselves a lot of time, effort and emotional discomfort in having to think up a new answers. We’re evolutionary ‘satisficers’. If the answer is ‘good enough’ to get the boss off our backs for a while, it’s the answer we’re programmed to go with.

Taguchi’s Design Of Experiments is mathematically provable to be massively more effective than traditional ways of doing things. And yet it’s viewed as cult’ish voodoo by most people. Why? Because it hasn’t been sufficiently ‘proved’ to those people (or their bosses) that Design Of Experiments is the ‘right’ thing to do. That plus the fact it’s got matrix algebra in it.

The point being that Taguchi Methods, like TRIZ, like every other Big Idea, needs the Trinity of Dysfunction to do its work before the ‘TrueDNA’ becomes emotionally visible. And the problem for both right now is that they’re both so difficult the community of hungry consultants is able to find much easier pickings elsewhere. Which is why the only way to sell Taguchi is to hide it in a piece of software that does other – easier to grasp – things. And why in many countries right now the only way to sell TRIZ is to call it a Design Thinking tool.

Cream always rises. Someone will unlock the lost Big Ideas from their cupboard when the time is right. And sometimes the trick is to hide Big Ideas in a Trojan Cupboard.

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it, and the motion picture involved in this case is not that”

United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart

When I tried to find a coherent definition of ‘Design Thinking’ I quickly discovered some very murky waters. “Design Thinking is a methodology used by designers to solve complex problems, and find desirable solutions for clients.” Or, “Design Thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be, and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer)”. Or how about, “a discipline that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.”

Personally, I’m inclined to side with Supreme Court Justic Potter Stewart when in 1964 he was asked to judge whether Louis Malle’s film, The Lovers’ was obscene or not., I know good Design Thinking when I see it. Or, actually, more often, I know good Design Thinking, when I observe it’s opposite.

And very often that ‘opposite’ looks an awful lot like ‘Operational Excellence’. Operational excellence is all about removing waste and maximizing the efficiency of a system, reducing things to procedure and simple instructions. It is the way of thinking given to the world by Frederick Winslow Taylor: systematically study a system, break it down into its smallest parts and find the ‘one best way’ of doing each of those small parts. Whereas design is all about escape from the norm and creation of new solutions.

The key tenets of Design Thinking involve mass collaboration, empathy with the customer, and, perhaps most importantly of all, the idea of earlist possible prototyping. Give the customer something to play with as quickly as possible so you can begin to learn what they really want. Fail fast, fail forward.

I was recently running a Design Thinking workshop and was trying to talk about the polar opposite differences between Operational Excellence and Design Thinking in terms of complexity. I drew a version of this picture:

It’s a model from an article I wrote in the September 2014 issue of the Systematic Innovation ezine (Issue 150) about one of our PanSensic complexity measurement tools. Plotted onto this picture of the actual-versus-assumed complexity of a situation, the polar opposite differences between Operational Excellence and Design Thinking become quite vivid. In Operational excellence, we’re trying to remove complexity such that we can manage the business through highly scalable sense-categorise-respond feedback loops. In Design Thinking we’re trying to embrace complexity by adopting exploratory, ‘probe-sense-respond’ approaches.

The picture also, I think, provides a pretty good illustration of what Design Thinking really is: a procedure for getting problem solvers into an exploration mindset that proactively utilises system complexity.

Okay, I realise this definition is no less fuzzy than any of the others. But now the connection to complexity is explicitly made, I realise I shouldn’t ever expect it to be.

While I understand that no-one goes to work to deliberately do a bad job, oftentimes merely turning up with good intentions is enough to cause an awful lot of inadvertent damage. There’s nowhere this applies more than in the healthcare sector. Everyone I’ve ever met there is passionate about making a difference. But all too often they fall into the trap of thinking their energy to do the right thing will carry the day.

We’ve seen a terrific example of thst this week from the very top of the NHS. Chief Medical Officer, Sally Davies has been telling the nation that obesity is a bigger problem than terrorism or climate change. The majority of her message was aimed at women in the mid30s to mid 40s (over 50% of whom are overweight or obese), and women in their mid40s to mid50s (nearly two-thirds of whom are overweight or obese).

Following the news headlines, I’ve overheard several conversations involving the target group, the gist of which seemed to be a fairly consistent, ‘this makes me more inclined to pile on the pounds’.

Whether the obesity issue is as dangerous as terrorism or climate change is difficult for a sane person to gauge I think. But what does seem clear to me is that, while Dr Davies’ comments were no doubt made with the very best of intentions – obesity is a big problem – she’s completely failed to understand her intended audience.

A lot of which comes down to understanding generational differences. When a 66 year-old Baby Boomer tries to tell Alienated Generation X’ers what to do, it comes across as sanctimonious, holier-than-thou haranguing. Especially as she is clearly not overweight herself.

Generation X ‘Nomads’ are a contrary bunch. The archetypal cut-your-nose-off-to-spite-your-face generation. They don’t respect what Moralising elders tell them because it was the very same elders that abandoned them as kids and declared them to be ‘slackers’ and ill-educated when they grew up. All their lives they’ve learned not to trust Boomers. When a Boomer says ‘white’, a Nomad immediately sides with black.

Had Sally Davies understood this, she might well have said what needed to be said differently. Or, better yet, got a Nomad colleague to convey the message instead.

It’s not rocket science. It’s having the humility to recognize that your lifetime’s accumulation of wisdom and best intentions might be interpreted others in entirely the wrong way.

After a while you begin to spot a pattern. Introduce the PanSensic ‘read between the lines’ capability to managers or any of the Systematic Innovation problem definition tools and there’s a moment when their smile turns to a worried frown. “If these tools help to reveal the truth about a situation, what if the truth is that I’m the problem?” You can almost hear the brain cogs whirring. The words don’t always come out quite so overtly, but you can see the concern is there. And unless you nip the question in the bud very quickly, the conversation can very easily turn into an increasingly frantic search for a plausible deniability excuse to tell their boss why they’d been wrong to ask me to come and talk to them in the first place.

When I hear the ‘what if this shows I’m the problem’ question, I’m often tempted to respond perhaps we now already know what the problem is. No smoke without fire, right?

Of course, the conclusion I just jumped to is almost inevitably erroneous. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it seems like a natural human reaction to conclude that when someone acts defensively about something, they have something to be defensive about.

Because I was (and in many ways still am) a big fan of W Edwards Deming, I’ve managed to train myself to recognize that these defensive feelings of guilt that managers sometimes reveal are misplaced. “90% of all problems are problems of the system,” Deming famously declared back in the 1970s. By 1982 and the publication of Out Of The Crisis, the percentage had risen to 94%. By the time he passed away in 1993, the number had grown again to 96%. Whatever the number is, it suggests that an awful lot of people are feeling unnecessarily guilty about the work they’re doing.

Now, of course, ‘the system’ is the responsibility of the management team. They’re the only ones with the authority to formally alter how things are done within an organisation. But ‘being responsible’ is not the same as ‘my fault’ when things go wrong.

Especially as our world and the enterprises we operate within become ever more interdependent and complex. The more complex things become, the more likely it becomes that the silos managers are expected to operate within become increasingly artificial and increasingly problematic. And the more likely, to paraphrase the words of the cliché, the butterfly wing flap over in the warehouse causes a tornado in the Accounts Department.

I suspect that today Deming’s number is somewhere even closer to 100%

When a manager – implicitly or explicitly – asks the question, ‘what if PanSensic shows everyone I’m the problem?’ the right response is that PanSensic will reveal where in the system the problems are. And it will do it in such a manner that the manager can do what he or she is there to do… work ‘on the system’ to improve it. And maybe then become the hero they deserve to be, so they can go home at night not just with a clear conscience, but a healthy glow of pride.

The best thing about 2×2 matrices, apart from their deceptive simplicity, is they help make visible the contradictions that need to be solved.

Here’s one we’ve spent a lot of our time worrying about over the course of the last few years:

In either/or world, people are generalists or specialists.

They are deep and narrow or broad and shallow.

Education is either deep or broad.

Data is either BIG or THICK.

Most of us go through life assuming we can either have our cake or eat it. We’re expected to make choices: live in the top-left box in the 2×2 or the bottom right.

Being broad means being a source. Being deep means being a resource. Sources are many, resources are few. Sources compete on price, resources compete on expertise. When I want to source the latest Courtney Barnett album, I go to Amazon. When I need a resource to help me work out who’s the next best new artist of the year, I choose my local music shop, where they have a Sam that knows me and knows about what’s happening in the industry. Amazon is very scalable, Sam is not. At least not traditionally. It took her five years to get to know me and what I do and don’t like, and fifteen more before that getting to know the industry.

Traditionally I have to make the choice between breadth or depth. Buy something randomly on Amazon, or spend several years fostering a relationship with Sam.

But if I allow myself to contemplate the impossible – having my cake AND eating it – I realise the top right hand box is the place I’m supposed to get to.

QUINTESSENCE: the fifth and highest element in ancient and medieval philosophy that permeates all nature and is the substance composing the celestial bodies; the essence of a thing in its purest and most concentrated form.

It’s what PanSensic is all about. Big narrative. Giving managers and leaders the confidence to act. Extracting meaning from the past to help design the future.

Solving contradictions. Bigger And Deeper. Quintessent.

People love pretty pictures. There’s no doubt some of the prettiest pictures being created these days are coming from the word of social network analytics. Better yet to know that it’s really easy to construct pictures that look like they took a long time to produce. Things like this map of email traffic flows within an organisation:

I’ve had several rather depressing conversations this week with HR-types that seem to be under the mistaken impression that this kind of picture is useful as well as pretty. The depressing bit being that they don’t seem to want to see why the picture is pointless nonsense. Maybe it’s because they’re still at the stage that the people sponsoring them to create the pictures haven’t gone past the pretty-picture wow effect themselves yet? I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to. I suspect I won’t like the answer.

I don’t think the social analytics ‘solutions’ providers want to know either. They’re too busy turning the nonsense into even more detailed micro-nonsense. Why restrict yourself to merely plotting email connections when you can also build a host of quasi-scientific sounding dashboard diagnostics.

Response Rates – how quickly do people respond to their emails?

Inside/Outside Ratios – how much correspondence occurs within the organisation relative to the outide world?

Key Players – who receives or sends the most email?

It all sounds great. Right up to the moment you start to think about it.

Should that accidently start to happen, there comes the frightening realization that none of this stuff is in any way actionable.

It’s not actionable because it’s missing a number of very important pieces of additional information. The fact that you emailed me is meaningless. The fact that you were frustrated or angry or (preferably) happy starts to give me some kind of context. What you were writing about gives me more. Was it chit-chat or did it contain some useful content? A question? An answer? Factually correct? Mis-informed? Your Mental Gear? Whether you were telling the truth? Only when I know this kind of stuff do I have the opportunity to learn anything useful.

Don’t show me a social network picture unless it shows me frustration levels. Or where the meaningful traffic is coming from and going to. These, too, might still look like pretty pictures, but now they might actually allow me to do something useful to improve the network.

Or maybe I’ve got the wrong end of the stick again? Maybe the point of the pretty pictures is to cover the cracks in the office wall? As opposed to working out why the cracks seem to be getting bigger?

‘That’s cheating’ is a frequent reaction when any of us hear an inventive solution to a problem for the first time. Cheating in the context of inventive problem solving is all about breaking rules. Sometimes breaking rules is a good thing. And sometimes it isn’t.

The recent VW emissions testing debacle is a good illustration of breaking the rules in a bad way. We still don’t really know what’s happened for sure, but the fact that the company has admitted that cheating took place probably tells us enough to speculate on the reality: cars are subject to increasingly strict emissions legislation and VW found themselves in a position whereby they were unable to meet those targets. Faced with the prospect of not being able to sell their cars, the engineers must have somehow found themselves in a horrible ‘rock and hard place’ conflict. Sadly, it appears they took a ‘bad cheat’ approach to their conflict. Better, someone in the company decided, to cheat the tests than to potentially put the company out of business because they didn’t have a legislation-compliant product.

I had a similar legislation-compliance cheating situation myself in the 1990s. We’d invented a low water consumption toilet and were busy trying to license it to one of the UK manufacturers. A big part of our rationale was that the legislation was changing and the toilets being produced by the industry would no longer be compliant. I quickly became frustrated by the lack of interest in our invention. Not only did it exceed the new water consumption regulations, but it was cheaper to manufacture, more compact and more hygienic. None of the manufacturers seemed to care. Finally, I got one of them to explain why they weren’t interested in the new design, despite the fact that their current designs were about to become illegal. “You don’t understand how this industry works,” said the chief engineer, “we can’t afford to innovate. Far easier for us to write to the Government and tell them that if they insist in enforcing the new legislation, they will kill the industry and risk losing thousands of jobs.”

To my mind, although this wasn’t an illegal response like VW’s, it was still an unpleasant case of ‘bad-cheating’ in action. Especially when looked at from the societal and environmental perspective with literally billions of gallons of wasted water at stake: we were all cheated by an industry that thought it was easier to write a letter than think about the problem.

I guess a part of my frustration arose from my previous experience in the aerospace industry. Just as in other sectors, the aerospace industry is heavily regulated. The pressures on manufacturers to improve energy efficiency and reduce emissions have been just as high as in the automotive sector. But the response of the industry to these ever more stringent requirements has been somewhat different.

In the case of VW and the UK water industry, the reaction to a requirement that was beyond the realms of current capability was to break the legislator’s rules. In the aerospace industry, on the other hand, there is a clear understanding that the regulations exist to advance our understanding of how the world works.

When the aerospace regulators specified parallel reductions in NOx and SOx emissions, for example, they knew, as did engineers in the industry, that the two requirements were in many ways contradictory. Increasing combustion temperature improved one but made the other worse. And vice versa. ‘The Science’ said we could have low NOx or low Sox, but not both. In TRIZ terms, we can see the challenge to be a classic contradiction: we want combustion temperature to be ‘high and low’. And that’s the convention the industry set about challenging, fairly rapidly turning the paradox into a suite of combustion system designs that achieved the ‘impossible’: designs that had both high and low combustion temperature, and both low NOx and low SOx. The designers here too had to break the rules. But the rules they broke were the ‘laws’ of physics and chemistry. Or rather mankind’s rather limited understanding of those ‘laws’ and the hidden incorrect or incomplete assumptions they contained.

That’s good cheating: Breaking rules that we had wrongly assumed were rules. The ‘laws of physics’ that turn out to be nothing of the sort. The trade-offs that we’d assumed were inherent, but turned out to be merely the next contradiction to be solved.