Whenever anything happens it happens because there is a viable system. Sometimes stuff happens unexpectedly: we didn’t know there was a system, but it turned out there was. Sometime we decide to be proactive and make stuff that we want to happen happen. This requires us to create a viable system.

Strip the world back to first principles, and we see that a ‘viable system’ contains a minimum number of pieces. Depending on how you cut up the jigsaw, that minimum number is six. TRIZ calls it the ‘Law Of System Completeness’. If we have an intention to deliberately and successfully change something, it requires a viable system and that viable system needs these six pieces:

Sometimes we think we’ve designed our change system to include them all. Sometimes we’re right and sometimes we’re wrong. Sometimes people tell us that we have all the pieces we need and still we don’t get the successful change we were expecting.

When our change attempt doesn’t go as well as we expected, it is because one or more of the pieces of our jigsaw are missing. Or not working properly.

The question, then, becomes which one. Or ones.

The best way to answer that question is to look at the symptoms we’re experiencing. Different symptoms come from different missing jigsaw pieces:

If the symptom is anarchy, the cause is a lack of shared vision about the change objectives.

If the symptom is constipation (lots of input, but no output), the cause is a lack of pressure for change from our intended customers.

If the symptom is getting stuck in cul-de-sacs, feeling paralysed and not knowing what to do next, the cause is a lack of relevant knowledge and/or brain-power within the team.

If the symptom is spinning wheels, the cause is lack of a realistic work plan.

If the symptom is everyone heading towards a nervous breakdown, the cause is a lack of capacity to execute.

If the symptom is random oscillation in directions or outcomes, the cause is a lack of relevant metrics.

If you have more than one symptom, the cause is a lack of understanding of systems in general and the Law of System Completeness specifically. Go directly to First-Principle-Jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

“I am becoming convinced that confronting people with ‘facts’, although necessary to better understand our predicament, will be almost completely ineffectual when it comes to altering our course… facts are secondary to accessing raw emotions when it comes to change…”

Nate Hagens

The large majority of all of the work we do with the ABC-M tetrad model is about providing clients with a better understanding of the intangible needs of their customers. A few of the braver ones are now also beginning to ask whether the model is also applicable to their employees. The nice thing about universal models, like ABC-M, is that the answer is an easy ‘yes, this also applies to the people within your organisation.’

That said, I suspect the reason few organisations are as yet asking the question is their instincts are telling them they won’t like the answer.

The simple rule, when we’re thinking about customers, is that innovation occurs when Autonomy, Belonging, Competence and Meaning all get better.

The corollary when switching the model to look inside organisations is perhaps something like, ‘success happens when employee Autonomy, Belonging, Competence and Meaning all get better’. ‘Success’ in the context of the workplace can be any number of things. Successful change. Successfully engaging people in their work. Successful project outcomes. Etc.

And therein lies the problem – or ‘problems’ – for most jobs and most organisations. Managers and leaders know that Autonomy, Belonging, Competence and Meaning for the most part don’t get better when people step across the company threshold and turn themselves into employees:

Autonomy – I often hear people saying, ‘I love change, I hate being changed’. What they hate, I think, is the loss of autonomy that occurs when managers ‘inflict’ change on their charges. For most of us, the moment we step into the office, we know that our level of Autonomy just took a turn for the worse: we used to be in control, now our boss is.

Belonging – if management have done their job in any way well, this is the easiest of the tetrad to get right. When people feel loyal to the organisations they work for, their sense of Belonging increases. They feel a sense of pride to be part of the team. The polo shirt with the company logo on it, or the team lanyard are both symbols of increased Belonging… or rather, they are provided people are actually proud to be ‘wearing the shirt’. One often gets the sense in some organisations that wearing the company logo detracts from a person’s true sense of Belonging – the logo being a sign that, by forcing them to wear it, you’ve just removed them from the (cool) tribe they were a member of before they stepped into the office and forced them to join your very uncool work tribe.

Competence – it is sometimes said that there are only three universal taboos – never criticise a person’s religion, life-partner or work. The last of these three is all about the Competence we feel when we know we’re good at our job, and how we really don’t like it when that competence comes in to question in any way. When people say, ‘I love change, I hate being changed’, what they’re typically also implying is, ‘provided it doesn’t make me feel like an incompetent idiot’. Change is uncomfortable for everyone because almost inevitably it causes our perceived level of Competence to dip, albeit hopefully temporarily. One of Apple’s biggest insights over the years has been to create products where, from the moment the customer opens the box, they feel more Competent than they were when the lid was still taped down. When we have to open a user-guide, our sense of Competence goes down. What Apple learned with their intuitive user interface design is what most organisations still need to learn when people enter the workplace: we all need to feel like we’re good at stuff. And we need to be able to demonstrate that competence to the people around us.

Meaning – the really tough one. To the extent that several clients have in effect asked us to remove it from the tetrad when we’re trying to help them measure what’s going on in their workplace. ‘Making ABC better’ is something they can live with. Making things more ‘meaningful’ is much more difficult. And the honest truth in far too many organisations right now is that a very large proportion of the work we ask people to do is worse than meaningless. Over time, one hopes, all the meaningless work will be eliminated (or given to the robots to do), but right now, for the most part, measuring Meaning – or the lack thereof – is a surefire way of depressing a majority of the people in your organisation. Nothing ever improves, of course, until we are able to measure it. Which is why the more enlightened organisations are now beginning allow for the ‘meaningful-ness’ of work to become something they should be measuring and sharing around the organisation. We’re still a long way away from the ‘war on meaningless work’ that is probably needed in most parts of society, but at least putting it on the radar – and letting managers know it is measurable – is a small step in the right direction.

And if that sounds like uncharacteristic optimism on my part, it probably is.

(PanSensic already has an ABC-M narrative analysis lens. If you’re feeling brave and want to explore how close your organisation or your employees are to achieving the ‘ABC-M all get better’ business success criterion, give me a shout.)

Back in 1994 when I first started describing myself as an ‘innovation consultant’, no-one seemed to recognise the term, never mind know what I did. Today, it feels like there are a million and one innovation consultants. I think there are many reasons for this, not least of which is that the world is in the midst of an innovation wave and a lot of frustrated corporate ‘innovators’ have found that it is easier to set up by themselves than it is to try and innovate in a big-company environment. The big-companies, it seems, still don’t really get it when it comes to innovation. As evidenced by the fact that 75% of innovation comes from small companies.

All that said, whenever an organisation – big or small – is thinking about innovating, and deciding they might benefit from some external assistance, the new problem they face is an apparently overwhelming amount of choice. A million and one innovation consultants with ten million and ten different messages. I just conducted one of our periodic reviews of the state of the art and I’d have to say the main feeling I was left with was one of deep sadness. So much choice and so little understanding of what innovation is about. Talk about the blind leading the blind.

I thought it might be time to start putting together a sort of user guide to help the bewildered become a little less bewildered.

Before we get to the guts of a prototype ‘how to choose the right innovation consultant’ process, there are a couple of questions prospective innovators might want to ask before they start actually talking to prospective consultants.

Question Zero: Do We REALLY Want To Innovate?

In my experience a fairly large proportion of ‘prospective innovators’ find themselves in such a position with a high degree of reluctance. They’ve been handed the challenge by a boss who, I think most believe in their heart of hearts, isn’t really interested in actually changing anything: there is a need to look busy, but, heaven help us if it ever comes to anything requiring a serious decision. Innovation tokenism.

If the real – heart of hearts – answer to this question is ‘no, we really don’t want to innovate’, your best bet is to choose your ‘innovation consultant’ on the basis of either a) they are the coolest and most fun, or, b) being able to say I worked with this one will be good for my CV.

Right now, if answer a) is the one you favour, you’re probably going to go for one of the swarm of under-employed, under-talented Hollywood sci-fi scriptwriters that seem to be doing the rounds at the moment. You’ll have fun (I can speak from experience), but you’ll learn absolutely nothing of any value at all, innovation-wise.

If b) is your answer, you need to go to the consultant with the highest daily rate and/or public cachet. Presence of words like ‘Stanford’ or ‘Silicon Valley’ are helpful indicators. Again, as with option a), don’t’ expect to actually learn anything of relevance to either innovation in general or your organisation in particular.

Question Zero-Point-Five: Is An Excuse For Failure More Important Than Success?

This is the plausible deniability question. 98% of innovation attempts end in failure, and in a lot of organisations, finding yourself in charge of one of the 98% failures can be very career limiting. If that’s your situation, the answer to the ‘which innovation consultant?’ question is very simple: you’re going to choose one of the Big Five consulting companies. Your project will still have a 98% likelihood of failure, but at least when things do go wrong, you won’t be blamed for the failure. Or the enormous consulting bill.

Okay, so now to the proper model. The one for people that have a genuine desire for their project to end up in the 2% success category. Here’s a hierarchy of questions you need to ask of your prospective innovation consultant candidates. The basic idea of the hierarchy is, if they fail one question, there’s no point advancing to the next question because their failure already dooms you to the 98% failure bucket.

Question One: Does The Consultant Understand ‘Good’ & ‘Real’ Customer Outcomes?

Given the fact that there are only two ways to innovate and that one of them is offering customers a new outcome (or ‘function’ or ‘job’ – different words, same meaning), a really good early question to a prospective consultant is how they set about identifying such ‘new outcome’ needs. Given the widespread use of words like function, job and outcome, and the presence of multiple types of ‘function database’, it’s fairly likely unless you’re particularly unlucky with your list of candidates, that they will be able to talk to you about tangible outcomes. The real decider, therefore, here is how they respond to probing questions about how they propose to bring the intangible customer outcome needs into their support of your project. This is the point where you might start to get the blank looks. As a test if/when this look appears, you can test whether they are properly out of their depth by asking to explain the relevance of the JP Morgan aphorism, ‘people make decisions for two reasons, the good reason and the real reason’. If they manage to bluff their way towards an answer that hints they’ll use any kind of customer interview to answer the question, they fail. Got to jail. Do not pass Go.

Question Two: Does The Consultant Understand Contradictions?

If new-outcomes is innovation strategy number one, the other is ‘solve a contradiction’. About 85% of innovations succeed by using this strategy. This also happens to be the test that will allow you to quickly eliminate the large majority of so-called ‘innovation consultants’ from your selection process. Whether you use the words ‘contradiction’, ‘conflict’, ‘trade-off’, ‘condundrum’, ‘paradox’, or any number of other synonyms, unless they can point you towards how they will help you to identify and eliminate contradictions, they’re not going to help you to innovate. Most respondents will answer with a blank stare, others will try and deflect the discussion onto a subject they are more comfortable with. Either way, they fail.

Question Three: Does The Consultant Understand Complex Adaptive Systems?

By the time you reach Question Three, something like 90% of your candidate consultants will have fallen by the wayside. Here’s where you get to eliminate over half of those that remain. Innovation fundamentally means embracing and working under the governing ‘rules’ of complex adaptive systems. You need to know that they understand what a complex adaptive system is. And, more importantly, how that knowledge impacts on the innovation project they’re going to support you through. The early stages of any innovation project are about exploration. Which in turn means identifying and answering ‘the unknowns’. Asking them about the process they propose to navigate you through the ‘fuzzy-front-end’ stages of your precious project, the moment they try and draw a Gantt chart or start talking about pipelines or Stage-Gate, you know they’re not going to be able to help you. Key words and phrases to listen out for in terms of the consultants that do actually understand the connections between complexity and innovation include: ‘emergent’, ‘first principles’, ‘minimum viable demonstration’. Plus, of course, they need to be able to convince you they know how to connect these key words to how they’ll affect how they’re going to spend the minimum amount of (your!) money to make the maximum amount of progress in answering the unknowns.

Question Four: Does The Consultant Understand Analytics?

By Question Four, you’re already somewhere near sifting the genuine cream from the curdled milk. The fourth Question is all about what sorts of analytical measurements and measurement tools are they going to bring to bear to help you get through the exploration and execution stages of your project. The key here is listening out for the sorts of thing they propose measuring. If their list includes all the ‘usual suspect’ measurements (any of the ’75 essential KPIs – see SI ezine worst of 2015 Awards), they’re wasting your time. You need to be listening out for unusual suspect measurements. Things that you know are going to be important (meaningful), but that are traditionally thought to be impossible to measure (‘team morale’, ‘answered unknowns’, ‘frustration’, ‘engagement’, ‘Hero’s Journey stage’, ‘sense of progress’, etc) are the things you need to know. Your consultant needs to be able to demonstrate that a) they know why such measures are important, and, b) how they’re going to make those measurements.

Question Five: Does The Consultant Understand Methods?

At a superficial level, this last Question is about whether your candidate consultant is trying to sell you their method, or the right method for you particular context. If they don’t ask you about the Innovation Capability Level of your organisation, the tools and methods your organisation/team currently uses, or the psychometric profiles of the project team members, the chances are they’re there to sell you ‘their’ method. Easy to catch them out on this question. If they’re trying to push ‘method X’ onto you, ask them for evidence that this is the right thing to bring to bear in your context. Ask them to describe an equivalent situation on a previous project that Method X has worked (if they can, ask them to explain the expression, ‘you can never step in the same river twice’). If they get through that question, the next one is to show you how they’ve done back to back analyses of Method X,Y and Z in order to establish that Method X was indeed the most appropriate one. Don’t worry too much about whether you’ve ever been through this kind of comparison exercise in your own organisation before, at the end of the day, 90%+ of consultants are well versed in just one or two methods, so you shouldn’t have too much difficulty getting them to the point where they are using the word ‘err’ twice per sentence and looking like the they’d rather be somewhere else. Which, as far as your selection process is concerned is precisely where they need to be.

Taken together, those five questions should enable you to swiftly get down to a Top Two or Three. To help make the questions easy to remember, just think about OCCAM:

Beyond that point, your choice is basically going to boil down to your own intangible outcome needs: who’s best going to make you into a hero? Who’s going to stick by you when the going gets – inevitably – rough? Who, to cut through to the simplest answer, is the one that is going to be your innovation Razor?

I’m a big fan of Albert Einstein, but one thing he definitely got wrong was the belief that “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.” It’s an aphorism I still hear churned out unthinkingly by just about everyone in the ‘creativity consultant’ world. As if the statement is some kind of call to arms for clients stuck in the rut they’re perceived to be in. If Einstein said it, the unspoken logic goes, it must be true.

It becomes even truer, the creative consultant believes, when it gets written onto a napkin and a photo of it gets inserted into all of their Powerpoint slide decks.

Fortunately, after not very much searching, it turns out Einstein never said anything about insanity at all. Rather it seems to have been attributed to him by those parts of the ‘creative’ world seeking to inflate their already bloated sense of self-worth.

I’m pretty certain Einstein never really understood complexity theory, so he might have had every excuse for coming to a conclusion that anyone doing the same thing shouldn’t ever expect to get a different result. On the other hand, I’m pretty certain he would have understood the aphorism ‘you can never step in the same river twice’. Heraclitus gave us that little gem around 2500 years ago, when complexity theory definitely didn’t exist.

Perhaps it didn’t need to. Perhaps people had the common sense back then to recognize that it was very frequently the case that people did exactly what they’d always done and ended up getting very different results. Like 88% of 1955 Fortune 500 companies that are no longer with us. They all believed they’d keep being successful by thinking and doing the same old thing too.

The really simple way to make that napkin picture look like the dumb thing that it really is, is to modify it so it looks like this:

Now we’re forced to think about everything around us – Heraclitus’ ‘river’ – and about whether it is sensible to think that it is all staying the same. Think about that for a few seconds and you  have to believe it’s never true. I’m sitting here in a noisy café and my not so good coffee is going cold. In a minute it will probably too cold. Which means I won’t get my full caffeine fix. Which means I’ll probably forget to write something on my job list. Which… you get the idea.

The reason there are so many fragile organisations on the planet right now is that they’ve somehow been brainwashed into believing the same-thinking-same-result mantra is true and, even worse, then connected it to the idea that, because they were doing well a couple of years ago, they just need to keep doing what they’ve been doing. It’s like they’ve become collectively drunk on a cocktail of cognitive flaws – Status Quo Bias, Normalcy Bias, Confirmation Bias and Illusion of Control. To all intents and purposes, you had me at ‘Fortune500’. The ‘environment around us’ doesn’t stay the same even in this stupid café with it’s dated soundtrack, never mind in a commercial organisation of several thousand people.

In a complex world the best we can say is that if we keep doing the same as we’ve always done we will probably get the same result. The closer we are to the edge of chaos, the less probable that same result becomes.There are no guarantees in a complex system because we’re surrounded by a swirling cauldron of interdependent causes and effects. The fact that thinking the same doesn’t necessarily mean we get the same result also tells us – anyone that wishes to be more resilient than the fragile organisation they’re probably working for – that what’s needed is a finely tuned what-around-me-has-changed radar so we can sense what’s changed and shift our response accordingly.

Oh, wait, evolution already gave us one of those. Strike that. What we need is to stay as far away as we possibly can from creativity consultants that teach us how to not use it any more.

“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.