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By Vic Desotelle, inKNOWvate
Closed-loop systems inherently extend and retain an organization's knowledge capital by designing products that can learn and return information from its consumer experience. Note that a closed loop methodology makes it essential for an organization to move from supply chains to value webs.
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Contributing Editor: René JornaWith a Foreword by John Elkington
http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/innovation.htm
HOW SUSTAINABLE IS INNOVATION?
Problematically, most contemporary patterns of innovation in human social systems and organisations are not sustainable. This prevents people from learning effectively, from recognising and solving their problems, and from operating in sustainable ways. It is arguably why societies, businesses and industries around the world are so unsustainable.
Sustainable innovation is a pattern of social learning and problem- solving that is, itself, sustainable. The sustainability of innovation, moreover, is linked to the sustainability of its outcomes, which manifest themselves in what people produce and do in the world. Sustainable innovation, then, is a necessary precondition for sustainability in how societies and organisations function - the ways they organise, the products and services they make, the energy and resources they use, and the wastes they produce.
As challenges such as demographic pressures, ethnic tensions, terrorism, global poverty, pandemics and abrupt climate change force their way into mainstream politics and business, so we see growing interest in innovation, entrepreneurial solutions and, critically, issues such as how to ensure successful solutions replicate and scale. Sustainable Innovation aims to illustrate that shift. Instead of simply focusing on environmental and technological matters, it views and evaluates innovation-for-sustainability in terms of the human, social and management challenges and responses.
Developed from the Dutch research programme `Knowledge Creation for Sustainable Innovation', this book presents empirical research and cases to develop a theory of sustainable innovation that is based on management of knowledge, knowledge and cognition and innovation approaches.
Sustainable Innovation suggests that knowledge and innovation will be the key drivers of social and corporate sustainability in the years ahead. It will be essential reading for managers and researchers in areas such as sustainability, innovation, knowledge management and organisational learning.
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To place an order for this title at a discount of 10%, or to view/download `The Foreword` by John Elkington, `The Preface` and `Knowledge creation for sustainable innovation: the KCSI programme` by Rene Jorna
Please visit the Greenleaf website at:http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com/catalogue/innovation.htm
You can also request a review copy or inspection copy from this site - see the home page: http://www.greenleaf-publishing.com
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Principles of Ecology
From the Center for Ecoliteracy (By Fritjof Capra)
1-Networks
*Interdependence, Diversity, and Complexity*
The members of an ecosystem are interconnected in a vast network of relationships in which all life processes are interdependent and achieve stability through a diversity of linkages.
2-Boundaries
*Scale and Limits*
At all scales of nature, we find living systems nesting within other living systems, each within its own boundary and limits.
3-Cycles
*Recycling of Resources and Partnership*
The interactions among members of an ecological community involve the exchange of resources in continual cycles so that all waste is recycled through pervasive cooperation and countless forms of partnership: on the planetary scale, each of the elements vital for life goes through a closed loop of cyclic changes.
4-Flow Through
*Energy and Resources*
The constant flow of solar energy sustains life and drives ecological cycles, all organisms feed on flows of energy and resouces, each species producing output that is food for other organisms.
5-Development
*Succession and Coevolution*
The unfolding of life, manifesting as development and learning at the individual level and as evolution at the species level, involves an interplay of creativity and mutal adaptation in which organisms and environment coevolve.
6-Dynamic Balance
*Self-Organization, Flexibility, Stability, and Sustainability
All ecological cycles act as feedback loops so the ecological community regulates and organizes itself, maintaining a state of dynamic balance characterized by continual fluctuations.
Domains of Community Development and Innovation
Regenerative Commerce is a system that is based on a broader understanding of what it means to develop technology and business. inKNOWvate proposes that, using these principles, a region's economic system can revitalize itself and perform beyond expectation.
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The following represent shifts in awareness of the models we use to create and innovate within enterprise. (Note that a shift means we are including new information that expands existing models and does not mean that we are replacing them.
A shift from:
* From Single ... To Triple Bottom Line (3E's) Management (evolved organizing STRUCTURES)
* From Building Mechanistic Systems ... To Growing Living Wholes (advanced technological PATTERN)
* From Linear Sequencing ... To Nonlinear Cyclic Closed Loops (integration of value-webbed PROCESSES)
inKNOWvate's long term objectives is to create a global network of innovation learning centers for business and community. Each interdependent center will incubate innovative technologies and companies that can work for a post-industrial, globally-conscious society. The concept known as 'Regenerative Commerce' will act as an integrating framework for incorporating principles of sustainable innovation for the realization of business products and services that work for the emerging global community.
RELATED CONCEPTS
1- Sustainable Design: Closed loop systems (4e's)
2- Development Principles: Metabolic Growth (Biomimicry) (Ecological) (Permaculture)
3- Distribution Methodology: Triple Bottom Line (3E's)
4- Regionalized Frameworks: Cellular Communities, Regional Conversation Word Map
5- Sustainable Enterprise: Considerations
6- Networked Communication Model: Concentrix Management
Guidelines for incorporating and managing principle-based enterprise:
Regenerative Commerce Presentation Slides
Design the World is copied from blog site Permanent Innovation with permission from Michael Kaufman of Innovation Labs
There is an emerging field of design called "geodesign," which is the use of design as a method of dealing with organizational, behavioral, and cultural problems. Since design is in many ways synonymous with innovation, it really means the use of design as a tool to for social innovation.
For example, a project by designer Bruce Mau that is documented in this week's International Herald Tribune is intended to help Guatemalans think positively about their country's future. (The project itself can be found here (in Spanish), although the web site is a bit sparce.
Mau's larger project is called Massive Change, which "explores the legacy and potential, the promise and power of design in improving the welfare of humanity."
Guiding Your Organization Through The Rugged Landscape Ahead
By Arian Ward of Community Frontiers
As we all know well, the world has changed dramatically since the times when traditional strategic planning first became the foundation on which organizations of all types are based. The landscape on which organizations operated then was relatively predictable, stable, and homogenous. Now it is filled with uncertainty, rapid change, and increasingly diverse players and dynamics. These players not only think and act differently than they used to; they keep changing their minds about what they want and expect from the world around them.
Yet given this dizzying environment in which organizations find themselves, why do so many keep doing strategic planning as if it were still 1960? And even if they have an inspired vision of who they want to be based on their changing environment, how do they create the bridge between their aspirations and the day-to-day operations that members actually experience as the organization?
What organizations need is strategy and a process for creating it that flexes, adapts, and evolves to still make sense in this complex environment, while keeping the organization seamlessly aligned with these strategic dynamics. In other words, they need a “living strategy!”
In a nutshell, living strategy is:
* the dynamic story of the shared aspirations, strategic direction, and strategic outcomes of the organization and the community it supports,
* emerging and continuously evolving
* from the collective knowledge of the community and
* from an expanding network of ongoing strategic conversations among all members of the community around the questions that matter most to them,
* all seamlessly interwoven into the “fabric” of the current organization through a continuous process of reflection and renewal.
One of the fundamental concepts of living strategy—both in terms of its content and of the evolving process itself is that in a dynamic, complex environment like what organizations face today, the future can’t be “planned.” Instead, we want the strategy process to come alive through discovering and exploring questions that really matter---through collaborative dialogue, thinking together, and sharing stories among all stakeholders, not just among a select group of leaders and experts.
Living Strategy recognizes that organizations and their environment are much more like living organisms within a complex ecological system than they are like mechanisms within a human-designed and controlled system. After all, they are made up of people within a world of many other people. What could be more natural, more unpredictable, and more “alive” than people with all our frailties, moods, and dreams? Therefore, Living Strategy, as we practice it, is based on the sciences and tools related to living systems, particularly those that can be applied to organizations as living systems. These include complexity science, life science, social science, community development, dialogue, storytelling, and organic approaches to knowledge and learning.
To help further clarify what we mean by Living Strategy, the following tables offer some distinctions between traditional strategic planning and Living Strategy and between traditional enterprise management and a living systems approach to enterprise management we call a “sense and respond system.” Finally, we leave you with a few tips on how any organization can begin to develop a Living Strategy approach to the future.
Table 1: Living Strategy Compared to Traditional Strategic Planning
Strategic Planning Living Strategy
Assumes you can predict the future and develop successful plans based on those predictions Consists of strategic thinking, questions, dialogue, and stories; assumes you can’t predict the future, but you can collectively prepare for what might emerge and therefore, successfully respond to it.
”The only kind of strategy that makes sense in the face of unpredictable change is a strategy to become adaptive.... Planned responses do not work.”
Rigidly scheduled and time-bound; e.g., every 1-2 years, looking out 3-5 years into the future.
Assumes that strategy needs to be newly developed, deployed, and implemented each time you do strategic planning.
“Strategy as Inquiry” – ongoing and dynamic, designed to change whenever change is indicated.
Produces more stable strategic direction (unless the environment changes drastically), because it only changes when it needs to, not when the calendar says it’s time to generate a new plan.
Planning is done by a select group of leaders and “experts” within a rigid, hierarchical organization that uses strategy as a political tool to maintain the status quo or jockey for more power, prestige, and resources. After a few face-to-face group interactions, a small number of individuals develop the “final” strategic plan. This select group uses a linear planning process, producing a static text document that is meant to serve as the complete expression of the organization’s strategic direction.
Living Strategy continuously emerges out of ongoing, interwoven:
• individual reflection and work
• group face-to-face and virtual interactions and collaborations
• dialogue across the whole community of organizational stakeholders
It “lives” as compelling stories, images, questions, and expressions of the community’s aspirations, priorities, and inquiries into the future. It acknowledges that the organization and its environment form an interconnected system, where strategy serves to focus and align the interactions of the whole system toward a future collectively envisioned and evolved by those stakeholders.
Textual expressions of the strategy are considered to be “snapshots” of the organization’s strategy at a given point in time. Graphics, such as those produced by a graphic recorder , illustrate and bring to life the textual expressions of strategy.
Like an all-knowing, all-powerful patriarch of old, the organization assumes responsibility for the future of its members and other stakeholders. Yet much of the organization’s strategy for dealing with the future is its planned response to external forces which it doesn’t really understand and over which it has little control. Our society’s revered values of democracy and free speech get lip service, at best, even in many organizations who call themselves “member organizations.” “The law of requisite variety” – If a system is to be able to adapt to its external environment, it must incorporate as much or more variety than its environment.
Living Strategy emerges from and supports the organization’s community. This community includes anyone who may have a stake in the outcome of the enterprise, even if they don’t yet know they may have a stake (such as potential new members or markets).
The diversity, intelligence, and passion of the entire community is tapped to creatively seize or make opportunities to co-create its own future, rather than waiting to let it happen to them.
Strategic planning is mainly an academic exercise with little relevance to the daily work of the enterprise, as people must refer to a “cheat-sheet,” wall chart, or web page to even remember this year’s plan. Everyone in the organization lives strategy as a natural part of their work and relationship with the organization. Each person has a deep understanding of Living Strategy, in their own words but with the same shared meaning. They keep “one foot in the present and one foot in the future.”
Table 2: Traditional approach to enterprise management compared to a living systems-based approach – what we call a “sense and respond system’, since that is how living organisms survive and thrive within their environment, by sensing the environment and responding appropriately to what they sense.
Traditional Approach to Enterprise Management
Plan, control, change
The complement to a “strategic planning mindset” is that if you plan everything well enough you can then control everything and everyone in the organization according to the plan.
Mechanistic approach which relies on traditional management processes and information systems to find out what people need to know about the environment, make centralized decisions about what they should do with this business intelligence, and then inform and manage them to implement these decisions. Traditional research methods are used for intelligence gathering and environmental scanning.
Measurements give us the ability to plan and control. If something is within our acceptable measurement range, it’s working fine; if not, we either have to make people improve their performance or we need to change the plan.
Sense & Respond System
Understand, influence, evolve
The organization is an organic, “whole system” of interconnected, interdependent individuals, informal groups, and formal organizations, who can’t be predicted and controlled, but they can be understood to a sufficient extent to influence their behavior. By understanding their mindsets, needs, and behaviors, we can try to design a whole system based on our understanding that is flexible and adaptable enough to accommodate the changes and uncertainties inherent in living systems, and then continuously evolve the design based on our observations of the system in action.
The nervous system of the organization is an interconnected, knowledge and trust-based, communication system, consisting of:
• Sensing – supplements traditional information gathering by tapping into the collective intelligence of all stakeholders within the system – their existing knowledge + their real-time awareness of significant events, ideas, trends, and needs in the environment. The intelligence they provide is far richer than traditional research surveys and other intelligence gathering methods, since it doesn’t have a built-in time delay or filter, plus they can provide the context around the data such as the stories and thought processes behind their answers – what turns the data into meaningful information.
• Sensemaking – A “triage process” that enables the enterprise to determine the best course of action to take for a given sensory input. Not another mechanistic gatekeeper that impedes rapid decision making and response, but an organic process, driven by a set of simple rules and roles, that builds the intelligence into the whole system that enables this decision making – what turns the information into useful knowledge and surfaces the rich underlying patterns and themes that are not evident when looking at independent data streams.
• Response – The organizational capability to quickly respond to sensory inputs that warrant an organizational response, at the point in the organization where the response will be most effective. This means this part of the organization must already have access to the knowledge and the necessary authority and responsibility to respond appropriately – what turns the knowledge into effective action. This is the essence of the agile organization and the intelligent organization.
Like with Living Strategy, ongoing dialogue forms the heart of this “living system.” This is because rich, meaningful dialogue tends to create trust-based relationships and shared knowledge – two of the most critical factors in the success of any organization. Uninformed dialogue rarely produces much value for anyone, so the dialogue needs to be linked to the enterprise’s information and measurement systems and to decision-making elements of the sense-and-respond system. Measurement is about informing this dialogue to make it more meaningful and resultant decisions more effective, not about making sure everyone “makes their numbers.” Measurement also helps us understand the system better so we can continue to evolve its design and improve the likelihood of getting what we want from our actions by clarifying what in the system drives what outcomes.
The sense-and-respond system uses systems thinking and other whole-systems tools to help understand and guide the enterprise. But systems tools can be applied just as mechanically as any other tool. For that reason, any use of a tool should be accompanied by meaningful dialogue both before it’s used, to provide the context for what we’d like to learn from using the tool, and after it’s used, to gain deeper, shared insights around the questions that prompted its use. This cycling between dialogue and focused, tool-supported action is characteristic of an effective sense-and-respond system.
How Can You Apply These Concepts To Your Organization?
1. Living Strategy/Sense & Respond are about following these principles, not about following a specific recipe or methodology. You can customize your approach to fit your needs and culture any way you wish, as long as you follow these principles. You only need to do just enough to gain a shared understanding of what the future holds and what kind of future you want for your organization and the communities, subject areas, products, and services it supports, as well as a reasonable approximation of how best to navigate the organization toward that desired future (assuming you can make mid-course corrections as you learn more about what you’re facing).
2. Get your senior leadership – paid and volunteer, thinking and talking strategically - in deep, meaningful dialogue , not in shallow discussions or political debates. Focus on the real meaning of the content, not on the format or process. Take the wordsmithing offline. World Cafés are an excellent way to help you do this because they are based on many of the same living systems principles we are relating here.
3. Invite diversity and inclusion, but be prepared for what might emerge when you do. The best way to do this is get out and engage your key stakeholders. Focus on listening to them, not telling them. Then harvest the wisdom that emerges, such as the most important questions, issues, and opportunities for the organization to be paying attention to. Again, World Cafés are an excellent means of engaging your stakeholders around these questions that really matter to them.
4. Focus the time and attention of your senior leadership and other key staff on these important strategic questions. You don’t have to wait to meet face-to-face to do this. You can continue your strategic dialogue between leadership meetings with email, conference calls, and online document libraries, discussion boards, and other virtual interaction tools.
5. Balance stability with flexibility. Abandon the calendar as the driver of your strategy. Instead, let significant events and information become the triggers of your strategic dialogue and changes in direction. You don’t have to change your strategy every time you review it, but you also need to be flexible enough to change it when your environment indicates its time to do so.
6. Think and work with your enterprise as a whole system. ”The elements of a living system can be understood only in relationship to the dynamics of the whole.” There are many systems tools to help you do this , but which tool you use isn’t what’s important. It’s that you are somehow able to create and engage around a shared understanding of the whole enterprise, especially how its different elements relate to each other and their environment. You don’t have to do this all at once or even get it perfect, since there is no such thing as “perfect” in a living system. You can start with small, simple steps like drawing and talking about how different elements of the enterprise relate to each other, and then evolve this whole systems view gradually through a series of similar dialogues with other stakeholders.
7. Evolve an organizational culture that supports this new way of thinking and behaving. Introducing dialogue as one of your primary means of communication (as mentioned above) is a good start in this direction. To help develop a living systems mindset, begin to introduce a living systems-based language to replace the mechanistic language organizations have been using since the industrial revolution. Examples of more organic terms that can be substituted for some of the more widely used mechanistic terms:
Use Instead of Use Instead of
Elements, aspects Components, parts Sensing Information gathering
System, cycle Process Sensemaking Information processing, analysis
Principles & Guidelines Policies & Procedures People, Communities Human resources, Constituencies
Direction setting Planning Leading, coaching Managing
Guiding, navigating Measuring, controlling Cultural evolution Change management
8. Accept the reality that we can’t predict the future nor can we plan and control the enterprise according to our predictions using simple linear processes and hierarchical structures. In the non-linear, dynamic system or environment in which we all exist, we can only anticipate what is most likely to happen through continuous feedback, inquiry, and learning, and thus be prepared to respond collaboratively, quickly and intelligently to whatever emerges from the system. This is often more of a personal evolution than an organizational one, since we all have an inherent desire to control the environment around us. Giving up this illusion of control and embracing the unlimited possibilities of the unknown can be very freeing, as we come to feel more comfortable with the increasing levels of uncertainty around us. Even better, it can give us more control over this uncertainty, since we now have the power to serendipitously recognize and act on opportunities that we might have ignored previously since they didn’t fit our “plans.” We can co-create our own future, rather than letting it happen to us.
Note: These are excerpts from a series of articles on Living Strategy published in the Journal of Association Leadership, the flagship journal of the association industry. If you would like the complete text of these articles, please contact Arian Ward - arianatcommunityfrontiersdotcom.
By learning seven foundational practices, anyone can become a skillful innovator.
By PETER J. DENNING and ROBERT DUNHAM
48 May 2006/Vol. 49, No. 5 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM
Something big is missing in our understanding of innovation.
Popular magazines annually venerate top innovators with special
articles and profiles of the “Top 50” or “Top 100.” The Amazon.com
Web site lists 8,400 books with “innovation” in their titles. Books on
innovation are frequent bestsellers—for example, Christenson’s The Innovator’s
Dilemma, Foster’s Creative Destruction, and Slywotsky’s Value Migration.
Our technology and business graduates have been steeped in stories of
technologies that changed the world—and many dream of one day
doing likewise.
Despite all the experience and advice recorded by ten thousand
authors, 96% of innovation initiatives fail (Business Week, Aug. 1,
2005, “Get Creative”). That’s an abysmal 1-in-25 success rate. Many
people are openly dissatisfied with their ability to get the wisdom of
the literature to work for them. Our own students and clients complain
often about their technological innovations not being accepted and used. They are baffled, as were we, by the reality that the best ideas often did not make it and many were pushed aside by worse ideas. What is missing? What does it take to help a good technology “win”?
We believed that innovation takes place in an “ecosystem” comprising an environment interacting with individuals. If the environment is too restrictive or individuals lack certain skills, innovation attempts will fail. Our search of the literature yielded many conclusions about the environment, but very little about individual skills beyond “innovators must be risk-tolerant and lucky.” There seemed to be a consensus that innovation is driven by processes beyond human control and that innovation failures greatly outnumber successes -- in other words, that skill makes little difference.
The evidence contradicts that conclusion. Masterful, repeat innovators are too numerous to ignore. The innovator’s skill is much more important than is generally believed. If we could identify the elements of the skill, our students and clients could learn them through practice. They then would see more of their ideas adopted. Their organizations would see improvements in their success rates.
We set out to discover what the innovator’s skill is and how to teach it to our clients and students. We found that the key is to understand innovation as adoption of new practice. It is distinct from invention. Language-action, which shows how action is initiated and shaped by conversations, eventually led us to the interaction patterns at the core of the innovator’s skill and the practices needed to master them. We have been teaching these personal skills successfully to our clients and students for over 15 years. The “culture of innovation” so ardently sought by organizational leaders arises from the collective behavior of individuals who are competent in these practices.
You can learn these skills. With practice you can become a competent innovator. Your leverage is high: improving your success rate to 5% puts you 25% ahead of your competition. Even if you are not willing to engage with the practices, an awareness of what they are will already help you and your organization improve your prospects of innovating.
Invention is not enough
The first challenge is to settle on a clear definition of innovation. Dictionary definitions are not much help: they vary from clever inventions to mass adoption of products. The lack of clarity is partly responsible for the inability to teach and learn innovation as a skill. The wrong definition leads to the wrong skill.
The Language-Action framework encouraged us to make an operational definition -- one that is observable and executable. How do we know for sure when an innovation has happened? It is simple: we observe that a group or community has adopted a new practice. Peter Drucker linked innovation to adoption of new practices in the 1950s and Everett Rogers in the 1960s [3, 8]. Harold Evans stresses it in all his stories about innovators [4]. With this definition, adoption becomes executable when we find the actions that produce it.
The word “practice” is very important. It refers to habits, routines, and other forms of embodied, recurrent actions taken without conscious thought. Spreading ideas is not enough to get people to change their habits. Innovators induce changes of habit by offering and supporting new tools or processes perceived as high value by adopters.
Invention is different from innovation. Invention means to create something new, but does not require that anyone accept or adopt it. The stories of innovators demonstrate that the inventor and the innovator are often not the same person. Gary Kildall built the first personal computer operating system, CP/M, in the late 1970s. Bill Gates took an imitation, DOS, into the standard operating system for the IBM PC and later for 90% of all PCs. Kildall was the inventor, Gates the innovator. Harold Evans tells the stories of numerous unheralded innovators who turned famous inventions into standard infrastructures; for example, Samuel Insull took Edison’s inventions into modern electric power generation and distribution [4].
The Patent Office offers compelling evidence of a fundamental difference between invention and innovation. Peter Drucker says that no more than one in 100 patents earns enough to pay back its development costs and patent fees, and no more than one in 500 recovers all its expenses.
Many people suffer great expense and frustration because they think clever ideas are innovations. They live in the vain hope that their invention will be recognized and adopted. The literature reinforces this mistaken belief by singling out as examplars rare successes, such as the zipper, the ballpoint pen, the paper clip, or the aerosol spray can, and ignoring the many failures. Many research labs churn out large numbers of bright ideas in order to find the few that will pay off big enough to make up for all the failures. The cleverness of an invention or the existence of a patent is a poor gauge of innovation.
Although invention and innovation are not the same, they have common aspects (see Figure 1). Both inventors and innovations start with a possibility. The inventor turns the possibility into an idea, artifact, patent, or process and proposes that others consider it. The innovator turns the possibility into an offer for adoption and then follows it through to adoption. In fact, as we will see shortly, the practice of invention is the first three of the seven practices of innovation. Many innovators bypass the work of invention by taking up what inventors have already proposed.
Figure 1. Invention and Innovation.
These distinctions have been lost in common thinking. To many, innovation means “a novel invention”. An unfortunate consequence of this muddle is that many people believe that the skill of innovation can be cultivated by teaching the mental skills of invention such as puzzle solving, conceptual blockbusting, or creative thinking. They are invariably disappointed when they find these skills do not produce adoption of their inventions.
The Many Forms of Innovation
The inspiring stories of great innovators can mislead us into thinking that innovation is always unusual, good, big, fast, or radical. However, this is not so:
Usualness. Innovation is a normal human process -- almost everyone is looking for better ways to do everyday things. There is nothing unusual about it. The bulk of innovation in the developed world comes from small businesses with limited clientele. Celebrity innovators are responsible only for a tiny fraction.
Goodness. Innovations can have unexpected negative consequences. A bad innovation can be abandoned because a post-adoption evaluation concluded it was unsustainable.
Size. The size of an innovation is the number of people who adopt. Innovations come in all sizes. A workgroup of 4 can adopt a new email practice, a city of 40,000 a new traffic pattern, a nation of 4,000,000 a new Internet culture. Smaller innovations are much more common than larger -- typically, doubling the size yields one-fourth as many innovations. A beginner at innovation typically produces small ones, an expert much larger ones.
Speed. Innovation takes time. Some people adopt faster than others. Rogers divided adopting populations into five groups: inventors, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. The overall speed of adoption depends on the relative advantage perceived by adopters and the severity of barriers. People adopt for all sorts of reasons besides economic advantage -- for example, self-esteem, lifestyle, survival, longevity, or professional reputation.
Radicalness. Most innovations are incremental. The radical innovations -- they change our interpretation of the world -- are atypical and unusual. The ATM changed banking practice but did not change how people saw themselves as human beings. The computer is said to be radical because, through its instant worldwide communications, it is changing us from locally aware beings to globally aware beings.
Toward a Generative Framework
One of the ways we understand a practice or skill is through a framework that offers a high-level view of how it works. The vast literature on innovation offers three main frameworks: theoretical, empirical, and generative [10]. Theoretical frameworks, such as Drucker’s principles of innovation [3] or Klein and Rosenberg’s chain-linked process model [5], and empirical frameworks such as Rogers’s diffusion model [7], are good for revealing the overall structure of innovation process and the areas most deserving of the innovator’s attention. But they are not good for telling the innovator what skills to build, how to practice them, or how to deal with breakdowns that will be encountered in the process.
In contrast, a generative framework tells the innovator exactly what actions are needed to cause innovation and specifies them in a way they can be learned and executed. These actions are the focus of practice for improving one’s skill at innovation. Generative frameworks have been used in other areas. For example, Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Robert Kelley’s How to be a Star at Work), and Daniel Goleman’s Working with Emotional Intelligence are generative frameworks for workplace success. In Recapturing the Spirit of Enterprise, George Gilder offers a generative framework for innovation, but it is incomplete.
Generating Innovation Through Language Action
Our framework, Personal Foundational Practices, is generative [2]. It tells us what actions produce the intended outcomes (adoptions), what interaction patterns produce those actions, how the interaction patterns can be learned and practiced, and how to cope with breakdowns that block actions from completing.
The theoretical basis for the framework is language-action philosophy, a branch of linguistic philosophy begun by John Austin in the 1940s. The central claim of the language-action framework is that purposeful actions and interpersonal coordination are the results of commitments people make in conversations. In Understanding Computers and Cognition, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores say, “in this view language ... is no longer merely reflective but rather a constitutive medium. We create and give meaning to the world we live in and share with others.” [p. 79]. This has profound implications. We can analyze a set of outcomes to reconstruct the conversation patterns that produced them. We can design and practice patterns that lead to the desired outcomes. If we don’t like the outcomes, we can modify the conversations we are in or we can enter into new conversations.
In the language-action framework, “conversation” refers to any sort of interchange within a group of two or more people. Conversation is not just talk; it also produces and shapes action. Conversation includes verbal and non-verbal aspects.
The non-verbal aspects are perhaps more important than the verbal. Humans communicate not only with words, but with gestures, facial expressions, body movements, tones and inflections of voice, subtle shifts of energy, and more. We use the term “somatic” for all the non-verbal forms of interaction. In fact, over 90% of the cues to which people respond, even in active dialogs, are somatic [6]. Flores insisted that his clients and students understand “conversations” as interactions combining verbal and somatic patterns. Richard Strozzi Heckler emphasizes the same point [4].
All this applies to innovations. We can work our way back from observed outcomes (adoptions) and find the interaction patterns that produce them. This analysis is the gateway to understanding innovation as a set of learnable practices.
The Seven Foundational Practices
Our main sources for discovering the generative practices of innovation have been narrative stories of innovators; these stories reveal the conversations in which innovators participated and the kinds of interactions they excelled with. Good sources are Billington [1], Evans [4], Rogers [7], and Tedlow [12]. Stories focusing mainly on the mechanics of inventions and technologies were not useful.
From these sources we discerned a distinctive, recurrent pattern of generative practices driving every innovation (see Figure 2). While innovators brought sharp differences of personality, style, humor, character, charisma, extroversion, introversion, optimism, and pessimism, they were all skilled in the same seven practices.
Figure 2. Anatomy of Innovation.
The wheel of Figure 2 shows six basic innovator practices around the rim and leadership at the hub. Each has a particular structure of conversations and actions. The first two (sensing and envisioning) are the heart of invention. The fourth through sixth (executing, adopting, and sustaining) are the main work of adoption. The third -- offering -- is the crucial turning point between pure invention and innovation: the innovator proposes to bring the new idea into the world and generates trust in his or her expertise to do so.
The six practices on the rim of Figure 2 are a progression but are not sequential steps. Innovators move forward and backward among them as they blend and adapt to what they are learning. They are more like parallel processes. You can improve your skill of innovation by practicing them in any order.
An example will help clarify what we mean in Figure 2 by a practice. The sensing practice has a verbal aspect that consists of looking systematically at Drucker’s seven sources of opportunity [3] and at marginal or anomalous practices [10]. The somatic aspect, called “presencing” by Peter Senge et al, is about becoming aware of, and then articulating, vague feelings of unease when disharmonies appear [9]. The practices consist of exercises of using the checklists and of recognizing, holding, and responding to the feeling of unease. Each practice of Figure 2 can be elaborated in this way, as verbal and somatic components.
Although every practice has its somatic aspects, advanced innovators will study somatics as an eighth, deeper practice that surrounds the other seven (see Figure 3). Strozzi Heckler gives an overview [11] and Samson predicts that a whole profession will develop around this skill [8].
The table here provides more details about each area of practice. It also summarizes the typical breakdowns that innovators must cope with. In our work with students and clients, we break out the table elements into the components of conversations, actions, speech acts, and somatic skills.
Figure 3. Somatic practices surround the others
Examples
We will illustrate the innovation practices with two examples. The first is about Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the first Web browser, protocols, and services and then worked to bring about their widespread adoption. From the detailed accounts in his book, Weaving the Web, we can see him exercising each of the practices. In the 1980s he sensed a disharmony between the actual direction of the Internet (email and file transfer) and its promise (sharing of all human knowledge). He envisioned a system wherein anyone could hyperlink any document to any other; a mouse-click would cause the system to retrieve a linked document from any location. In 1990 he offered to build such a system at CERN, and in 1991 to help the hypertext research community set up web servers. He executed by putting together programming teams to develop good Web software and make it available for anyone to use. He stimulated adoption by visiting many sites and attending many conferences to tell people about his system, always soliciting new software, servers, and browsers. In 1993, Marc Andreesen, a student at University of Illinois inspired by Berners-Lee, made Mosaic, the first universal, easily installed graphical browser. Thereafter, users adopted the Web like wildfire. In 1994, he founded the World Wide Web Consortium, hosted by MIT and CERN, to support sustainable integration of the Web in systems worldwide and to preserve the Web in the public domain by creating open software and standards for the Web. Throughout, he exercised leadership and recruited ever-larger numbers of followers and web supporters. He articulated a small set of guiding principles for web development and stuck with them. He refused to let the web “go private” or to become wealthy from his own invention. He said the cause was too important and too big for his personal considerations to get in the way.
The second example is blogging, the practice of providing one’s diary or regular commentary via a “web-log” Web site. The idea first appeared in 1997. Open software developers contributed tools that helped bloggers create Web sites and readers manage their subscriptions. The idea propagated via Internet discussion forums and was given a big boost in 2001 when the mainstream news media reported that bloggers were influencing political debate. In 2005 the number of blogs was estimated at 50 million. This example is interesting because there was no single inventor or innovator, only a community coordinating through Internet discussion groups. The seven practices were there, distributed among many people, but no one took responsibility for the whole. It is difficult to say how common “distributed innovation” of this sort will be in the years ahead.
Conclusions
Our main claims are:
• Innovation occurs when a group or community adopts a new practice.
• Invention and innovation are different skill sets.
• The language action framework helped identify seven practices that constitute the innovation skill set.
• Anyone can learn the innovation skill by mastering the seven personal practices.
In the popular view, innovation is the product of the fertile, creative mind, the work of the “lonely genius”: a cognitive process. Our framework shifts the emphasis to interaction. Innovation means not only that a group or community adopts new practices of interaction, but the way to arrive there is through seven kinds of interaction with those groups and communities.
Internet technologies can help the innovation process by communicating ideas, coordinating those who are working toward adoption, and distributing software and data. These are, however, only facilitating technologies. The outcome (people adopting new practice) is still brought about by people who embody the verbal and somatic skills of Figure 2. Technology cannot replace them.
We believe that the seven foundational practices are the missing link in our understanding of innovation. We have been teaching them to students and clients for over 15 years. We have seen dramatic improvements in their results. The same can happen for you.
Table. Generative Practices of Innovation
Practices Key Aspects Characteristic Breakdowns
Sensing Possibilities Sensing and articulating opportunities and their value in a community. Seeing possibilities in breakdowns. Being sensitive to disharmonies. Blindness. Inability to move from sensing to articulation, to hold the thought, or to see opportunities in disharmonies.
Envisioning
New Realities Speculating about new worlds in which an opportunity is taken care of; and means to get there. Inability to tell vivid, concrete, compelling stories or to design plans of action.
Offering
New Outcomes Proposing new rules and strategies of play that produce the new outcomes. Listening to concerns then modifying proposals for better fit. Establishing credibility in one’s expertise to fulfill the offer. Missing awareness of and respect for customers. Inability to listen, to enroll people, to articulate value, or to see people as fundamental in the process. Unwillingness to modify proposals in response to feedback.
Executing
plans and actions Building teams and organizations. Carrying out action plans for reliable delivery. Failure to manage commitments, satisfy customers, deliver on time, or build trust.
Adopting
new practice Demonstrating value of proposed adoption so that others can commit to it. Becoming aware of power structures and community interests to determine fit. Aligning action plans for coherence with existing practices, concerns, interests, and adoption rates of community members. Developing marketing strategies for different groups. Recruiting allies. Overcoming resistance. Forcing adoption through compulsion. Failure to anticipate opposition, to anticipate differing adoption rates of segments of community, or to articulate the value from adopting. Lack of enabling tools and processes for adoption.
Sustaining
Integration Developing supporting infrastructure. Aligning new practices with surrounding environment, standards, and incentives. Assessing related innovations for negative consequences. Abandoning bad innovations. Discontinuing after end of useful life. Failure to plan for support and training, to change enabling tools and systems, or to align incentives with the new practices.
Leading Declaring new possibilities in ways that people commit to them. Moving with care, courage, value, power, focus, sense of larger purpose (destiny), fluency of speech acts. Inability to listen for concerns, offer value, work with power structures, maintain focus, operate from a larger purpose, or perform speech acts skillfully.
Attending to Somatics Working with the somatic aspects of communication and commitment. Ascending the ladder of competence. Connecting with people. Producing trust. Developing an open and inviting “presence”. Blending with concerns, energies, and styles of others. Inability to read and respond to body language, gesture, etc. Inability to connect and blend. Failure to recognize and overcome one’s own conditioned tendencies, to appreciate differing levels of skill and their criteria, or to engage in regular practice in the other practice areas.
Peter J. Denning (pjd@nps.edu) is Director of the Cebrowski Institute for information innovation and superiority at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and is a past president of ACM.
Robert Dunham (bdunham@enterpriseperform.com), founder of Enterprise Performance, Inc., teaches people how to be leaders, managers, and innovators in programs offered through his company and at Presidio School of Management. He previously led workflow technology development at Action Technologies.
References
[1] Billington, David. The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made American Modern. Wiley (1996).
[2] Denning, Peter J. “The social life of innovation.” ACM Communications 47, 4 (April 2004), 15-19.
[3] Drucker, Peter. Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Harper Business (1993). (First published by Harper Perennial in 1985.)
[4] Evans, Harold. They Made America: Two Centuries of Innovators from the Steam Engine to the Search Engine. Little Brown (2004).
[5] Kline, Stephen J., and Nathan Rosenberg. An overview of innovation. In The Positive Sum Strategy: Harnessing Technology for Economic Growth. National Academy Press (1986), 275-305.
[6] Mehrabian, Albert. Silent Messages. Wadsworth (1971).
[7] Rogers, Everett. Diffusion of Innovations. 5th Edition. Free Press (2003).
[8] Samson, Richard W. Hyperjobs: The new higher-level work and how to grow into it.” Futurist 39, 6 (Nov-Dec 2005), 41-46.
[9] Senge, Peter, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, and Betty Sue Flowers. Presence: An Exploratio of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. Currency (2005).
[10] Spinoza, Charles, Hubert Dreyfus, and Fernando Flores. Disclosing New Worlds. MIT Press (1997).
[11] Strozzi Heckler, Richard. The Anatomy of Change. North Atlantic Books (1984, 1993).
[12] Tedlow, Richard. Giants of Enterprise: Seven Business Innovators and the Empires They Built. Harper Business (2001).
This article sent to you courtesy of
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Innovation Cycles
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Beata Lewis, JD, MSC, Founder
Coaching for Leadership & Collaborative Excellence
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