Friday, February 28, 2020

Hire the Right Innovation Executive (CXO, CIO, CTO, CINO).

Executive recruitment is not easy. Hiring great people is always a challenge, but leadership recruitment is a high risk, and potentially costly endeavor.  If you bring on the wrong person for the job,  it can cost the company millions of dollars.

In recent years, corporations have sought to in inject innovation into their operations. Around 2012, companies like Target invested millions of dollars into creating model stores to test ideas, gas spectrometers to streamline produce supply chains, and hired a slew of people trained in design thinking. It also spun up "Project Goldfish," a secret effort to create the store of the future. By 2017 Target shut down many of these projects, as the abstract futuristic research conflicted with the reality poor revenue.

Today,  innovation is at the heart of growth for Target, but not the same 'version' of innovation that was pursued in 2013. The approach today is about solving real problems and making real impact on the bottom line. Today, target utilizes near term and long term methods, and has grown it's data science capabilities to coordinate with design-driven methods.

We can learn many things from this example, but the central narrative is that "research," is not the driver for corporate innovation. "Development" is the engine.  While all the development should be supported by a culture and sound methods in experimentation, exploration, and at the end of the day - you gotta make the thing, keep making the thing, and get results.


The most critical marker to identify the best hire is simple: How does this person drive results in the real world by introducing radical insights with effective action?


By and large, innovation executives focus on the things of technology, data, or the customer experience, or they focus on the how, agile development, user research, and experimentation methods. A good innovation executive will succeed in building these things and processes - yet a better one is far more focused on the what and the why, what will these things do in the world and why does it matter?

Innovation leadership demands the ability to create compelling visions of the future that are connected to existing evidence, but about 3 deviations removed into the realm of possibility. Leadership is the translation of that vision into processes and artifacts through others, to make that vision tangible. If this leader is truly great, then unexpected and unknown obstacles will become assets and new discoveries will further realize the vision, not undermine it. Sometimes this means the first steps are "less innovative," because a particular company weakness needs to be resolved, or because the workforce isn't mobilized.  Yet every every step of the way, this person can translate the profound into the ordinary.

Thursday, February 27, 2020

True Innovation Makes No Sense Yet Changes Everything

Over the decades I have spent countless hours with executives who seek to bring innovation to their IT systems or their businesses. They say they want dramatic changes. They are 110% convinced that certain technologies can make it possible.  But what they really want is to increase profits, increase efficiency, improve communications, and have greater control over their company.  Those are all good things and quite often, they want proven conventional methods to satisfy many of those needs. Innovation, however, consists of introducing an unknown variable into the mix, so that one cannot entirely predict the outcome. At first, no one likes that idea. 

In the photo above I am soaking pieces of an apple tree and a lemon in a sanitized bucket of distilled water. After a few days I will boil this water and add sugar. I will then filter out the items, cool it down, and bottle it with a chosen yeast to make a hard seltzer, approximately 4.5% ABV and 100 calories. Everything about this process is standard... except the infusion of apple wood and lemon.  I have only a vague idea what this might taste like, based on my experience of smoking meat with apple wood, the smell of the wood, and my familiarity with lemons. Perhaps this infusion won't work at all, it will make zero perceivable difference, or perhaps it will yield a disgusting result.  

To manage the risks, I am only creating one gallon of alcohol. Furthermore, everything I am doing is based on previous experiences and data, with the exception of the wood and fruit. If the outcome is terrible the cost was low. If it is only "a little" terrible, then I can try another version. Maybe apple wood and no lemon? Maybe pieces of oak under pressure - like this Cleveland-based company that uses a similar approach to age bourbon in merely one week?

The process I just described is not innovation. Soaking some wood in the water is somewhat novel, but thats about it. The overall process is more akin to the scientific method as a structured approach to incremental learning. This is one way, the most common way, to manage innovation. The innovation part is leveraging absurdity. Apple wood is a high risk, untested,  and by all means reckless ingredient that is likely to sabotage my brewed product. Have you ever seen an apple wood flavored beer on the shelf? Is this because it is a proven bad concept,  or did no one ever make the leap to try it, then try enough to succeed?  The only insight to hedge the risk, again, is my personal subjective experience with the wood which I used in a smoker, and that isn't very reliable. 

The risk to take a nonsensical action, and to persist in the nonsense, is at the heart of innovation, art, and insanity. The incredible opportunity is the small, yet viable probability that my reckless action will generate massive returns if all goes well. If it doesn't - well, then we could. have trouble. Creating a process to manage innovation is essential to keeping your company afloat by keeping the risks small.  But this still isn't innovation.

Yet what if, somehow, maybe this apple wood seltzer introduces a new idea about beverages. What if it surges in popularity, so much that it will generate an entirely new market of organic wood infused beverages, demanding an increase in new forestry growth and sustainable forestry practices. Maybe this demand will be high enough that it leads to new kinds of job creation,  and inspires other markets that enhance taking care of the earth. Just maybe, I soak some wood in a bucket, and with constant dedication and determination, transform the entire way beverage ingredients are sourced to stimulate new growth in the rain forests and stimulate new economic models.

This is all possible. Before Uber or Lyft, most people would never have jumped into a stranger's car. Before Starbucks, no one in their right mind would have spent seven dollars on a coffee. And before I started brewing beer in my basement, I never thought about the taste of a tree.

When irrational action meets profound vision to inspire a chain of consequences that forever change the lives of people, businesses, and communities – then you truly innovated.  If you are good at it, you don't need a 10 million dollar team of technicians to start, you just need a 5 gallon bucket and a few small logs.

Wednesday, February 26, 2020

Quantifying Research and Development in Everyday Experiences

Growing up, I was terrified of math. I was terrible at it and this was mostly because I didn't realize math was a means to engage the world and make sense of it. Without a big picture, I failed to see the relationship between the smaller bits and pieces taught in the classroom.  For years on end,  I had no understanding that the various lessons of Algebra class were distinct kinds of problems, requiring distinct methods. I truly thought that all my math lessons were sequential, building upon previous steps and methods, because that was how my other classes had been structured. Consequently, algebra made no sense, it was fragments stacked on fragments.Geometry was more intuitive, but for some reason, was only taught later, after one 'masters' algebra. In the meanwhile, I could wrap my head around the problems posed in physics class - even had a strong sense of intuition for it - and I didn't understand why.

I went to art college in part because it didn't require math. But while I was there, I became curious, wondering if I could build a different relationship with the subject. I began to read books on the history of zero and the lives of mathematicians. When I went to grad school for urban planning, I was deeply motivated to confront this fear. In my second semester I was faced with a graduate statistics course. It was very hard at the time, often demanding up to 25 hours a week of dedicated study because everything was new. I earned a B, and a lifetime of insight,  as with continued practice over the years, I developed an intuition for statistical reasoning. Statistical reasoning had profound consequences on my life.  Whereas art education established a foundation in abstraction and abductive logic, statistics created a path to order and qualify worldly observations.

Over the years, I came to realize that quantitative reasoning is not a special thing, but simply sits on a continuum with other ways to engage and make sense of the world. As a designer, I learned to make things with materials to shape the world. By extension, the creation of graphs, charts, maps, scratch paper and spreadsheets are the material mediums by which we can numerically interpret the world around us. With math we can make visible the invisible. 

Today I do not draw a strong distinction between qualitative and quantitative information. The corner of my basement exemplifies this relationship. I am brewing beer and hard cider. I have scales and beakers, Erlenmeyer flasks, distilled water and sanitation equipment. I have many different kinds of yeasts, with labels like EC-1118, also known as champagne yeast. I log my activities in an excel sheet. I calculate any many billions of yeast cells are necessary for fermentation at a given volume and temperature, dependent upon the quantity and type of sugars in the beverage.  I built a webform to ease my data input, logging information on my spreadsheets like the temperature of the water when I add ingredients,  or where those ingredients come from. Standardizing all the inputs,  I can then scale my production, tweak variables, and make projections on new recipes. I do not do this as scientific research, but as an artistic exercise, wildly experimenting with the transformation of everyday elements from my home and neighborhood into consumable adult beverages.

But the data is merely a representation, like a painting or a piece of music, which I use to compose a bottle of beer. The music note, on a piece of paper has no sound - nor can one taste decimal points. If I make a great bottle of beer, then maybe you can taste the story of its making, get closer to the place where the ingredients were farmed. You probably won't taste the math. The math just helps me keep things clean, repeatable, and helps me keep track of my emerging story so I can learn from it. Perhaps one day, if I build enough data, it will enable the discovery of new stories, to propose new formulations. But at the end of the day, the value of the work is derived from the joy of making with patience, care, and love. Quantification, if done well, enables the exploration of that joy so that others may share it.