How to lead break through projects with Scott Berkun, Webstock 2008

Notes from the How to Lead Breakthrough Projects workshop run by Scott Berkun, on the second day of Webstock 2008.

Introduction

One of the defining concepts of innovation is that it is something new. Often though people think something is innovative only if it is something recent. Don't forget the hot new thing that came out several years ago, but is not so cool anymore. It may still be an innovation. A good way to learn about innovation is to look at the development of ordinary things we take for granted... many of them were innovations, but we don't think of them as such because they happened a long time ago.

A definition of innovation: To begin or introduce something for the first time

Innovation is always relative. If a civilization hadn't seen an arch before, it would be an innovation. The development of the arch was innovative because it was an entirely new approach that revolutionised architecture.

Innovation is abut solving a problem, and is often a side-effect. If you had to choose between being good at something or being innovative. Focus on being good, on solving a problem. If you have a really hard problem, innovation will be a by-product of fixing it. McDonald's hamburgers for example were a result of trying to fix the problem of inefficient hamburger production. A factory-type manufacturing process was applied to the food industry, and this was an innovation.

Developing from idea to innovation

If you were to think of the steps from developing an idea through turning it into an innovation, what would they be?

1. Idea
2. Pitch
3. Proof of concept
4. Prototypes
5. Plan
6. Acceptance of risks
7. Commitment
8. Execution
9. Innovation
10. Commodification (comes after innovation)
    

The creative idea part is only a small component. The rest is work. If your ideas are failing somewhere take a quick diagnostic test by looking at the above steps. Where do your plans fail? See if you can find people or skills to help with those problem areas.

Why managers are trained to stop innovation

• Management was born from conservation
• Developed for factories, banks and railroads
• Defined manager-centric authority model
• Profits fueled the birth of American business schools
• The creative lifecycle of a corporation starts with the entrepreneur (high risk) and grows to a corporation (low risk)
  

Using mythology and narrative

The images of well known innovators are shrouded in myth. They make it look easy, but they are often the front-men for teams, having worked with multiple people to develop their innovations. We can still learn from their stories though. Look for matches between your challenges, and those faced by famous innovators:

• Calson who invented the copy machine had to take out a mortgage on his house to kick-start funding.
• Mizoguchi who invented the Toshiba laptop didn't get initial approval from management
• Look at any rockband to learn lessons about team cohesion

Creative thinking

Building a creative and innovative team can be hard; here is a simple approach:

• Make the team smaller
• Give it more authority
• Increase trust and cover fire (protection)
• Choose people who: (a) thrive in uncertainty; (b) perform well when their ideas are challenged; (c) resist authority and status quo

For stories about innovative practices Scott recommended reading "Founders at work: Stories of start-ups' early days" by Jessica Livingston. Many stories about innovation tell that most innovations occur through hard work, luck and risk:

• Committed work by experts,
• Unexpected discovery followed by work, or
• Outsiders with ideas (who work hard)

Creative thinking and teams

As a leader you can help creative thinking by making sure there is a good vibe in the team. People need to be comfortable if they are to put forward ideas that are perhaps a little whacky. For this to work there needs to be trust within the group. A lot of the techniques you might learn in a creativity workshop are about reducing inhibitions. When the goal is idea generation, we can learn a lot from improvisation games (theatre sports):

• Yes and... (if someone starts an idea, just go with it)
• Don't short-change yourself by apologising for your ideas (no idea is a bad idea)
• Make the other guy look good (boost each others confidence)

How to find direction

If you are having trouble getting started with idea generation try these starter questions:

• Challenge - generate feature ideas for the best possible solution (e.g. design the best mobile phone you can imagine)
• Constraint- design a cheap version of the solution (e.g. design a $10 mobile phone)
• Inversion - what are the worst features you could imagine for your solution. Then invert that list to get lots of positive ideas (e.g. design a terrible mobile phone)

For more tips on creativity see Scott's Creative Thinking Hacks.

Growing creative environments

The management view of the would is that people are uniform, and that teams can be constructed with resources and goals. Instead think about developing a team like gardening. What kind of thing am I trying to grow? What needs do the plants have? The concept of growth, starts as a small seed. The creative team is grown... not constructed.

Define roles for the team

Hypothesis: any two people who work together will eventually disagree on who is responsible for what.

Team role definition exercise

What the project manager does

What we both do

What the programmer does

Have the team members independently complete the above form, then get together, move items around and agree on the lists. This is a benefit because:

1. We find out what people want to work on
2. It lists the things we agree on
3. It prompts a discussion with the team
   

Where are the seams between team members, are there gaps between roles? Look for those places and fill them. Look to make sure your team is functioning well, so that they can then go on to be creative and innovative.

Life of a team

Dr. Bruce Tuckman, in his paper "Development sequence in small groups", notes there is a lifecycle to team development:

• Stage 1 Forming - Roles and relationships aren't formed
• Stage 2 Storming - Starting to get to know each other
• Stage 3 Norming - Aware of strengths and weaknesses, passing to others who are better
• Stage 4 Performing - Trust others and don't have to look behind you, because someone has got your back
• Stage 5 Adjourning - Team starts to move on, end of activity

Given this lifecycle, the role of a team leader will change. Team leaders will start directing, and end up coaching. Like a gardener who is more hands on at the beginning. Scott's takeaways from this are:

1. Creating a team is a growth process
2. There are no guarantees that you will progress
3. Diverse set of skills are needed by the leader

Risks and fears

Common fears about ideas:

• If my idea fails, I am a failure
• I may look like an idiot
• Uncertainty makes me uncomfortable
• I do not want to reveal myself to others
• I'm not sure that I'm right
• They may laugh at me
• My reputation may be ruined

There is a fear of innovation because it can change the way people do things. An example of this is the story of the loom operators who were fired because automated looms were introduced. They tried to destroy the looms, and we know them today as Luddites - originally people who feared technology (because they lost their jobs). The moral of the story is that for evey innovation there will be a negative impact to others. It is normal part of innovation... it's part of the game.

Idea killers

You need to become a master of answering the idea killer comments:

• We've tried that before
• We've never done that before
• That's not how we do things here
• How can we justify the costs
• How will this become profitable?
• Our existing customers will not like this

See the stone and stone wheel video

Incubation of ideas

There are a number of options for incubating ideas:

• Sequestered (Apple). Take the team and put it outside the standard structure. The benefits are that you don't disrupt the culture of the standard structure, and risks are isolated. There is a tech transfer problem though. Others may dislike the innovators who have been specially selected, and there may be problems bringing their ideas back and integrating them
• Staged (Apolo programme - 500,000 people involved). Every release (launch) had something major, something significant that has never been done before. The staged option doesn't have the technology transfer problem, but it is hard to protect the schedule
• Adhoc (3M / Google). Opportunities raised and supported in an adhoc manner. It's flexible, but it's at the managers discretion and easy to ignore. People need to find time, and if you are not working in a supportive organisation it can just be lip service

You can find examples of all of these approaches working, and all of them failing. This does however give us a tool to look at how innovation is, or is not, working in our organisations.

The management meta-decision

How much should you innovate? It will often take more resources to innovate, so what can you sacrifice:

• quality
• cost
• schedule
• expected features

The Apple iPod for example sacrificed features in order to innovate in other areas. Another way of helping innovation in your project is to add an explore stage.

Explore

Design

Implement

Test

In the explore stage we try alternatives and experiment. If you take time to look at different options, the design / implement / test will be better informed. As a leader of a team be aware of the criteria of the experiment... to see if something works or fails, and to learn from it.

When a project team explores wildly, it can sometimes be difficult to bring everyone together again. One way around this is to add checkpoints during the explore stage. At checkpoint 1, any idea goes, at checkpoint 2 there should be agreement on three possibilities, at the next checkpoint narrow it down to two possibilities etc.With checkpoints there is lots of room for exploration, and the checkpoints help us winnow the options during the creative process. This approach is also called "divergence convergence".

We should also be aware of the innovators dilemma. The same characteristics that make a organisation innovative, will hinder them being innovative in the future. Organisations will natually try and protect the areas that made them successful in the first place. Overcoming it is very difficult, and is a natural problem.

What makes you happy?

Conventional	Breakthrough
Predictable Moderate return Dependence Incremental Love security	Uncertain Possibly no return Independent Transformative Love beating the odds

And lastly, what types of projects make you happy. There is a lot of glorifaction of breakthrough projects... are they really for you? If you look at the bios of great innovators, many of them are pretty uphappy. It is worth asking ourself what makes you happy before you step into an innovative project