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Innovation Network's Convergence '99
Notes
by Mary Zettel, 3M Attendee & Presenter
At the start we self selected into "homerooms" which were organized
by topics of Improvisation, Managing Innovation, Heart Intelligence, Problem
Solving, Innovation University, Creative Environments, and Storytelling.
These groups met daily during the conference to discuss learnings at sessions
from the reference point of the organizing topic.
I chose the Storytelling group. Not so surprisingly, this concept is one
of my biggest take aways from the conference, and I have plans to incorporate
it immediately into my work. The group warmed up when we met by creating
a spontaneous story by starting at one end and revolving through each
person who added on a bit until the last person completed the story. Then
we discussed what we were learning in our sessions and what we appreciated
about storytelling and how we could use it. Great examples to follow later.
This homeroom was a wonderful opportunity to start processing learnings
– have to think about it to share with the group, so I started thinking
about the lessons I was learning right away.
Day 1, Opening Activity
After a welcome we heard an explanation of how to use our specially designed
conference notebooks to prepare, participate, process, and practice (set
learning objectives, capture, process, and action plan from what we learned).
It was designed based on Confucius’ thoughts on learning. Then we
got started with a new twist on a scavenger hunt.
The activity was introduced, rather ambiguously, as a call to action for
the 200 or so attendees to assist in raising money for an expedition to
the South Pole. Rather than being a competitive exercise, we were to cooperate
as a team of 200 to reach the fundraising goals. Each of 20 or so tables
were given an instruction packet at this point
Instructions were to pick up coupons worth dollars at each of 17 locations,
to be found by using a set of clues that were provided. We were also instructed
that the coupons were worth different amounts of money depending on when
they were turned in.
Now the real lesson begins. A couple of teams grabbed their instructions
and immediately raced out of the room. Most others figured out that we
needed to learn what the other tables’ instructions were and how
we were to collaborate. We each sent a representative to join with the
others and figure out a plan. The other 90% of us sat around bored and
wondering what was going on. When the final plan was decided we were told
we were dividing up the locations and bringing back all tables’ coupons
to a central spot where we would hand out what we had gathered and prepare
to submit coupons at the appropriate time to get the maximum money award.
It’s amazing how a group of innovation-oriented people turn into
exactly what they complain about once the pressure is on. Here’s
what I took away from the activity:
- We have a propensity for action. We need to break this and invest as
much time in up front planning to ensure we take the best action. The
teams that ignored the fact that we were supposed to collaborate, not
compete, and took off out of the room immediately are a perfect example.
- Managers (in our case the representative) need to report back continuously
with teams before final decisions are made. We had no idea what was happening
and no opportunity for input. Don’t leave your team wondering what
is happening and how decisions are being made that affect them.
- Deploy only the number of people (and sometimes SLIGHTLY fewer) as the
task at hand necessitates. We had 10 people traipsing to a location when
one would have been fine. All of us were bored and unsure of what we were
doing. A small group would have had full knowledge of the task, gotten
it done with ease, and the rest of us could have been working or playing
on something else.
- Think outside the box. Pretty obvious one at a conference on innovation,
but most people followed the instructions to the tee. A couple of innovators
focused on the objective: to raise money for the expedition. Instead of
collecting coupons, they creatively raised money another way, by having
a nationwide bake sale. Another group figured rather than run around for
coupons they would take the money holders hostage and return them safely
in exchange for the money. Most people just played by the rules though.
- Leaders who put all the focus on the end result lose the impact of a great up front process and talented people. The talent of the rest of the team was not used and the team lost interest since they weren’t challenged.
Day 2 – Key Note
The day’s keynote speaker was a highlight of the conference. Alfie Kohn is one of the best speakers I’ve seen, both for message and delivery. Not one person could have been snoozing or daydreaming. His topic was on his book Punished by Rewards. He challenged that we believe that people are motivated based on rewards and punishment (R&P), largely due to Skinner’s research. But while Skinner published by applying his findings to humans, he did all of his work with rodents. The premise, "If you do this . . . then you’ll get that" is actually DEMOTIVATING to humans in the long run. He said studies have proven this for decades but haven’t gotten the same attention as Skinner’s work, possibly because people don’t want to believe that rewards don’t work.
R&P achieve temporary compliance at a great cost. The result is often worse behavior in the end. R&P also require surveillance to monitor compliance. People who got rewarded in studies performed worse in the end than those getting no rewards. The more appealing the reward, the worse the outcome was as well. The only avenue to truly lasting results is WORKING WITH people rather than DOING TO them with carrot and stick incentives and bonuses.
WORKING WITH means well designed cooperation – helping people work together well and giving people more say in what they do. This creates a positive long term impact.
The audience was asked to discuss why they believe rewards fail. Our table’s list included
- Reward signals the end of a behavior when what is wanted is ongoing
- Places control on rewarder who is then resented. People feel manipulated
like they are in a child/parent relationship.
- People focus on the tangible reward and overlook the intrinsic satisfaction
they are getting.
- People are less likely to add their own ideas or suggest flaws in a
plan if it will detract from opportunity to get reward, even though interjecting
is what is best for the company.
- The more people are focused on the reward, the less they care about what they are doing to earn the award.
Steps to appropriate compensation include
1.) Pay well; 2.) Pay fairly; 3.) Do everything to get $$ off employees’ minds so they can focus on work.
Incentives and bonuses are destructive because employees spend time worrying about what they will earn instead of knowing what they are being paid up front and then focusing their attention on their jobs.
Rewards rupture relationships. Horizontally they create competition and hamper cooperation, which is where real excellence comes from. Vertically they make managers less helpful and more judgmental/evaluative. Employees feel like a child in a consequence-based household. Employees are also less free to highlight problems or ask for help because to get the reward they must appear to have everything under control.
Rewards ignore reasons behind behavior. We miss the insight to identify systematic problems that are causes of behavior.
Rewards encourage you to take the shortest route to the cheese, not to take risks, not to find alternative routes, and to pick the easiest tasks. THIS KILLS CREATIVITY. Kids trying to earn "A’s" will focus on performance not on learning.
MYTH: we can motivate others. This is only possible through extrinsic means, which are ineffective. Intrinsic motivation is inversely related to extrinsic (rewards).
Alfie’s appearance on Oprah got some parents thinking. After proposing that parents undermine the generosity of their kids by having them competing in a lot of activities and praising them a lot (you reinforce competition and do for reward rather than do for goodness sake), he was put to the test. The show cameras went into two grade school classrooms. One group of students was told they were chosen to evaluate some new games for a toy company. They were asked to play with each one and at the end tell the moderator what they thought of each. The second group was told the same thing, except that they would get $5 for each game they evaluated. The moderator came back after a time and heard from each group of kids. Then the real experiment started. The moderator excused himself for a few minutes and the cameras rolled. The first group, who had been simply asked to evaluate, picked up their favorite games and filled the waiting time by playing with them. The second group, who was paid to evaluate, sat and did absolutely nothing until the moderator came back!
Day 2 – Real World Roundtables
My first roundtable didn’t offer any real enlightening take-aways My second was by Alex D’Anci of ABB Corporate Research on a creativity tool that can be used with a multi-national team to level the cultural playing field in Business interactions. It was quite helpful and since then Alex and I have exchanged company information and he will be working with our Corporate Enterprise Development group to see how 3M and ABB may be able to work together.
Alex’s tool compresses problem analysis, idea generation, and resolution into about three hours. This is miraculous regardless, but even more so considering cultural differences. He reinforced what we learn in diversity training: some cultures are more relationship oriented, some gain respect by sharing ALL they know, some are abrupt and abrasive, some are group decision oriented, . . .
His tool is called OPERA. This is an acronym for a way to progress a team through a problem solving process. OPERA is completed first for the problem analysis, then again for the idea/solution generation, and then finally to get to resolution. It stands for
- Own opinions. Individuals work on their own for about 8 minutes
to record their thoughts.
Pair. Discuss with a partner what you have recorded for about 10 min. and jointly pick four to post.
Expose proposals. Take time to post the top four from each pair on a board for 2 min.
Rank proposals. Each person distributes their allotment of votes and is only allowed to vote once for their own ideas. This takes about 10 min.
Arrange proposals. Remove those with no votes. This takes about 10 min.
Day 2 – Group Experiential
This is where I truly got ‘bit by the storytelling bug’ and learned to appreciate the wide applicability of the technique. I must admit I was already pre-sold on the concept but had not expanded my mind to the variety of uses. HBR had written a story on a 3M joint venture’s leader who used storytelling to convince 3M senior management that we must pursue the joint venture. In our session we used storytelling to create powerful problem definitions. The consultants realized from their work that if a problem is not well considered and defined, the solution will likely be of no value. We had about 25 people in the session and only 1.5 hours to learn the concept and experience it. We got more done than I have in all day problem solving sessions, and probably with a better result. The steps include
- 1.) Receive a partially cooked problem
2.) Tell your story about the problem
3.) Identify aspects of the problem
4.) Combine aspects of the problem
5.) Gain group consensus about the problem definition
6.) Plan next steps
Instead of jumping to our opinions of what is going on and what needs to be done (typical MBA style approach), we spent a few minutes listening internally to what stories came to our minds as we contemplated the problem. Then we spent 20 minutes taking turns sharing our stories.
This was executed well with the help of a virtual talking stick. A person signaled she wanted to share a story by an arm signal. Then once the story was complete she would signal again. This gave people an opportunity to complete their thoughts without interruption. Then the next person would add on to what was previously said without repeats, and began their story with "and . . . . " We added our story when it was most appropriate in the flow and had to talk about what we knew, not what we thought.
From the stories shared we were able to identify aspects of the problem easily. We broke into trios and discussed what patterns and themes arose. We wrote our themes on post-its and added them to the wall. We then walked around to read all of the postings.
To combine aspects of the problem we clustered similar ideas and came up with titles for each cluster. From here we were able to easily gain consensus about the problem definition and key aspects to solve. It was amazing to witness the thoroughness of evaluation from this process in such a short time. Next step planning on how to create a path forward would follow in a real situation.
The Land Awards Presentation was very interesting. In addition to hearing from this year’s award winner, representatives from the last three years of winners presented a state of the state since winning themselves. This year’s winner was a surprise - a group from the Federal Government (how many times do you hear government and innovative in the same sentence?!). The story is an inspiration and is available in full from the Innovation Network at www.thinksmart.com. An adhoc consulting group within the government that was formally disbanded figured out how to garner people, resources, and perseverance to make a huge impact in the agencies they served. The value they added proved that they should be supported as a formal entity again so their legacy will go on. I am getting a copy of their vision story soon. Rather than create a traditional statement, they used Storytelling to create a compelling vision of what they will do for the world. The speaker shared their journey very well, so you should enjoy the full version if you decide to get it.
Day 3 – Keynote
Doug Hall of Eureka! Ranch started out by asking for support for a new on-line charity he has started. Check it out at www.aspirations.com. It is dedicated to helping parents inspire their kids. He is raising awareness and money for it by trekking to the North Pole as you read this. The trip is being tracked through the website as well.
I was quite anxious to hear Doug talk. He is an icon of innovation for me. A former P&Ger who defied corporate convention and got big results has become one of the top paid consultants in the innovation field. A three day corporate session at Eureka! Ranch runs $100,000. He has a lot of repeat business, which speaks highly of his results. One of my questions for the speaker I had prepared before the session was ‘how does the top innovator in the field continue to innovate what he does?’ Turns out that was the basis for his presentation.
Doug shocked the audience by insulting the innovation industry for being too feeling oriented. He highlighted the need for productive creativity (he calls Capitalist Creativity) for the industry to thrive. If we can measure what we are doing, then we can prove or disprove success. I bought in until he presented his solution, which he would like adopted as the standard for the industry. It’s a bit too convenient to be able to set the standard by which you will be judged. I guess it is one way to remain the top consultant. Sounds like a Microsoft move.
He has ‘proven’ though with his measurements that STIMULUS drives creativity, not TECHNIQUES and TOOLS. He even went so far as to say that 90% of what he wrote in his book Jump Start Your Brain doesn’t work, now that he is able to measure the outputs. Not surprisingly, he has another book coming out that has many stimulus recommendations. One example from it is the Homeward Road Stimulus. This includes *Visit the Scene of the Crime (my version is create a day-in-the-life, site observations, and interviews to build market understanding), *Borrowing Brilliance (look for ideas at obscure booths at tradeshows), and *Perception is Reality (work on top complaints).
He also had a neat idea he labels the Hockey Puck. This idea reduces the fear factor in a group by planting people who are responsible for asking really dumb questions. This sets the benchmark for dumbness so people feel free to stretch themselves and ask anything that’s on their minds since it can’t possibly be as dumb.
Doug has also created a neural network from his clients’ inputs and results (sounds like he may have accessed the PIMS database or some other source also to train the network). He calls it Merwyn Technology. He uses it to instantaneously evaluate ideas during client sessions to predict the likelihood of success for an idea. Then they only move forward with ideas that get a high rating. He bases his satisfaction guarantees on the number of ideas that make it through the rating now. Doug’s energy, style, and efforts to wipe out the critics’ complaints about innovation work by making it measurable are still inspirational. I just need to erase the self-hype from his message.
Day 3 – Lead User Research presentations
My presentations for the conference went amazingly well. People seem truly interested in this approach to breakthrough innovation. Joyce had published an article I wrote in the previous association newsletter, so people were coming to me with really good questions after having thought about the process a bit. As always when I present on LUR I get more insight myself into the value of the process. Data collection via interviews by the entire team really intrigued people. The myth is you can’t do this work unless you are ultra-skilled. The learning of technique as well as content that comes from every cross-functional team member doing it in the LUR case adds a lot of value. Also involving key thought leaders in the industry the way we do in the concept development phase is largely unheard of. It makes sense when I think about it, people aren’t going to say no to their own idea. Rather than evaluating our product once launched, they will promote it as something they had a hand in. The process of diverging and then converging during each stage also caught people’s attention. It allows us to expand possibilities and then hone in so we can move forward each step of the way. The way we bring provocation into the final workshop also stood out. By keying in on attributes and then scanning all industries for the best experts we create provocation at a very deep and useful level. I told the attendees that our internal consultant only works with outside companies that are doing joint projects with divisions at 3M. That led me to brainstorming several divisions that may be a fit to partner with the companies that were represented and expressed interest. We’ve got something dynamite with LUR. Hope it continues to be supported in 3M.
Day 3 – Evening Wrap Up
We had a religious ceremony of sorts for the day’s closing by Mathew Fox, author of Original Blessing and The Reinvention of Work. He stressed the message of spirituality/cosmology is to recognize we are part of the whole. We need to not just share information but develop appreciation for one another. When people praise, the angels come. "Praise is the noise that joy makes." Tough to describe the rest of the experiential session. You’ll have to try it yourself sometime.
Day 4 – Final
We wrapped up our Storytelling group in the morning and stressed the responsibility of a listener to be fully present and tuned in. The final keynote was Jean Houston, author of A Passion for the Possible: A Guide to Realizing Your Full Potential. Had I paid attention to my travel schedule I would have missed her since my plane left during her talk. Thank God I didn’t. She shared many new concepts with us during an impactful presentation.
Jean shared her concept of Jump Time. We are living in a time of parentheses. History is being made faster than ever. We deconstruct and then reconstruct. We witness greater frequencies of Punctuated Equilibrium: moving in status quo until enough stress, ideas, etc. punctuate to a new place. This is Jump Time.
Another concept is Polyphrenia: the expansion of our healthy selves. It’s a healthy schizophrenia or multiple personality. She recommends creating a biography for an alternative persona who can do the job you need done successfully. She gave the example of herself. Hating to write, she assigns her alternative persona the responsibility of writing what has become 17 or so successful books. She has also written for John Lennon (a while ago obviously) and was influenced by Margaret Mead to experience many different places and people in the world.
She recommends you Dream what you Want to Be rather than what you Want to Have. Also, see beloved in everyone and everything. This tip is straight from Mother Theresa. When Jean had the chance to meet her and ask how she can be so giving to the sick and dying, Mother Theresa said, "I’m married you know." Jean said, "Yes, I realize nuns take a vow to God." Mother Theresa said, "No, I am truly married to Jesus. I am fully committed and in love with him and see his face in everyone I come in contact with. I can’t do enough for him and it is reciprocated." Mother Theresa spent hours each day taking time for communion with her beloved to reinforce her feelings as she saw him in other people.
One last concept from Jean (only because that is all of the notes I took!). Intellecky: innate potential of what you will become. You must realize what is in you. Just as an acorn has the innate potential of a tree, you also have the innate potential of something great.
One last miscellaneous learning I wanted to share is the power of MOOGIE. A dynamic speaker/consultant named Jon Pearson who could have been a keynoter himself but instead introduced ours, shared this tool. When we as adults attempt to draw a picture, such as a horse, a lot of self doubt may begin cropping up. As we draw the curved lines and try to make it the shape of the horse, we tell ourselves, "that isn’t good, that doesn’t look anything like a horse, this is really bad, I can’t draw." One of his teachers suggested that students pick out one part of the drawing that they can feel good about, like the hoof, and emphasize what a nice hoof they drew. Jon goes one BIG step bigger. He moogie’s. This is scribbling, like you do when you are doodling while talking on the phone. Instead of drawing the OUTLINE you moogie from the inside out. Take the horse example: you could scribble to form the nose, turning into the head, down the neck to the body, out to the tail. Then scribble on some legs. This will come out a lot closer to looking like an actual horse than an outline will. And you’ll feel better about finding your talent as an artist. ; - )