Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 18

Innovation: There Is No Final Destination

Innovations don’t stay innovations. There’s that drawer in all of our houses with the electronics, gadgets, and devices that were the it-thing in their own time and now have outgrown their usefulness and creativity. The challenge is not to become innovative but to stayinnovative.

How do you stay competitive and drive growth on a long-term horizon?

Change your mind. In almost all other forms of thinking, consistency is a good thing. But in the unconventional realm of innovation, consistency is overrated. All of these larger forces outside of your control are constantly changing—political climates, economic realities, technological developments, medical discoveries, and countless others. You need to be flexible in adapting to these forces and making them work for you. Keep experimenting and looking for better ways of doing things. Remember that your first idea is almost never your best idea.

Seek out incongruities. Conflicting data and trends can become great inspiration for unexpected innovations, because most people simply ignore these incongruities. For example, even as digital publishing and e-books dominate the literary marketplace, there is still a powerful segment of the population that wants and values print books. Over time, an innovation often reverses into its opposite. Anticipating these incongruities will put you ahead of the game and help you stay innovative.

Look for outliers and wildcards. These are things that others normally don’t look at. A wildcard is something that most people don’t incorporate into their long-term planning even though it actually happens on a regular basis: meteorological disasters, disease outbreaks, work stoppages. Being prepared for wildcards will give you the first-mover’s advantage.

In 2012, IBM conducted a study of over 1,700 CEOs around the world, and found that the biggest quality executives are looking for is creativity. What do these managers and leaders mean by creativity? They’re looking for people who are hungry for change, who can beinnovative beyond customer imagination. They want thinkers who are globally integratedin their approaches. They seek out individuals who are genuine; not just generous. And, finally, they want experimenters who are disruptive by nature. We value conformity in so many aspects of our everyday lives, but when it comes to innovation, conformity is something to avoid. Innovation is a form of deviation, and so innovators must be deviants.

In the early twentieth century, William McKnight came up with the now-famous 3M strategy test—a set of three questions to ask about an idea initiative. Now, almost a century later, they are still the best questions: Is it real? Can we win? Is it worth doing?

It’s no longer enough to be innovative. You need to stay innovative in an ever-changing world where innovation has a shelf life. There is no “there” in innovation. If you’ve developed the miracle drug, there’s always another miracle drug to make. If you’ve opened the great restaurant, there’s always a second restaurant. We’ve never fully arrived: whenever we get where we think we wanted to get, there’s a new place to reach. It’s not about the destination—it’s about the destination after the destination.

How to Make a Creative Genius

Meet Jack. He knows he will never be a creative genius. He learned that in fifth grade during his weekly trumpet lessons when he sat next to Wynton Marsalis. He learned it again in ninth grade when we played on his junior high basketball with Magic Johnson. He learned it yet again in college when Timothy Berners-Lee was his computer lab partner. The difference in talent or good fortune didn’t seem fair or democratic to Jack, but he knew it was real. Jack knows the truth about creative genius because he has seen it in action and has the good sense to realize that he will never possess it.

Let’s leave the hype about how “you too can be talented, rich and famous” to the P.T. Barnum’s of our world and the “everyone is creative in their own way” consolation for your Sunday school lesson. You have known that some people are just naturally more creative than others from the first time you created anything and compared it to the work of those around you. Yes, I know, you should never compare your artistic abilities but you know that everyone does and you know that it matters. Just like Jack.

So, let’s get real for just a moment and discuss a few of the possible origins of creative genius:

Talent: Violin virtuosos need extraordinary psychomotor skills, poets need an inventive facility with language and theoretical physicists need an incisive mathematical prowess. It turns out that while practice does play a part in elite creative performance it’s actually much less than previously thought. A recent New York Times article “How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Talent” explored the latest research on innate versus developed creative abilities. Though nurture graduates with honors, once again nature is the valedictorian. Talent matters most.


Groupings: Why does creative genius show up in pairs? The songwriting team of John Lennon and Paul McCartney famously competed with each other and fought their way through the most prolific musical collaboration since Gilbert and Sullivan. Constructive conflict and positive tension are commonly associated with creative genius. Two or more talented people push each other’s ideas into hybrid solutions that neither can accomplish on their own. Consider the astounding amount of Nobel Laureates like Francis Crick and James Watson that have received their honors as a tandem. When Lennon and McCartney left the Beatles so did their creative genius.


Situations: Winston Churchill was a creative genius in some situations and utterly inept in others. He had a sterling reputation for the victories achieved during his long military service and was celebrated for his ingenious and aggressive strategies until they backfired at the Battle of Gallipoli where his Allied Forces incurred 250,000 casualties. A disgraced aristocrat, Churchill took on several administrative roles with little success until the outbreak of the Second World War when he was elevated to Prime Minister and brilliantly led Britain in its darkest hour. It’s the situation that makes someone the right person at the right time. When the situation changes, so does what we take to be creative genius.

So what ever happened to Jack? He learned to put his personal puzzle together and use what he had to the best of his abilities. He learned that what he lacked as a singularly extraordinary person could be offset by what he could achieve as an exceptionally whole person. He understood that creativity was as much about his own evolution as it was about any organizational revolution. Jack’s genius was wrought in the fiery furnaces of failure, the redemptive journey of self-discovery, and disciplined practice that brings mastery. Creative genius: no. Fully creative: yes.

So, how do you make a creative genius? You don’t. You can be born with creative genius, you can be a creative genius when accompanied by others with complementary skills or you can be in the right place and right time to be a considered a creative genius. But if you think you can make yourself a creative genius on your own, well, you don’t know Jack.

Innovation: Making the Unknown Known

In his magnum opus Critique of Pure Reason, the philosopher Immanuel Kant builds a bridge between what is known, what is unknown and what is unknowable. Innovation is a demonstration of his philosophy in as much as it is the only value proposition that becomes manifest in the future for which we have no data today. It is a creative venture into the unknown to discover what is knowable and how to us this new knowledge purposefully.

Progress pulls the future into the present and pushes the present into the past. This means the normative management techniques used to align organizational processes are of little use when trying to reach the future first. They attempt to stabilize that which by definition is dynamic. When looking forward into the unknown it is the unexpected event that becomes the norm. To navigate from the known to the unknown and beyond requires constant course corrections.

While there are no known maps to the undiscovered country, there are only trends and tendencies that provide some general direction: changes in demography, developing technologies, discoveries in medicine. The challenge is to overcome our present predisposition to make sense of what would otherwise be nonsensical. For example, even after four voyages to the New World, Columbus still believed he had landed in India and never realized the fortunes he had hoped to gain from a shorter route to the Far East.

We need to consider multiple perspectives if we are to look through our own blind spots so that we may see what others miss:

Create: This is radical, revolutionary thinking mastered by creative and artistic types of people. This perspective values new and different kinds of brainstorming.


Control: This is pragmatic thinking that values the reliability of systems and processes and high-scale production. This perspective values logic, order, and structure.


Collaborate: This is patient, participatory thinking practiced by people who come together in nurturing and empowering communities. This perspective values a long-term vision that will join individuals with shared ideals.


Compete: This is thinking that is driven by profits, speed, and the desire to come out on top. This perspective values fast-paced growth and quantifiable results.

Consider the trends and tendencies you might face in the future through each of these mindsets. Once you’ve done that, you can determine the probability and potential impact of all these drivers and design experiments based on those projections. It is crucial to run many experiments at once.  This is what venture capitalists do: they diversify the array. Instead of picking just one project you think is going to work, design many small projects that you can test. This is how you will know which bridges to cross.

While you run those experiments, you need to be open to change: make adjustments as you go based on what’s working and what’s not working. Failure along the way is inevitable. The key is to fail during the experimental stage, when the stakes are low. Then you can learn from those failures and succeed when it really counts.

None of these strategies in preparing for the future will work if you don’t diversify your gene pool. This means assembling a team of the best and brightest. Remember that innovation is not amateur hour. The goal is not merely to be on par with the field but to lead the field. And the only way to be a leader is to be an expert. This doesn’t mean that you have to know everything yourself. Rather, this means that you need to surround yourself with people who know the things that you don’t. Everyone will have their own area of proficiency. Amassed together, your team will be experts in your chosen field.

Innovators understand that the unknown doesn’t have to remain unknown, but they need to be prudent about which bridges they cross for these will determine where and when they will arrive in the future and if their innovations are timely and valuable. So, be flexible as you consider and prepare for the possibilities that may await you on the other side. Leave many options open.

As Immanuel Kant’s observed, “Human reason is by nature architectonic”. Put another way, you must build your bridge to the unknown as you walk over it.

Innovation Starts in Dark Places

There is a dark, untold back story of innovation that may disturb you: many of the earliest forms of the world’s biggest technological advancements were pioneered by bad people in morally corrupt contexts. The most radical innovation in video streaming started in the pornography industry. The most sophisticated uses of messaging technologies started with drug traffickers and terrorists. Counterfeiters have pimped digital technologies to such an advanced state that governments are rethinking the use of paper-based currencies.

Why does innovation often start in dark places? When you’re working in the fringes, the normal risks and rewards associated with radical change suddenly become different: you have a lot less to lose, but you can also gain a lot more.

The relevant analogy here is a bell curve. The closer you get to the middle of the curve, the more things are pulled toward normalcy. The farther away you get from the middle, the more deviance you see. This is exactly where these dark places exist: at the high-deviance edges of the curve, at either the crisis points or points of exceptional success. I call this the 20/80 rule: it’s easier to change 20% of an organization 80% than it is to change 80% of your organization 20%.

If we want to combat these dark places and catch the people doing bad things, we need to move along the bell curve with them and perhaps beyond. We need to start innovating at the points of extremity, where things are going really well or really poorly, where the risk of failure is low but the potential rewards are high.

What can you learn from understanding this dark back story of innovation?

There aren’t bad methods—there are just bad people. We should not encourage—indeed, we should fight against—an innovation being used for an evil purpose, but we can still learn from the methods and use them for good.

In order to keep up, we need to move farther out on the bell curve. This means working in areas that make us feel uncomfortable. Keep your moral compass but travel beyond the traditional limits of the conventional map to terra incognita.

There will always be an insurgency. Use this as a motivation to do more: you can remain ahead of the other guys if you keep pushing forward and getting there before they do.

In their 1997 book, The Axemaker’s Gift: Technology’s Capture and Control of Our Minds and Culture, James Burke and Robert Ornstein argue that whenever anyone invents something good, bad people can co-opt it for their own wicked uses. The opposite is also true: what starts out as a bad thing can be transformed into something good. Keep your mind open. Don’t be constrained by black-and-white thinking with rigid distinctions.

Innovation is rethinking what you think you already know. It often happens when and where you least expect it. Remember that innovation is a form of deviance. Staying in the middle of the bell curve is no longer enough. Move toward the edges and see what’s out there. You might just shed a little light on these dark places.

Originality is Not All That Original

What do William Shakespeare and Led Zeppelin have in common? They both pinched much of their material from artists that came before them. The Bard, who added a few thousand original words to the English language and gave us our most unique phrases, was unabashed in his thievery of complete tracts from well-known poets and playwrights of his day. Most of his plays recycle stories from history and other literary works, and his stylistic flourishes are inspired by things that his contemporaries were already doing.

Now it appears that Led Zeppelin, those icons of originality for a generation in motion, may have also ripped-off some of the most memorable riffs in the rock ‘n’ roll canon. In a recentBusiness Week article, Stairway to Heaven: The Song Remains Pretty Similar, author Vernon Silver makes the case that “The Biggest Band in the World” was actually built on the music of a lot of smaller ones. If these originals aren’t all that original what hope is there for the rest of us to become truly one of a kind?

Just how original is original? This might sound like a sacrilege to a sensitive artistic soul: even those that we deem to be the most original are merely copying or co-opting the work of others. In truth, we have been given a false sense of our singularity from the time we are told that no two snowflakes are alike to that self-help book on your bed stand that assuages your sense of ennui like a good massage or tall glass of merlot. Given that we share 98% of our genome with swine, how different are we likely to be from others in the human family?

Our individuality contributes to our sense of meaning and purpose. This is why we worry so much about being unique. As Sir Isaac Newton suggested, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, or in Led Zeppelin’s case, the not so very tall. Perhaps it is more useful to think of our uniqueness as a gift given to us by others that we re-wrap and embellish before re-gifting it.

Anthropologists have two complimentary theories regarding how new ideas spread. The first is called diffusion, which means that a unique idea moves from one individual or group to the next. The second is called polygenesis, which suggests that an original idea appears simultaneously in multiple persons and places because the conditions and timing are ripe. In either of the two views, the creative idea is not wholly unique. It can be traced back to our exposure and experiences or credited to simply being in the right place at the right time. The point being that what we take to be something altogether new may be more the result of our awareness than our special creative abilities.

So here are a few thoughts to keep your creativity and individuality in perspective:

You’re not that original—and that’s okay. What you’ve heard so many people say is true: there’s nothing new under the sun. Find comfort in this realization. Rather than trying to come up with something completely new, consider yourself a craftsman, working off of other people’s tools and ideas.

Originality does not mean merely shocking people. Radical innovation happens within a context. What one person does at one moment in one place may not work in a different context. It’s about adapting an old idea to a new situation.

Continue to experiment and see what happens next. To embrace the knowledge that all originality is a new form of someone else’s originality is not to discourage radical thinking. Instead, it is to redefine what radical originality is. The most radical ideas are often the simplest.

In Hearts of Darkness, the 1991 documentary about the making of his classic film,Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Coppola presaged the advent of YouTube. He said, “Suddenly, one day some little girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart…and make a beautiful film with her father’s little camera-corder, and for once this whole professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form.” There is nothing new about his uncannily accurate prediction for our future. This is what artists and creative thinkers have been doing forever: reinventing an old form for a new audience. Think about vintage style in fashion or movie remakes or musical revivals.

William Shakespeare re-told old stories in a new medium, with a new language. Led Zeppelin updated an old idiom—the 16-bar blues—for a new genre. Perhaps we should be on the lookout for the new George Frederic Handel who composes oratorios on his Garmin or the Marcel Proust who streams out his consciousness through his Twitter account. While the shoes and haircuts change over time, the song remains the same.

The False Ambition of Innovation

Booze only brings false courage but coffee incites false ambition, an equally dangerous proposition. You know that to-do list you make at the opening bell that you are certain to conquer by lunch only to find it lingers on well into the wee hours before you finally abandoned it in despair like the impossible dreams of your halcyon youth. Lately, I’ve noticed that innovation has a similar caffeinating effect on leaders everywhere. I’m unsure if it’s the false stimulation it produces or the dulling of the senses but when the word innovation is uttered a torrent of completely unrealistic ideas are sure to follow. Listen carefully and you too can hear the sound of irrational exuberance: “It’s the next Google” or “we can build it in six months tops” or my favorite, the “you can do it” call of the misguided corporate cheerleader. Come to think of it, false courage and false ambition are both potent forms of delusion.

Sure there are the smarmy inspirational posters that human resources department plasters all over the break room where Michelangelo encourages us to reach for the stars or Einstein quips that creativity is way more important that being intelligent. I guess if you are an artistic master for the ages or the genius that redefined the space-time continuum you just need to level up your ambition and go for it. But what about the rest of us ordinary folk – reasonably competent and intelligent – who are just doing our best to be a little more extraordinary? Well, miserable old Thomas Edison put it in perspective as only the most prolific innovator of the last century could, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.” Innovation starts with ambition and is guided and sustained by it but the journey is arduous and requires discipline, diligence and a preternatural amount of good luck as you schlep hither and yon. Those with false ambition fall away along the way.

So how do we level set our ambition?

Go Big in Small Way: It all starts with momentum. It not what you say but what you do that gets things moving forward. Innovation is merely affirmed by outrageous ambition and upbeat blather but sustained by the pace and proof of concept. It’s the small things that start to work that lead to bigger and better things. As momentum accelerates, so does ambition.

Trust, but Verify: Ironically this iconic saying usually associated with President Ronald Regan is actually an Old Russian proverb. It’s one thing to believe you can achieve your aims, but quite another to successfully produce the tangible manifestations of innovation and gain acceptance in whatever markets you serve. Instead of waiting until you have the perfect mousetrap and hoping that world will beat a path to your door, it is far wiser to do some testing along the way. Make a little, sell a little and adjust a lot.

Manage Great Expectations: We’ve all been to the pep rally masquerading as a leadership retreat or town hall meeting. Like that good old All-American Knute Rockne, the emotional boss whips us into a frenzy with talk about winning one for the Gipper or poor little Nell or the emaciated shareholders. The problem is that the last three losing coaches all did the same thing. Unfortunately inspirational rah-rah doesn’t stick. Adults like to be treated as such and require some objective honesty and detached prudence in return for your credibility. Otherwise, cynicism abounds.

Ambition, yes, but reasonable, flexible and achievable. Both imaginative and measured. And just to be sure, you might want to cut down on your Java jive.

Innovation Now or Later?

Have you ever had two seemingly unrelated things happen around the same time and each in some way produced an insight into the other? Well it happened to me recently.

A bright and ebullient student came to visit me at my innovation lab seeking some career advice for a creative person soon to be in possession of an MBA from a top flight school. She had been offered the standard issue brand manager position at a humongous packaged goods conglomerate as well as a promising gig at a nameplate consulting firm back east.

When I asked what she wanted from a career her crisp reply was simply “to be happy.” I pressed as to what exactly brought her happiness. With a chagrined smile she simply said, “I want to be a writer.” Fair enough, “why don’t you just start writing your novel now?” I asked. “Because I know it would take years to become a successful author and I want to be happy now.” And there it was: the tradeoff of getting a little of what we want now or a lot of what we want later.

The following day I had a meeting with an executive of a venerable multinational corporation to discuss potential innovation strategies that would move his stock price up. He liked my unique approach for synchronizing the scope and scale of his massive enterprise to provide complex solutions that were well beyond the reach of rivals and upstarts. What he didn’t like was the three year timeline I estimated it would take to successfully maneuver into position. And there it was again: the tradeoff of getting a little of what we want now or a lot of what we want later.

And then it clicked. Innovation is lot like happiness. Neither the student nor the executive were willing to invest the necessary time, our most precious currency, to achieve the return that they genuinely sought – personal happiness and professional innovation. Too much happiness today, happy hours and retail therapy for example, brings too little tomorrow. Conversely, if you pay everything forward there is little left in the till to meet the obligations of today. As with most maneuvers, balance is way of the wise.

Here’s the rub: we live in an instant world – coffee, ATMs and movies on demand – but following your bliss or making innovation happen requires that you’ve run enough experiments and have gained enough experience to not only master your disposition and your trade but to exceed it. Both happiness and innovation require trudging through the ordinary to reach the extraordinary. The way is long and the tolls are high. That’s why most turn back and take the convenient job or the follow the industry leaders.

There are two forms of time most relevant to the human experience:

Chronological time which can be maximized via the efficient sequential organization of tasks. This form can be seen in every productivity app on your smart phone.
Developmental time which resists compression because it must be fully experienced as it naturally unfolds. This form becomes self evident when you learn a new language or acquire a new skill.

Chronological time, our authoritarian task master, has so thoroughly dominated our lives that we scarcely have a moment to think beyond the daily checklist. This lack of soak time not only cheats us of the intervals in which we produce happiness and creativity but also alters our sense of perspective. If the eternal present is all that there is, what hope is there for the future where we make our world better for those who follow?

With apologies to enlightened beings everywhere, the power of now is not just contemplative and appreciative but also progressive. Put another way, now is not just where we end but rather where we start. Mindfulness of our happiness is not an invitation to accepting our lives as they are now but rather a call to creating the lives we seek experience some time hence. Happiness and innovation are investments. We may forgo the pleasures of today for the satisfaction that our discipline may bring tomorrow.

So the next time you want to be happy, or to create something marvelously new, ask yourself when you really need it and when it is most likely to happen. Managing our own expectations of time gives us the power and purpose to realize our more lofty ambitions.

Who knows, you might even become an author or raise the price of your stock.

Beautiful Innovation Orphans

In the captivating fairy tales of the Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm there is often a perfect and pure magical child who is unmercifully mistaken for an ordinary mortal. What ensues is the cathartic story of their trials and torment until they overcome the ordeal and are reveled as the princess or magus or hero and the world is made right. Sadly life seldom follows fiction in such family matters. The same is true for innovations that are remarkable in all ways save one – they languish in want of someone to love them.

My unusual occupation takes me to some of the most astonishing technical centers and research labs hidden from the watchful eyes of the uninitiated. Out of sight and far out of mind, these investigators and simulators summon up their genies and phantasms in the blasé shadow of our mundane world. Our kind is capable of conjuring the most astonishing enchantments that twist and turn the very story of nature – Miracle drugs that cure the incurable, molecular alchemy that turns dirty water clean and ubiquitous beams of light that bring power to the powerless.

But for those on the outside looking in it is all too easy to mistake the unfamiliar for the untrue. The illuminating lamp of possibility is dimmed by the pall of palatability. We fear what we do not understand and we do not understand much. And even for those brave souls that dare to venture forth, the new is always impractical by definition for it does not comfortably conform to the old. So it is little wonder that great ideas high born in the rarified terroir of the lauded research lab or creativity cluster or fashionable design studio often go unnoticed, unattended and unloved. Much of what we generally take to be the future is actually the past languishing in some forsaken corner like wistful Snow White or servile Cinderella.

There are three basic archetypes of innovation orphans that are readily recognizable but not so easily adopted:

1. Innovation orphans that are not seen nor heard: Innovation research labs and the like are an invitation only affair. Only the good, the smart and the anointed are granted entrance for they alone are entrusted with keeping our most ingenious ideas as well as our sacred trust. When so few people see or hear of an idea there is little chance of it being adopted.

* How to see and hear the innovation orphans: Find the fairy godmothers. Seek them out in their secret places and petition their sound council. Accept them in all their mercurial splendor and interpret their enigmatic directions. Treat it like a riddle to be unwound or quest to be undertaken and you may well find what you seek.

2. Innovation orphans that are not easily understood: Sophisticated frameworks, complex methods and arcane vernacular make even the most experienced innovator feel amateurish and dim. What is counterintuitive is not easily simplified or aligned with our strategic aims. So while we may feel a wizardly idea is worthwhile we don’t know what to do with it.

* How to understand the innovation orphans: Each time we hear a story we travel in the company of the knowing narrator. They are not only the teller of the tale but also the crone or chronicler that give it meaning and make sense of it. Find the wise one that can interpret and translate the substance and uses of a new idea or innovation.

3. Innovation orphans that represent a changing of the guard: Radical ideas are as threatening to the powers that be as zealous revolutionaries are to the political establishment. Each breakthrough unseats an incumbent product or service and potentially the enterprise that makes and sells it. The only motivation greater than the aspiration to grow is the primal impulse for self preservation.

* How to protect an innovation orphan from the old guard: Every new idea needs a hero to protect it before it can defend itself. Bureaucracy and conformity are the battlements of the entrenched. But every old champion remembers well that they too were once young and will recount the glory of their own guardians. Appeal to their sense of honor and desire to once again be renewed by battle.

Innovation orphans need to be adopted. Though they might not be invented here, or by you, they may be worthy of your support. Just be sure that you really love them.

What Innovation Doesn’t Solve

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the big dreams and grand visions of my distant relative, Robert Fair DeGraff—a publishing innovator who co-founded Pocket Books in 1939. His idea was a simple but game-changing one: reprint bestsellers and classics in small paperback editions and sell them for just 25 cents apiece. The success was instant and lasting. Twenty-five years later, in 1964, Pocket Books sold around 300 million volumes annually.

But Robert DeGraff didn’t start Pocket Books because he wanted to make money. What drove him was a much deeper and larger cultural ambition: he thought that by making classic books so easily and cheaply available to masses of people, Pocket Books would eliminate illiteracy. Of course, this didn’t happen. The proliferation of accessible and low-price books did not change American literacy rates.

Why didn’t more people read just because books became inexpensive? Because they didn’t see what reading would do for their lives. Making the books accessible is only half of the project. The bigger part is showing people what major uses reading can have in their lives, how to apply reading and the skills of reading to better themselves.

The lesson here is this: technical innovation doesn’t change culture. We often assume that technology will change everything—that technological advancements will make things easier and better and solve larger problems. The truth is that technology is just one aspect in a larger web of cultural issues and changing only technology will not have an effect on these broader cultural issues.

Robert Fair DeGraff’s Pocket Books reminds me of a project I worked on with one of the largest public school systems in America that wanted to apply computer-based training to its curriculum to improve functional literacy. The assumption was that access to a computer and technological competency would enhance the education of students who otherwise would’ve struggled. This wasn’t the case. The technology we brought into the classroom didn’t bring out the kind of fundamental shift that we expected it to.

Regrettably, I suspect the same will hold true for most massive open online courses from the Khan Academy to Coursera. While some primary school standardized testing scores have improved during the last decade there is little credible correlation between the availability of laptops and tablets and any significant progress in closing the alarming achievement gap. New technology in itself will not set us free. Sorry.

So how exactly can we start the kind of larger-scale cultural change that technological innovation on its own cannot bring about? The key is to use technology not as an end by itself but as a means to reach something else. Here’s what I mean:

 

Fall in Love with the Problem; Not the Solution: Any new gadget simply dropped into a complex set of circumstances is most likely to be co-opted by them. Instead, work backwards to understand the underlying challenges and potential opportunities the situation presents. Run experiments with small diverse groups of participants to see what works and what doesn’t, and most importantly why. This will give you some understanding as to the underlying issues and an opportunity to work with people to develop some simple rules that can be applied en masse.

 

Stop Boiling the Ocean to Extract Gold: As Teddy Roosevelt put it “Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” Seek out early adaptors and provide new technologies to them within a limited time frame. Work with them to find suitable applications and uses. Engage them step by step and make adjustments as you go along.

 

What’s in It For Me?: For the most part, people are self-interested and tend to do what’s best for them and their immediate community. Deal with it. Pay attention to the rewards these new technologies provide the first users and highlight these when introducing them to their peers. Most important, let the lead users develop a sense of personal ownership for these innovations and their management.

What would Robert F. De Graff see in the world if he were still alive today? He would understand that technology is simply the binding and paper that contain the book as a physical artifact. While the narrative may be written on the pages in between, the real story is how we make sense of it all. Your challenge is to move innovation beyond the technology to the desperate places where it may first enable and at last enlighten.

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JEFF DEGRAFF is a professor, author, speaker and advisor to hundreds of the top organizations in the world. He is called the Dean of Innovation because of his influence on the field. To learn more about Jeff and his work on innovation please visit www.jeffdegraff.com. Join Jeff in the art of growing with his new eBook series The Enlivened Self. You can follow Jeff on Twitter @JeffDeGraff and LinkedIn.

Digital Natives vs. Digital Immigrants

Don’t let the word “digital” fool you in all this talk about how difficult it is for digital natives and digital immigrants to communicate. The truth is that this generational gap between the so-called digital natives (the generation of people born during or after the rise of digital technologies) and the digital immigrants (people born before the advent of digital technology) doesn’t actually have to do with technology. The real issue is that the two worldviews that they represent are so different.

Digital natives view the world horizontally, in equalitarian terms. Rather than dividing the world into hierarchies, they see everyone as existing on an equal level. They embrace the benefits of sharing things and ideas with each other and, in doing so, they cross boundaries. They are driven by values. For this reason, many of them are distrustful of traditional cultural and social institutions: marriage, religion, government. In opting out of these institutions, they have declared themselves microsegments of one – free agents.

The advantage of a digital native’s worldview is the genuine democracy and equality that comes out of their rejection of centralized and control based forms of governance. The downside is that they’re unlikely to build anything that requires intensive capital, tangled complexity or tremendous magnitude—going to the moon, curing cancer, recreating the power grid: large-scale projects that need vertical organization by goal-oriented, focused people.

Where digital natives imagine a world with little institutional structure and open access to people of diverse backgrounds, the culture of digital immigrants is a meritocracy. Typically a more aggressive, competitive and results-obsessed generation, they are often seen as cutthroat by their younger associates. The advantage here is productivity: digital immigrants are goal oriented as opposed to the value orientation of the digital natives. While they have the ability to get things done quickly they may overlook the long term consequences of their actions. Workaholics are not an uncommon manifestation of this win at all costs world view.

The paradox here is that digital immigrants, for the most part, invented the complex technologies and systems that digital natives use fluently – the Internet, microchips and the ubiquitous cloud comes to mind. In this way, digital natives and digital immigrants must grow to work together and learn from each other.

What can digital natives teach digital immigrants?

To collaborate across boundaries, with a variety of people
To make a place in life for values
To build solutions that are horizontal

What can digital immigrants teach digital natives?

To achieve goals quickly
To use focused resources in building things to scale
To revitalize or repurpose existing institutions

Think about this: digital immigrants may have invented the technologies that digital natives use but didn’t accurately anticipate how they would use them. For example, text messaging (SMS) was developed in the 1980’s as an easy way for service engineers to quickly communicate regarding outages and replacement parts. It would have been unimaginable then that young people would chat and twitter using the service instead of talking on the phone. It is the combination of the two world views that has produced for better or worse a new form of communication and multibillion dollar industry. If we allow an opening for an ongoing dialogue between these two generations, we can all achieve things that we wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

The irony is that, eventually, we will come full circle: the children of digital natives will act like digital immigrants. This is just how things work: we see the world differently from the people who came before us. Generations are simply oppositional in nature. But they don’t have to be at odds with each other. It’s about talking with and learning from people who you normally wouldn’t work with, who don’t see things the way you do. What will you do to start a dialogue with a generational stranger, your digital other?