Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 19

The Innovator Dating Service

Looking for a winning idea? All you have to do is click your heels and ask the Great and Powerful Omni Web for your wish to come true, or so I’m told. Open innovation has become a jumble of buzzwords that somehow connect the dots between ideation and commercialization – Collaborative open innovation networks (COINs), crowd sourcing, idea markets and countless acronyms, homonyms and even eponyms. So now we are to believe that the way to enlisting the most talented innovators is the same path many are taking to finding their true love. Well isn’t that precious.

The search for new talent in organizations everywhere has become like a dating site: the goal is to find someone who shares your interests and skills, to make a match. This is the false and misguided belief that drives so many Human Resources departments today. More and more companies are moving their recruitment efforts to social media, depending on big data to find amazing new people for their teams.

In this way, these HR divisions have essentially become dating services. They believe that they will discover their next generation of innovators by using algorithms that evaluate how well potential recruits align with a pre-determined set of qualities that they’re looking for in a match.

What may seem like finding the right person for the right job is really just an attempt to be more efficient, an attempt to automate what is, in reality, a highly complicated process.

Let’s be generous for a moment and assume that the success rate of finding an authentic innovator via a big data algorithm is about the same as finding your soul mate. It’s possible. We see these snuggle bunnies on the television commercials for these dating services. But is it probable that you can find the missing piece to your innovation puzzle via a transactional platform? I doubt it. Innovation is highly situational, cultural and requires that innovators are developed. You need to apprentice them, you need to get their hands dirty—put them to work and see what they’re capable of.

Often, the talent you want in your organization is the talent that you don’t know you’re looking for. The dating-service model of recruitment results in a bland, uniform team that has little authentic diversity – cognitive as well as cultural.

Alignment is not conducive to innovation. Constructive conflict—not harmony—is what will spark innovative thinking in your company.

Here are a few things that are known not to be predictors for hiring successful innovators:

Intelligence tests
Creativity assessments
Employment experience
Areas of expertise
Emotional intelligence
Patents applied for

More so, when any of these are deemed to have significant correlations further research invariably nullifies the findings when applied to different fields of endeavor and different domains. The point being you can’t find innovators via a dating service because we don’t have an established benchmark as to what makes an effective innovator. The situational variability is far too great and accurate predictors of the future are only useful when there is a steady continuation to the present. When was the last time your life moved in straight line?

What happens when pragmatic thinkers work with big-picture thinkers? What happens when the goal-oriented thinkers meet the patient thinkers? This is the complete opposite of the rigidity and uniformity that comes from dating service apps. It’s not what happens with the individual but rather the chemistry or lack thereof between them.

The goal of innovation is to change the gene pool: to produce variation—not to eliminate it. Innovation is deviation—and you need deviants.

Have you ever noticed that in creative communities everybody is a little weird? People in those communities not only know that but they expect other people to share their weirdness and be okay with it.

These are exactly the kind of people that you can’t find with the dating-service model. Was anybody looking for Nikola Tesla? He slept on a rubber mattress because he could feel the earth move. He came up with the DC system because angels talked to him. Then he became passionate about restoring injured pigeons he found in Washington Square Park. To say he was an outside-the-box thinker is an understatement.

Automating the search for innovators like a dating service will only give us a generation of vanilla. It’s the thing about dating that you’ve heard so many people say but that almost always turns out to be true: the person you end up with is never the person you think you’ll end up with. It’s not about finding the perfect match—it’s about finding the perfect mismatch.

Innovation Isn’t Change

Innovation isn’t change. It may seem like a minor difference but this is actually a huge distinction. Change is moving away from something; innovation is moving towards something.

Moving away from something is always traumatic while moving towards something is almost always a euphoric experience. Consider the following two examples of friends of mine who lost their positions during the Great Recession. Both are remarkable men with sterling credentials and prodigious ambition. Each is the primary earner in their household and takes their obligations to their families seriously. These kinds of people are seldom unemployed even in the worst circumstances.

The first responded to the dreadful news by rushing around indiscriminately, desperately trying to find a new job. He went to work in a field in which he had little experience and in a position for which he was overqualified. More so, he viewed his job as a temporary holding place for his career and his new employer knew it. What followed was seven years of moving from post to post always trying to stay ahead of the bad news but in actuality reacting to his own fear of getting caught in the wrong place at the wrong time again.

The second decided to use the downturn as an opportunity to pursue a life dream of opening a bakery. This was an unusual choice for someone who had previously been an insurance executive. While he missed the perks of being perceived as important, especially the paycheck, he enjoyed his newfound freedom and the personal interaction with his small staff and the customers who visited his petit boulangerie. Though the new career brought sacrifice for him and his family it was viewed as the manifestation of a shared vision. This kept them optimistic and even inspired during the difficult early going.

Change left my first friend moving backwards, trying to make something not happen, while innovation kept my other friend moving forward, trying to realize a dream.

We remember and write about Christopher Columbus today because he was moving towards something—not away from something. He wanted to find a Western route to the Spice Islands – Malaysia and Indonesia. Like most Europeans of his time, he was confused about the size of the planet and the constellation of the contents, but only the ignorant of the day thought the world was flat given the luster and pursuit of riches via the Spice Trade and the Silk Road.

A former admiral and a brilliant navigator, Columbus sent multiple ships with different hulls, keels, crews, and types of provisions. All of the ships took slightly different routes. Columbus was hedging, which is completely different from change. He was saying, “I don’t have information right now. I need to gain information so I’m going to spread my portfolio at the beginning of this venture.”

This is no different than what venture capitalists do today. They make relatively small investments in diverse therapies for the same disease state. They fail forward by accelerating the cycle of trial and error just like Columbus.

While change works to remove constraints, innovation uses them to drive higher order solutions. Progress has a visible trajectory but only when viewed as history. Consider the evolution of transportation that becomes the revolution of communication when our ambition for speed moves us from the physical to the virtual. Trains become cars become jets become the web become smart phones become the internet of things where every device talks to every other without human effort. The seemingly insurmountable impediment initiates the novel solution. For example, if Kepler had a computer, we might still be living in a Copernican universe because it would be easy to calculate epicycles. It was the problem, the constraint that brought the answer; not unfettered freedom.

Innovation and change require two different mindsets. Change may be described as the “make it stop” or “make it better” mindset. While the innovation mindset might be best be described by “make it different” or even “make it new.” The former pushes you away from an undesired state while the later pulls you towards a desired state. In either case, “magical thinking” is dangerous. The ubiquitous blather of “just think happy thoughts and the world will change” is both superstitious and narcissistic. The whole of humanity and the universe in which it is contained is neither your slave nor fairy godmother. What is needed are multiple experiments with reality. Try many things, fail early and fail often—to find what works, and doesn’t.

Develop a deep sense of destiny and it will change, no strike that, it will innovate the way you think about the voyage. Just remember to be open to what you might discover along the way.

The Art of Making Art

My family belongs to a ponderous array of arts organizations – symphonies, museums, theater companies and a mélange of performance ensembles that defy category. While we are not the House of Medici we do our best to support the cause of institutional creativity. Though I am an avowed proponent for supporting the arts, I am perplexed as to why is it that the most creative people in the world run their organizations in the most doctrinaire and conventional ways. It’s a maddening paradox.

Curators, museum-directors, theater-organizers, and a variety of other art leaders look for and value original, imaginative artworks. But when it comes to developing novel sources of funding, alternative forms of public participation and reimagining the functions of the institutions themselves, they are relatively slow adopters. Consider how businesses like coffee shops or microbreweries, based on mature commodities thousands of years old, have reinvented their categories by changing the experience via what might be deemed performance art while your favorite symphony or art museum is a comparatively staid affair.

While there are obvious examples of success such as Cirque du Soleil, which resurrected an outdated form of entertainment, for the most part, they still follow the basic conventions of the industry – performance palaces, subsidies and tax abatements, highbrow advertisements and of course the radiant sound of “tickets please”. There is little here about the business itself that Shakespeare or Beethoven would find astounding.

Of course, not all arts organizations are incumbent with a full purse of endowments. These start-up arts organizations live week to week by their limited resources and prospects trying to move past the conventions of the conventional. Theirs is an assortment of inexpensive apps, shared spaces and clever business arrangements to quickly navigate around the most intractable challenges.

Whereas in the competitive world of commerce the innovative practices of these upstarts would be copied by organizations with greater scope and scale there is little evidence to suggest that these new approaches have taken hold. As long as there is a generous source of funding from the willing wealthy, there is no reason for many of our most cherished arts organizations to innovate. This is a dangerous situation given that the worst of all growth strategies is to have an increasing share of a decreasing market. Just ask Blockbuster Video.

So how do we help our favorite arts organizations to be as imaginative in the way they run their organizations as they are in the artworks and performances they put on exhibition?

Let’s start by getting their mid and back office functions up to date. Think of it as a digital intervention on a highbrow makeover program:

Strategic planning: LivePlan and Prezi
Finance: Kiva and KickStarter
Hiring and Staffing: LinkedIn and Beyond
Project Management: Yammer and InnoCentive
Marketing: SurveyMonkey and Shutterfly
Training: TED and Khan Academy
Merchandising: Etsy and Pinterest

Of course there are thousands of other applications that digital natives know best as well as new takes on conventional services like ZipCar. Visit some successful professional service providers to get a better sense of how these post-conventional converts have crossed the digital divide to embrace new tools and methods that have changed their way of thinking and working within a federation of free agent affiliates.

If you would like to increase the speed and magnitude of innovation in your arts organization earnestly perform the following thought experiments:

What would you do…

If your traditional sources of funding dried up completely in the next three years?
If no one currently under the age of thirty would ever attend a performance or exhibition as they exist now?
If you could only have three staff members that managed a virtual federation of talent?
If you sold all of your buildings and everything went digital?
If you could no longer play, perform or display the classics?

Sometimes the best way to avoid a crisis is start one that you have some semblance of control over. What this does is quickly connect cause with effect so that you may find innovative solutions in time to revitalize your arts organizations.

You can start by showing your support in new ways. Help an arts leader choreograph a social media marketing campaign or rehearse a pitch to a prospect as if it were performance art or sculpt a unique business model of operation. Just become part of the unseen creative process.

With apologies to Maestro Sondheim – “The art of making art is putting it together”…together. Cue the music.