Jeff Degraff's Blog, page 3

How to Foster Innovation: Jeff DeGraff with Social Change Strategist, Jonah Sachs

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various background but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

In this episode, Jeff interviews Jonah Sachs, a journalist, entrepreneur, social change strategist, and author of the bestseller Winning the Story Wars.  Together, they discuss how to foster innovation.

Unleash your creativity

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Light Your Fire with the Sparks of Diversity

My graduate students are all very smart, but they are often very tentative about their goals.  They talk to me about their dreams but not how they’ll reach them.  Some have strong entrepreneurial ideas but struggle to connect with the people who could help make those ideas reality.  Others tell me they want a soulmate, yet they can’t seem to meet anyone.  From the point of view of creativizing, it’s really the same challenge.  I ask them: where could you find the sort of people you’re looking for?  And surprisingly often I hear something like this: I suppose they’re at the ski club, but I don’t like to ski.  Or: my uncle would give me some seed money, but he’s kind of hard to deal with.  Or: I hear a lot of networking goes on at the coffee shop near the university, but I don’t drink coffee.

I tell them, you’re not going for the coffee or the skiing.  Your uncle doesn’t have to be your best friend, just be sure you can trust him and that you have a clear understanding of each of your rights and responsibilities, spelled out in a contract.  Go where the sparks fly.  That’s where you have the best chance to light a fire.  And sparks fly where things bang up against each other.  Where there is some collision and some difference – even some conflict.  My home state of Michigan is in a terrible recession, but my city is not – because my city is one of the most diverse in the country.  It is mixing and creative tension that leads to innovation, yet people are most comfortable with people like them.  And so they often avoid the uncomfortable, conflict-prone, creative situations where innovation can happen.

WHO CAN DO WHAT YOU CAN’T?

Part of creativizing is to learn to love – or at least respect — the people and practices that you now hate.  Machiavelli famously said “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” Begin a practice of treating people who approach things from the opposite point of view as your greatest asset.  Forget about improving your areas of weakness. Surround yourself, instead, with people who are already good at what you’re bad at and work with them.   Ask yourself: who can do what I can’t?  Who has the skills or the means or the access that I lack?  Am I avoiding meeting those people because I’m more comfortable with people like me?  Am I afraid to be told there are other ways to do things, other goals that matter?  Am I avoiding people who might say I’m doing it all wrong?  Try this month to connect with some potentially helpful people who don’t make you feel perfectly comfortable.  You don’t need to set up a formal partnership, at least not yet.  For now, focus on expanding your circle so you can discover the powerful diversity of people around you.  If you are a parent of a child in public school and you are angry about the state of your school, don’t just talk to other angry parents.  Talk to some of the teachers and administrators.  Talk to the students.  If you want to design videogames, don’t just talk to other gamers.  Talk to people who don’t like videogames about what they don’t like. Talk to the manager at the local videogame store about what it’s like to be in that business.

I’m not saying that you need to hear from people who think differently every day.  Sometimes a new idea or a beginning effort needs to be protected from any and all critics for a while, just as some plants have to get started in a pot indoors before they’re strong enough to transfer to a garden. But as soon as you feel you can tolerate it, start seeking them out – not people who will tear you down but people who will spot approaches you miss.  

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

We Grow When Our Life Sucks… Or When We’re On a Roll

Newcomers to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting are often surprised that what you’ll find there is the opposite of reassurance. Normally, if someone has a crisis, a friend will say relax, it’s going to be okay, don’t be too hard on yourself.  Stay positive.  Breathe.  But at an AA meeting you have to stand up in front of everyone and say: alcohol wrecked my life.  Here’s the painful story, and what am I today?  I’m still an alcoholic.  

This approach is a speed ramp to remembering the worst times, your most disappointing and shameful defeats.  Why?  When life is all right, it’s comfortable to stay where you are, and painful to commit to something new.  Most of the time, we all strive for consistency and comfort: we want tomorrow to be reliably like today.  That’s why AA doesn’t go easy on the novices: they understand that until newcomers own up to the reality of their situation, there is little hope of them kicking the habit. Yet when life feels miserable, risk and reward reverse: now it hurts to stay where you are, but trying something new actually feels better.  As Bob Dylan put it, “When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

We seldom change on our own.   But most people will try something new – like not drinking even though they badly want a drink — if they feel bad enough.  It’s as true for companies as it is for individuals: Why is Apple is doing well now?  Because they nearly went bankrupt in 1997.   They had to try a lot of risky, potentially embarrassing innovations because the alternative was to give up and go home.  Out of those risks came the iPod, iTunes, the iPhone and the iPad.  We see this pattern over and over in business: the original vision of a hybrid engine like the one in the Prius was developed in the 1970s during the oil crisis.  When gas prices game down, the idea got lost, but during the recession of 2008-2009, when General Motors had to take a government bailout, they took the risk on finally producing the Volt, their hybrid.  It’s as Rahm Emanuel, the mastermind behind President Obama’s unlikely election, liked to say: “A crisis is too valuable to waste.”

We experience these same dynamics as individuals. Divorce, bankruptcy and loss of health drive us into changes we previously believed unimaginable. We change, and hopefully grow, when our life sucks. When it comes to creativizing, if you want to move from idea to action, find the part of your life that feels worst and focus on it.   Where is the pain so high that trying something new would be an improvement?  Remind yourself of what’s wrong, and take an action there.

GET ON A ROLL

Is there no alternative to suffering in order to change and grow?  Actually, there is.  We are also freed to change when life exceeds our expectations.  Graduation, a new job, true love, or the birth of a child are some of the events that make us feel we’re “on a roll.”  Economists call this “risk capital.”  When we’re doing well, we know that even if something goes wrong, we can absorb the losses, so we take more risks because we know we won’t be wrecked by a failure.  I suspect this is one reason New Year’s resolutions are so popular: almost everyone feels at least a temporary feeling of optimism on New Year’s Eve.  That optimism makes contemplating change less painful.

At its best, getting on a roll is a feeling like invincibility – anyone who’s been in love knows this feeling.  It’s also one reason the rich get richer – they can afford to take chances.   But that doesn’t mean only the rich and the newly in love can benefit.  You can to.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Innovation’s Impact on the Future of Business: Jeff DeGraff with Futurist, Jacob Morgan

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various background but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

In this episode, Jeff interviews Jacob Morgan, a best-selling author, keynote speaker and futurist who explores the future of work and employee experience. Together, they discuss the role of innovation in the future of business.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff – Jacob Morgan

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various background but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

In this episode, Jeff interviews Jacob Morgan, a best-selling author, keynote speaker and futurist who explores the future of work and employee experience. Together, they discuss the role of innovation in the future of business.

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

You Are Not the Weather

Don’t most people notice the weather?  Yes, but they don’t respond to it.  In my home state of Michigan, there were signs as far back as the 1970s that the auto manufacturing jobs on which so many relied were leaving the country.  By 1994, Michael Moore had made his movie “Roger and Me,” about the horrific effects of outsourcing on his hometown of Flint.  Word was out.  I personally had two friends who took it upon themselves to get new training before their manufacturing jobs disappeared.  They started to ask themselves and their friends: is there any reason to think the number of auto factory jobs is going to go back up again?  Is the work I do so special that it will be necessary no matter what happens to the auto industry?

When they thought about these questions, they realized the answers were no and no.  So then they looked around for industries where the weather was better.  Online sales were growing every year, and one of my friends had always liked and been good with computers.  The population of elderly people in Michigan was growing, and my other friend – a big, burly guy, the last person you would have guessed – had always had a feeling for caring for the elderly.  In the end, one became a website designer and the other a nurse.  Yet most people with jobs in the auto industry kept going to work as if they didn’t see the storm clouds or feel the first drops of rain.  Either they felt the sensations and didn’t think about them or they had no way to apply their creativity to what they observed all around.

How can you shift from passive notice of the weather to active response?  To begin, make time to reflect on the larger changes going on around you.  Instead of using all your time to check items off the to-do list or kick back and relax, give yourself a half a day a month, or two hours here and there, to watch the weather.  Put it on your calendar.  Treat it as one of your most important meetings.  When the time comes, learn about changes going on in your area and your industry.  How could you start?

Read a news magazine or industry publication that you normally skip
Replace an hour of “entertainment” television each week in favor of a news or documentary program about an issue you are concerned about
Browse an online news aggregator such as HuffingtonPost or Google News, that gives a wide range of experts and observers a place to comment on the trends they observe
 Make use of the expertise and experience of the people all around you.  Make a point to talk to different folks at community gatherings – at a party, after religious services, at a school event – and ask them what’s new in their business or their neighborhood.  Where do they see opportunities?  Or what has them concerned?
When you travel, talk to the people traveling alongside you.  The person next to you on the bus or plane, or in the seat nearby when you stop for a bite to eat.  The driver of the airport shuttle or the taxi.  Are things changing around here?  What’s on their minds?
Join a group on Facebook or another social networking site that provides neutral information on big-picture issues that concern you – health, education, finance, etc.  Remember that the goal here is to choose a group that will expose you to new points of view, not just reinforces the views you expect to be true.
If you have children in your life, discuss issues of the day that get raised at your child’s school.  Work to help them develop a big picture perspective.  As you help them to think for themselves, you may find that they are learning things or encountering situations that are new to you as well.  

In any of these ways, you can begin to become aware of the changes on the horizon.  But don’t just sit alone to wonder and worry – find others who are interested in watching the weather and discussing the longer-term possibilities.   “I saw on Huffington Post that X and Y.  Do you think that will happen here?”  “I read in the newspaper that …” Start an ongoing conversation, with others and with yourself.  Conduct thought experiments: When you look up at the sky, what do you see coming?  What might that mean?  Is that something that’s going to matter for you?

The most important thing is to remember that you are starting a learning process that will take time.  If you spend one afternoon learning and talking, chances are you won’t end the day with any answers at all.  That’s exactly where you should be.  For now, your goal is to establish the innovator’s habit of looking up and identifying some clouds you need to keep an eye on, some areas down the road that are expecting sunshine.  

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

There Is No Data on the Future

A journalist asked me, “Is the Euro going to go up or down?”

“Up, of course,” I said. That got his attention.  

“Why? “

“Because it’s down now.  That’s what currencies do.  They go up and down.”

“When?” he wanted to know.  “When is it going to go up?”

All I could do was smile.  “If I knew that, I wouldn’t be telling you.  I’d be off buying Euros.”

We would all like to know right away which of our ideas for how to make our lives better is going to succeed and which isn’t, so we can be perfectly certain of success.  That’s why people buy so many of those checklist-type books with titles like Seven Steps to Get Rich Quick.  We’d all love to find a foolproof checklist that will succeed everywhere, for everyone, forever – but as we find out sooner or later, there’s no way to get that kind of perfect information.   Just watch any old science fiction movie. It may be good or bad, but with hindsight we always find that the filmmaker never gets the future right.  If you watch “2001,” you’ll see that the story assumed that by 2001 there would be two bases on the moon, one run by the United States and one by the Soviet Union.  At the same time, when a character in the movie makes a video phone call, he has to sit inside a phone booth and pay by the minute – the creators were able to imagine an American moon base but not a free Internet phone call on a handheld device.  And though it’s supposed to be the future, everyone is dressed in closely tailored 1960s clothes, because that’s what was in style when the movie was made.  There is no data on the fashion future, either.

Even graduates of business school fall into the trap of thinking they can know what the future will bring.  MBAs typically try to understand the future by doing more research on the past, so they can document and repeat what worked before.  But as innovators know, the game keeps changing.  What worked before won’t necessarily work again.  There is no certainty.   If you don’t believe me, go read the checklist-style business books on innovation that were popular five years ago.  It’s the reading equivalent of slowing down on the highway to get a look at a car wreck. Innovative business practices that were heralded as the next new thing are strewn to the side of the road.

Take a business practice from that era called Total Quality Management.  It was the innovative management approach developed back when the Japanese were suddenly making cars of much higher quality than we were making in America.  Our cars were full of defects, and lots of Americans started to buy Japanese.  To become competitive again, the Total Quality Management approach said that everyone involved in making a product like a car, including people outside the company such as suppliers and customers, had to participate in checking and maintaining quality.  It was a very good idea about how companies could make fewer mistakes, and by about the year 2000 American quality ratings were indistinguishable from those of Asian companies.  TQM worked.

 

The trouble was, too many business people forgot that TQM was an innovation developed to solve a specific problem at a specific time.  They forgot that their fabulous data about TQM only applied to the past, and that there was no data from the future.  TQM came to be seen as a cure-all, a required “improvement” for any company.  But eliminating errors is not the only thing companies have to do well.  And in fact, while American car companies were focusing increasingly on reducing the number of mistakes they made, Japanese and Korean companies shifted focus.  They started to ask: how could we build exciting new luxury cars?  How could we break into what has always been an American and European market?  They had shifted from reducing errors to expanding into new markets, and the fact that American companies were hyper-focused on reducing manufacturing errors meant the Asian companies had plenty of time and room to innovate – and pull ahead of American manufacturers again.

 

All those American companies that jumped on the TQM bandwagon were making the same basic mistake: they thought that past success was a guarantee of future success.  We all do this at times.  Every year, it seems, as college admissions news comes in, I hear about some family shocked that their child hasn’t gotten into any college except a safety school.  They say something like: “How could that happen to Billy?  He was such a smart little boy.  Why, when he was four years old….”  They’re still relying on the mental picture they have of him from years ago – and ignoring more recent potential pictures, like the one of his school losing its standards, or the one of smart Billy, bored in his failing school, cutting classes and getting into trouble.  

 

If past performance can’t predict the future, and you can’t rely on the methods that worked yesterday to work again for you tomorrow, then what can you do?  How do you meet the uncertainty of the future – the only place where you can grow? By taking the mental stance of the successful creativizer.  Neither hiding from change nor lost in endless preparation and research.  Uncertain – but not upset to be uncertain.  Because life can’t be fully plotted in advance, only understood in hindsight, the innovator goes forward uncertain but curious, interested, and responsive to new data as it comes in, and comes in again tomorrow.

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

How Improv Sparks Creativity: Jeff DeGraff with Comedian and Writer, Bob Kulhan

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various background but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

In this episode, Jeff interviews Bob Kulhan, founder of Business Improv. Together, they discuss how improv can have huge benefits on everyday life, and how it helps spark creativity.

 

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff – Bob Kulhan

Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These thought leaders come from various background but all share insight from their personal and professional experience that can be adapted to foster innovation either in a business setting or in your personal lives.

In this episode, Jeff interviews Bob Kulhan, founder of Business Improv. Together, they discuss how improv can have huge benefits on everyday life, and how it helps spark creativity.

 

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More

What are the basic steps to make innovation happen?

One of the first stories I ever learned to read was called Stone Soup. It was a tale about three wily soldiers with no food or money who come to a wary village and set a large iron cauldron by the well in the town square. As the inhabitants look on, the soldiers fill the vessel with water and ceremoniously place a large stone in the pot. Intrigued, the villagers come out to examine and critique the colorless concoction. Some suggest that the broth would be improved with carrots or potatoes and such to which the tricksters agree. The meal gains momentum as the folks each willingly add some small ingredient. Soon the cauldron is bubbling with a sumptuous brew and all feast and dance in celebration. The story ends with the soldiers moving down the road to repeat the whole charade on the next unsuspecting burg.

I have never forgotten this parable about the generative power of communities engaged in small and diverse creative acts. Over the years I have been lucky enough to work with many of the top companies in the world on ways to make collaborative innovation happen. Sometimes it requires complex strategic maneuvers or the intricate coordination of customized processes and arcane measures. But at its most basic level, organizational innovation is mostly about making stone soup. That is, getting everyone, everywhere, every day to make small unique contributions that when combined create something truly great.

All learning is developmental. If you don’t believe it try speaking a foreign language or taking up an instrument and you will quickly discover that the failure cycle knows no age. We learn by seeing and then doing and finally by teaching – See One, Do One, Teach One. Of course talent matters but our gifts come in many diverse forms so it is essential that seek out those who are unlike us so that we may see beyond our own blind spots. Innovation is not produced through alignment or agreement but rather through the positive tension that comes from constructive conflict. Diverse teams can jumpstart a project in four simple steps:

Set High Quality Targets

Identify high impact and high probability growth targets
Create a shared vision with an appropriate level of ambition
Select initiatives to test the strategy


Enlist Deep and Diverse Domain Experts

Identify the various areas of expertise needed
Assess organizational capability and culture
Enlist high potential growth leaders


Take Multiple Shots on Goal

Brainstorm winning ideas and transform them into solutions
Jumpstart growth and innovation project teams
Gain organizational buy-in for new ideas


Learn from experience and experiments

Assess what worked and didn’t
Develop simple rules of thumb
Implement winning solutions throughout the organization

Pay special attention to the intangibles such as how the team uses its creative energy to produce momentum.

An innovation only exists for a very brief moment before it goes sour like old soup. As with a chef trying new recipes, practice precedes mastery. The more you cook the better the dish. The stock of this innovative soup is deviation and requires the encouragement of deviance. The old adage is wrong. Too many chefs don’t spoil the broth; they make the sumptuous stone soup.

The following video about the future of creative collaboration might also be helpful.

This question originally appeared on Quora .

 

Discover the power of constructive conflict and how it can help foster innovation. By reading The Innovation Code, you will learn how to harness tension and transform it into positive energy to successfully implement your innovation projects.

Learn More