Cense

Innovation to Impact

Innovation Case Studies

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If you’ve ever taught a course on an applied subject matter you’ve probably considered introducing case studies.

Case studies are systematic accounts of an activity and aim to provide evidence to illustrate or support an example of something. This might be to show a problem-solving approach, an introduction of a new technology, or demonstrate a particular implementation success or failure.

The case study approach is a core of what Harvard Business School uses and has been replicated in the Harvard Business Review and many other business journals. Harvard even has a structured method that has been adopted by business schools (and other faculties) worldwide.

Case studies are meant to provide us with guides based on practice to help us think through things, follow, or avoid. While this might be true in the abstract, our experience is that they are far better at stimulating discussion in class settings, but lousy at providing innovators with real guidance on what to do.

Partly, this has to do with the stories that are told and partly it’s because of the questions that are asked of the case examples themselves.

A New Case Study Approach

There is another way to approach case studies for innovation.

Innovation is always context-dependent. Complex contexts are those where there is a lot going on at multiple scales, intensities, and connect many different entities like people, organizations and networks. Increasingly, this is what describes the context in which innovators work.

This represents many if not most markets, public policy landscapes, schools, and care institutions today. If you’re involving humans, you’re involving complexity. This requires an approach to understanding and making sense of what happens that accounts for complexity. Consider the Cynefin Framework as a guide in assessment of what kind of situation you’re in.

So it makes sense that case studies — which are designed to take lessons from one context to apply broadly — reflect lessons tied to what’s special about a specific context and not try to reflect too many others.

By understanding what’s special we can better understand what’s general by allowing us to recognize the patterns that make something different and common not one or the other. It sounds simple, but it’s actually something that is lost in the current case study method.

We offer some questions to consider when you look at any case study — including the ones that you write for yourself – to better get value from an case to apply to your own situation. These questions can help you to get to a sense of where an innovation sits within a system and what barriers and facilitators were in place to shape the context, the actors, and the situations that define a case (and are often neglected).

Questions for Cases

For the sake of brevity the term innovator is used to reflect an individual, group, or organization who undertake the design, creation, implementation and ownership of the innovation — which can be a product, service, or policy.

  1. What kind of relationships or ecosystem is the organization/innovator a part of? (Innovation doesn’t exist in a vaccuum — it’s critical to understand what influences were available to shape the culture of innovation creation)
  2. How were these relationships leveraged, connected, or served in the development or execution of the innovation? (Innovations are a culmination of relationships in their creation, growth, and realization into a market to different extents, but never without them so they ought not be ignored).
  3. How was the innovation implemented? (This helps us understand the viable actions that were taken and how much was dependent on other things, what role happenstance (luck) played, and what degree the plan met reality)
  4. How much risk did the innovator assume? (This allows us to gauge how much motivation, fear, and pressure the innovator was under)
  5. What was going on in the immediate environment during the development and implementation of the innovation? (This reflects situational, policy, climate, and local contexts)
  6. What learning processes were put in place? (This speaks to the matter of sustainability and determines if this is likely to be a one-off or something that might be sustained)
  7. What outputs, outcomes, and impact was achieved? (Did the innovators capture what was produced and what effect it had on the world around the innovation, not just whether it was sold or bought)
  8. What evolved? (Scale isn’t about just ‘more’, but whether it evolves to meet the needs)
  9. What is the fit and the purpose? (Innovation is all about fit for purpose and these need to be articulated to assess whether or where it fits and what the purpose(s) are)
  10. Is there a ratchet? (A ratchet is something that gains leverage the more it’s used. Is there something that allows the lessons of the innovation development or the innovation itself to take something — the organization, people, or product/service/policy further with leverage?)

Try asking these of any case study and you might find what’s missing and what you can ask of your own work to learn more, do more, and innovate better. Case studies often reflect ‘one-off’ events that are highly constrained and not always transferable in what can be learned and applied. By asking these questions you might find answers that can help you make more from your own situation.

If you want help asking and answering these, contact us and we’d be happy to help you.

Systems Mapping Cautions

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A systems map is a useful means of visualizing connections between ideas, actors, institutions, and activities. Systems maps can be designed using many different conventions and methods, but the basics are the same. The point of mapping systems is to get a lot of information on a single page.

System maps can help generate insight into patterns that influence behaviour and outcomes. In short: they help us see things better.

A system map is also a potential trap. Maps can lead us into false beliefs about the subject of systems and what the real system is. It’s much like the Buddhist phrase about the finger pointing to the moon: we confuse the system map for the system itself.

Luke Craven, a designer and systems consultant, has remarked on the paradoxes found in system mapping. Among these paradoxes are the tendency toward generating a single, over-arching map. This article reminds us of many conventions we recommend in using system maps.

System Map Suggestions

  1. Diversity in Form. Systems Thinking has many different schools of thought and systems mapping often follows conventions generated from these schools. These forms or conventions are the visual languages of the system. For example, System Dynamics emphasizes causal loops and stocks-and-flows. Social Networks use nodes and links to represent a system.
  2. Awareness of Form. Merging forms together can be useful but must be done mindfully. When we deviate from a convention, we violate certain rules (while creating opportunities). A systems mapper needs to be aware of what is lost and gained when using multiple visual forms. Hybrid maps require coherence to be useful.
  3. Volume. Multiple maps using multiple forms can generate insights that can’t be found when using a singular approach. It’s important to create the time and space to generate multiple maps. Too often we find organizations fail to do this.
  4. Validation. Every map reflects the map-maker. Thus, the more map-makers involved the more the map reflects the diversity of the system and different realities. Show your maps – in any form – to others. Feedback is fuel for system diagrams.
  5. Continuation. A system map’s value changes over time. It’s important to recognize that as the context changes, so does the map’s utility. We recommend updating and revisiting a map over the life of the project.

Map-making can be a powerful way to learn, explore, and illuminate relationships and patterns in a system. It is because maps are so powerful that we must be cautious in making them.

Good map-making requires thoughtful consideration to what a map is and how it is to be used. When you have done this, you have a remarkable pathway for shaping change.

If you want to make system maps and see what they can do for your organization, contact us. We will help you chart a path toward insight and impact.

Surfacing Your Organization’s Identity

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Have you ever asked questions about your organization’s identity before?

Who are you?

What do you stand for?

What kind of things motivate you to action and direct your attention?

The answers to all of these questions shape what we do in our work. Organizations that have a clear sense of what they do, why they do it, and who they do it for tend to succeed. The reason? These organizations have greater alignment between purpose and strategy. In short: they have an identity.

Our identity — who we think we are — is a powerful guide for our behaviour. So how do we answer this question in our work?

Bulls Eye

A simple starting point for finding what matters and moves you is to use a Bull’s Eye diagram. A Bull’s Eye Diagram illustrates priorities through three layers of importance. All that is needed is a diagram of the ‘target’, sticky notes, and a space to organize the notes. The example below is done using the Mural tool and a pre-set template for ease of use..

A Bull’s Eye diagram can be used with individuals or groups. We often use this for a project when a client is struggling to identify what is both important and necessary for their work.

We also recommend that you use the Bull’s Eye diagram at the start of an engagement.

Once the items from the sticky notes are placed, it’s easier to see themes in the ‘data.’ This approach allows organizations to see what their members think are most important. It is the aggregate of these ideas that shape the culture of an organization and when you know what they are it’s easier to design with them.

With this knowledge in hand your organization can better design a purposeful strategy and make your identity aspirations a reality in practice.

We help organizations to design their culture for success. If you want help using this or other tools like it, contact us.

The Art of Gathering

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Innovation work from identifying problems in need of solutions, generating ideas, creating things, and simply providing the inspiration and mutual support for doing the work often requires gathering.

Whether it is face-to-face, online, or some hybrid option the same general rules apply for what makes a good gathering when it comes to the up-front work.

Priya Parker has made the art of gathering a focus of her life’s mission and work and has pulled together some brilliant resources for those of us who are looking to bring people together.

These opening questions are the starting place by asking some fundamental questions about the purpose of gathering (something too often forgotten about).

Here are Priya’s recommended questions to help guide you in gathering:

  • Who is this for? What is it that this person loves to do? 
  • What are the various gifts or talents or skills of the people invited? 
  • How do you actually want to spend the time? 
  • How will you create a “moment of focus”? 
  • If this is a digital gathering, what are simple ways you can have guests bring something or wear something that connects them to the purpose, the person of honor and each other?  

Among the most valuable assets engaged in any innovation effort is time and attention and by asking these simple questions we can best use and respect both.

Perspective Taking Circles

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The power of perspective is one of the things that differentiates high output and impact innovators from others. It’s easy to get lucky or have good timing, but it’s another to create value when those things don’t happen.

One of the ways we do this is by engaging in some perspective-taking. This simple exercise and question set can help build some of the ‘thought muscles’ that can help encourage us to see, imagine, and engage things differently for creative benefit.

The Exercise

This works best when physically in the same space and can work online as well. What you need is to create a space where people can re-position themselves against a central object that can be almost anything except a ball (because it looks the same from every angle). Place your participants around the object with a comfortable space to sit or stand.

You can do this virtually using a dynamic space like Kumospace or some other virtual reality-like environment. It can also work using a board like Miro or Mural with some designed object in the middle, but it is more awkward.

The idea is that everyone has a chance to literally see things from a different point of view.

This can be done as an observation exercise but is more enhanced when it is combined with drawing. Asking people to draw what they see — no matter what kind of skills or abilities participants have with sketching — is a great means to engage people in thinking more deeply about their perspective.

Once individuals have had time to observe and reflect on what they see, the next step is to have everyone share their perspective. This is where drawings are useful as people can speak to what they drew as drawing focuses us on certain elements and provides a means to account for those perspectives. It also allows others to point to the drawing and make specific, not general comments.

It’s that specificity that is key to illuminating and articulating differences of perspective.

Uses

The role of this method is to reveal how where we sit in a system — even a small one of people interconnected around a shared experience of an object — can have remarkably different perceptions of the same thing in the same space.

It begins to build cultural practices around creating space for exploring and sharing perspectives within an organization and can serve as a base for better organizational design and learning.

It’s simple, engaging, and revealing in its method.