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Perspective Taking: The Power of Ten

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Great innovators often see problems or solutions that others miss. This is as much about perception as it is anything else.

To illustrate the power of perception, consider the famous perceptual illusion below which profiles a young girl and an old woman (or “wife” and “mother in law”). The image, which dates back to 1888, shows how the same image can produce two very different stories about the subject matter.

There’s a way to create the same effect by looking at a situation through the lens of time. The Power of Ten is a perceptual forecasting and innovative technique that can help you can perspective on a situation, a product, or service by looking at the effects in layers, each offering a new possibility.

How to do it

The Power of Ten technique is simple. Take the current situation, topic, product, or service and forecast what might happen in ten minutes from now, ten hours, ten days, ten weeks, ten months, and ten years.

In some cases, you’ll find little effect or difference between the two and in others the differences are dramatic.

Consider waiting times for a service call. In that case, ten minutes might be a long time and ten hours is insufferable. If you are on a waitlist for an elective surgery, ten days might be incredibly fast, ten weeks reasonable, and ten months is anxiety producing.

What about a particular situation? Consider the dynamic situation that unfolded with the COVID-19 pandemic and policies that affected how and where we work. Time perception changed, value changed (e.g., Internet access), and certain things like parks, groceries, restaurants and bars, and video conference tools all changed their value in a matter of days, weeks, and months in different ways.

The Power of Ten activity is designed for you to forecast and spend some time thinking about what will something look like, feel like, interact with, and impact the world at each of these different scales.

This simple exercise will allow you to see constraints, opportunities, effects, and interactions that are either not present or imperceptible at one scale at other scales. This allows you to see connections between things that were not perceived before.

This is best done as a group and can be performed in a short time as a facilitated activity or at a distance.

If you want to see possible futures using this approach and want help, contact us. We can help you multiply your perspective by a power of ten.

Note: This exercise draws inspiration for a video first produced in the 1970s by the legendary design partnership of Charles and Rey Eames for IBM.

7 Questions to Evaluate Design Thinking

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Design thinking is much more than sticky notes, whiteboards and creative exploration. It’s impact can be felt in the outputs and outcomes tied to actual product or service and much further if we allow ourselves to focus on that.

Here are 7 questions that we ask of design thinking that focus on the learning outcomes and uncover the true impact of creation, design, and execution, which is a big part of what design thinking is all about.

By asking these we can better tap into the true return on investment of design thinking as a transformative approach to learning, not just product or service design.

  1. What do people learn in the process of engaging in design thinking?
  2. What new skills to people acquire, develop, or refine through design thinking?
  3. How are the lessons from engaging in design thinking applied to other subsequent products?
  4. What is the effect of design thinking on the mindset of those involved in a design-oriented project?
  5. How does the co-design process influence team development, cohesion, creativity, and innovation performance?
  6. What role does design thinking play in shaping the innovation culture (e.g., creation, execution, delivery, and evaluation) with an organization?
  7. How does design thinking contribute to the implementation of innovations?

Evaluating the impact of your products or services is always important, but if you focus only on that you will miss some of the biggest benefits that design thinking offers your organization when done well.

If you need or want help in learning how your team learns and amplifying the effects of design thinking, contact us and we’ll help you out.

Note: This article was inspired by a recent post on our sister blog, Censemaking, which focuses on ideas, commentary and issues tied to innovation.

Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

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Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Innovation Talent Inventories

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Faced with a situation or opportunity that demands you try something new or change what your organization does, the type of knowledge, skills, and experience required is often different than what is used to maintain the status quo. One of the most overlooked places to look for this talent is right under our noses — or beaks — and that your birds of a feather might be closer together than you knew.

An innovation talent inventory is an exercise that organizations are advised to undertake every 6-12 months (depending on the level of dynamism within the organization and industry) to assess the talent within your organization.

Why an Inventory?

Talent acquisition and retention is a costly part of organizational development. Hiring staff often means looking at a variety of skills, yet may only enlist a few of them for a specific job. Over time it becomes easy to lose track of or forget that your team may have skills and experiences that can be brought to bear on your current project.

The process of undertaking an inventory is also a means of recognizing and reminding your team of who is on it. By looking at your staff through the lens of innovation, it’s also possible to identify attributes that were not germane at hiring or recruitment but have evolved into a need at the present day. Whether its a certification course, extra-mural activities like coaching sports, or experience working in a particular sector, these previously non-recognized experiences can now serve to support your team’s innovation project.

Undertaking an Inventory

There is no prescriptive means of undertaking an inventory and we recommend the following:

Informal interviews. Simple coffee-time conversations can make a big difference and have the added benefit of allowing your team to build trust and commitment to the innovation project in the process. Toronto-based software firm Freshbooks encourages their team to go on ‘blind dates’ (not real ones) over coffee with staff in other departments so that they can learn from each other. Informality allows for conversations to wander to different parts of a persons’ career that might have been previously unexplored.

Resume reviews. Whether it is looking over your team’s personnel files or LinkedIn pages (all with permission and consent of your team, of course), a review of the current set of listed skills, experiences and certifications can jog your memory about what talent your team already has. Being transparent about why you’re doing this and ensuring that any exploration is done solely for the purpose of the innovation talent inventory is essential. This can be a powerful means for team and trust-building if done right and harmful if done poorly.

Surveys. A simple exploratory survey asking individuals to identify skills and abilities (less about knowledge) can catalogue your teams’ ideas and suggestions. The one risk with this approach is that many staff might still see themselves in their current role and frame their responses according to that. Like with the interviews, focusing on a person’s journey rather than their current destination is key.

Visual Mapping. Another fun and informative strategy is to use visual maps where individuals either self-plot or are plotted on a map of the situation. Plotting out the needs, wants, and opportunities on a simple large-sheet of paper and then having individuals place themselves closest to where they fit related to those needs, wants, and opportunities can be highly participatory. This works by having the page posted on a wall in a common area for a few days (e.g., coffee room) or using an electronic tool such as Miro or Mural.

Together, you will find yourself and your team learning much from what you already have and putting underused or unknown talents to work to help take your idea forward. You’ll know so much more about what you already know (and didn’t realize).

Need help putting this together? Contact us and we can show you how to engage your team and learn more, together, to set yourself for innovation, by design.

Innovation Implementation Index

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What does it truly mean to say that you are an innovative organization? One of the simplest, most powerful measures is implementation. How many innovative initiatives have you launched and put into the world?

There are arguments why the QWERTY keyboard is inferior to other designs, but there’s no argument that its the best innovation we’ve ever had when it comes to typing. Why? It’s the one that was implemented into practice.

Success Marks

Checkmarks on a list usually imply some kind of rote behaviour that isn’t suitable for innovation, although checklists themselves are useful for quality control. We prefer the idea of ‘success marks’ which indicate that an idea has been successfully taken from concept and put into practice — whether or not it yields desired outcomes.

As an index, we propose the following six metrics:

  1. The number of new initiatives that have been implemented into practice
  2. The number of projects that have developed prototypes that have been tested
  3. The prototype ‘death rate’: divide the number of terminated prototypes by the total number of prototypes developed
  4. The number of prototypes moved into implementation (* which is a similar, but not necessarily the same number as #1)
  5. The number of new initiatives started:
  6. The initiative death rate: divide the number of ‘new’ projects started by the number of projects implemented

Number 1 is the most important of all of these.

The reason we count all six as part of an index is that each of these represents some form of concerted action and effort toward moving ideas out of concept into action with the lowest number (Number 1) representing the highest value to the organization.

While having ideas is a precursor to prototypes we don’t we count this because it is easy to game this metric.

We also don’t believe in coming up with metrics about innovation or even prototype quality because the success of implementation and the quality of the prototype don’t always match. You can implement an idea that is still in development, yet still has value that can be realized right away.

Want to show how innovative you are? Consider scoring yourself on these metrics to see how much of what your organization does is talk and how much of it is action.

Want to move ideas into action? We can help. And we can develop the metrics to show what kind of impact your innovation has in the world. Let us show you how.