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Mindfulness: Seeing the Constellations of Innovation

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Revealing what’s behind the light

In a world filled with increasing number of signals and lots of noise, it can be difficult to achieve focus and determine what to pay attention to. In this third piece in a series, Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage, we look at one of the bedrocks of sustainable innovation that is the best representation of something shockingly simple, enormously powerful, but not easy: mindfulness.

Before embarking on an introduction to mindfulness for innovation, let’s dispel some myths about what it is not. It is not religious, spiritual, or some new-age trend, nor is it meditation. While it can and often is be affiliated with all those things, mindfulness is simply the practice of paying attention to what is around you and to yourself in the process. It is about conscious awareness of the present moment and non-judgemental attention toward the thoughts, feelings, experiences that arise from that experience. 

An Exercise in Mindfulness

To many, the idea of mindfulness seems like an odd start to the conversation about innovation and evaluation, but the closer you look at what mindfulness is all about, the more it becomes clear how important it is to what innovators and evaluators both do. 

At a recent talk on innovation and evaluation as part of Service Convention Sweden, Cameron Norman took the audience through a short exercise in mindfulness that looked like this: 

  • Close your eyes (or lower your eyelids a little). [This reduces the amount of distraction from visual stimuli]
  • Put your feet flat on the ground and keep your back straight [This also reduces the amount of ‘signal’ coming from the body by getting into a more optimal position for sitting]
  • Breathe easy and relaxed and simply pay attention to what’s going on around you and what you are thinking. [Breathing easy avoids the issues created by holding one’s breath, creating a whole realm of problematic stimuli]

There are variants of this exercise that include focusing on the breath (which is a common technique for mindfulness-based stress reduction) and emphasis on quieting the mind, yet the outcomes are similar: an increased awareness of things that were — up until that moment — unaware and that is where mindfulness comes into evaluation. 

Evaluation serves innovation best when it goes beyond the simple assessment of outputs, outcomes, and process document. Evaluation can be a mechanism for focusing attention on the work of innovation and its context. In the example above, the audience was asked: what did you notice? The answers ranged from hearing the HVAC system, noticing their breath, and realizing how much noise takes place during a talk. 

In previous workshops, participants have reported bodily sensations (e.g., getting hungry), temperature changes, physical discomfort (e.g., back getting stiff from sitting), a wandering mind, and often forms of judgement about not ‘doing it well’ (for which there is no ‘well’, but rather ‘practice’). Just like evaluation for innovation, there is only ‘useful’ and not ‘useful’, not ‘good’ and ‘bad’. 

Linking Mindfulness to Evaluation

The idea of applying mindfulness to organizations is not new and has actually been well-researched. Introducing and practicing the concept of organizational mindfulness has been shown to be strongly correlated with what high reliability in organizations, meaning that they continually produce desirable results, consistently. Innovation is difficult to do and doing it repeatedly and consistently is even more so. What organizations that have fostered mindfulness in the way they work have done is create a mechanism for paying attention that is systematized and implemented consistently. 

Mindfulness is not a one-off exercise for those who adopt it into their work, but closer to a way of being. What it does is provide the means for organizations to not only focus on what’s in front of them, but to pay attention to the subtle signals that take place around that focus. (see two articles on our sister site Censemaking that link organizational mindfulness to social innovation and to developmental evaluation)

Mindfulness also cultivates curiosity. Curiosity is what draws an innovator and evaluator to consider what additional things might be happening (which we will explore later in this series) beyond just the intended outcomes. It is what leads us to innovation in the first place. By regularly creating space for mindful reflection into the innovation space, we nurture and cultivate curiosity. 

Doing the Work

What does mindfulness practice look like for innovation? As mentioned earlier: we are dealing with something simple, not easy. A place to start is to follow some of these practices: 

  • Ask evaluative questions, which include one that focuses on paying attention. We’ve discussed three of the most useful questions for promoting evaluative thinking in a previous post. 
  • Create regular reflection space within the organization at each level (program, division, organization). This includes setting aside deliberate time regularly to reflect on what the data is telling you about what is happening, drawing on some of the questions above. This means instilling quiet, uninterrupted time for members of an organization to think and reflect. This involves unplugging from networks and thinking. It may involve tools (e.g., whiteboards, notebooks, cards) or movement (e.g., going for a walk or run), but it must be focused. Switching back and forth from email or other demands won’t work. 
  • Bring reflections together. Individual reflection is important as is the chance to discuss those insights or experiences with others. Socialize the process of reflection by establishing a sharing culture. This builds much on what Donald Schon proposed as part of his work on attractor mapping, by enabling innovators to determine where the action is in the face of not always knowing. This means attending to the system that an innovation is a part of. 
  • Reserve judgment and avoid labels. The rush to judge something is what kills curiosity and mindfulness. Ever notice that once something is labeled as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ we cease to ask the kind of questions of it that get deeper into its core? Mindfulness is about being open and then assessing utility. 
  • Use learning as an outcome. What mindfulness does is encourage identification and insight into patterns. What comes from that identification and discussion is learning and is a genuine and important outcome for innovators. Document what is seen, heard, discussed, and concluded. 

The biggest barrier that we see in our work is time. It isn’t that this takes a long time, although it does require some investment of it, rather it is that organizations are reluctant to prioritize this work and make it a regular part of their practice. Doing it occasionally has some benefit, but making it part of the organizational culture is really what will transform everyday work into something that has potential beyond the original purpose.  

By instituting mindfulness into the work of your organization, you are more likely to see the constellations and quiet of night and not just the blue sky of the daytime. 

Photo by Teddy Kelley on Unsplash

Seeing Innovation Differently: The Role of Evaluation

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See what you do through new eyes

We begin a series called the Innovators Secret Advantage by starting with a simple, but powerful premise: perspective is everything. 

This is based on a phrase that we use as our guide at Cense: 

“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Marcel Proust

Evaluation is most commonly seen as a means to assess the merit, worth, and significance of a program, service, or product. Evaluation can focus on implementations and learning, how a program works, outcomes and outputs, or some combination of these things. This is how most see evaluation. 

However, for innovators — those looking to develop and apply something new into a situation — evaluation offers so much more when approached as a tool for innovation. This is less about the method and much more about how we treat the methods. This is where we need our new eyes. 

Evaluation = Feedback

What evaluation offers to innovators is feedback, which plays a central role in complex systems. These are the kind of systems that most human services exist to various degrees. Complexity creates conditions for innovators where it’s difficult to know what is happening with a high degree of certainty. Feedback allows innovators to ‘take the temperature’ of what they are ‘cooking up’ to see if they need to make changes. These changes might look like doing more of something, adding things, or perhaps removing something. It’s very much like making a soup. 

Evaluation is the means of obtaining feedback and doing it systematically. It allows innovators to avoid bias, mis-perceptions in the data, and overcome blind spots that get created. Innovators are focusing on their product, service, or program itself, but with a slight shift in perception toward feedback systems, and they can gain much more in the way they approach their work.  

Evaluation is the means of providing fuel for innovation, particularly as an idea moves from concept to prototype. Data, systematically collected and focused, along with the analysis and sensemaking that comes with it, plays a vital role in determining how ready an innovation is for deployment or how appropriate it is for scaling upward or outward. 

Seeing With New Eyes

Seeing with new eyes begins by asking some questions. The first three questions foster evaluative thinking, not just new ways of seeing: 

  • What is going? 
  • What is new?
  • What does it mean?

The next question is: What are you hiring innovation to do for you? The answers to these questions are what can inspire that new way to see the work being done. 

The final set of questions to give you those new eyes come from mindful reflection. Organizational mindfulness is not some new age meditation technique, but a scientifically-supported approach to paying attention across the organization to learn what is being done and how it connects with purpose and values. 

Engaging these questions will set the stage for using evaluation as a means to help innovations fulfill their true promise. In the weeks ahead, we’ll look at how this is done and what your new eyes can be trained to look at. 

Evaluation: The Innovator’s Secret Advantage

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I have a secret….

Innovators are a hopeful lot. They are looking to find an advantage by creating something new that will improve their current condition or at the very least prevent their current situation from deteriorating. Sometimes you need to change to keep things the same. 

Evaluation is one of the hidden (maybe secret) advantages from those innovators who are looking to sustain their work over the long haul. For those who are looking to innovate in human systems, evaluation might be the only thing that allows an idea to scale beyond its current implementation. 

Why? How? And what does this look like? We will begin a series looking at the Innovators Secret Advantage and how evaluation can and does play a role in supporting good design, measuring impact, guiding strategy, and informing the development of new ideas. Over the next few weeks we’ll be introducing ten points to illustrate how evaluation can take your ideas forward and create the impact on your clients, the public, your market, and the world. 

Sound good? Stay tuned and the secrets will be revealed. Through case studies, practical examples, evidence, and theory we’ll illustrate how to use evaluation to support and amplify your innovation with humans, products, services, and policies. It’s time that evaluation’s advantages are accrued to everyone, not just those ‘in the know’. 

And, if you’re in the area, our Principal, Cameron Norman, will be speaking on this topic at the upcoming Service Convention Sweden on November 28th, 2018. Get a jump on what’s to come!  

Image Credit: Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Evaluation’s Hidden Value: Clarifying Your Strategy

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Evaluation is more than just the assessment of merit, worth, and significance of a program, product, or service. Although these are the primary functions of evaluation, it can serve far more than this when designed and implemented in the appropriate manner.

Evaluation focuses attention on the things that your organization builds, has built, and implements and the purpose and role(s) they serve. In doing so, evaluation serves as a primary support tool for strategy. In order for an evaluation to do its job, it must be aligned with the purpose of the thing it is evaluating.

For example, if an evaluation is being asked to assess behaviour change, the focus of the program or stimuli (e.g., app, message, etc..) for that change is a core part of the strategy. By matching the program components with the activities and intended outcomes, evaluators can help determine the degree of alignment and assess (and advise on) the likelihood of success before any data is collected. It is through the data — the evaluation itself — that this alignment and the assumptions behind it are tested.

Theory into practice

The process of aligning the planned activities with the outcomes is part of what a Theory of Change is designed to do. To illustrate, consider a program designed to promote some kind of behaviour change (e.g. engaging in a new activity, doing more or less of something, etc..). For a change to take place, there needs to be a certain logic in how the intervention (i.e., the activity or service) is set up based on some established design principles.

We also know from the wealth of knowledge of behavioural science, that there are many different ways to promote change and that some are more efficacious than others. A skilled evaluator can help determine whether the approach being used is likely to produce the desired change by building out a Theory of Change and then matching that with the appropriate outcomes.

This is what the heart of a strategy is all about: aligning the resources, intentions, and actions together to produce an outcome.

Like the image above, evaluation helps peel back the top coat to reveal what is happening underneath. It helps take the mystery out of why programs work or don’t work and what the reasons are why people do things (or don’t).

It’s one of the reasons why we bring strategy, evaluation, and design work together. By connecting them, you get far more performance out of your program than if you just keep the cover on.

To learn more, contact us and we’ll be happy to show you what’s under your hood.

Image credit: Nathan Van Egmond

Innovation’s Single Biggest Question

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There is not a bigger question for innovators — social, product, service, policy — than What are you hiring this [ ] to do for you? 

Let’s break this down a little and then explain why we ask that at the beginning of any engagement and all throughout from the first meeting to the final run of the evaluation data. The question gets us to shape what and how we might design our innovation while the answer is about the ways we tell what kind of value it generates and the impact it produces.

What’s in a question?

The start of the question is about you, the aspiring innovator. This highlights the role of the creator and reminds us that we are generating this ‘thing’ by procurement, by design, or by simply encouraging something to be made. Without us (i.e., you), nothing changes.

The active use of hire is about the reality that we are paying for innovation through our time, our energy, our focus, our social (and often political) capital, and our money. All of these could be spent elsewhere. Design is an investment and it’s purposeful. Asking this big question gets us to pause and think deeply about what we’re putting into innovation and what we’re looking to get out of it.

The [ ] is the thing you’re hiring — the proposed service, experience, product, policy, or ecosystem — and is what you’re purposefully bringing about. This is your idea manifest into something real.

The last part is ‘to do for you‘ is active: it’s about ensuring that you’re clear about what purposes it serves. No matter how beneficial your planned innovation might be for others, you are ultimately asking it to serve a role, fill a need, for you. It is you that wants to solve a problem, build a market, or prevent something from happening, and this requires some clarity to innovate well.

What’s in an answer?

Innovation is not just creating things, it’s about evaluating the things we create. If our novel products, services, experiences, and policies don’t generate value for people, they aren’t really innovations. It’s just stuff.

An evaluation perspective on the question asked above might look at things like:

-The roles people played in the innovation process, including the skills they used, experiences they had, and the insights that they gained along the way. This learning is what feeds into our understanding of how an innovation develops along with the people and organization it is a part of. All of that is part of the innovation dividend or ROI.

-The resources used as part of the ‘hiring‘ process like money, time, human resources, and other capital; all can help look at the value of the initiative to see if the costs and benefits make sense.

-What ‘things’ are produced — the prototypes, their functioning, their benefits, and weakness — as well as provide a means to document the iterations, the steps taken, the new ‘offshoots’ that might emerge, and the resulting products, services, experiences, and policies.

-Lastly, the innovation needs to fulfill some requirements or expectations and evaluation looks at what it does in the world, for whom, under what conditions, and what other impacts might emerge unintentionally. This helps assess risks, benefits, and find new opportunities for further development and innovation.

Better questions, better answers

Innovation is what will drive much of the future value of your organization. It’s what allows you to build, grow, adapt, or sustain what you’re doing because even if you don’t feel a need to change, everything is changing around you and sometimes you need to change just to stay where you are.

By asking this one simple question you might find answers that will lead you to much better innovations to shape and create that future.

We help our clients ask this question. If you want our help, contact us and we’ll gladly help you ask better questions for better answers.