Designful Innovation

Futures and Optimism Bias

2022-02-25 by cense

Futures (thinking) and strategic foresight can be powerful tools to help us to plan and see opportunities and threats ahead of us. When we can imagine what might happen it’s easier for us to plan for it. Futures work allows us to anticipate what could be so we can adapt better to what is now.

Good strategic foresight involves drawing on trends and patterns to create scenarios, envision possible futures, and assess risks and benefits. It is, however, a product of our present. When we use futures and foresight we begin with stating our assumptions. As we wrote recently on Censemaking, it is the willingness of futurists to see preferred, positive, and optimistic futures that they often neglect things we dislike. Just listen to the assessment on the Globalist of the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and you’ll hear how badly the West got its futures thinking wrong.

Assumption Building

The first step in any futures or strategic foresight project is assumption finding, building, and assessment. We begin by asking ourselves: what do we believe to be true about the situation?

We continue asking: what do we believe about the past, the present, and the future?

Another key tool we use is the Third Position Strategy where we begin asking questions about our beliefs from a ‘third’ position that is not us. Another is the What Went Wrong approach which is a post-hoc review of what we’ve already done. After-action Reviews are other ways to help assess what kind of beliefs we had about something and the effect of that thinking on action.

These two approaches combined with some exploratory design research help us surface assumptions.

Assumption Testing

We also advocate asking these questions and using these techniques ahead of engaging in futures work. There is no ‘correct’ answer to these questions and there may be multiple answers.

Do we see the situation through a lens of optimism or pessimism?
What would someone who is not like me to see in this situation?
What are the fundamental beliefs about human nature that guide our thinking?
How is the situation we are looking at (past, present, future) similar to what’s happened before?
How might we see the situation differently?

By asking these questions and building narratives that can challenge and confirm the answers we can better ensure that our futures thinking is less prone to unhelpful bias.

Futures building is all about beliefs and assumptions. What’s important is that we recognize, acknowledge, and remember the ones we bring.

Futures and strategic foresight work is a means of seeing what might come before it does. It’s a big part of what we do at Cense. For help in bringing this perspective to your organization, contact us and let’s grab a coffee.

Photo by Alex wong on Unsplash

The Role of Support in Innovation

2022-02-16 by cense

The Beatles’ song made legendary by Joe Cocker speaks of getting by with a little help from our friends. The role of friends — associates, collaborators, trusted allies, partners — is vital to making innovation happen.

The myths about change-makers and innovators are many: The self-made woman/man, the great innovator, the great mind who works long and hard to succeed because of their own cleverness or ingenuity, the entrepreneur who transforms a market all by herself, a leader who takes an organization to new heights. Take your pick.

However, the evidence is clear: you need supporters to succeed. Whether it is early-stage support for ideas and potential or to deliver the finished product, support is critical to innovation. This was the topic that we recently covered on the latest episode of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast.

Look at the list below and you’ll see that most core items involve some kind of support mechanism either through teams, senior leadership, or markets.

Testing for innovation — https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/the-eight-essentials-of-innovation

Three Lessons for Support Generation

There are three core lessons from the literature on what to do:

Find a tribe, build a community, join in with others. Whatever it takes, connect with those in your market, outside your market and those you wish to serve. Engage.
Be a friend to have a friend. Share ideas, lessons learned, and assist your community however you define that. We see time and again that the best organizations are known and respected because they give from themselves. That also ensures that they receive just as much. You’re much more likely to attract the kind of knowledge that you need, the skills that you need when you share the knowledge and skills that you have. Creating a connected community of people who ‘get’ you is important.
Leave the heroes to the comic books. Heroes make for great stories, but really lousy, real life models for change. What you need is a supportive structure. Mastermind group leadership teams, peer meetups – they all make a difference in reducing isolation and increasing the amount of contact points you have so that you can generate ideas and do so in a group that understands you. These can be internal or external — but they must allow for support to be gained and received.

You can’t do it alone. Find ways to connect with others who are doing something similar to what you’re doing, that support, which will be different for everybody, but that difference makes all the difference.

If you want to build a strategy to create connections within your organization contact us — we can help. We can also help you build the kind of internal structures to learn, share ideas, and innovate.

Photo by Neil Thomas on Unsplash

The Role of Knowledge in Innovation

2022-02-09 by cense

In this second in a short series on change-making fundamentals, we look at the role of knowledge. This was covered in the second episode of Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast.

Knowing and Doing

There is an unspoken assumption that ‘to know is to do‘ anchoring knowledge to change. Yet, as evidence shows all around us (just look at politics or COVID-19, to name just two) that what we say, believe, know, and do are all different.

To innovate is to take knowledge and create something new with it. While knowledge is almost always an ingredient of change, it isn’t always the main driver of change. To illustrate, consider that more than 1.3 billion people in the world regularly use tobacco products even though the science on the negative health consequences of cigarette use is overwhelming. At present, more than 8 million people every year die from cigarette use. So knowledge is important, but we know it’s not the only way to get someone to change.

What’s necessary are to focus our efforts on types of knowledge and their roles in facilitating change. There are three core areas of knowledge:

Types of Knowledge

Process knowledge is the kind of knowledge we have for how to get things done. Process knowledge might be how to organize a team, or how bring things about and deliver service value.

Technical knowledge is tied to the use of tools, frameworks and their application related to the specific means of accomplishing things. Technical knowledge might be how to use a particular piece of software

Content knowledge is focused on the topics of relevance to what you want to innovate or change. It may be knowledge about the market or the particular problem of which your innovation is looking to solve.

Research and Self Assessment

Innovation doesn’t require that we are experts in everything, but it does require that we know, a certain amount of what is important. This is where self-assessment like the personal inventory method and other tools can come in handy. It’s also where design research . If, for example, you’re looking into children’s mental health, you probably need to know a little bit about how children function and what services might already be in place.

Design research helps build content knowledge and helps us to fill gaps in skills or process knowledge that we may not have. However, we don’t recommend so much research that it is no longer easy to make sense of what you are doing. Sensemaking is a key stage of synthesis and strategy for dealing with large amounts of research data. It’s also important to also remember that innovation is about something new so we may not have all the data that we need to draw clear conclusions.

The key lessons are that we can’t assume that having knowledge leads to change. With research, sensemaking, and processes to ask questions about what we know we can better innovate.

Censemaking: The Innovation Podcast is available through most places you get your podcasts.

Photo by Gabriella Clare Marino on Unsplash

Doing Our Homework on our Research

Unpacking Change

2022-02-04 by cense

Change through design is the fundamental feature of innovation. This page and the innovation toolkit that it’s a part of are one of the ways we seek to share our experience of innovation.

Innovation is very natural, but also something we can learn.

To provide alternative ways to learn about innovation and change-making we’ve launched a new podcast. Rather than serving as another web-based radio show, Censemaking is designed to do more. It’s a short-form summary of a new idea in practical change-making every episode.

The first season of Censemaking is focused on the fundamentals of change. Each episode in the first season will focus on one of the ten central pillars of change. Episodes are about 10 minutes long and, just like Censemaking itself, meant to be enjoyed over coffee or over your next break.

Ten Factors for Change

The ten factors of change are both individual and contextual and will be covered in each episode in the first season. These factors are:

Knowledge. The bedrock – no knowledge or no change.
Skills. How we apply knowledge and transform it into activities, action, and change.
Tools. These tools are what allow us to transform our knowledge and skills into something.
Confidence. Confidence is the bridge between our dreams and vision and our capacity to undertake the work needed to make them real.
Outcome Expectations. We are more likely to hit what we aim for than not.
Time & Space. This is the most under-appreciated and poorly understood concept when it comes to real innovation.
Conditions. Having the right conditions to innovate and having that creation play a useful function when those you seek to serve are ready is as much alchemy as it is science. That doesn’t make it worthy of neglect and it’s something we can design for.
Social Support. Great change doesn’t happen working alone.
Environment. The space around where we work — the context — matters.
Glue. This highly non-technical concept reflects how we line things up together to hold them. This is our strategy and the design for how we transform it and learning into real change.

The podcast is introduced and hosted by Cameron Norman, our President, and this first episode explains how this came about and introduces these ten factors.

Photo by Erwan Hesry on Unsplash

Design Thinking Practice: Designing for What’s Next

2022-02-02 by cense

What does it mean to take Design Thinking and actually apply it in the world?

This was the subject of a series of webinars hosted by the Tamarack Institute for Community Engagement. The webinars featured Co-CEO Liz Weaver speaking with Cense Ltd. President Cameron Norman.

In this first in a series of posts, we outline the key steps in applying design thinking in practice by looking back at this series and begin with the idea of designing for what’s next.

A Framework for Change

The series was set up by a look at designing for what’s next. In this discussion, Cameron Norman introduces the Design Helix – a multi-stage framework for putting design thinking into action.

The Design Helix (below) is based on our two decades of experience designing products, services, and systems at Cense and reflects the literature on design and design thinking. It’s a framework – a means of thinking about design — and not a prescription.

This multi-stage framework is designed like a helix partly to reflect the very fact that most of what humans engage with is created (designed). Design is at the DNA core of what we humans generate into the world — for good or otherwise.

The helix has two major strands that are tied together by activities that go in sequence but may have greater or lesser roles as one progresses through them. The framework is meant to guide design and provide a means to account for the key aspects of the design process. It is not prescriptive in the methods that articulate this design practice. Many different methods can be used to support this work.

Designs are rarely ‘one and done’ and are iterative, thus the helix actually winds its way around and connects multiple iterations together as illustrated in the image below.

Designing What’s Next introduced attendees to this design helix and what it means in practice. The helix will be further discussed and elaborated in a second series that we’ll cover in future posts. A recording of the conversation is below.

We will look at this process in greater detail in future posts as we walk through this series on applying design thinking and reviewing the Design Helix.

For more information on this approach and to apply it to your work, contact us. This is the approach we take with our clients and train those working alongside us.