Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Copy Cat: Learning Through Observation

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Is there a competitor or colleague that does something you admire? Is there a small pang of jealousy or envy in how another firm does what it does? Rather than lament it, embrace it.

We can channel our impressions of others into benefit if we transform our envy or observations into actions. This is a technique called Copy Cat.

Copy Cat is a simple technique that can be done as part of a monthly review and fit in with your regular strategy and sensemaking sessions. This technique allows you to focus learning on aspects of a competitor or peer’s behaviour and activities that you would like to learn from and maybe copy. Copy Cat is a form of appreciative inquiry. It works by focusing our attention on specific qualities or actions that we can adopt in our organization and practice.

How to be a Copy Cat

Copy Cat involves systematic attention and review of specific organizations and activities you admire or wish to copy. This is a technique based on the psychological concept of modelling and self-efficacy. Copy Cat begins by identifying those individuals, organizations, or groups that we admire or wish to emulate. It may be specific persons or it may also be behaviours or practices.

After we identify what it is that we wish to model, the next step is to begin observing the person/organization/behaviour/practice we are interested in. Literal observation, use of artifacts (e.g., articles, news stories, word of mouth, or marketing materials can all help. Your data gathering should be systematic, but it does not need to be comprehensive.

The next step is to engage in sensemaking. Sensemaking is a social process that allows us to make meaning of what we find. Bring together all your data, share it with those involved (this can be done independently, but is far more powerful in a small group), and make it accessible to everyone involved. Sensemaking helps us to ask questions about what we see and what it might mean for us in our work.

We use Copy Cat to see how others’ actions might apply to our work. Copy Cat provides guidance on what to do and how it can be done.

Applying Copy Cat

When we systematically, attentively watch others using Copy Cat we begin to consider how what we see can apply to us. This is where our design skills come into play.

We ask the following questions:

  1. What resources are employed in these actions? Do we have them?
  2. What knowledge or skills are required to do these activities?
  3. What circumstances are present in these actions? Did they help or hurt what was done?
  4. What outcomes emerged from these actions and can we tell what they are?
  5. What might this look like if we did those actions? What do we need that we don’t have?
  6. What negatives might emerge from these actions?

Copy Cat allows us to dissect the core components of someone else’s actions and consider how we might apply those lessons to our work.

By taking time to do this — we recommend spending 2-3 hours per month on this activity — some distinct benefits can be revealed.

  1. We sharpen our observation skills
  2. We begin learning more about our market
  3. We open our eyes to new ways to do something and the constraints others operate in
  4. It engages us in reflective practice about what we do and why
  5. It keeps us active in our market
  6. It builds systematic learning and praxis into our organization
  7. We enhance our curiosity and use it to channel energy in our organization

This simple method can have enormous benefits for an organization and helping build learning, innovation, and engagement in your people and your market. It requires little in the way of specialized tools and only a small amount of time.

If you want help building this into your learning and innovation practice, let’s talk. This is what we do and we’d love to help you do it, too.

Photo by Jonas Lee on Unsplash and Max Baskakov on Unsplash

Multimedia Visualizations For Strategy and Impact

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Multimedia visualizations are powerful ways to convey a lot of information in a small space and with little time. The use of a visual — a map, a drawing, a picture, sketch, or collage — provides layers of information beyond words. When dealing with complex situations, visualizations provide clear communication pathways.

Unlike some of our other posts, this is not pointing us to a specific tool or technique, rather a general approach to thinking about and engaging with content.

Let’s look at the benefits of adding more visuals to your work to help your strategy, evaluation, and program design efforts.

1. Relationships. One visuals can help you with understanding proportions, distance, and other relative characteristics. It is useful to position things next to one another – whether that is choice alternatives, network connections, or even contrasts. Seeing things in relation to one another on a visual canvas provides our brains with new information that is difficult or impossible to gain from more abstract thinking without visuals.

2. Colour and Texture. How something looks and feels can tell us a lot about what it means. By adding colour to something we apply a simple lens that can convey meaning. Colours like green invoke environmental imagery, red is well-known to have many meanings in different cultures, while blue can be relaxing. Texture can do the same thing. To illustrate, consider New Zealand-based Icebreaker who makes wool-based clothing and uses texture-rich images of sheep’s wool to highlight how its products are natural in composition. Use of texture in the imagery gives a sense of integrity, warmth, and a feel to fabrics even when the buyer might only see them online.

3. Variety. As more people work remotely and digitally than ever before, the visual landscape for many of us has changed in most workdays. We lack contrast in our environments and also in our digital screens. By increasing the visual constraint and variety by diverging from text and boxes toward photographs, graphic images, videos, or some other form of visual media we draw attention. When so much feels the same, few things are more valuable than attention.

4. Abstraction and Narrative. Words offer us a restricted set of options due to the need for us to be linear in our the way we speak. With a visual we can better draw abstract themes from an object and use things like metaphor to describe scenarios that allow us to transcend words.

There are many ways to use visuals and software tools like online whiteboards such as Miro and Mural, visual organizing tools like Milanote, and tools such as Jamboard or Trello to showcase information in ways that extend beyond text.

Consider bringing more details into your next project and discover what visuals can do for creating richer, more vibrant ideas and creative opportunities to your work.

Forecasting

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You might not have a crystal ball, but you can still envision the near-future by using a simple strategy called forecasting to plot your strategy for the coming months. Here is how.

Fundamentals

A forecast is a data-driven prediction of possible outcomes that can be used to generate scenarios. The first item required is data. This can be qualitative, quantitative, or mixed and from primary or secondary sources. Most often, forecasts are a combination of these.

Checklists have been found to be useful tools to help organize data that contribute to forecasts. Pull together those sources you have and then organize them in a manner that allows you to build a narrative — a story — of what has happened to allow you to better anticipate what might happen.

Forecasts work when there is some expectation of a linear progression from time to time (with some variation). Time series data — data gathered on the same topic/issue/item multiple times over in succession — is among the most popular sources of data. This will allow you to see patterns and spot trends that lead you to now.

Add Imagination

Once you’ve developed a model of the present situation, the next stage is to imagine what might happen in the near future. Forecasts are generally useful for predicting near-term (e.g., 3-, 6-, or 12-months) outcomes and are less useful for longer-term assessments.

Next match data from other sources — social trends, government policy documents, census data — to create scenarios. For example, seasonal trends can change the near term. ‘Seasons’ like ‘back-to-school’, holidays, flu trends, weather changes can all affect how present data can mislead us for future activities. The COVID-19 pandemic provided an example of the various ways in which an economy can re-open, a healthcare system can respond, and what ‘back-to-school’ looks like.

From these data points, work together as a team (this is always better done in groups because different people will see data differently) we can start to envision possible futures and outcomes.

Look for amplifiers and dampeners. What things might make an existing trend more pronounced and what might dampen that trend, or extinguish it altogether. In discussion as a group you can

Structuring Forecasts: Tips & Tricks

Begin your group work together with a few simple ‘rules’ to guide your discussion. Start with limiting any feedback or critique of ideas at the start. You want to explore why something could happen, not assess the likelihood of such activities at first. This opens our minds up to unlikely scenarios.

It’s helpful to have someone on the team who can play the role of the ‘black hat‘ – the person whose role is to illustrate why something won’t work. Edward DeBono’s ‘thinking style’ roles can be useful here in helping us structure a way to look at the data and ideas from different points of view. Building on these different perspectives, it’s important to build a variety of scenarios and attach a level of anticipated likelhood to them. (e.g., high, medium, or low) and timing (e.g., imminent, soon, long-term, etc..)

Build out as many scenarios as the data suggests might be useful. This is often three to five, but rarely nine or ten.

From these scenarios, ‘walk them back’ to the present using an approach of asking “what happened just before X” and repeating that of each answer until you find yourself at the present. This allows you to start building pathways of potential causality.

While it may be that none of the scenarios come into reality, there are likely to be pathways that resemble them. When you find these, your team can use those to examine the assumptions that you hold with each one of them and use that to develop a strategy around them to better increase your anticipatory awareness and adaptive capacity to learn and act.

Taken together, this method can help you to see what might be coming and plan accordingly. It is a powerful means to explore near futures and design your organization to be better suited to living in them rather than having to play catch-up.

To go even deeper, the Future Today Institute has developed this useful ‘Funnel’ model to guide forecasting that might be useful to you as well.

FTI-Funnel ToolDownload

If you want to develop forecasts, contact us. We can help you see what might be coming and design your team to better meet it.

The Amazing Spidergram

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Illustrating action points within a complex system challenges evaluation users. Time to call on your friendly neighbourhood spidergram for help.

Visualizing complex systems is a challenge within strategy, foresight, and evaluation because each component of the system is interconnected with others. Influence on one of these is likely to influence others.

From an action standpoint, it’s easier to focus on one or two small parts of the system than tackle the entire system all at once. How do we reconcile this and provide a means to see the parts of the system without being reductionistic and neglecting the relationship with the whole?

One answer is: look to the spiderweb.

A spiderweb is a good entry-level metaphor for helping people see places they can take action within a system by creating distinctions between the parts (nodes, intersections) and the whole (branches, webs). There are two related, but different spiderweb models worth noting.

Spider Diagrams / Mindmaps

Spider diagrams (or spidergrams or mindmaps) are ways to connect ideas together through the branch-and-thread model akin to a spider’s web (hence the name). These are often called mindmaps and have been shown to facilitate learning about complex topics.

They enable the development of relationships between ideas and possible causal or associative pathways between ideas, concepts, or other data- or evidence-informed concepts. They also enable us to cluster related concepts together to identify sub-systems that may be more amenable to our intervention within the larger whole.

Spidergrams / Radar Diagrams

The other spider-related metaphor that is available to innovators and evaluators is the spidergram, sometimes called a Radar Chart or Spider Chart. These allow for the display of data collected along a scale presented alongside others that use a similar proportioned scale.

This hub-and-spoke model of data allows users to see a variety of performance indicators presented along a similar set of axes related to a common goal.

What this allows for is a view of performance across a variety of metrics simultaneously and can recognize how we make progress on one area often at the expense of another. Strategically, it can enable an organization to balance its actions and foci across a variety of key indicators at the same time.

This can be used with quantitative data such as the financial data above or social data, too.

Spidergrams/charts can also overlay data within the same domain (see example) providing even more depth into recurring or separated data points within the same topic or subsystem.

The web of engagement

What makes these tools powerful is that they display a lot of data at the same time in a manner that can facilitate engagement with a group of people tasked with making decisions. Visualizing data or systems brings the benefit of literally getting people’s focus on the same page.

People around a table can then literally point to the areas they are interested in, concerned with, do not understand, or wish to explore assumptions about.

Complex systems introduce a lot of data and a lot of confusion. Sensemaking through the use of visuals and the discussion that they encourage is one of the ways to reduce confusion and get more from your data to make better decisions.

If you’re stuck in the web of data and complexity, call on your friendly neighbourhood spidergram.

Want to learn more about how this can assist your innovation efforts? Contact us and we’ll gladly swing over and help (without the costume).

Photo by Jean-Philippe Delberghe on Unsplash. Spidergram by

Developmental Evaluation Trap #2: The Pivot Problem

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In this third in a series on Developmental Evaluation traps, we look at the trap of the pivot. You’ve probably heard someone talk about innovation and ‘pivoting’ or changing the plan’s direction.

The term pivot comes from the Lean Startup methodology and is often found in Agile and other product development systems that rely on short-burst, iterative cycles that include data collection processes used for rapid decision-making. A pivot is a change of direction based on feedback. Collect the data, see the results, and if the results don’t yield what you want, make a change and adapt. That sounds pretty familiar to those looking to innovate, so where’s the trap?

The trap is that the decisions made aren’t grounded in data or the decision-making is flawed in how it uses data. In both cases, the decision to change direction is more arbitrary than evidence-based.

What do we mean by this?

The data problem

When innovating, it’s important to have the kind of data collection system in place to gather the necessary information required to make a useful decision such as whether to continue on with the process, make a change, or abandon the activity. James Dyson famously trialed his products hundreds of times with ‘tweaks’ both large and small to get to the right product design. A hallmark feature of this process is the emphasis on collecting the right data at the right time (which they call testing).

Dyson has since expanded its product offerings to include lighting, personal hair products, industrial drying tools, and an array of vacuum models. While the data needs for each product might differ, the implementation of a design-driven strategy that incorporates data throughout the decision-making process remains the same. It’s different data used for the right purpose.

Alas, DE has given cover to organizations for making arbitrary decisions based on the idea of pivoting when they really haven’t executed well or given things enough time to determine if a change of direction is warranted. Here are three things that one needs to heed when considering DE data.

  1. Process data. Without a clear indication that a program has been implemented appropriately and the constraints accounted for, how do you know that something ‘failed’ (or ‘succeeded’) based on what you did? Understanding what happened, under what conditions, and documenting the implementation behind the innovation is critical to knowing whether that innovation is really doing what we expect it to (and ensuring we capture the things we might not have expected it to do).
  2. Organizational mindfulness. The biggest challenge might be internal to the organization’s heart: it’s mindset. Organizational mindfulness is about paying attention to the activities, motivations, actions, and intentions of the entire enterprise and being willing (and able) to spot biases, identify blind spots, and recognize that, as much as we say we want to change and innovate, the reality is that it is disruptive for many people and something often unconsciously thwarted.
  3. Evaluability assessment. A real challenge with innovation work is knowing whether you’ve applied the right ‘dosage’ and given it the right amount of time to work. This means doing your homework, paying attention, and having patience. Homework comes in the form of doing background research to other, similar innovations, connecting to the wisdom of the innovators themselves (i.e., draw on experience), and connecting it together. Paying attention ensures you have a plausible means to connect intervention to effect (or product to outcome). This is like Kenny Rogers’ Gambler:

you got to know when to hold ’em

know when to fold ’em

know when to walk away

know when to run

An evaluability assessment can help spot the problems with your innovation data early by determining whether your program is ready to be evaluated in the first place and what methods might be best suited to determining its value.

The decision-making problem

Sometimes you have good data, but do you have the decision-making capabilities to act on it? With innovation, data rarely tells a straightforward story: it requires sensemaking. Sensemaking requires time and a socialization of the content to determine the value and meaning of data within the context it’s being used.

Decision-making can be impeded by a few things:

  1. Time. Straight up: if you don’t give this time and focus, no amount of good data, visualizations, summaries, or quotes will help you. Time to substantially reflect on what you’re doing, discuss it with those for whom it makes sense.
  2. Talent. Diverse perspectives around the table is an important part of sensemaking, but also some expertise in the process of decision-making and implementing decisions — particularly in design. An outside consultant can assist you in working with your data to see possibilities and navigate through blindspots in the process as well as be that support for your team in making important, sometimes difficult, decisions.
  3. Will. You can give time, have talent, but are you willing to make the most of them both? For the reasons raised above about being mindful of your intentions and biases, having the right people in place will not help if you’re unwilling to change what you do, follow when led, and lead when asked.

Developmental evaluation is powerful, it’s useful, but it is not often easy (although it can be enormously worthwhile). Like most of the important things in life, you get what you put into something. Put a little energy into DE and be mindful of the traps, and you can make this approach to evaluation be your key to innovation success.

Want to learn more about how to do DE or how to bring it to your innovation efforts? Contact us and we’d be happy to help.