Cense

Innovation to Impact

Knowing Thyself: Colleagues, Coaches and Consultants

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Self-knowledge is a great asset, however the reason we often hire an external consultant is because we know a part of ourself so well that it becomes difficult to see other parts of who we are.

We obviously have a bias toward the role of external consultants because that’s what we do, but we also recognize that part of role that we are often asked to play can be filled by different people or sometimes the same person playing many of them.

We refer to three C’s: Colleagues, coaches, and consultants. These are not mutually exclusive from one another and can be separate or combined. In each case, however, the role is focused on specific tasks that we want to highlight in helping you identify what best serves the particular situation or problem set you face.

Colleagues

Perhaps the most neglected role of the three are colleagues (or peers). A colleague is someone who works within the same field, department, team or organization as you and can provide feedback and perspective on the work you do and your performance. Because they know the work, they can speak to technical issues very well. However, because they are close to the work (and maybe you) they may include the same biases and limits to perspective as you do, too.

Colleagues offer the following:

  • Deep knowledge of the situation, context, and circumstances of the work. They know what you know and experience what you experience. There is little need to spend extra time empathizing with your situation.
  • This familiarity allows for more quick-to-start and nuanced conversations about issues.
  • Familiarity also allows for great compassion: it’s easy to talk with your peers about issues that might seem too far removed from others.
  • This familiarity also brings the same ‘blind spots’ and potential prejudices around actions, behaviours, policies, and possible outcomes. This can limit what is ‘seen’ and what is proposed.

Coaches

When you think of the highest performing athletes do you think about their coach? They all have one.

Athletes know the value of coaches because it’s only through that blend of expertise, motivational energy, and shared commitment through feedback that they can improve. The same is often true for organizations and individuals.

A good coach provides:

  • Someone on your team who is committed to the same project as you. Their success is yours.
  • Expertise in performance and how it relates to your specific industry or context.
  • A more intimate relationship in that they are focused on you (or your organization) and thus is more sensitive to its ‘moods’ and rhythms than someone who is more distant.
  • A coach has a separate role from who they support so, unlike with colleagues, there is less confusion and more clarity about what specific benefits a coach can and will provide without the potential for it to be conflated.

Consultants

A consultant is like a coach in that they bring an outside perspective – even more so.

A consultant is someone who is freed from the specific demands associated with the role, outcomes, and processes associated with your work and offers expertise and a different perspective on what you do. Many times we are so engrossed or familiar with what we are doing that we are unable to see new possibilities or consider alternative pathways for working.

Consultants provide many distinct benefits:

  • A consultant may not have specific domain expertise as your organization.
  • Alternatively, a consultant may have deep expertise in the domain you work in, but less in specific processes. They might also possess both. In every case, their value is in separation from the day-to-day activities of your work. This provides a more dispassionate view of your work. (Note: we don’t believe it’s necessarily more objective, just different — we all have biases).
  • Consultants can provide tactical and strategic advice much like a coach but without the closeness to their client and the same investment in the work. This isn’t to say that consultants care any less for the success of their clients, rather they are not part of the team and thus are not affected by the same fears of failure or concerns as a coach is.
  • Because consultants work at a distance they also are more likely to be versed in methods, tools, knowledge and practice skills that allow them to work well with groups who are unfamiliar to them (yet are similar in need or content expertise). This allows them to be bridge-builders within and across organizations and networks more easily.

Having others help us to know who we are, support our work, and provide expert advice is invaluable. Whether you are seeking to “level up” or simply maintain your focus and performance consider bringing in someone who can help you go further and cheer you on.

Whether its your peers, a coach, or a consultant you’ll find that long journey to excellence and innovation is far less lonely.

If you work with human services and systems and want someone who might serve to motivate you and help you to learn, we might be able to help. Contact us and let’s talk about coaching, consulting, and community.

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.

Designing for Humans: Considerations for Innovators

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Over at our sister site Censemaking we wrapped up a series called Design for Humans. The focus of the series was on different considerations that we must make in the process of designing useful, impactful things for the world around us.

Strangely enough, we often don’t do a good job at designing for humans with our services and products. In the process of innovating, we make many assumptions about how the innovation will be received and the impact it will make.

There are reasons why real substantive change is actually very difficult to generate. Humans are difficult to work with and to influence and the more we can design for how humans actually live, think, work, and play the more likely our change-making efforts will yield positive results.

Deeper Research

One of the ways to do better design for humans is to conduct detailed research. This goes beyond a few focus groups or observations toward more fuller engagement with different audiences. Strangely, many of us actually don’t really know what we want. We think we know what we want or that we know how to articulate what we want.

Research in this context involves the time, care, and attention to who people see themselves and who they act as. This is about our imagined reality and our lived one. (The two intersect and diverge through our days and life).

Many of our purchases are based on decisions that involve aspiration, comfort, fear, convenience, ethics, and utility in different combinations. These are both our own and the ones that we adopt from others depending on our situation. Individual decisions are very often tied to collective ones. If we do not understand the different groups we are affiliated with or aspire toward being a part of, we lose much of what is known about what drives a decision.

If we do not take the time to understand who it is that we are speaking with or seeking to influence — their individual set of values, beliefs, and experiences — then we will create a ‘mass’ for a ‘mass market’ that is unlikely to be receptive.

Luck and Science

A great deal of impactful design is based on a dance between luck and science. Viral marketing campaigns are more brilliant in retrospect than in advance. As Tendayi Viki and Mitch Joel recently spoke about in their conversation on innovation, most great innovations look absurd in advance and clever in retrospect.

This means great design is about framing the ridiculous.

It also means ensuring that, practically speaking, we must consider the very way we humans think, feel, and live — which is often ridiculous to the outsider. Great campaigns and products tap into this.

They also are about luck. Designing for luck through great observation, research, testing (prototyping), and ongoing evaluation ensures that what we put into the world has the potential to succeed in making some positive difference, not necessarily that it will no matter how good it is.

Whether its luck, perception or something else we find ourselves recognizing that the gap between what we think is valuable and useful and what others think (or are willing to consider) is large. The Chasm illustrated above is real and rather than engage in a futile effort to design around it, we need to recognize that there are sharks in those waters.

That’s what they did in the film Jaws. When we design for that, we design for humans (and sharks).

If you’re looking to create something more human in your work and need help, contact us and we can help make sure you don’t get eaten by the sharks you’re swimming with.

Images by Business Illustrator used under license.

Innovation Like An Epidemiologist

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What if innovation was like epidemiology? What if we wanted to understand the source, scope, scale, and spread of an idea or product?

That’s one way that we think about the innovation process.

Innovation – like a virus — is similar to infectious disease epidemiology. Both of these areas look at the development of something, its effects, its spread, and how it scales over time. Both innovation and epidemiology require evaluation as well.

Viral Innovation

The parallels between infectious disease epidemiology and innovation are many. The first of these parallels is between a virus and an innovation.

A virus develops and mutates as it has more exposure to hosts. A virus ‘learns’ from what it does and adapts to fit a changing context. Innovation does the same thing only with an idea, product, or service. For innovators, the aim is for healthy development and the creation and distribution of the product or service. This is what research and development and marketing is all about.

Innovation and epidemiology are also both interested in the spread and scale of things. If an innovation works well in a context we might want it to spread to other contexts. Innovators often want their products to scale as far and as wide as possible. Sometimes innovations scale and sometimes they don’t.

The way we know this is through conducting detailed, systematic monitoring and evaluation.

Epidemiology, like innovation, is driven by evidence from the laboratory and the real world together.

Stages of Development

At Cense, we also look to another parallel between the two areas: research and development.

Innovation develops in four stages that are similar to phases of research trials.

The role of design and evaluation is different for each stage. At Stages 1 and 2 the emphasis is on working with innovators to align their intentions with their design to explore what it (the innovation) does and how it does it. This is where design thinking and strategy are most prominent.

At Stages 3 and 4, the aim is to build an evidence base and strategy to spread and scale the innovation. At these stages, the focus is on marketing, distribution, and amplification. Evaluation in these stages focuses on the larger impact and the means by which the innovation is implemented and adopted for use across contexts.

Like an epidemiologist, its important to collect data to support moving the innovation from each stage. It’s also important to explore what kind of effects — positive and harmful – are generated at each stage.

At Cense, we work with our clients to design the right evaluation and strategy for each stage of development. There are no ‘one-size fits all’ approaches to innovation. Much like with a virus, an innovator must know what their innovation does and what will change at each stage and scale of its development.

What is key is designing data collection and strategy that is fit for purpose.

Viruses aim to spread and survive just like innovations. By thinking like an epidemiologist you can help your innovation to survive and thrive like the best kind of virus.

Photo by Bill Oxford on Unsplash

Context Setting

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In any innovation project, there is a need to set the starting point so you know where you’ve come from in understanding where you are and where you are going to.

We’ve often referred to this as setting a baseline. Another way to frame this is about setting the stage for what’s to come — your context. One of the tools to help you do this is to prepare a Living History document — a master document that tracks your activities, decisions, and observations along the journey. This is part of a larger effort to evaluate and tell the story of your innovation.

However, context-setting is more than that. Starting a business in the middle of an economic crisis or a pandemic is not the same as doing it in the middle of a boom. Measuring the early success of an ice cream shop that opens in Canada in January is different than one that opens up during the summer months. The same product and service, a very different context.

Starting Out

Where to begin?

The first thing we suggest you do is try to view your current situation and context through the eyes of a stranger. Imagine you are coming upon a place or situation for the first time. What are you noticing?

That beginner’s mind is something that we use in Design Thinking all the time to help us ask better questions. It helps us to be mindful of our environment and ourselves and allows us to ground whatever actions we take, strategies we create, and directions we follow in the present reality — not just possibility. As innovators, we often are primed to see what could be at the expense of what is.

We don’t want to lose that, just to put it aside at the beginning.

This involves asking questions like:

  • What is this [ ] for?
  • Why is this [ ] done the way it is?
  • What do these [people, things, tools] do?
  • What is important to the people around me in this situation?

Simple questions like this can lead to profound insights about something you thought you knew. Add in some observations — without judgement — by simply describing the things you see in front of you and you’re ready to start organizing and sensemaking.

STEEP-V

We like to use the STEEP-V framework to help you organize some of what you see. STEEP-V is a means to record and organize information based on a variety of different factors present in a context. These are:

  • Social
  • Technological
  • Economic
  • Environmental
  • Political
  • Values

By organizing and inquiring about your context using these categories we start to see what kind of situation we are in and what are the areas of focus of our clients and community. It helps us to understand why people might be more inclined to act, think, strive in particular ways and how what we are doing with our innovation can meet people where they are at to bring it together.

By combining some inquiry-based questions and STEEP-V you will draw a picture of the current context that you can use to populate your Living History document and use as a point of comparison down the road.

By understanding the context in which you are launching your innovation you are reminding yourself of the constraints, enablers, and situations you’ve designed your product or service for. Later — months or years later — you might find that things have changed. With this baseline, you can then do this context-setting again to see whether you are still designing for it — or for the past.