The Innovation Walkabout

2022-07-26 by cense

Did you ever notice how much you take in visiting a new city or town for the first time?

Maybe it’s time to get out more.

The Innovation Walkabout is a simple technique that adopts what we do naturally when encountering something new. The method is as simple as it sounds.

The first step is to pick an issue you’re looking to develop. This might be expanding a market, serving a client better, or changing your focus.

Our second step is to find a physical space where you can learn about this issue. This would be where your customers are, your competition might be, or something else.

The third step is to go for a walk to this place with the mindset of being a newcomer. What do you notice?

What are people doing? Pay attention to the kind of relationships that you see. Are there structures — physical or otherwise — that inhibit or facilitate what happens in that space?

What Do You Notice?

When you notice something, ask yourself: what else? We suggest adopting a coaching stance by asking these questions:

What is going on and what captures your attention?
What else do you notice? Keep asking: what else and you’ll be amazed at what you come up with.
Can you imagine what your collaborators would notice?
How about what your competitors might notice?
What would someone who sees this scene every day notice?

When we ask these questions, we start taking the stance of different audiences — this helps us to learn. Take notes on what you see, sense, think, and hear. By taking better notes you can increase your learning, too.

So What?

This seems almost absurdly simple, but that is where its power lies. We can do this almost anytime. The metrics for success in this exercise are:

New insights.
New ideas.
Number of ideas.
Quality — detail — within those ideas.

If you are looking to innovate and need some new intelligence, try walking outside your door. Be intentional and purposive in your walking. Practice what Rob Walker calls “The Art of Noticing” and you will find you notice a lot more.

You might be surprised at what you see and find to help you out.

We design systems to help integrate simple and complex strategies for learning and innovating. If you want help to grow, learn and innovate, reach out and lets go for a walk. Who knows what we’ll notice together?

Image Credit: yns plt on Unsplash

Making Visions Work For You

2022-06-15 by cense

A good vision statement should do many things for your organization. Too often, a vision statement is created that goes into PR and marketing materials, gets framed on the wall, and then left alone. When we have a good vision, we have so much more than that.

Vision statements can indicate your ‘North Star’. A vision statement can also be your Southwest star, too; it’s about indicating direction. But, it’s more than that.

A good vision statement should:

Provide strategic direction.
Help you make decisions about your strategic activities.
Inspire you and your organization.
Focus on the direction of your efforts.
Align your resources with your goals.

Using Your Vision

It’s worth putting in the work to create a strong vision. A vision will allow you to weather the complexity of your market or circumstances. If you’re getting pushed to do new things, a vision can help you to determine what things are most appropriate. A vision might not tell you exactly what to do, but it will reduce the number of options available. By reducing the volume of information and number of decisions, a vision reduces complexity.

That reduction in complexity reduces the amount of effort you need to put into decisions.

When we have fewer decisions, we can focus more on the quality of those decisions.

Creating Your Vision

Vision statements and the like do not need to require days of meetings and processes. We suggest the following steps:

Research what the pressing needs are of the organization.
Ask what the priorities are of the organization based on these needs.
Inquire about what actions are needed to be achieved within a certain time frame (e.g., year, 3-years, etc..).
Determine the values that guide the work.
Bring together the key leaders and stakeholders to frame what kind of feelings and sensations represent success in achieving the goals.
Put these words (descriptors) together.

Yes, it can be that simple. The aim is to create a good enough phrase that can be used in practice. The focus must be on those who will use the vision, not external audiences. Why? Unless you’re looking to create a PR exercise, the vision is meant to inspire and focus your team.

That means designing it for the humans in your organization, not anonymous external individuals. With a vision ready, you can allow it to serve as your compass as you navigate complexity in the years ahead.

Ready to develop your vision? Want help? Let’s talk – we do this with human services organizations working in complex settings, high-pressure environments, and with a need to innovate.

Image Credit: Erlend Ekseth on Unsplash

Three Metrics for Design Evaluation

2022-06-13 by cense

Design is about the creation of products, services, policies, and systems for use and benefit. It’s a structured, creative process that shapes what we do, how we do it, and what impact we create. Design is fundamentally about innovation: doing something different or new for benefit within a context.

Inspiration, Utility, and Values

How should we measure design and its impact on our organization? We suggest three core evaluation metrics above all to consider.

Inspiration. A design has to inspire you. If you’re not excited about what you’re producing, why would it inspire your clients, customers, or users? By inspiration, we mean that it must capture or focus attention, delight, or attract energy. It does not mean a design has to be glamorous, just that it’s noticed for its purpose or appropriately invisible. For example, creating a negative opt-in to organ donation on driver’s license renewal forms vastly increases the donor pool (and reflects the desire of the population to be donors in the process) because it means people have to choose not to donate, rather than the opposite. Even with something benign like a form adjustment, Inspiration is an outcome.
Utility. Use is the second key metric. Design is about being fit for purpose and if there is a poor fit then the benefits will also be poor. A great design fits the purpose for what it was designed for and is useful. It doesn’t have to be the best, just useful and better than the available alternatives. If your design is not used, then no matter how functional, attractive, or conceptually sound it is, it is a failure.
Values. The alignment of your design with the values of your organization is critical to ensuring that the benefits that you accrue are the ones you want. If you value sustainability and responsibility, then your design has to reflect that. To illustrate, if you’re a company or organization that stands for human rights and ethical practices, what you produce (your designs) needs to reflect that. We see a lot of problems with organizations that say one thing and then design for something else.

From Perfection to Fit

There are no ‘perfect’ designs. A design is made within a time and context and the value and benefit of that design will change over time as the context changes. Even if we want things to stay the same and stable, the world around our designs is changing and evolving. Designs are also made with constraints posed by resources, time, and circumstances. However, design is designed — your process and procedures need to aspire and be set up to achieve the results you’re looking for.

These changes are why evaluation is such an important part of design: we need to continue to monitor and evaluate our designs in light of changes in context and circumstance.

We can’t hope for inspiration, utility, and alignment with values unless we design our designs to match that. Models like the Design Helix (below) can provide some guidance on what can be done to facilitate this.

The process of design and innovation is part art and part science. If you’re looking to design better — whether it’s to improve your products and services, make better policies, or build a culture of innovation we can help. Let’s talk.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

Practical Systems Thinking: The Cynefin Framework

2022-05-10 by cense

The Cynefin Framework is among the most widely used frameworks for understanding how systems are organized. It might be the most practical means of bringing systems thinking to life. A system, after all, is simply an organization of things within some constraint or boundary.

We rely on The Cynefin Framework (pronounced /kəˈnɛvɪn/ kuh-NEV-in) as a central platform in our training and consulting work for strategy, evaluation, and design. The reasons are many, but its utility is the most important of them.

What makes the Framework so useful is that people can relate to the stories we tell about systems using it. Perhaps the best story comes from the Framework’s founder and chief advocate, Dave Snowden in describing how to organize a children’s party using systems thinking*.

This video has been our most widely-referred source for teaching the fundamentals of systems thinking since it was first made.

The Framework has also been an inspiration informing the development of a centre for studying and intervening in complex systems based in Wales. It’s also developed into a burgeoning practice and learning community centred around the model.

The video below adds detail to help explain how the Cynefin Framework functions and where it came from.

We recommend reading Chris Corrigan’s excellent update on the Cynefin Framework. Chris has been one of the leading practitioners contributing to the thinking on the Framework’s use and development.

Using the Framework

Unlike many other Frameworks, Cynefin is useful throughout a project life cycle, not just at a particular stage.

In the beginning, we recommend using it to orient yourself to the situation you’re facing. What kind of problem situation do you find yourself in? What elements of the situation are complicated, complex, or simple? These questions aided by the Framework can help you identify key aspects of the system and complement systems mapping work.

As you move through the project, the Framework can help serve as a wayfinding tool. When you know where you are, it is easier to see where you are going. Social systems are dynamic, so while we may find ourselves in a quadrant at one stage, this can shift during the project or at particular moments.

The Framework can also be used as an evaluation tool by helping frame the questions you ask and the strategies that link your actions to your outcomes. By inquiring about the way your work and activities are organized within systems, we can ask better questions and assess real influence and possible impact.

We recommend starting any evaluation with the Cynefin Framework.

We also recommend using the framework as part of a strategic assessment approach to planning and sensemaking. The framework can help you to determine the role of evidence and practice — when to look for ‘best evidence‘, practice-based evidence, and innovative problem-solving options.

Moving Forward with Cynefin

We recommend using Cynefin Framework to anyone working in applied systems thinking, check it out. There is a global community of scholars, practitioners, and policy-makers who are working on advancing, testing, and documenting the use of it in practice. A recent book has been published that provides further examples and can be of use to anyone looking to get into Cynefin.

It’s worth the effort to explore – and we think you’ll agree.

* It is worth noting that our use of the term systems thinking is just that: thinking about systems and how they are organized and function. We recognize there are many different definitions and models of systems thinking including those used by Dave Snowden that may not fully subscribe to ours.

If you want help in applying lessons from the Cynefin Framework or building up your systems thinking capacity for action and strategy, reach out and let’s have a coffee meeting. We can help.

Image credit: Mitchell Luo on Unsplash; Snowded, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Using Decision Canvases

2022-05-04 by cense

You might have noticed that the world seems to be awash in canvases these days. The canvas model owes much of its popularity to the work of Alex Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and their Business Model Canvas.

A canvas is a form of system mapping that visualizes critical aspects of a system and organizes them. A canvas uses visual conventions like boxes and arrows to lay out key assumptions, resources, actors, and value claims.

Three examples of popular canvases include:

Andi Roberts has pulled together a massive list of fifty different types of canvases that cover issues ranging from value chain analysis, ethics, and strategy, to project management and more.

Some popular canvases like the Business Model Canvas are even pre-loaded as templates in visual thinking tools like Miro and Mural.

There is even a tool called Canvasizer that can help you create your own personalized canvas.

But how do we use these in practice?

Canvas Application

Most of these canvases rely on a similar structure. The simple form of using 8-12 boxes organized in an essentially linear format. This is a strength and weakness of the approach. The reason? It reduces complexity and interdependence, favouring a simplified organizational approach.

The simplification makes it attractive to people and relatively easy to use. The difficulty is the risk of oversimplifying the situation and confusing the model with reality.

It is for both of these reasons that we use canvases with caution. Canvases can be helpful in the following circumstances:

When a project team is unsure where to start. A canvas reduces complexity and can help people start getting things on the page. Just getting started can be an enormously powerful reason to use canvases. Too often, organizations pause because they do not know where to begin. This can nudge that process forward.
When the research hasn’t been entirely done or organized while the need to move forward is high in its absence. Sometimes, there are holes in the research (what we know about a situation) and plotting key themes or issues on a canvas can help us to hypothesize more clearly what else we need, know, or ought to consider.
In times when there isn’t a budget to support in-depth research and sense-making. Canvases can help us to anticipate what a situation has present and available. In the absence of data, we can imagine what might be needed. This isn’t faking data and should be used when research is used to guide, not to prove or validate.
When the number of anticipated themes and key variables for consideration is relatively tiny. Massive systems with many variables don’t fit well, but in many situations, we are not dealing with large, massive, complicated systems — they are small and complex. There are a few key categories and for these, canvases can work well.
When there’s coaching time available. Canvases shouldn’t be used for client work without sense-making and coaching. We see many people confuse the map and model with the landscape and reality.. Plotting out data on a canvas is relatively simple and can be done with little time. What takes time is making sense of what it means and how it can inform strategy. Designing a strategy from a canvas takes time, care, and attention. Doing this is where the value of a canvas comes in.

Canvases are useful. Find or create one, and you can focus your team on what’s most important, organize it, and help foster the kind of conversations needed to assess what to do and how we might do it in the future. Canvases are design tools, and if you consider their advantages and limitations, you can become a great organizational designer.

We use canvases and many other tools. If you want some help setting this up, applying it, or learning other tools and methods, let’s have a coffee and talk about your needs and how we can help.