Cense

Innovation + Impact

Acting in Complex Times

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The complexities and complications of circumstances tied to the COVID-19 pandemic represent a hyper-exaggerated version of situations organizations find themselves in moments of disruption due to economic, social, and technological shifts. It is a moment of innovation.

What makes the current situation distinct is that the issues are global. Usually we have safe refuge in a new market, region, or setting, but now we don’t. How can we develop or implement strategy when things are continually changing for us and our partners, suppliers, and customers or clients?

Smallest Visible Systems (SVS)

Systems thinking helps us to understand how things are connected and structured, while complexity science can help us appreciate the challenges associated with how to understand the nature of the problems that present themselves. What both can teach us is that in times that are truly unprecedented in their complexity and scope it can be difficult to know what to do and how to act.

The temptation with systems approaches to strategy is to look at the whole system, but that is dependent upon whether we can see the boundaries of the system to help us understand the range of activities we need to consider in developing a model to guide us.

  1. Coherence is what we are seeking. In order to achieve coherence, we need to take some kind of action (often called a probe) and then see what that does. This helps us to examine how the system is behaving and how an action generates reactions and where (or whether) coherence forms. Coherence is basically a way of saying that things go together with some manner of alignment where
  2. Seeing or creating coherence is about meaning and meaning is context-dependent. What is meaningful for us depends on our circumstances, but it also provides us with a means to focus our attention amid the various signals we’re getting. Various patterns, relationships, interconnections and signals that we see that align together and create something meaningful are coherent.
  3. Coherence also provides us with a language to communicate. When you observe coherence it begins to create a language you can use to communicate to others about what you’re seeing. When we look at what is happening at a societal level, its difficult to find what coherent narratives are actionable. At a smaller level, we might find them and this allows us to communicate more fully with others and this will allow us to scale and grow our learning.

This is the smallest visible system (SVS) in which you can make a difference. Once you can act wisely on this system, you can expand the boundaries and scope to work larger.

Acting on Systems

What this means for action is this:

  1. Pay attention to what is going on around you. Ask yourself: what is important and meaningful to me?
  2. Be systematic, but not rigid, in how you pay attention. This could mean looking at sales numbers, social trends, meeting minutes and observations from everyday life. If you’re working in teams, ask people about what they are paying attention to and what has meaning for them. What things are they organizing their work or life around? Reflective journaling can help, too. This is data.
  3. Gather the meaning. Bring together those things that offer some coherence to see how they make sense for what you are doing, seeking to become, or what you wish to accomplish. This is a social process called sensemaking. By guiding yourself through the data it’s possible to see patterns and what is called emergent properties — new forms of order arising from what might seem unordered.
  4. Start to act on this new coherence narrative and then repeat the cycle from step 1.

This will help you to determine what is useful and not useful for you in whatever context you are operating in. It’s a simple, but powerful means to start the journey toward a greater understanding of your present situation and help you see how and where you can act, whether that is in a time of massive upheaval or something merely disruptive.

Keep safe and know there’s more that you can do than you realise.

If you need help in setting this process up, implementing it, and making sense of it all, reach out. This is what we do.

Visual Thinking

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Service and product design involves creating something, envisioning it’s use, consideration of its effects, and hopefully seeing it achieve a goal. When we are creating or planning our project we need to consider all of that on top of the many ideas we have about what that product or service ought to involve. That is a lot to hold in our heads at one time.

This is why designers often rely on visual thinking and communication to help illustrate these ideas as systems. The benefits of this approach are many and include:

  • Providing a way to communicate your thoughts in multiple dimensions. Time, space, sequence, and effects are all different considerations for service design and visualizing that allows us to see these all in one space. Our language is linear, visualizing allows for linear and non-linear effects.
  • It creates a space for everyone to participate. Whether you are a skilled visual communicator or someone who hasn’t drawn anything by hand in 20 years, nearly everyone can draw. Visual thinking tools can provide a means to literally get people working on the same page. Simple methods like the Sketch Map are easy to employ and get everyone sharing ideas together.
  • Visual language – such as that illustrated by XPlane in their useful guide to visual thinking transcends spoken words and allows us to communicate even when our shared spoken language isn’t strong.
  • Visual thinking allows us to use metaphors, express complex emotions, and connect physical and emotional things together during a service journey in a way that is difficult to convey through oral or written language.
  • Visuals provide an artifact that can be interrogated, explored, and reviewed from many different perspectives allowing people to point to objects, relationships, and structures and ask about their purpose, illustration, and meaning without requiring much technical understanding of the problem-domain (allowing outside and alternative perspectives to meaningfully contribute).
  • It also provides a means to generate a shared understanding of the system boundaries, components, and purposes that guide your development of the service. It gets people on the same page metaphorically and literally.

Visual communicator Angelika Skotnicka provides a strong case for why we want to consider visual thinking and how it is done from the perspective of graphic recording.

Consider ways to bring in visual thinking to your project planning, service design, evaluation, and strategy development. It is low-risk, high-reward and is an engaging, low-cost, and often enjoyable way to generate enormous insight quickly and effectively.

Want to learn more? Contact us and we can help you bring your ideas to light visually and more.

Innovation Strategy: A Tool

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Innovation development and execution are highly affected by what kind of environment you operate in. For innovators in business, the public sector, and healthcare questions abound like:

How can we determine what kind of market — whether it’s products, services, and policies — do we want to focus on? What does innovation look like in each of these? How do we align who we are with what we want to do?

We have developed a new tool for helping you navigate the various markets you are in, could be or would like to be in. The tool is available by clicking on the link.

Blue Ocean Strategy Framework

One of the popular approaches to conceptualizing the domains of organizational strategy is the Blue Ocean strategic model developed by Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne. The model distinguishes Red Ocean from Blue Ocean environments or marketplaces where businesses compete**.

(** or any organization seeking to differentiate itself in the marketplace of ideas and attention — it’s not just for profit-seeking ventures)

The Blue Ocean Strategy Framework presents a dichotomy between zones of competition and makes the distinction that organizations are either creating their own path or competing within existing contexts.

This dichotomy is useful for business but neglects much of the work that is done within social innovation and public sector innovation where there are spaces of co-creation and collaboration that exist with and among partners by design and necessity. In these areas the need to work together across contexts and often in ‘co-opetition‘ where organizations who might compete for resources at one moment might also rely on those others to succeed.

To help understand this we’ve developed a useful framework (or canvas, when used as a tool) for considering two additional areas to address when developing a strategy. This framework — presented visually below — introduces two new zones of strategy that complement the red/blue ocean strategy.

Beyond Oceans

The two additional zones include the Green Forest and an interstitial area akin to the Gulf Stream or Atlantic Drift ocean currents that carry water from both zones, greatly influence the climate beyond them and provide a unique ecosystem between them.

The Green Forest is an environment that feeds off the ocean and the nutrients from the currents. It’s those areas of collaborative innovation where no single organization can create a true difference on its own and where there might not even be an advantage to doing so.

Organizations might operate in many different areas depending on their size and configuration, however, the projects and work that is done and the strategy required to generate it might require the kind of mapping and zonal ‘marking’ that allows it to avoid confusion and discover the needs and challenges it faces more effectively.

Consider using this model in your work. None of these are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ rather they describe environments and contexts of strategy that can guide your innovation development and deployment. Knowing what environment you are working within allows your organization to better strategically align its planning, resources, and operations to suit that context and succeed.

Note: Are you interested in exploring different strategic domains and want some help applying this framework to your organization? Contact us and we’ll show you navigating these different terrains can help you see more and do more in your organization than you ever thought possible.

Photo by Aviv Ben Or on Unsplash and by Fezbot2000 on Unsplash

Innovation: Why Starting Points Matter

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If you’re looking to measure some form of progress or impact connected to your innovation (a product, service, or policy) then paying attention to the starting point is critical.

Evaluators call this a baseline and it’s maybe the most important line you can draw. A baseline is really the point of comparison for all you do. When speaking about improvements or change, this is the point you refer to when making those claims.

For something so important, it’s remarkable how few organizations capture baselines well. Let’s look at what it means and how you can do a better job of determining your innovation’s baseline.

Setting a baseline

An ideal baseline is set as far back from the present as possible at the start of your innovation journey. However, as many journeys have starts, stops, and tangents it might be that the start of the innovation journey actually ‘begins’ mid-way through a timeline.

If you are already started your innovation journey, the best time to set a baseline is now. It’s possible in some cases to use retrospective data (looking backward) to assess a baseline, however that can be fraught with certain biases that are unhelpful. If looking retrospectively, consider neutral data points like dates and times, concrete descriptions of product work, and use verifiable sources of data (e.g., work activities, prototypes, expenditures) to support that work.

When setting a baseline, there are some other tips we advise to enable you to capture the most possible useful data you can. If you are innovating in a human system, it’s possible that the innovation may have many effects that go beyond the most obvious so collecting the right data to capture these effects at the beginning is key.

  • List out the resources that have been assembled to develop the innovation such as people, space, and other capital (e.g. funds). These are your starting inputs into the project.
  • Gather a project plan or schedule of activities early to help determine what happens after the project begins. This will help determine where deviations from the plan take place, when, and help you trace back what happens if or when those changes take place to the strategy. Capturing deviations is critical because it helps you go back to see what adaptations you make at the end. Without this data, these activities might appear to be random or haphazard.
  • Capture cultural/environmental factors. Using the STEEP-V (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political, and Values) model is helpful in knowing what to pay attention to. One of our clients experienced a major, unexpected removal of funding due to rapidly changing political priorities of a government that was supporting their work. By capturing these broader situational variables you can place your innovation work in a context.
  • Document the state of your organization’s readiness and preparedness, which may also include an assessment of innovation readiness. Many innovations fail not out in the market, but within the design studio. Changes to organizational priorities, resources, and personnel can scupper, delay, or change the plans for an innovation. Capturing the state of the organization is an important point as it will allow you to see where things go off track or where they are enabled because of the organization.
  • Develop a project charter and theory of change. While a project may change direction many times, a baseline assessment can help you reflect the desired outcomes and original purpose of the innovation — which are quite likely to change over time. Having this in place can help explain what changes take place and what adaptations take place.

Baselines are the key point for making any claims of change, improvement, or transformation. They are the point where we say “in relation to what?” when speaking about change.

Give yourself some time and use the baseline assessment as a chance to spur reflective and strategic planning about your innovation. You will be grateful you did and amazed at the results later on.

If you’re interested in learning more about baseline development and its role in supporting innovation evaluation, contact us and we’ll gladly help.

Photo by Suad Kamardeen on Unsplash

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