Cense

Innovation to Impact

Evaluating Learning for Innovation

by

Learning is at the heart of innovation. Our definition of innovation is contingent upon it:

Learning transformed into value, by design

Traditional approaches to learning tend to focus on two things: recall and performance. Thus, we look at knowledge-based tests (consider most of what we took in grade school and college or university) or performance assessments (reviewed accomplishment on a specific task or problem set).

What is often absent from both of these is a consideration of the context and the learner themselves. It’s one thing to be exposed to information or demonstrations of how to do something, yet it’s entirely another thing to actually learn it.

Assessment of Learning: Questions to Ask

Our assessment of learning is inspired by this approach and informs the questions we ask about learning:

  • Exposure. What level of exposure did we have to the material or experience? How did this exposure treat our sense of understanding of the problem and the context? What salient information did we attend to during this exposure? How (or were) we attentive to what was presented to us and what was the context in which this was presented?
  • Connection. How is what we are exposed to related to what we’ve already experienced? In what ways does this new material fit with what we have previously learned? Where does this material or experience fit in shaping my goals, intentions, or general direction for myself or my organization?
  • Reinforcement. What activities allow me to apply what I’ve been exposed to in new ways and in practical ways repeatedly (including fitting with what I already know, whether a theory or practice-focused material)? What systems are in place to allow me to integrate what I’ve been exposed to into my current understanding of the situation? What activities have been set out to enable recall and re-visiting materials in the near and longer-term?
  • Application. What opportunities do I have to apply what I’ve learned into shaping a new understanding of a problem or steps toward addressing it? What opportunities are present to reflect and integrate this application of knowledge or skill into my existing repertoire of practice or understanding?

Without these, there is a decent chance we will undergo some form of performative learning — doing activities that look like learning but aren’t really effective. Taking workshops on topics that are not relevant to your work or set up too distant from the problems you’re seeking to tackle is one way. Filling your days with reading articles, watching webinars, taking courses, listening to podcasts, and viewing videos on some material without a means to organize and integrate that into your experience.

You will retain some, but probably not enough to warrant your time and energy. Furthermore, this kind of ‘filling’ of your attention actually serves to decrease the likelihood that you’re able to use this because of the sapping of energy from your brain. The more we expose ourselves to, the more energy is required and eventually we’ll be depleted enough that things won’t stick.

Ask yourself these questions above next time you’re looking to really, truly learn as an individual, team, or organization.

If you’re looking to learn more, do more with what you have, please contact us and we’d be happy to discuss ways we can help you be a better learner and innovator.

Better learning comes from better systems, by design. we can help you build them.

Predicting Next Year’s Top Story

by

Foresight can involve complex data gathering, sensemaking, and design and also be something as simple as developing the headline for next year’s news.

This simple technique can get your organization started on futures thinking and provide a way to connect the present situation with trends that you are seeing in your industry and the world to strategy and aspirations. This technique gets you to imagine the headlines of the future (what people are writing or saying about your enterprise) and walking back from that or projecting forward to fill in the steps that led you to that outcome.

Setting the Stage

This is an activity that is best done as a group anywhere from 4 to 12 people and can be done in as little as an hour, although it can be done over a longer period of time in single or multiple sessions if you wish to go deeper into the assumptions and models for the future.

It’s important to frame the exercise by choosing whether you want headlines for the organization or a specific project or product. It doesn’t matter who these imaginary headlines are to be written by (e.g., journalists, industry professionals), however, it does help to imagine what context they are to be written (e.g., news media, business press, industry news outlets, professional associations, peers). Make whatever context you pick clear even if it is in multiple contexts.

Next, set a time horizon for the headlines sometime within the next 6 to 12 months.

Lastly, this is often used to frame positive outcomes. However, after you’ve determined what success looks like it is worth considering repeating the exercise at a later date (e.g., one week later) with the converse: focusing on headlines that report failures, disasters, or problems. This can help your team see threats as well as possibilities.

The materials you will need are pieces of paper (preferably sticky notes because they are easily portable and can be re-arranged) and a whiteboard or flipchart/newsprint sheets of paper and markers for a facilitator (who can be external or a member of the team) and the team/participants.

Activity

Individually, have participants brainstorm headlines they imagine for the time horizon you have set. Give them about 5-10 minutes and ask participants to strive for volume — lots of ideas — over quality.

As a group, post together (with stickies) or share the ideas that individuals have generated. This can be done by having individuals post up their sticky notes on a wall and then later organized or by doing successive round-robin reporting where everyone presents a single idea in as many rounds as there are ideas.

We suggest having the group vote on headlines that they like, elicit the strongest reactions (positive or negative), or are the most provocative. Aim for 3-5 headlines. With these headlines explore as a group some of the assumptions that are in place for this headline to come true. The aim is to answer the question: what would have to happen for this to become a real headline?

Why?

This activity helps you set and frame a goal for your organization, project or product. It can help elicit information about what kind of aspirations, assumptions, and ideas that your team has about what you are doing. It will also allow to identify what kind of relationships, resources, or facilitators are needed to get from where you are to where you wish to go over the time horizon you’ve picked.

If you do the negative case headline, this technique can help frame what kind of necessary activities are required for success and where they can possibly go wrong. it will allow you to identify threats and risks associated with what you’re planning to help account for that in your plan.

This simple technique is powerful and can be used in a single session, with multiple units, or as part of a planning exercise and the dividends are great. It’s fun, creative, and informative.

If you want to see more about what this can do, contact us and we’ll gladly help you set up a foresight scan and strategic plan for your project or organization based on this kind of futures thinking.

Dive In Process

by

Much attention is paid to tools, methods, models, and other artifacts as a means to support learning and innovation while much of what makes real change happen is actually a process. It is doing, not thinking. It’s diving in to the pool rather than focusing on the fences around it.

Today we look at one of the most simple, powerful means for creating change in complex systems: the diving-in process.

From Confusion to Coherence

Uncertainty is troublesome and often prompts a pause. When the situation is murky and situation complex, the strategy forward is to generate coherence where there isn’t any. That comes from taking action with a commitment to evaluation and learning.

By taking action we start to affect the situation around us creating a pathway forward. By paying attention and learning as we go ahead we can quickly determine whether the coherence we create is beneficial or not and start adjusting as we go until we are able to generate a stable situation where the path forward is clearer.

Diving in to a situation is not being reckless when accompanied by strategic learning through evaluation. Capturing data on what happens (e.g., observations, quantitative, etc..) will provide you with something to focus on amid the confusion and that will lead to seeing patterns, which is where coherence emerges.

Application

Diving in is as it sounds: take a leap of hope. First, make a conscious, deliberative strategic decision to pursue a path of action without expectation for an outcome, only for learning.

Build a set of metrics that are simple, have low ambiguity, and can be applied readily to capture feedback from your actions. These might be sales numbers, website traffic, number of clients or patients seen, occurrence figures — anything that is tied directly to your actions. It’s about creating that smallest visible system. These can be observational, numerical, or something else.

Next, commit to attentive, reflective sensemaking. This means capturing and examining your data regularly and often to look for patterns. Where you see patterns — and preferably, where your team sees them (this is best done as a group) — start reflecting on what it might mean. Is it positive? Negative? Too soon to tell? As patterns emerge, you follow them and document what actions you take in response to those patterns.

The last step is to adjust your strategy as necessary and repeat until you’re moving into a place of greater certainty and clarity about what to do.

This will generate coherence and enable you to take a wise action next.

It doesn’t eliminate uncertainty altogether, rather this approach allows you to avoid being paralyzed by it and potentially create positive benefits in the process of reducing it.

If you want help with finding pathways forward through uncertainty reach out and contact us. We can help you see opportunities and design strategies to take you away from confusion to coherence, safely.

Simple Systems Scoping

by

Systems thinking done broadly allows us to take into consideration the various factors — structures, activities, relationships, interconnections — that can influence our organization, market, and domain of inquiry.

One of the fundamental qualities of systems is that they have boundaries. For example, when we consider an organization as a system we need to place boundaries on that organization such as who to include (e.g., all employees? full-time vs part-time? paid staff vs volunteers? settings or sites? etc..). There is no correct choice, just a useful one. Your boundary choices are to reflect what you are seeking to understand and how you’re seeking to act.

But how do you tell? We share with you a remarkably simple, but powerful way to scope your systems and determine if you have set the right boundaries.

Two Criteria

If you set your boundaries of inclusion in the system and find that you are lost and struggling to identify, map, or monitor the various interconnections, actors, actions, and outcomes within a system because there is too much to focus on then that is a sign you have bounded your system too loosely.

If you’re continuously finding yourself trying to explain what happened in the system by things outside of the boundaries, then you have bounded your system too tightly.

That’s it.

It may take some experimentation to get your boundaries right, however these two criteria can tell you if you’re on the right track or not.

Systems-informed strategy, mapping, and evaluation can be complicated, but understanding the boundaries does not have to be. This simple strategy has consistently allowed organizations to focus on what matters and avoid getting lost. The key is to make sure you have the ‘just right’ amount of detail and focus to allow you to make a meaningful sense of things and guide your action.

If you want help implementing a systems strategy for innovation and change in your organization or network, contact us.

Surfacing Invisible Rules

by

What often can hold our change initiatives back are mental models about how or why something happens. Historically, many innovations and discoveries were held back or failed outright because people were unable to see or believe what was in front of them. By asking a set of questions at the outset and throughout your project you can avoid many mishaps.

The scene below from Men In Black illustrates what happens when our mental models about the world get upended and ask a simple question about what we know*. (*Just prior to this scene, Will Smith’s character confronts alien life forms for the first time — something that Tommy Lee Jones’ character already knows and lives with.)

One way to surface these hidden assumptions is through an exercise we might call ‘Invisible Rules‘. This three-part exercise can help you surface and uncover those ‘hidden’ rules we live by that might be holding us back from what we are seeking to change.

The exercise involves asking a series of questions in three stages:

1. Assumptions

  • What assumptions am I operating under?
    • Consider things like people (populations, characteristics, traits, knowledge, skills, preferences), time and timing, the likelihood of success, resources required.
  • How did these assumptions come about?
    • Is the evidence based on fact or folk knowledge?
  • What evidence is there to support that these assumptions are true?
    • Is this evidence still valid? (e.g., is it based on a historical or current position? Has something changed considerably since the evidence was first generated to prompt questions about its relevance?)

2. Design

With these answers, we move to a new set of questions tied to the design of your innovation (project, product, service, etc..)

  • Can I modify any part of the design (e.g., remove, reduce, amplify, or replace) that might make it better?
  • What can I learn (borrow, modify, adapt) from other designs addressing similar issues?

3. Future-casting

Lastly, it is useful to ask yourself three “How might” questions about your innovation.

  • How might this project fail?
    • For whom? Under what conditions?
  • How might we learn about what we’re doing while we’re doing it?
    • The evaluation and reflection metrics, measures, and processes in place to learn what works and doesn’t as you go.
  • How might things change beyond our control?
    • Possible surprises that might sidetrack your plans (e.g., pandemic, government change, policy change).

These simple set of questions can produce an enormous amount of data for you and your team. In just a few hours you might save years of pain and problems and see beyond the fence into the pool of opportunity beyond.

Want help in seeing things differently and asking better questions in your work? There are some simple steps that can help your team see things that others can’t. Contact us. This is what we do.

we’d be happy to help.