Cense Ltd.

Inspiration, Innovation and Impact

Clarifying Your Intent and Impact

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There are a handful of universal practices that transcend technique, tools, and strategy. Paying attention is one of these. Choosing what to pay attention to is more tricky.

Intentional practice is just as it sounds: do something with purpose. This sounds simple — it is simple– but it’s among the most powerful practices for discovery, innovation, and performance. Being intentional requires that we know what we value, what value we seek to create, and how well we are doing.

This allows us to apply methods like the Copy Cat Method to learn from others. Our intentional practice also leverages something called attractors — energy directed toward an activity.

Noise Reduction

Noise — unhelpful information in its relevance, salience, or quantity – is everywhere. We find noise almost everywhere. Noise increases as data is generated and shared. Our ability to attend to it all is compromised by the volume available to us. What intentional practice does is it forces us to consider what is most important and when.

When we are intentional about what we are doing we create a noise filtering system that allows us to better judge data.

Getting intentional means being clear on what you want. It’s about working as an organization to ask explicitly about values and the kind of impact desired.

A useful tool to help this along is a variation of the Personal Moral Inventory Checklist developed by Dom Price. This checklist basically requires us to assess our performance across four different areas of impact outlined in the image below.

PMI.png
(See Atlassian’s article on the topic)

This tool designed for individuals can be modified for organizations in helping to generate a connection between the choice of activities and the perceived impact of those activities. This can only be done by creating a tighter, simple coupling of activity, intent, and perceived impact.

Using Simple Inventories

What the above inventory does is make things simple, reduce noise, and focus us on the core principles and values of our work. We recommend using something like this — there are many options — as part of a values and value clarification exercise. Bring together your team and give some time to ask yourselves three questions:

  1. What do we stand for?
  2. What kind of impact do we want to express through that stance
  3. How well are we doing?

These simple questions can help you to clarify your core beliefs and values, determine what kind of value you wish to create through your work, and assess progress on those values. It’s simple, powerful and something that ought to be done every 6-12 months to best capture variation, changing circumstances, and provide a means to calibrate your strategy and operations.

If you want help facilitating this process in your organization. Contact us and let’s talk.

Habit Design: A Starting Place

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Among the greatest means to promoting sustained behaviour change is to create healthy (beneficial) habits. The science of behaviour change provides many recommendations for how to form, break, and maintain good habits.

While we often believe that beliefs change habits, we often find that behaviours themselves can just as profoundly affect our beliefs.

There are many ways to shape the design of habits with good research and we’re going to introduce you to a few of them.

  1. Pay attention. The first step toward understanding habits is recognizing which ones we have — as individuals and organizations. Doing sufficient research to observe and record the degree to which we perform an activity repeatedly is essential. A habit is something that requires little or no conscious decision-making. It’s not that we don’t know it doesn’t exist, we just do it with the most minimum amount of ‘friction‘. Observation, recording, and reflection all contribute to this part of the process.
  2. Model the benefits. All of our habits benefit us in some ways. The key is to determine what those benefits are and if those habits are harmful or detrimental to our goals. By knowing what we are doing we can begin to change what we do. By understanding the benefits of harmful or unproductive habits we can also start to determine how we might be able to replace them down the road with our designs.
  3. Understand history. How salient is a habit? Once we know what we do, it’s important to see how strong habits are. For example, someone who started using cigarettes two weeks ago will have a different habit structure than someone who’s smoked for 25 years. Whether its consumer habits, health, productivity, or otherwise, the salience and strength of a habit is tied partly to a person’s history with that behaviour. The same applies to organizational practices as well.
  4. Model the context. It’s not enough to know what we do, it’s important to understand what context we do it in. The environment is a powerful force in shaping what habits we engage in and to what degree. By understanding our context, including how and what triggers our habit, we can start to begin to re-design this context. This can be done by tracking what behaviour is performed, where, and what other variables were present at the time.
  5. Identify leverage points. A leverage point is something that can be adjusted — amplified or reduced — that can yield large benefits indirectly within a system of activities. Most of what we seek to change is one behaviour among many that are, as we’ve seen, often connected to one another. For example, to use the cigarette example, many smokers cite drinking alcohol as a co-habit (the two are done together). In this case, reducing or changing the way one behaviour is done can also affect the other. This is called habit stacking. It’s having one behaviour affect another.

By engaging in systematic inquiry — observation, interviews, surveys, or reflective practice — we can start to illuminate some of these powerful hidden forces that shape and direct our choices and behaviour.

Try these methods out. The application does not need to be complicated, just systematic.

Need help or want more detailed design research to help your organization change and design for something different? We can help you – contact us.

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Prototype Death Rate

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This simple metric can be a big determinant of innovation success.

A prototype is developed when you’ve developed an idea to the point where building a conceptual ‘mock-up’ to test and challenge is possible and desirable. A prototype is the conceptual realization of an idea and allows us to test its fit for purpose ahead of full release to assess bugs, defects, flaws, strengths, and gaps in our design and knowledge.

Persistence in design and development is among the top predictors of innovation success. As we’ve heard from others: fail often and fast to succeed sooner.

The Prototype Death Rate is a simple metric that captures innovation attempts, successes, and the responsiveness of an organization.

Simple Math

Divide the number of prototypes that are stopped by the total number of prototypes developed overall.

This metric forces us to ask: what is a prototype? Have we generated one? In many cases, organizations have not fully thought through what a prototype might actually look like. As the UN Refugee Organization writes, a prototype is not a pilot test. What we consider a prototype to be is something that can be debated, but whatever is agreed on must guide design strategy.

The number of prototypes developed can correlate with the amount of attempts and the effort used to bring new ideas into focus and eventual development.

By tracking what is generated and how it is used, we also create a mechanism for responsiveness. We can start to track our progress, our actions, and our outcomes by paying attention to our attempts and their usefulness in results.

Try it out. Start with defining prototypes. Then build an inventory of prototypes and projects. Then do the math.

If you want help setting up your innovation metrics and system for design, reach out to us. We can help — this is what we do.

Photo by Amélie Mourichon on Unsplash

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

Mind Maps For Complex Projects

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A mind map is a powerful, simple organizing tool that features a lot of information on a single page. We use mind maps and other visual tools to communicate relationships between ideas, people, project components and topics with our clients and partners. We present a short introduction to how and why you might want to use mind maps in your work.

A mind map is a visual representation of a project that links actors and actions together. This article focuses on using mind maps, not creating them.

Below is an example from software provider Lucidspark (which is a tool for creating mindmaps) that illustrates what a mind map is and how it can connect ideas and actions together.

Visualizing our Relationships

A search of Google (or any other search engine) will find thousands of visual examples of what a mind map is. There are few ‘essentials’ for mind mapping, which is among its most attractive features.

A complex project is one where there are many things happening at the same time, at different time scales, and involving many interdependencies and actors. That’s just a way of saying: there’s a lot going on.

It doesn’t matter how you organize your mind map only that it is useful. That means it provides information that you can make decisions with and act on. If it does that, it’s a good mind map.

Once we have that in place, the mind map allows us to examine the relationships between the nodes and topics to assess their fit. The expression ‘getting on the same page‘ reflects an ability for all of those looking at the document to have a similar representation of what’s on that page. The mind map allows us to verify relationships between entities, determine gaps or inaccuracies, and explore different ways of connecting things together.

There may not be a single ‘master’ map that is better than all, but there may be a map that is more useful than others.

How to Use Mind Maps

When we use this with clients and partners on projects we aim for the following:

  • To examine the assumptions involved in the project
  • To explore alternative relationships of fit and see if the map is the best representation of what we are looking at
  • To guide the project and keep the topics on track
  • To provide a building block for connecting ideas together (in ways that weren’t done previously)
  • To map out a system of relationships
  • To use colour and visuals to surface feelings, thoughts, and other emotional aspects of the project that might influence the strategy or outcomes

By creating a visual representation we see the whole project and the relationship context. Relationships are the key in any complex system. When we visualize these relationships it allows us to see how the actions in one relationship can affect others. Visual maps can aid us in anticipating possible effects.

(Note: We don’t use the term ‘unintended effects’ – just effects because in complex systems it’s too hard to predict cause and effect with any degree of accuracy).

We continually refer back to our maps to help ensure we are accounting for all relationships of importance throughout the project and not just those that have the most amount of activity within them. It’s incredibly difficult to track this in our heads or in something like a spreadsheet or text document.

Mind maps can be great tools to visualize a lot of information and get you and your collaborators on the same page when it comes to understanding what is going on in a complex system and program. Try it out — they are easy to create and simple to use.

If you want to use this approach to visualizing your programs and using this to help you innovate, contact us – we’d love to hear from you.