Over the last 30 years, consumers have reaped the benefits of dramatic technological advances. Even with these massive gains, we can expect still faster progress as the entire planet—people and things—becomes connected. Already, five billion people have access to a mobile device, and more than three billion people can access the Internet. In the coming years, 50 billion things—from light bulbs to refrigerators, roads, clothing, and more—will be connected to the Internet as well.
Every generation or so, emerging technologies converge, and something revolutionary occurs. Now we are on the cusp of another major convergence: big data, machine learning, and increased computing power will soon make artificial intelligence, or AI, ubiquitous. AI follows Albert Einstein’s dictum that genius renders simplicity from complexity.
Consumers already encounter AI on a daily basis. Google uses machine learning to auto-complete search queries and often accurately predicts what someone is looking for. Facebook and Amazon use predictive algorithms to make recommendations based on a user’s reading or purchasing history. Given AI’s wide applications, all companies today face an imperative to integrate it into their products and services; otherwise, they will not be able to compete with companies that are using data-collection networks to improve customer experiences and inform business decisions.
Advances in so-called “deep learning,” a branch of AI modeled after the brain’s neural network, could help doctors identify cancer-cell types or intracranial abnormalities from anywhere in the world in real time. AI can also detect and defend against digital security breaches, and will play a critical role in protecting user privacy and building trust.
As in past periods of economic transformation, AI will unleash new levels of productivity, augment our personal and professional lives, and pose existential questions about the age-old relationship between man and machine. It will disrupt industries and dislocate workers as it automates more tasks. But just as the Internet did 20 years ago, AI will also improve existing jobs and spawn new ones. We should expect this and adapt accordingly by providing training for the jobs of tomorrow, as well as safety nets for those who fall behind.
We can count on technological innovation to continue at an even more rapid pace than in previous generations. AI will become like electrical current—invisible and augmenting almost every part of our lives.
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More companies are adopting sprints: a two- to five-day process that helps companies solve and test design problems. Sprints are effective because they give teams of all sizes the motivation and momentum to turn an idea into a prototype. If your team wants to try working in sprints, follow the process developed by Google Ventures. They've developed a great booklet, which we've summarized here.
How Google Ventures Runs a Design Sprint
PREPARE
This stage is universal to every design sprint, and it belongs to the sprint master, or the person leading the sprint. Assume you'll need one day of preparation for every sprint day. Before beginning the sprint:
- Formulate a meaningful design challenge the sprint will center around, and identify deliverables.
- Select and invite the sprint team, which should be between five to eight people.
- Put together a schedule for every component of the sprint.
- Lead a design audit to understand the existing issues.
- Gather supplies that are necessary for each stage: sharpies, paper, tape, sticky notes, and a timer.
- Choose methods for every stage of the sprint. Compile the challenge, deliverables, schedule, audit results, and methods in a deck.
UNDERSTAND
In the first phase, the team determines user needs, business needs, and technology capacities. This could consist of:
- User Interviews. Kick off your sprint by asking users how they use a particular product, and why they like or dislike a product.
- Competitive overview. Find out what other products or services inspire the current product. (Five to ten products should be sufficient.)
- Summarizing the learnings and first ideas. Use sticky notes to share the first ideas people generate, and group them into themes. Vote on the best ideas to determine which should be used as a springboard for the sprint.
DEFINE
Break down ideas from the first stage to determine the key strategy and focus. Make them more concrete by defining:
- The Central User Journey. Put together a map that lists all the stages someone goes through from learning about the product to becoming an expert user.
- Design Principles. List the three words that you would like users to use to describe the product.
- The First Tweet. Imagine you are launching the product. What is the first Tweet you send out? This can help the team focus their strategy in 140 characters.
DIVERGE
Now it's time to come up with as many solutions as possible:
- Quick Sketch: Fold a piece of paper in half, and then half again, to create eight rectangles. Give everyone five minutes to sketch one product idea in each rectangle.
- Storyboards. Give your team five minutes to sketch a storyboard, or comic strip, demonstrating all the key steps the user must take.
DECIDE
It's finally time to make a choice.
- Zen Voting. Share your sketched ideas with the team, and then vote silently to avoid team bias.
- Team Review. Evaluates the ideas with the highest votes and decide which ones to prototype. It may be necessary to do more sketching and exploring.
- Thinking Hats. Encourage everyone to choose a thinking hat (idea generator, optimist, pessimist, technical feasibility, or user advocate) and evaluate the decision from that point of view.
PROTOTYPE AND VALIDATE
Lastly, create a mock-up, demo, video, or physical prototype of your product, and get it into the right hands:
- User test. Let a user play with it to see if anything needs to be improved.
- Stakeholder feedback. Since the stakeholder holds the checkbook, their review of the product is essential for the sprint to succeed.
- Technical feasibility check. Will the existing team be able to carry out production? If not, discuss potential workarounds.
FOLLOW UP
After the sprint is done, it’s important for the sprint master to create a follow-up plan, share the results and survey participants to learn how to keep making sprints better in the future.
Takeaway: Google Venture’s sprint method will give your team the momentum and motivation they need to present a quality product prototype to stakeholders in a week. Remember, the plan above isn’t an exact science. You may substitute methods for your own or shorten the time spent on one stage, but make sure to go in order.
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Why should flying deplete us? We’re just sitting there doing nothing. Why can’t we be tougher — more resilient and determined in our work – so we can accomplish all of the goals we set for ourselves? Based on our current research, we have come to realize that the problem is not our hectic schedule or the plane travel itself; the problem comes from a misunderstanding of what it means to be resilient, and the resulting impact of overworking.
We often take a militaristic, “tough” approach to resilience and grit. We believe that the longer we tough it out, the tougher we are, and therefore the more successful we will be. However, this entire conception is scientifically inaccurate.
The very lack of a recovery period is dramatically holding back our collective ability to be resilient and successful. Research has found that there is a direct correlation between lack of recovery and increased incidence of health and safety problems.
And just because work stops, it doesn’t mean we are recovering. In a study released last month, researchers from Norway found that 7.8% of Norwegians have become workaholics. The scientists cite a definition of “workaholism” as “being overly concerned about work, driven by an uncontrollable work motivation, and investing so much time and effort to work that it impairs other important life areas.”
The key to resilience is trying really hard, then stopping, recovering, and then trying again. This conclusion is based on biology. Homeostasis is a fundamental biological concept describing the ability of the brain to continuously restore and sustain well-being. When the body is out of alignment from overworking, we waste a vast amount of mental and physical resources trying to return to balance before we can move forward.
As Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have written, if you have too much time in the performance zone, you need more time in the recovery zone, otherwise you risk burnout. The value of a recovery period rises in proportion to the amount of work required of us.
So how do we recover and build resilience? If you’re trying to build resilience at work, you need adequate internal and external recovery periods. As researchers Zijlstra, Cropley and Rydstedt write in their 2014 paper: “Internal recovery refers to the shorter periods of relaxation that take place within the frames of the workday or the work setting in the form of short scheduled or unscheduled breaks, by shifting attention or changing to other work tasks when the mental or physical resources required for the initial task are temporarily depleted or exhausted. External recovery refers to actions that take place outside of work—e.g. in the free time between the workdays, and during weekends, holidays or vacations.”
If you really want to build resilience, you can start by strategically stopping. Give yourself the resources to be tough by creating internal and external recovery periods. You can take a cognitive break every 90 minutes to recharge your batteries. Spend time outside or with your friends — not talking about work. Take all of your paid time off, which not only gives you recovery periods, but raises your productivity and likelihood of promotion.
Wicked Problem Solvers: Lessons from Successful Cross-Industry Teams
Companies have long cooperated within their ecosystems, working with suppliers, partners, customers, and even competitors. But as the premium on innovating grows, especially for wicked problems—those with incomplete, contradictory, or changing requirements— more organizations are tapping the capabilities of new and far-flung partners. That such cross-industry collaborations can generate radical innovations is clear. How to build and run them is another matter.
Though the practices are presented here in sequence, in reality they are not isolated activities that are executed and then completed. Rather, they evolve as leaders cycle through them, continually optimizing each, using experience from one to inform another. For example, learning from project execution often leads to modification of the starting vision. Let’s look at each practice in turn.
Foster an Adaptable Vision
Project leaders know that a compelling vision motivates team members to work hard and collaborate. The conventional wisdom has been that an unwavering vision is needed to keep people inspired and on track; but in cross-industry teaming, where innovation projects are complex, dynamic, and uncertain, the vision must be deliberately designed to evolve, for three reasons: First, a team’s capabilities are often unclear at the outset. As members’ expertise is integrated, new possibilities come into focus. Second, an adaptable vision provides room for diverse participants to shape it early on and influence it as the work unfolds, both of which are essential to maintaining engagement. And finally, as these novel projects get under way, end users’ needs may change.
Make project values explicit. While project vision may shift, the motivating values underlying it—its supporting principles—serve as unchanging bedrock.
Invite input and celebrate change. It’s critical to engage team members from diverse industries in developing and reshaping a project vision.
Promote Psychological Safety
Much has been written about the importance of creating team environments in which it’s “safe” to volunteer crazy ideas, admit errors, and openly disagree without fear of ridicule or punishment. To create a climate that invites people to speak up, leaders commonly model the desired behaviors—being curious, acknowledging uncertainty, highlighting their own fallibility. These and other tactics that promote psychological safety are particularly important for cross-industry innovation teams.
Acknowledge the experiment. Pointing out that the work ahead is experimental creates an expectation that risk taking, both interpersonal and technical, is essential.
Reduce legal concerns. To build a safe environment, it sometimes helps to clarify the project’s legal context.
Encourage social bonding. In projects where interindustry trust is low, new innovation teams typically begin with a negative balance of it. That’s why it’s important for leaders to explicitly cast the diverse expertise among participants as a source of solutions rather than of conflict.
Enable Knowledge Sharing
The insights that come from deep understanding of an industry often seem so obvious to experts that it may not occur to them to explain their reasoning. This creates misunderstanding and conflict. Project leaders should insist that participants share their thought processes, and should help them do so.
Emphasize professional values. As discussed, clarifying project values is central to building the cohesion that helps cross-industry teams weather a project’s shifting goals. Likewise, cross-industry project leaders must surface the professional values that characterize different disciplines and find the common ground among them.
Force face-to-face interaction. Left to their own devices, most people will incline toward others in their own business. A real-estate finance professional is not going to naturally sit down with a software developer to share insights. Such connections become even harder to build across geographic, language, and national boundaries. One way to overcome these obstacles is to encourage face-to-face interaction among team members.
Foster Execution-as-Learning
Because there is no blueprint to follow the best leaders embrace an execution-as-learning mindset that puts a premium on experimentation.
Test and learn. At certain points in the process, big ideas (alleviate poverty through better business approaches) must be followed by small action (provide business training to individuals on the ground). Experiments must be narrow and deliberate, to gain insight about what works in unfamiliar territory.
Welcome “arguable” changes. Any cross-industry project is going to encounter scope changes. During the Autodesk headquarters project, VP Phil Bernstein, himself an architect, offered this typology: avoidable, unforeseeable, and arguable. Avoidable scope changes result from inadequate sharing or poor planning; unforeseeable changes are new requirements that emerge as a project unfolds and more is learned; arguable changes—also emergent—are the result of new, debate-worthy preferences that surface unexpectedly.
THE MOST audacious innovations simply cannot be created
by single companies or by industries operating alone. Leaders
increasingly find themselves operating in complex business ecosystems where cross-industry teaming is necessary to innovation. To succeed in this world, they must strike a difficult balance: They need to advance their vision by looking beyond their own industry perspective and engaging a host of potentially antagonistic experts with distinct industry mindsets. They must be flexible, open-minded, and humble on the one hand and filled with fierce resolve on the other. Leading this way is challenging, but it’s a learnable skill, and as cross-industry teaming becomes the norm, it is one that no leader or firm can afford to ignore.
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