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When companies or agencies search for disruptive and innovative strategies they often assemble a panel of experts to advise them. Ironically the panel is often made up of people whose ideas about innovation were relevant in the past. Unintentionally, by gathering the innovators from the past, the past is what’s being asked for – while it’s the future that’s needed.
A better approach is to look for people who are the contrarians, whose ideas, while they sound crazy, are focused on the future. Most often these are not the safe brand names.
In the 1950’s and 60’s with the U.S and the Soviet Union engaged in a full-blown propaganda war, the race to put men in space was a race for prestige – and a proxy for the superiority of one system of government over the other.
NASA had panels of experts arguing about which of two options to use to get to the moon: first they considered, direct ascent; then moved to another idea, Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR). All the smartest people at NASA (Wernher Von Braun, Max Faget,) were in favor of Earth-orbit rendezvous and they convinced NASA leadership this was the way to go.
But one tenacious NASA engineer, John Houbolt believed that we wouldn’t get to the moon by the end of the decade and maybe not at all if we went with Earth-orbit rendezvous. Houbolt was pushing a truly crazy idea, Lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR). This plan would launch two spaceships into Earth orbit on top of a single Saturn rocket. Once in Earth orbit, the rocket would fire again, boosting both spacecraft to the moon. Reaching orbit around the moon, two of the crew members would climb into a separate landing ship they carried with them – the lunar excursion module (LEM). The LEM would detach from the mother ship (called the command module), and land on the moon.
The third crew member would remain alone orbiting the moon in the command module. When the two astronauts were done exploring the moon they would take off using the top half of the LEM, and re-dock with the command module (leaving the landing stage of the LEM on the moon.) The three astronauts in their command ship would head for home.
The benefits of Lunar-orbit rendezvous (LOR) were inescapable. You’d only need one rocket, already under development, to get to the moon. The part that landed on the moon would only be 14′ tall. Getting down to the surface was easy.
Houbolt bet his job, went around five levels of NASA management and sent a letter to deputy director of NASA arguing that by insisting on ground rules to only consider direct ascent or earth orbit rendezvous meant that NASA shut down any out-of-box thinking about how to best get to the moon.
Luckily Houbolt got to make his case, and when Wernher Von Braun changed his mind and endorsed this truly insane idea, the rest of NASA followed. We landed on the moon on July 20th 1969.
I recently got to watch just such a panel. It was an awesome list of people. Their accomplishments were legendary, heck, every one of them was legendary. They told great stories, had changed industries, invented new innovation platforms, had advised presidents, had won wars, etc. But almost none of them had a new idea about innovation in a decade. Their recommendations were ones you could have written five years ago.
In a static world that would be just fine. But in a corporate world of continuous disruption and in a national security world of continuously evolving asymmetric threats you need to have crazy people being heard.
Or you’ll never get to the moon.
Lessons Learned:
- Most companies and agencies have their own John Houbolts. But most never get heard. Therefore, “Blank’s rules for an innovation task force”:
- 1/3 insiders who know the processes and politics
- half of those who would provide top cover to non-standard solutions
- 1/3 outsiders who represent “brand-name wisdom”
- They provide cover and historical context
- 1/6 crazy insiders – the rebels at work
- They’ve been trying to be heard
- Poll senior and mid-level managers and have them nominate their most innovative/creative rebels
- (Be sure they read this before they come to the meeting.)
- 1/6 crazy outsiders
- They’ve had new, unique insights in the last two years
- They’re in sync with the crazy insiders and can provide the insiders with “cover”
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Organizations I work with increasingly struggle to straddle two painfully polarizing operating principles. On the one hand, they desperately seek greater agility; on the other, they genuinely want to include all the right stakeholders in their processes.
Including more people, alas, typically increases coordination costs and response times. But, almost paradoxically, greater organizational agility requires greater responsiveness and improved coordination. The more stakeholders involved, the more likely that decisions are delayed. But effective agility frequently demands inclusive stakeholder involvement.
By far the best and most useful approach for managing those tensions is Michael Jensen’s path-breaking work in decision rights a quarter-century ago. Simply put, decision rights clarify authority and accountability for decisions and decision making. Decision rights are about how organizations “decide how to decide” who is empowered to make decisions.
The RACI framework offers an excellent real-world instantiation of Jensen’s decision rights approach:
- Responsible. Who is completing the task?
- Accountable. Who is making decisions and taking actions on the task?
- Consulted. Who will be communicated with regarding decisions and tasks?
- Informed. Who will be updated on decisions and actions during the project/process?
Intriguingly, ironically, and importantly, the fastest-growing application of decision rights I see emphasizes digitalization, data, and analytics. Who has the right to access, process, and share data has become the greatest source of opportunity and contention in the enterprise. This structural shift goes well beyond what Jensen originally envisioned and described 25 years ago because the rise of Big Data – and its associated analytics – changes contemporary debates and arguments around decision rights. Decision rights around data increasingly require data around decision rights.
As organizational decisions increasingly become more data driven, top managers need to assure decision rights are data driven as well. That explains why so many organizations have made data governance a strategic and organizational priority. Instead of more traditional IT governance, which seeks to create greater accountability for IT systems management, data governance recognizes that data is the mission-critical asset to manage.
How does that data get shared (inclusiveness)? And how does the organization effectively take advantage of that data (agility)? The answer to those data governance questions will be found in the innovative application of data-driven decision rights. The future of data governance depends on the future of decision rights, and the future of decision rights depends on the future of data governance.
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There’s a key difference between knowledge and experience and it’s best described like this:
The image is from cartoonist Hugh MacLeod, who came up with such a brilliant way to express a concept that’s often not that easy to grasp. The image makes a clear point—that knowledge alone is not useful unless we can make connections between what we know. Whether you use the terms "knowledge" and "experience" to explain the difference or not, the concept itself is sound.
I collected some quotes and advice from my favorite creative thinkers about the importance of making connections in your brain. To start with, I want to look at some research that shows intelligence is closely linked with the physical connections in our brains.
INTELLIGENCE AND CONNECTIONS: WHY YOUR BRAIN NEEDS TO COMMUNICATE WELL WITH ITSELF
Research from the California Institute of Technology showed that intelligence is something found all across the brain, rather than in one specific region. Research from the California Institute of Technology showed that intelligence is something found all across the brain, rather than in one specific region. The study also supported an existing theory about intelligence that says general intelligence is based on the brain’s ability to pull together and integrate various kinds of processing, such as working memory.
Aside from physical connectivity in the brain, being able to make connections between ideas and knowledge we hold in our memories can help us to think more creatively and produce higher quality work.
CONNECTIONS FUEL CREATIVITY: NOTHING IS ORIGINAL
Steve Jobs said this in a 1996 interview: "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something."
Maria Popova is arguably one of the best examples (and proponents) of what she calls "combinatorial creativity." That is, connecting things to create new ideas: "… in order for us to truly create and contribute to the world, we have to be able to connect countless dots, to cross-pollinate ideas from a wealth of disciplines, to combine and recombine these pieces and build new castles."
Author Austin Kleon is someone who immediately comes to mind whenever the topic of connections and remixing art comes up. Kleon is the author of Steal Like An Artist, a book about using the work of others to inspire and inform your own. It starts off like this: Every artist gets asked the question, "Where do you get your ideas?" The honest artist answers, "I steal them."
Every new idea is just a mashup or a remix of one or more previous ideas.
HOW SCIENTIFIC THINKING IS ALL ABOUT MAKING CONNECTIONS
In The Art of Scientific Investigation, Cambridge University professor W. I. B. Beveridge wrote that successful scientists "have often been people with wide interests," which led to their originality: "Originality often consists in linking up ideas whose connection was not previously suspected."
START MAKING CONNECTIONS AND GETTING CREATIVE
I’ll leave you with some suggestions for improving your own ability to make connections.
1. ADD TO YOUR KNOWLEDGE—THE POWER OF BRAND NEW EXPERIENCES
2. KEEP TRACK OF EVERYTHING – ESPECIALLY IN THE SHOWER
3. REVIEW YOUR NOTES DAILY—THE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN METHOD
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Lively conversation about the planet's most pressing environmental issues.
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