Counterfactual thinking is a term of psychology that describes the tendency people have to imagine alternatives to reality. Humans are predisposed to think about how things could have turned out differently if only…, and also to imagine what if?

If we’re serious about innovation, a little counterfactual thinking can be powerful — provided it doesn’t slip into the realm of delusional thinking.  For purposes of innovation, examining the “if only” question can help you understand what happened, and help you understand what might be improved the next time.  If you approach these “if only” questions regularly and wisely, you can help foster a process of continuous improvement with powerful results — all because you took the time to consider an alternate reality.

Equally,  asking “what if” can free you from mental ruts and ossified business processes.  This ability to step outside your routine to consider alternatives is critical to innovation.  Holly Green describes the process in her post, What If You Asked “What If?”:

It involves examining your own thinking process to understand why you think the way you do. More important, it involves pausing your thinking process every now and then and contemplating how to change perspectives, how to challenge your own assumptions, how to consider the opposite of what you normally think, how to ponder multiple right answers, and how to do things differently.

Not only can this type of counterfactual thinking help identify new directions, it can also help you avoid bad ones.  Jack Vinson writes that asking “What if I’m wrong” is a great way to prevent the painful consequences of implementing a half-baked idea. To be clear, Jack is not recommending that we become paralyzed by doubt:

This is not a suggestion to kill ideas simply because there are negative ramifications.  It is a suggestion to verify that those negatives could really happen, and decide how to prevent those negatives from happening while still getting the benefit from the original idea.  This might be part of a risk management practice, or it could be part of being smart about deciding how to do things.

So counterfactual thinking need not be delusional.  In fact, it can help with innovation and risk management when done correctly.  On that basis, counterfactual thinking seems like sound thinking to me.

[Photo Credit: ChernobylBob]

Eye candy aside, I was struck by some of the reaction to the ad campaign.  Even the most jaded of  the commentators had to admit that the rapid-fire interactive nature of the marketing effort was innovative.  As I thought about this further, I wasn’t altogether surprised to learn that the parent company of Old Spice is Procter & Gamble.  Those of you who are long-term readers of this blog may remember a post I did on the use of design at P&G entitled Why KM Needs Good Design.  As it turns out, good design is just part of P&G’s approach to innovation, which is described by their legendary former CEO, A.G. Lafley in this Harvard Business Publishing video:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvIUSxXrffc

While I commend the entire 14-minute video to you, I do want to draw your attention to a few points A.G.Lafley made:

• Innovation isn’t just about product or technology.  At P&G, they try to “integrate innovation into everything [they] do” — from their product design to the design of their internal business processes.
• They start and end with the customer. This means that they take concepts and prototypes to customers early to ensure customer views are reflected in product development.  They aim to “co-create and co-design” with target prospective customers.
• Starting at the 3:20 minute mark, A.G.Lafley describes P&G’s innovation review process.  As you listen to him, consider how a similar approach would affect your organization.
• They have a business strategy and an innovation strategy.  Their job is to ensure that the two are aligned and support each other.
• A.G. Lafley is aware of the human tendency to do the easy thing first.  Therefore, part of his role is to focus his team on the biggest, most critical issue that must be resolved in order to ensure the success of an innovation.
• Basic rules for an innovation process:
  • Know your customer. Know what their needs and wants are.
  • Bring the right team together, set the direction and some simple goals, then make some choices.  (Making choices is how he describes strategy.)
  • Have a simple process for gathering ideas, converting those ideas into basic prototypes and exposing those prototypes to your customers so that they can provide feedback.
  • Have a development and qualification process to evaluate innovation.
• While grassroots innovation is good and to be encouraged, enterprise-wide innovation is difficult without the full engagement and support of the CEO.   In addition to assuming responsibility for innovation, the CEO must create an innovation culture within the enterprise.
• An innovation culture requires
  • being open and open-minded
  • connecting ideas and people
  • working collaboratively
• What keeps the team engaged and motivated during long-term innovation projects? “It’s not the boss flogging you.” It’s the positive feedback you get from your customers along the development path.

This holistic, customer-focused approach to innovation is something we all should consider  in our knowledge management efforts, Enterprise 2.0 deployments, law firms or other places of work.  While we may not achieve the viral success of the Old Spice guy, the resulting innovation is bound to have an impact.

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*As promised, here’s the remedial course on Old Spice ads. (This is just a small selection of the large number available on YouTube.)  Enjoy!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLTIowBF0kE

In response to Gillette:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tqoc6wTNotI

In response to Alyssa Milano (4th in a series of videos):

www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Y7MZV_bD0

[Photo Credit: Umpqua]

Background:

[These are my quick notes, complete with  (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error.  Please excuse those. Thanks!

From time to time, I'll insert my own editorial comments - exercising the prerogatives of the blogger.  I'll show those in brackets. ]

Notes:

• They focus on “design thinking” = human-centered design.
• Three key principles of Design:
  • Empower people, not ideas – ideas are cheap
  • Create platforms for coalescence – give people a place to be together and work together.
    • They have a wiki system organized around groups, they have a blog effort that is a rich source of new ideas, etc.
  • Facilitate and Reward Participation.  Every little bit of friction in the system impedes participation.
    • They are maniacal about eliminating friction in the system.
    • Bring information to people. Don’t make them go find it. (They use a feed system for this.)
    • They display their activity stream on the wall of the office – it encourages people update their stream. This provides built-in rewards
• Good design coupled with good technology will change the culture, which will in turn change they way an org works and what it produces.
• They used a platform from existing software with a custom interface. They are moving to a mGenera platform.

Background:

[These are my quick notes, complete with  (what I hope is no more than) the occasional typo and grammatical error.  Please excuse those. Thanks!

From time to time, I'll insert my own editorial comments - exercising the prerogatives of the blogger.  I'll show those in brackets. ]

Notes:

• They have a corporate-wide office of innovation.
• They learned early that it is hard to get a good focus on innovation because there are many competing/diffuse definitions of innovation.
• Can’t just focus on idea creation.  You also need the intellectual rigor and discipline to translate great ideas into practical business solutions and then deliver them.
• Four themes of their innovation strategy: leadership, process, governance, enablement.
• Paradox: really good management will kill innovation because good managers are trained to eliminate risk.
• Good managers shouldn’t focus on individual innovators; instead focus on creating a good environment for innovation.
• Look at innovation as part of an entire system — need to attend to innovators, customers, external partners
• They enable and facilitate — rather managing in a command-and-control way
• They focus on NEXT Practices rather than BEST practices
  • He says that if you implement best practices you just as good as the next guy.  BUT you need to be better.
• E2.0 has taken off in CSC, based on a Jive platform. Nearly 50% of the employees are active on it.
• Lem Lasher ended by announcing Clare Flanagan’s promotion. Nice!

The book is engagingly written, describing Priestly in both his positive and negative qualities and how his work fits into the greater context of what was happening in England and on the larger global stage.  One theme that was repeated throughout the story has to do with his deep interest in many areas: natural philosophy, religion, and politics being the primary areas.  He was deeply curious in all these areas with the best evidence being his prodigious talent for writing in all these areas.  The fact that he was interested in all these things was not enough to make him an important figure.  He had the opportunity to interact with many of the leading thinkers of his time from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Antoine Lavoisier to the members of the Royal Society.  Along with this wonderful social network, Priestly’s vast interests also gave him an intellectual and idea network that was perfect for the age of amazing discoveries and thinking in this age.  And on top of these fantastic networks of people and ideas, Priestly (and many others of this age) had another key quality: he had the leisure to explore these things.

This snippet points to several important preconditions for innovation or paradigm shift:  (i) mastery of more than one subject, (ii) a social/professional network that allows the innovator to discuss and test ideas, and (iii) time.  Of these three, time is sometimes the most challenging.  In our world of hiring freezes where fewer are doing more, time is the rarest of commodities.  Yet, our minds need time to map one area of mastery on another and to elicit insights.  And, it takes time to find and engage the right people in your network to discuss  and test those ideas.  Finally, it takes time to bring an innovation to market and measure its impact.*

But leisure implies more than just time.  It also implies having the freedom to choose how to spend one’s time.  It isn’t enough for an employer to say “take a  day and innovate.”  What’s really needed is protected time in which you are free to follow your interests.  In doing so, you engage not only your intellect but your passion, which is another critical ingredient for innovation.  Passion leads you to the insight that others who are less engaged in the subject miss.

While necessity may be the mother of invention, time is the father of innovation.  And, in the case of innovation, perhaps lots of time is necessary.  So, how do you make the time for innovation?

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*Updated:  Thomas Vander Wal pointed me to a post of his that discusses a failure by Boeing to give innovation an opportunity to take root and show results:  Acceptance of Innovation Takes Time.  It seems like the more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Photo Credit:  Micky]

Knowledge managers have their own skills and tricks. And some of us are extremely good at what we do in normal office settings. But have you considered what might happen if you changed venue or context? What skills would be portable? What new tricks would you have to learn?  What new audiences or clients could you reach?

I’m not suggesting that you become an acrobat on a subway train. Rather, I’ve told the story to help you initiate a thought experiment. It’s in experiments like this that we discover new opportunities for innovation and growth — and, perhaps, a chance to brush-up some old tumbling skills.

[Photo Credit:  Florriebassingbourn]

If you look around, you’ll see some of the same issues with respect to Enterprise 2.0 and social media generally.  There’s lots of concern about how to evaluate its efficacy.  And even more concern about how to regulate it.  Some companies have clamped down on their employees, while others have taken a more moderate approach, presumably emboldened by the potential they see in these new communications channels.  Whatever mode your company’s in, take heart from the fact that we’ve seen this pattern of behavior before.  If you doubt it, watch the  5 1/2 minute video below entitled “Card-Carrying Capitalist Supports Nationalization” provided courtesy of The Wall Street Journal Online.  In this video, author Matthew Bishop explains why he thinks bank nationalization can be a good thing.  While I’m not in any way endorsing or criticizing his point of view, I was interested in his suggestion (about 2.5 minutes into the video) that bubbles follow innovation.  And, because it’s hard to understand properly what’s really going on in a period of great innovation, it’s easy for abuse to occur during that bubble.  However, companies that can find some sound operating principles that take advantage of the innovation will be able to ride out the bubble and emerge in a stronger position.  The role of social media evangelists is to help companies find that oasis of calm and sanity amid the hype and frenetic activity surrounding web 2.0 tools so they are well-positioned to thrive after the bubble bursts.

So when you hear people deriding social media and Enterprise 2.0, remember that they are viewing these new communications channels through their old bricks-and-mortar lens.  They will catch up with the rest of us once their vision has been corrected.

[Photo Credit:  h. koppdelaney]

The reason we’re so resistant to anomalous information — the real reason researchers automatically assume that every unexpected result is a stupid mistake — is rooted in the way the human brain works. Over the past few decades, psychologists have dismantled the myth of objectivity. The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored.

Ignoring failure can occasionally be a sanity-preserving, efficiency-enhancing approach to life.  However, when we ignore repeated failure, we may in fact be ignoring the only feasible explanation on the horizon.  Realizing this and acting on it requires strength of mind, openness, and a certain measure of humility.  It requires a true empiricist’s approach to life.

So how do we turn perceived failure around?  How do we find an epiphany amongst the rubble of unwanted test results?  Jonah Lehrer has the the following advice:

Check Your Assumptions: Ask yourself why this result feels like a failure. What theory does it contradict? Maybe the hypothesis failed, not the experiment.

Seek Out the Ignorant: Talk to people who are unfamiliar with your experiment. Explaining your work in simple terms may help you see it in a new light.

Encourage Diversity: If everyone working on a problem speaks the same language, then everyone has the same set of assumptions.

Beware of Failure-Blindness: It’s normal to filter out information that contradicts our preconceptions. The only way to avoid that bias is to be aware of it.

When it comes to implementing Enterprise 2.0 tools, there’s no substitute for constant experimentation.  And, there’s no way to avoid disappointments as you struggle to find what works best in your organization.  That said, don’t be too quick to discard your apparent failures.  When viewed with an open mind, they may point the way to success.  By following Jonah Lehrer’s advice, you may be able to find a breakthrough — an Epiphany.

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Here is some additional reading on Failure:

• Host a Failure Party
• Do You Need a Failure Target?
• The Upside of Failure
• When Failure is Fine
• Safe Mode

[Hat tip to Dan Pink for pointing out this article.]

[Photo Credit: wenzday01]

His theory is interesting.  When you have a success under your belt, you have something to protect: your reputation, your confidence, your sense of well-being.  Once you’re in protection mode, you’ll find that you’re unwilling to do anything that might upset your equilibrium.  You are reluctant to consider change or take new action.   You subsist in complacency.

In Tom Koulopoulos’ view, one of the great benefits of social media is that it is disruptive.   It brings new ideas to you, it asks new things of you, and it is beyond your control.  Despite the threat social media can present to the successful and complacent, if they are able to get over their defensive posture, they’ll find that social media provides a very effective spur to innovation and action.

[Photo Credit: papalar]

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For additional information on Tom Koulopoulos’ ILTA09 keynote speech, see Sean Brady’s blog:  This Year At ILTA.

In 2004, The Wall Street Journal published an article on Eli Lilly’s failure parties. These parties were started in the early 1990s by W. Leigh Thompson, who used them “to commemorate excellent scientific work, done efficiently, that nevertheless resulted in failure.” According to the WSJ,

Lilly has long had a culture that looks at failure as an inevitable part of discovery and encourages scientists to take risks. If a new drug doesn’t work out for its intended use, Lilly scientists are taught to look for new uses for a drug.

As part of this effort, Lilly developed “a formalized and thoughtful process in which it reviewed failures more honestly, more deeply and started the process sooner than anyone else.”  This is a very sensible response to what is reported to be the 90% failure rate for most experimental drugs.

By taking a creative second look at what was originally considered a failure, companies have salvaged their investments and been able to bring profitable innovations to market:

• Viagra was originally developed to treat angina (severe chest pain).
• Evista, now a $1 billion- a-year drug for osteoporosis, was a failed contraceptive.
• Strattera, a drug for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, was first conceived as an antidepressant.
• Post-It Notes were intended to be an improvement on adhesive tape and ended up creating an entirely new product line.
• Scotchgard was created for airplane fuel lines, but was re-purposed as a stain repellent.

Have you gone back to see where a well-conceived project went off the rails?  Can it be re-imagined for another useful purpose?  Innovation isn’t just about that initial brilliant idea.  Sometimes, it’s about a brilliant comeback plan.

[Hat tip to Matthew Cornell for forwarding an article on learning that mentioned Failure Parties.]

[Photo Credit:  frippy]