The Ideators’ Journey

“When you don’t know where you’re going any road will get you there”
-Cheshire Cat
building on Jon’s post … A Collaborative Journey which discussed our exploration into the collaborative tools and services space.

At this point, the answer’s a definite maybe…

Is there opportunity? Definitely. Can it be cultivated? Maybe.

As Jon said we’ve been looking at the collaboration space. We realize it’s a large umbrella filled with possibilities and even more possible paths to our goal. Even how we define collaboration is subject to interpretation. To me the most prevalent digital collaboration tool is email. And here we are 10 years from the dot com heyday and email is still … well email. Our collaboration tools have yet to evolve.

But I find this not only with collaboration tools, with digital tools and services in general. The internet and PC software is in its infancy yet for how big a part of our life it’s become we need the internet to grow up faster than almost any consumer technology (I’ll say the cell phone is the lone exception here).

So where are we going?

I imagine somewhere near the beginning of the ideator’s journey is have a vision.

We have an idea that we’ve whole heartedly embraced. The vision is of software, services, internet applications etc. that allow diverse groups of people to work better together than alone.

Diversity is a core part of what we believe is necessary to take these experiences beyond their infancy. There are a myriad of perspectives that have been shut out from determining what PC experiences are meant to be. Be it discipline, gender (here is a question could women bankers have prevented the financial crisis?), cultural, class, level of technology-aversion, or even willingness to question the status quo – there are many untapped perspectives.

You can expect us to seek out diverse perspectives, embrace new ways of thinking, and in other ways explore ways to learn and work together.

So first order of business… finding a name
(to be continued)

- Mikal
You can find me at notsocommoncents.com a business blog

I attended Ignite Seattle! on Wednesday evening. twitter = #is6 for the event, @ignitesea for general info). The format of Ignite is short talks. Each speaker gets 5 minutes/ 20 slides - which works out to 15 seconds per slide. The slides advance automatically so there’s no fudging on the time. Talks were an interesting blend of science, geek, art, and life experiences.

I enjoyed the talks thoroughly. You can get a good feel for the event by visiting the central Ignite site and by searching YouTube for “ignite o’reilly”.

Even more rewarding was the chance to catch up with lots of creative friends. I particularly enjoyed getting to tell Scott Berkun to his face how much I enjoyed his book The Myths of Innovation. I studied history of Science and Technology in college and I think he does an excellent job presenting the material with both well-researched accuracy and fun-to-read levity.

Also, in a conversation on the advantages of local agriculture, I realized that “resiliency” (or lack thereof) is a useful term in describing a hidden or externalized cost of large scale agri-business. Example: Mid-Western grain farming appears to have the cost-advantages of scale. However, fast-forward several decades, the land erodes to the point where it costs so much to rehabilitate the land between each growing season that the grain becomes more and more expensive. “Externality” is when current prices of goods do not reflect the full cost and/or impact of production. (think rainforest decimation). Great opportunities for innovation around eliminating externality and building local resiliency! 

Best of all, since I’m married to another geek, the evening doubled as “date-night”.

Eve’s Ask for help makes a great introduction to a series that Mikal Lewis and I will be kicking off on collaboration.

During this series, we’ll apply approaches from Change the Way you see Innovation to a real-world problem: exploring product and business opportunities for web-based collaboration tools. Along the way, if all goes well, we’ll design and perhaps even prototype a free tool, and recruit some early users. If that sounds interesting, please join us!

Let’s start with some background. Eve, Michael, Mikal, and many of the other people you’ll see participating in this series met on the Ad Astra (Analysis and Development of Awesome STRAtegies) project I led at Microsoft. Ad Astra was a grassroots strategy effort that focused on innovation, culture, and collaboration with a remarkably diverse* team of amazing people. Our highest-profile technique included Mashup Days, in-person collaborative events (1, 2, 3, 4) featuring pink beanbag chairs. We also did a lot of collaborative writing, where projects like our Open Letter to Ray Ozzie and Harry Potter and the Future of Think Weeks involved fifty or more people collaborating via a wiki, a blog, email, and in-person meetings. Even though weaknesses in the Sharepoint-based tools we used made it difficult and time-consuming, the results were consistently good and occasionally outstanding.Since leaving Microsoft, I’ve continued this approach with more of a social network focus: Wetpaint wikis, Google Groups, my.barackobama.com, Facebook, and Twitter. Results continue to be great, and tools like Wetpaint, Google Groups, and Mixed Ink are much better than Sharepoint. Still there’s plenty of room for improvement.

So that brings us to an example potential product and business opportunities. Imagine we had a web-based tool that complemented these other technologies and made collaborative writing for a distributed team a lot easier. Could we get people to use it? And if so, is there a business model?

At this point, the answer’s a definite maybe. Vague as it is at this stage, the idea’s clearly got a lot of possibilties. Mikal and I believe it’s worth exploring, even though it may well morph into something else. So in the next post of the series, we’ll take a first step by describing a specific scenario.

Of course we’re far from the first people to be in this “definite maybe” situation for an idea. How do others approach it?

jon

* by Microsoft standards, that is

Last weekend I had a friend in town for a visit who grew up on a small orchard.  I asked him if he would mind making a short stop at the nursery to advise me on picking out a couple fruit trees.  I felt a little sheepish cutting into his vacation time, but he was really flattered and we picked out an apple and a cherry.

When we got back to my place, he inspected the trunk wood from the sickly apple I’d recently taken out.  “Uh oh….nematodes.”  Now I’m a pretty good gardener, but words like “nematode” elude me.  It turns out that nematode is a fancy word for roundworm. 

The bad news is that I couldn’t plant my new apple tree where I’d had the old one.  Because it would likely sicken and die of the same soil infection.  The good news is that nematodes generally don’t jump species – so I could plant my new cherry tree there.  Furthermore, Jamie told me the spot I’d selected for the cherry tree was better for the apple anyway.  

What I learned is that I had NO IDEA there was so much to learn until I asked for help. Asking for help does not come easy for me.  Sometimes it is a matter of ego, but often, as in this instance, I just feel as though I’m imposing on someone else’s time or energy.  Most often we discover that people love being tapped to share their experience and expertise. 

The second story in our successful collaboration series is our proposal for a session at the 19 annual Pegasus  conference - the theme of which is “Now more than ever:  critical skills for courageous organizations”.  The conference will be held November 2-4, 2009 in Seattle, WA.  Michael Foster, Iris Lemmer, and I will be presenting a 90 minute snapshot of Change the Way You See Innovation: Through Asset-Based Thinking. 

Our process for drafting the proposal was  simple, fast,  and very effective.  I sent drafts over email to a group of about 10 people who were already fairly familiar with the guidebook content.   For any given draft, I received at least 4 responses with edits.  The final submission was much stronger than the original draft, demonstrating that engaging others in simple ways can yield powerful results.

Try it!  Reach out today and see what it does for your project.

Eve E.

Why the long silence? Well, just like many of my fellow collaborators, I found myself stuck and uninspired. In other words… writers block! To break out of my long silence, I decided to ask for help. Over the next series of posts, I’ve invited a couple of colleagues to help me explore the topic of collaboration. To kick things off, I will share a collaboration success story of my own.

Change the Way You See Innovation - the guidebook

Michael Foster and I collaborated with The Cramer Institute on a guidebook called Change the Way You See Innovation: Through Asset-Based Thinking. We mashed up content we’ve been working on for the Ideator’s Journey with content from Kathy Cramer & Hank Wasiak’s latest book Change the Way You See Yourself to create a powerful two-day workshop and guidebook on leading innovation efforts with asset-based thinking.

Collaborating on the guidebook helped shape the outline and flow of the full length book. It became a milestone with a deadline that we could really focus on, that also helped build momentum for the Ideator’s Journey book project. Most importantly, it resulted in a tangible success that has become a new asset for us. I have been able to secure a lot of new interest in the book now that I have the guidebook to show as an example of the kind of content I am producing.

Copies of Change the Way You See Innovation: Through Asset-Based Thinking, by Kathy Cramer PhD., Hank Wasiak, Eve Enslow, and Michael Foster, can be ordered via Amazon. (Note that a technical limitation allowed us to list only one author on Amazon.)

In the spring of 2006, we were working with a collection of passionate individuals across Microsoft Corporation on the topic of grassroots culture change. How would we inspire individuals to act - both independently and collectively - in ways that would coalesce into a movement for organizational change? For those that experienced our work directly, the “Ad Astra” (Analysis and development of Awesome Strategies) project equated to increasingly positive personal and team transformations. However, we found it difficult to explain to business leaders exactly what we were doing, and why it was important for the organization. As Human Resources and Organizational Development professionals know, the broader impacts of organizational change are difficult to measure over short timeframes. The impact that can be captured in the short term tends to be more qualitative in nature and often dismissed as “non-tangible evidence”.

Jon Pincus, author of Tales from the Net and then the General Manager of Windows Live Services Strategy, proposed that we host a collaborative offsite with our partner creative agencies The Cramer Institute, The Concept Farm, and EASCI Applied to create a team narrative that would communicate both the evolution and value of the project in humanistic terms. In the process, we discovered a new workshop for organizational change leadership.

With The Cramer Institute, we crafted an agenda for the day that drew heavily from the work of Joseph Campbell. Joseph Campbell was a writer and professor best known for his work on comparative mythology. In several seminal works on mythology and the human psyche, he described the archetypal heroic cycle as “the one great story of [hu]mankind”, or the hero’s journey. We are all familiar with the hero’s journey story. We have read it in our favorite childhood books, and we have seen it played out in the cinema many times over. Since the publication of Campbell’s work, many other authors have applied this theory consciously - George Lucas, for example, credits Campbell for his influence on the Star Wars stories. We employed the construct of the heroic journey as a guide through the experience of leading change within the context of a corporate organizational structure. From our own experience, and that of our participants, we realized that we had stumbled upon a fantastic tool for driving organizational change.

In Star Wars:

Luke Skywalker feels that nothing exciting ever happens on the remote planet of Tatooine, though he longs for adventure. He is called to join in the quest when he discovers a plea for help hidden by Princess Leia in the droid R2-D2. Luke leaves his ordinary world behind and begins an adventure with an uncertain future with Obi-Wan Kenobi as his guide.

In business:

While corporate life may seem mundane in comparison to Star Wars, our own experiences as change leaders can be, at turns, deeply frustrating and highly elating. These heroic adventure stories have appeal exactly because they reflect universal concerns. They are a great key to life and may be used as a tool for dealing more effectively with our workplace organizations. The heroic journey invites individuals and teams to explore their own unique potential to lead change and to be changed in the process. Using this metaphor, we create and explore rich collective narratives that serve as a guide for what to expect in the change management process and a basis for describing what is needed to navigate challenges and be successful. We collaboratively define our vision for change and move toward them in a more unified way. Rather than dismissing obstacles such as resistance and fear, The Journey acknowledges these as part of our innate human experience and enables us to move through them with newfound courage and conviction.

By acknowledging the human side of our experiences, we discover ways to be more connected and feel more supported and appreciated in our work. Prospective change leaders often comment that they “bring less than their whole selves to work.” Feelings, preferences, passions, and personal experiences are simply being left out of the workplace narrative. With the heroic adventure, we bring aspects of what make us uniquely creative, passionate, and committed back into the workplace narrative. When we reconnect with our personal assets and values, we become more deeply inspired and committed.

The heroic journey metaphor also enables us to heal a wound currently found within many corporate cultures - the “lone hero syndrome.” This element of corporate culture exaggerates the idea that a hero is engaged in a solo effort and/or is super-human in nature and creates a rift with individuals and managers who value a more collaborative, team-oriented workplace culture. What is good that should be retained in the heroic adventure is the personal passion, courage, and conviction required to see change leadership through. What needs more emphasis is how we construct and care for our “crew”, how we form and maintain alliances, and how it is with humility that the hero himself is first transformed before they can share their newfound wisdom with others.

The holistic narrative we create - comprised of both highlights and setbacks, allies and obstacles - invokes the courage and commitment to act and to make specific requests of others to join with us and take action as well. The narrative first fuels our own inspiration, and then enables us also to share our story in ways that inspire others to join in the adventure!

The elements of the narrative – “substance, sizzle, and soul”(1)

In general, we spend the majority of our time thinking about and preparing the substance of our communications. While it is absolutely important to know and communicate all of the important facts of any change effort, factual content is only worth 7% of our ability to have impact. In other words, the substance will only comprise 7% of our ability to influence what people remember and believe about what we say.

The remaining 93% comes from the sizzle and soul. That is why it is so necessary to include them. People comprehend and remember our mission when we provide stories and other elements with vivid sensory detail AND when they can see clearly why our message is so important to us personally. Our credibility and authority comes from our ability to speak with substance, sizzle, and soul.

Substance - WHAT we say (e.g., facts, ideas, formulas, directions, strategies, etc.)

Sizzle - HOW we engage people (e.g., tone, pauses, volume, resonance, interaction); HOW we craft what we say (e.g., stories, metaphors, analogies)

Soul - WHO we are (e.g., your passions, desires, aspirations, and values) and WHY our message is important to us.

The elements of the journey

Change leadership begins with both creativity and a vivid, detailed vision for how to succeed. With the Heroic Journey, participants are invited to imagine, dream, experience, and change the way they see themselves as change leaders. We embody the change we wish to see in our organizations and in the world at large. (2)

• The call to adventure: We recognize our change effort as representing a new and less familiar world. We will be called to reach beyond our current set of skills, networks, and tools to achieve our goals. There are strategic views, layers of influence, and operators we were previously unaware of. At the same time, our resolve is building. Our vision is becoming more clear and the call to act on it more and more persistent. Will we answer the call?
• Initial resistance: We are initially reluctant to take up the cause. We know it will be difficult and we are already experiencing resistance from others as well.
• Crossing the threshold: At some point, our desire to see our vision become reality surpasses our reluctance. This moment of resolve signifies the threshold crossing. The questioning ceases and we commit to the journey.
• The testing: We must engage and succeed in a series of tests as we champion our cause. We must discover assets in our self, others, and each situation we encounter in order to create and maintain momentum.
• The nadir/satori moment: We reach the moment that tests our abilities to their limits. Only by facing the ultimate challenge may we be transformed ourselves and gain the wisdom to effect organizational and societal change.
• The return home: When we see the adventure through, we discover our unique sources of power, influence, and impact. Regardless of the success or failure of any one particular change effort, we return from the journey with newfound insights, a cadre of newfound allies, and the personal inspiration to begin again.