Not ready for change?

Google does acknowledge that people may not be ready to "upgrade". Very understandable, as change sometimes means errors, buggy functionality, etc.

Why (intelligent) people resist change

From: http://www.business-strategy-innovation.com/wordpress/2011/02/why-people-resist-change/


"I most organizations, advocates of change are not viewed favorably by the people in charge and vice versa. As a result, too frequently, the dialog between change agents and those protecting the status quo breaks down because both sides pigeon-hole one another into simple, negative and convenient stereotypes."




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Why is Innovation so Hard?

An interesting article by James Robertson: http://www.volere.co.uk/sohard.htm that we will be commenting here soon...

Change agents as responsible for change

I recently came accross this description by therapy experts about the challenge of helping people change their bad habits & behaviours:

"Readiness to change is not a client trait, but a fluctuating product of interpersonal interaction. The therapist is therefore highly attentive and responsive to the client's motivational signs. Resistance and "denial" are seen not as client traits, but as feedback regarding therapist behaviour. Client resistance is often a signal that the counsellor is assuming greater readiness to change than is the case, and it is a cue that the therapist needs to modify motivational strategies."

http://www.motivationalinterview.org/clinical/whatismi.html

I find this highly relevant for everyone involved in triggering change in others, such as designers. Mainly because it clearly expresses the common misleading idea that creative individuals are victims of the resistance to change expressed by their bosses, clients, or the general public. Listen carefully to these guys: resistance to change is caused by the designer. The fault is not of the 'stubborn' or 'ignorant' client but a reflection of how the so-called 'creative' person handles the change proposal, often times in unimaginative ways. Every day I am more convinced that being creative is not merely to come up with weird ideas (as most books suggest), but to creatively introduce changes.

Yet another list of reasons behind failure

Lists always draw attention. There is something about a chain of items that perhaps makes reading easier -something valuable in a rapid lifestyle.

Here are 56 reasons why innovation initiatives fail in the corporate world. Some of them seem more like consequences rather than causes, others are repetitive, but I guess that 56 seemed like a good number at the time.

We could narrow them down to 22 + a 23rd: "Ideas are simplified to lists"


2. No clear definition of what "innovation" really means
3. Innovation not linked to company's existing vision or strategy
8. Senior Team not aligned
10.Innovation champions are not empowered
11. Decision making processes and evaluation of new ideas are non-existent or fuzzy
13. Risk averse culture
14. Overemphasis on cost cutting or incremental improvement
20. Too many turf wars. Too many silos.
22. Reluctance to cannibalize existing products and services
23. NIH (not invented here) syndrome
27. Mind numbing bureaucracy
29. Lack of clearly defined innovation metrics
30. No accountability for results
33. No training to promote and direct individual or team creativity
35. Inadequate sharing of best practices
36. Lack of teamwork, collaboration and communication
47. Over-reliance on technology
49. Unrealistic time frames
50. Failure to consider issues associated with scaling up
52. Failure to consider commercialization / implementation issues
54. No processes in place to get fast feedback
55. Inadequate sense of what your customers really want or need

Computational Explorations of Creativity and Innovation

My thesis now is a book available in amazon.com: Computational Explorations of Creativity and Innovation: An in-silico laboratory to understand the social dimension of creativity.
Ricardo Sosa (Author)
VDM Verlag, 2010
ISBN-13: 978-3639207781
http://www.amazon.com/Computational-Explorations-Creativity-Innovation-Ricardo/dp/3639207785

The interesting case of the shopping cart

My students came up with this nice example of innovation: the shopping cart. Here is a thorough analysis of the case, worth analysing & necessary to understand the creation of meaning: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/12/22/92/PDF/WP_CSI_006.pdf

Ancient creative technologies

Some of the dominant definitions of innovation imply that profit is the main criterion to define success. A more inclusive view would suggest that radical changes are sometimes triggered by other factors, such as curiosity and a "why not?" approach to technology.

Here is a view to inspiring examples from ancient and medieval times of creative applications of technology:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19526111.600-the-programmable-robot-of-ancient-greece.html?full=true

It is true that war and trade are two of the main drivers of technology, but let's not forget about exploratory & insightful search.

Being creative to avoid innovation

This is an interesting dilemma. Some people exhibit great creativity in order to avoid innovation. A simplistic view of creativity is that artists are creative because they have a lot of freedom to come up with crazy stuff, and that engineers are not creative because they work on highly complex and constrained problems. This can be challenged easily.

In large engineering projects, sometimes people have to exhibit large degrees of creativity in order to face pressing problems in production or construction. Ironically, some of these emergencies are triggered by small changes in design. The thing is that these engineers need to be really creative to try and stop 'change propagation'. This happens even in companies that considered themselves as 'not innovative'... and is something that also in contexts of limited resources you see all the time: very clever solutions to make-do and overcome scarcity.

My students have identified a similar dilemma regarding 'dissent': you can be a dissenter in order to trigger change in a system, but you can also use dissent to avoid change initiatives.

Creativity aint a straightforward topic...


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Brownie Wise and Tupperware

A very interesting story of a change agent: Brownie Wise was a brilliant salesperson who caught the eye of Earl Tupper and helped create the concept of Tupperware Parties, a major paradigm shift in marketing and sales. Her story is relatively obscure due to various circumstances, which actually make the entire case more appealling and suitable for analysis.
I was given this example by Rosaura Aguilar Cruz, a student in my Innovation class. Here is an excerpt of the source:

"Modeled on the home party plan pioneered by Stanley Home Products and expanded and refined by Brownie Wise, the home party plan became and remains the exclusive outlet for Tupperware." http://americanhistory.si.edu/archives/d8470b.htm

Indirect consequences of intervening a system

This is a NYT article reporting on how H. Mubarak's decision of killing all the pigs of Egypt back in May, has caused a huge problem with the organic garbage in Cairo.

Not strictly an innovation issue, but this case highlights two fundamental aspects that are useful to understand innovation:

1. Don't mess with complex systems unless you are aware of all the interactions. Here the garbage was used by the zabaleen community to feed their pigs, which were in turn a food source for them. With the pigs slaughtered, the Muslim majority probably thought they scored over the Christian minority, but in doing so they ended the equilibrium in the system.
2. Decisions have indirect and unintended consequences. Although one can tell from this case that the zabaleen community did warn the government, so this wouldn't count as "unintended", but certainly using the swine flu as an excuse to kill all the pigs, caused the indirect result of the garbage problem. My guess is that it also upset the zabaleen's economy, and perhaps the political cost of the entire episode will be huge.
   

Short summary of bicycle innovations

Probably not radical ideas, but a nice article summarising the constellation of ideas that are required / necessary to develop a bike culture, courtesy of WorldChanging: http://www.worldchanging.com/archives/010406.html

The real value is not on the (new) ideas, but how they are implemented. And this articles does a nice job in pointing out the challenges...


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Real Innovations, Real Impacts

Forget about the iPhone, Kindle and other gadgets. They may be interesting, but DO NOT SOLVE anything!

Powermondo does:
"Over 3,000,000,000 people do not have access to affordable, safe, and healthy products to meet their daily needs for survival." http://www.powermundo.com/products-and-services.html


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Compromises

Often times innovation-seekers aim to implement radical ideas that make a lot of sense in ideal conditions, but unfortunately are rejected due to the inertia and influence of the dominant paradigms. So then, we end up having rather mediocre ideas, more likely to be accepted. Here is an example: Boxed water (instead of the ubiquituous PET bottle).

Granted, it may sound rather silly at first, I mean the main symptom may be PET waste, but the issue at heart is how we consume water in the first place in relation to our culture of disposable consumption.

In the end, small packages need to be distributed whether they are made of carton or PET and the main environmental impact may be transportation.

Change is necessary, but often needs to be gradually implemented. The point to discuss here is: are these type of decisions an advance towards change? Or rather, are these 'sustainable' solutions a way to perpetuate sick behaviours?

Reusing + recycling ideas

Sustainability can be addressed at the user's end, and sometimes this is done creatively. Here are some interesting examples:

1. Casa de Botellas from Argentina. (
details)

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Types, scales, degrees and relevant innovations

The standard view on innovation is high-tech, glamorous, globalised products. But "innovation", i.e. the creative destruction of the worth of dominant ideas, is much more than that.

Here is a recent example of the type of change that is useful to broaden our understanding of innovation: the sort of low-tech, everyday, local and efficient alternatives that people / companies develop in what Bonsiepe called the "periphery":

An African bus, i.e. a bus designed and manufactured in Africa, responding to local needs and conditions.

So, beyond the usual dimensions of innovation (radical-incremental, combinatorial-transformative), we can also introduce dimensions linked to their scale (global-regional-local), and their relevance (market, social, scientific) following the Kuhnian link between paradigm shifts and communities.

This would reinforce the need to classify innovation always in relation to a context. There is no such thing as a universal innovation. Because innovation always transforms someone's life, it is only an innovation in relation to that someone. It may be entirely irrelevant for other people, at other times, and other places.

This is one of the implications of a situated view of innovation.

Routine vs. novelty

Interesting article on why some people prefer routine activities, whilst others constantly seek novelty. Or is it that all of us pursue routine/novelty for different matters?

I live in a town with hundreds of restaurants serving many of the world's cuisines: sushi bars, pizza parlors, pho, tapas, KFC, you name it. My family eats out a fair amount, and we appreciate these tastes, so we could conceivably explore a different menu every outing. But we don't. Some years ago we discovered a neighborhood café that we all really like, and that's pretty much where we go. It is our place.

I know that other people are different. We're basically opting for certainty and predictability, whereas others prefer exploration and change. But why do people differ on this trait? What motivates some to constantly seek out the next best thing, the greener grass, and others to stick with what is known and safe? How do we know there's not a new and better favorite eatery just around the corner? Are we trading off curiosity and novelty for the luxury of not having to make a decision?

http://rss.sciam.com/click.phdo?i=3c31fc0a814b4a08783894ecfd173dc5

Resistance to change

Thorough article from changingminds.org: http://changingminds.org/disciplines/change_management/resistance_change/rationale_resistance.htm

What is change?

Some random thoughts on what is change:

From the guys at well.com:http://www.well.com/user/bbear/change.html