Innovation Begins With An Eye

What is visible is an important first element in our process of perception. Common to most creative people is the concept that “Innovation begins with an eye.” Joan Fulton Suri of IDEO noted, “The starting point for most of our projects—whether related to products, spaces, or services—is observation of behavior in its natural setting. Teams do this together, along with clients, as a way of learning firsthand about the context, habits, rituals, priorities, processes, and values of the people we are designing for.” IDEO CEO David Kelley also asserted that, “Focused observation can be a powerful source of innovation. As you observe people in their natural settings, you should not only look for the nuances of human behavior but also strive to infer motivation and emotion.” Mark May said that revising your view may yield different results: “The value to innovation in learning to see lies in changing your perspective on the problem. Viewing the subject from every possible angle is a technique artists, sculptors, and photographers use regularly to enhance their ability to capture and render ‘the truth.’”

Because of the importance of first-hand observation to perception and innovation, Kim & Mauborgne said that field research should be the purview of corporate employees: “Send a team into the field, putting managers face-to-face with what they must make sense of: how people use or don’t use their products or services. This step may seem obvious, but we have found that managers often out-source this part of the strategy-making process. They rely on reports other people (often at one or two removes from the world they report on) have put together. A company should never outsource its eyes. There is simply no substitute for seeing for yourself.”

In the 19th century, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote, “Earth's crammed with heaven. And every common bush afire with God; But only he who sees takes off his shoes; The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.” If we have not noticed God’s dynamic presence in the world, perhaps it is because we have outsourced our eyes.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, market research, empathic research, observation, customers


References

Browning, E.B. (1864). Aurora Leigh. London: J. Miller.
Kelley, T. (2000). The art of innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.
Kim, W. & Mauborgne, R. (2005). Blue ocean strategy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
May, M. (2007). The elegant solution. New York: Free Press.
Suri, J. (2005). Thoughtless acts? San Francisco: Chronicle Books.

God Changes Minds

Enough was enough! Milton was a popular and highly respected bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, and was attending the denomination’s annual conference. The discussion at the conference turned to possible new technologies that would help men achieve greater levels of success and prosperity. A report to the denomination even included the possibility of a future flying machine to transport people from city to city. Milton was furious! From his chair in the audience he rose and loudly decried the absurdity of such talk, noting that it was blasphemy against God to believe that man would ever fly. Milton very publically stomped out of the conference, gathered his wife and children, and caught the next train home.

In the years that followed, Milton underwent a gradual but nevertheless remarkable change. He bought his young sons a toy “helicopter,” based on an invention of French aeronautical pioneer Alphonse Penaud. It was roughly a foot long and made of paper, bamboo and cork with a rubber band to twirl its rotor. His sons were captivated by it, and when it eventually wore out, they built another. As their interest in mechanics grew over the years, Milton made sure that his sons had access to the latest books and journals on the subject. Milton provided financial and emotional support when the boys started and grew fledgling companies, and even visited his sons Orville and Wilbur as they experimented with new models of aircraft on the windswept beaches of North Carolina. God changed the mind and heart of Bishop Milton Wright, and his crucial but unheralded support changed the world.

Are you open to a change of mind?


Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, airplane, Wright Brothers, Milton Wright, Holy Spirit

References

Crouch, T. (2003). The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.

Leadership Obedience

Please check out my recent article entitled “Downstream from Babel: Lessons in Obedience for Contemporary Leaders” in the journal Inner Resources for Leaders.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Deciding What Is Right

Christian innovation is not limited to developing the new to replace that which already exists. It also means deciding for and supporting that which is important and should never change. Albert Einstein, one of the most remarkable people in world history, was exiled from Nazi Germany because he was a Jew. He said the following:

“Being a lover of freedom, when the Nazi revolution came I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone by had proclaimed their love for freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks. Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

In this period of moral and ethical ambiguity, what does the Church stand for today?

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, Einstein, Nazi Germany, doctrine, faithfulness

References

Cochrane, A. (1962). The Church’s Confession Under Hitler. Philadelphia: Westminster.

Minds Limit (And Extend) Innovation

All innovation is dependent on the limitations of the human mind. We are unable to change and improve that which we cannot perceive and understand. As Canadian scholar Alexander Manu noted, “An individual’s or organization’s inability to recognize the meaning and potential of signals—be they in emerging technologies or emergent behavior—comes from the limits of their rational boundaries.” Our minds consistently retreat to the known and familiar.

One fascinating example was provided by Schoemaker & Day. The early morning hours of December 7, 1941 had been exceptionally busy for the captain of the destroyer USS Ward. Just hours earlier the ship had detected an enemy submarine moving toward Pearl Harbor. Releasing its depth charges, the crew of the Ward had sunk the submarine. While sailing toward Pearl Harbor, the captain could hear muffled explosions coming from the mainland. Turning to his lieutenant commander, the captain said, "I guess they are blasting the new road from Pearl Harbor to Honolulu." Even though his ship had engaged a foreign submarine only hours before, the captain made sense of the exploding sounds by reverting to his peacetime mind-set and completely failed to perceive the hostilities that lay just ahead.

How do we expand our sensemaking abilities? Education, experience, interaction with others, intentionally trying on new ideas, and developing multiple perspectives all help. Another important way is to ask God to “open the eyes of our heart.” In Ephesians 1:17-18 (NKJV) we read the prayerful admonition, “That the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give to you the spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of Him, the eyes of your understanding being enlightened; that you may know what is the hope of His calling, what are the riches of the glory of His inheritance in the saints…” There can be no clearer vision than that given by God.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, sensemaking, leadership, institutional learning, perception

References

Holy Bible, New King James Version (1982). Nashville: Thomas Holman Publishers.
Manu, A. (2007). The Imagination challenge. Berkeley: New Riders.
Prange, G. (1982). At dawn we slept. New York: Penguin Books.
Schoemaker, P. & Day, G. (Spring 2009). How to make sense of weak signals. MIT Sloan Management Review, 50(3), 81-89.

Innovating Christianity(?!)

Organizations, including churches, corporations, and universities, continually face the challenge of new and unsettling ideas. The preservation of longstanding corporate values, ideals, and principles is the sine qua non as new ideas are considered. Personal and group alignment with the “main thing” helps guarantee organizational perseverance, and the organization doesn’t want to fall prey to every new idea. As we learned in Ephesians 4, the faithful are enjoined “that we should no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, in the cunning craftiness of deceitful plotting…”

And yet, without fresh ideas and innovation, an organization quickly stagnates and dies. IDEO CEO Tom Kelley noted that leadership plays an important role in ushering new ideas into the organization: “You are not just in charge of today’s operations. You are responsible for making sure there is a tomorrow. You must constantly juggle the balls necessary to make new projects happen, to replace a just-finished innovation with a fresh exploration of another opportunity.”

This begs some important questions. Are there definable differences between new and untried ideas, doctrine, and dogma? How do we separate what is cultural baggage from essential biblical truth? When are orthodoxy, tradition, and best practices essential foundations, and when do they become unnecessary weighty impediments? What is the connection between personal and organizational revelation? In the crucible of idea consideration, can the process of discernment be speeded up or improved? What roles do leaders play in organizational acceptance of new information, and what roles do employees play in vetting new ideas prior to the leader’s acceptance of them? These important questions lie at the nexus of change management, the life of ideas, values transmission, and ideals preservation. These are dark woods that many fear and consciously avoid. It is an area that we must nonetheless choose to explore with an open mind and committed heart.

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship

Keywords

Innovation, values, corporate history, doctrine, dogma, leadership

References

Kelley, T. (2005). The Ten Faces of Innovation. New York: Currency Doubleday.

Hazy Memories of Innovation

It was Henry Ford who asserted, "History is more or less bunk” to a newspaperman from the Chicago Tribune in 1916. Ford was urging people to live in the present and not to be hobbled by tradition or orthodoxy. Mr. Ford also unintentionally focused on another issue: our historical record of innovation is accidently hazy at best, and intentionally distorted at worst. In brief, the guys who “won,” e.g. created the most successful innovation, were often those who helped write the revisionist history of their innovation efforts. As Scott Berkun noted, “Just because dominant designs developed before we were born, or in fields so far from our own that we’re ignorant of their struggles, doesn’t mean their arrival was predictable, orderly, or even in our best interest. Yet, the dominant designs, the victors of any innovative pursuit, are the ones that get most of history’s positive attention.” Looking in the rear-view mirror can distort historical reality: “Much of the literature of the history of technology is colored by post hoc kinds of explanations—that is, explanations that account for the emergence of a technology based on the final effects that the technology has” (Friedel, 2007). James Utterback similarly discussed historical distortion: “The emergence of a dominant design is not necessarily predetermined, but is the result of the interplay between technical and market choices at any one time.” That history doesn’t have to be too lengthy to be blurred. As Steve Wozniak, inventor of the personal computer for Apple said, “That’s what’s been bothering me—the fact that no one has gotten the story straight about how I built the first computers at Apple and how I designed them, and what happened afterward.” The lesson to be learned is that, to be of value, tales of innovation should come from primary sources, be consistent with other verifiable historical records, and always be considered with a measure of doubt. As my grandmother used to say, “Don’t believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see.”

Dr. Gary Oster
Regent University
School of Global Leadership & Entrepreneurship


Keywords

Innovation, historical record, innovation history, technological change

References

Berkun, S. (2007). The myths of innovation. Cambridge: O’Reilly.
Friedel, R. (2007). A culture of improvement. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Utterback, J. (1996). Mastering the dynamics of innovation. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
Wozniak, S. (2006). iWoz: Computer geek to cult icon. New York: Norton & Company.