Innovation Conversations

As designers and facilitators of rich conversations, we serve a valuable role in innovation.

As facilitators, we can create the "safe container" for authentic (and often times emotional or caustic) conversations to occur, and for subtle, deep cultural shifts in thinking to begin.

As designers, we can give shape to the results of those conversations. We produce a thing--sometimes called a "work product" or "knowledge object" or "communication tool" or [insert corporatespeak term here].

These work products can take the form of a static model, a complex information graphic, a magazine article, a schematic diagram, a fully interactive website, a private wiki, an unedited blog post, or an airport lobby-sized installation art piece. The form is chosen for the target audience (and.. ah yes, the budget) in question.

Whatever the output, the real heart and soul of the innovation process seems to remain the conversation.

The network members of Social Media Today are playing in the emerging space of new ways to have those conversations.

clipped from www.socialmediatoday.com The McKinsey Quarterly recent edition says “Innovation has become a primary force in determining company growth, performance, and valuation. Unfortunately, a wide gap exists between executives’ aspirations to innovate and their ability to execute.” Piers Gibbon writes about “The Innovative Conversation” The title was inspired by the researchers who have shown that “rich conversations”¹ have more value in business than “dehydrated, ritualized”¹ presentations. That “Connections and Conversations … provide the fuel for innovation” ² and companies need “to create a climate … where everyone feels the responsibility and desire to contribute to the organizations innovation performance.” In economics, business and government policy,- something new - must be substantially different, not an insignificant change. In economics the change must increase value, customer value, or producer value. The term innovation may refer to both radical and incremental changes to products, processes or services.

MindMap WebApp: Bubbl.us

From LifeHack's 11 Top New Web Apps of 2007:

bubbl.us: Flash-based mindmap creator bubbl.us allows you to quickly and easily make effective, attractive mindmaps that can be exported as images or as HTML outlines, or shared with others who can add new items or draw new connections between existing ones. Sometimes clunky if your connection is slow or if the mindmaps get too large. But a fantastic Flash-enabled tool!

Cherry Blossoms: Mapping the City of Bombs

Discovered via the post "You Don't Understand Our Audience" by Dateline reporter John Hockenberry on http://www.technologyreview.com/

clipped from web.media.mit.edu Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death. Alyssa Wright began working on Cherry Blossoms last semester, wondering how to think about — and feel about — the civilian war deaths in Baghdad. Alyssa’s genius was in sacrificing herself. After all, it’s not an easy piece to perform. You don’t know when it’s going to blow. It’s shocking and loud, and one has no sense of how others will react. Of course, she won’t get hurt by the compressed air, but she might well be confused for a suicide bomber (or, more appropriately, a mooninite) and arrested.

Alphachimp at Manpower's employment summit

Photo: Julie Fanselow

The international staffing service and employment company, Manpower, moved its headquarters from suburban Milwaukee to the Harambee-Brewers Hill neighborhood in September 2007, and it recently launched an initiative called Accelerate Employment Circles to help people in the immediate area talk about finding “A Place for Everyone in the World of Work.”

Addressing the December 17 gathering, Manpower CEO Jeff Joerres explained how – while the company is helping solve thorny staffing issues in China, India, France, and Mexico – unemployment remains high right in its own back yard. “We want to take the good things happening in this neighborhood, see if we can accelerate them, and take time and thoughtfulness to do so,” he said.

About 100 people attended the mid-December summit, and about 60 people – including a dozen or so members of the city-sanctioned Workforce Investment Board – spent three hours talking about what it would mean if everyone in the neighborhood had meaningful work. Using a guide developed by Manpower with the help of the Study Circles Resource Center (soon to be renamed Everyday Democracy), participants were asked to imagine a backpack containing the most important things people would need “to help them choose, prepare for, and obtain the right job for their talents and interests.” Items mentioned included opportunity, education, knowledge, self-awareness, trust, support, financial skills, and time-management skills. In one dialogue, participants noted the lack of a safety net of help with childcare, transportation, or simply the ability to take time off for an emergency.

As the circles worked, facilitators made written lists of ideas and observations, and graphic facilitator Jim Nuttle from Alphachimp Studio Inc. rendered the conversations into words and pictures. People spoke of barriers including racism, inadequate public transit, inflexible employers, the need for a living wage (working at or near the minimum wage is hardly worth it, some said), and the lack of gathering places where diverse people can meet and network. But they also spoke of assets including schools, the Milwaukee Area Technical College (whose president took part in a dialogue), non-profit organizations, and forward-thinking businesses.

After the dialogues ended, participants gathered to prioritize the action items proposed using keypad technology provided by Padgett Communications.

Rating the best social networks

Which social networking sites have the best balance of ease-of-use vs. available features? The British consumer magazine Computing Which? has ranked Bebo as the best social networks, ahead of rivals Facebook and MySpace. The Guardian writes:

Bebo and Facebook achieved the highest scores of 79% and 74% respectively, and were rated easier to use than MySpace and best for socialising. Bebo, which is used predominantly by the 13- to 24-year-old age group, is praised for working hard to encourage responsible networking. "Users can restrict who sees their information, and block users, and there's plenty of advice on security risks and how to avoid these," says the magazine.

Details that matter to new users include: ease of sign-up, length of process, ease of use, features, navigation, and speed of page loads. Of course, one of the major drivers is the number of friends the new user already has on the service!

Visit Bebonation >>

New Year's Contemplation

Thanks to David Christie, cheers to all.

Surprise form the Street: Art!

Few artists can walk past an empty lot, deserted building or blank wall without dreaming of the possibilities afforded by all that open space. Here is a flavor of some "artoneers" who are claiming urban blight as free range gallery space.

Article by Bill McGraw | December 18, 2007

clipped from www.freep.com CREATION OF COLOR: With an artistic storefront, the artist known as Dabl attracts customers to his store, Dabl's African Bead Gallery, at Vinewood and Grand River. He sells thousands of African beads, some more than 300 years old, he says. (ERIC SEALS/DFP) Aaron Timlin, CAID's executive director, added: "There's a pioneering attitude. There are so many things artists can do in Detroit because it is so spread out. Throw up a sculpture on a vacant lot. Performance art. Detroit is a big empty canvas." The spiritual godfather of the grassroots art scene is Tyree Guyton, whose internationally known installation around Heidelberg Street on the near East Side attracts visitors every day. Guyton's artwork deals with how abandonment affects a neighborhood -- and decay is central to the work of a number of artists. In Detroit, there are people who draw attention to abandonment by painting gutted homes orange or attaching orange traffic cones to them. There is Larry Zelenski, who produces greeting cards with lovingly enhanced photos of abandoned houses. And there is Kevin Joy, who paints cartoons, Mayan-style hieroglyphics and other wacky images on abandoned houses and in the windows of vacant downtown buildings.

Embrace the Edge -- or Perish

The periphery of today's global business environment is where innovation potential is the highest. Ignore it at your peril.

Article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown

Edges are increasingly significant as the global business environment speeds up. In a world of accelerating change, what's born on the edge transforms the core with breathtaking speed. A few short years ago, both India and China were marginal players in the global economy. Now they are central players. Not long ago, the Internet was a specialized communication platform for scientists. Now it's a center for commerce and advertising.

clipped from www.businessweek.com Engage. Too often, executives get intrigued with the edge and arrange field visits to explore this strange terrain. Insight rarely comes from such casual visits. Instead, executives need to identify and focus on challenging business issues to engage edge participants productively and drive real insight. Sustain relationships on the edge. A lot of the current effort in open innovation focuses on short-term transactions to gain access to existing resources. To get the full value of the learning that's occurring on the edge, executives need to find ways to build long-term, trust-based relationships with edge participants. Bring the edge to the core. In too many cases, companies set up remote outposts on the edge that become isolated and alienated from the core of the business. Senior executives need to identify challenges confronted by the core where insights from the edge can be helpful and sponsor initiatives to bring participants from both domains together around these issues.

Crowley's High Speed Art

Watch graphic facilitator Steph Crowley create a 35-foot mural over 5 days in high speed--inspirational music included!

This American Life: Unconditional Love

Dr. Harlow spent a lot of time with monkeys and their mommas. Evil, robot mommas, to be exact.

Dr. Harry Harlow and his Artificial Mother

Harry Frederick Harlow was an American psychologist best known for his maternal-deprivation and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which demonstrated the importance of care-giving and companionship in the early stages of primate development. He conducted most of his research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he worked for a time with humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow.

Some of Harlow's experiments involved rearing infant macaques in isolation chambers that prevented them from having any contact with other monkeys or human beings. The monkeys were left alone for up to 24 months, and emerged severely disturbed.

This podcast from This American Life examines Stories of unconditional love between parents and children, and how hard love can be sometimes in daily practice.

clipped from thisamericanlife.org Hard as it is to believe, during the early Twentieth Century, a whole school of mental health professionals decided that unconditional love was a terrible thing to give a child. The government printed pamphlets warning mothers against the dangers of holding their kids. The head of the American Psychological Association and even a mothers' organization endorsed the position that mothers were dangerous—until psychologist Harry Harlow set out to prove them wrong, through a series of experiments with monkeys. Host Ira Glass talks with Deborah Blum, author of Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection.

Full spectrum attention management

The comment at the bottom of this article sums it up: "This is THE best blog post about a GTD implementation I have read so far."

Katherine Doubek is an engineer, artist, and writer living in the American south and studies artificial intelligence at the University of Texas at Arlington. This post is a fantastic summary on personal project management and electronic organization for the Mac OS.

clipped from www.fragmentedzen.com David Allen’s Getting Things Done system (book) allows busy people to manage their attention, energy, priorities, and tasks in a simple, straight-forward manner. It’s discussed and reviewed in a number of places online, but example setups aren’t presented frequently. This article outlines my personal GTD setup, and how you can adapt it to help track your time and attention investments. I keep all information with me at all times which I may need to be able to reference on short notice, such as my portfolios, codebase, and medical history. This stays in a folder on my Mac’s desktop: If you’re interested, I’ve compiled a PDF of the full taxonomy of my archive folder for you to download and reference.

Google-funded 23andMe starts, offers $999 DNA test

Mon Nov 19, 2007 2:22pm EST

clipped from www.reuters.com Google Inc-funded 23andMe launched on Monday and began offering a DNA saliva test for $999 per person, which would help U.S. users of the online site learn about disease risk, inherited traits and their ancestry. Eventually users, who sign up for the saliva test online and receive it by mail, will also be able to participate in research. "The mission of 23andMe is to take the genetic revolution to a new level by offering a secure, Web-based service where individuals can explore, share and better understand their own genetic information," said 23andMe co-founder Linda Avey. Those who are tested may choose to learn their risk for developing certain cancer, Alzheimer's disease, diabetes and other illnesses, and get a referral from 23andMe to genetic counselors.

Crafting a Message that Sticks: An Interview with Chip Heath

Chip Heath and Dan Heath are the best-selling authors of "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die". The brothers are frequent contributors to Fast Company Magazine on winners and losers in the marketing landscape.

clipped from www.mckinseyquarterly.com Leaders must communicate increasingly complex messages to increasingly fragmented audiences that include not only investors and employees but also broader social groups. Designing and communicating messages that such disparate audiences can understand—and act on—has never been more important. Chip Heath, a professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Business who has long investigated why some communications succeed while others fail, explains how executives can make their ideas “stick” with multifaceted audiences.

Making Art Work @ Catalyst Ranch

This program combines three of our favorite things:

1. The Chicago Art Institute link
2. The ultra-creative environment of Catalyst Ranch link
3. Our friend and colleague Leslie Marquard of Marble Leadership Partners! link
   

clipped from www.catalystranch.com

Article by ALLISON RIGGIO | Contributing Writer | Chicago Journal
http://www.chicagojournal.com/

It may be years since most white-collar businesspeople went to art class, but a new corporate training philosophy might change the way Chicago does business.

The West Loop’s Catalyst Ranch teamed up with the Art Institute to develop an arts-based corporate train­ing philosophy unlike any other.

Aptly named Art-Work, the program utiliz­es the museum’s artwork as a medium for teaching communication and other business-related skills.

Catalyst Ranch, which specializes in hosting eccentric off-site meetings and events for various companies, developed Art-Work in conjunction with the Art Institute as an alternative means to the typical corporate teambuilding activities. The day-long sessions use the museum’s vast collections to illustrate and teach business concepts, and also utilize the creative working environment inside Catalyst Ranch to further develop ideas, according to Bobbie Soeder, explorer/matchmaker (aka vice president of sales and marketing) at Catalyst Ranch.

“Arts-based learning isn’t a new concept,” Soeder said. “But we feel that it’s so timely right now with today’s business climate and the push for creativity and innovation.”

The first half of the session takes place at the Art Institute, where co-workers view hand-selected artworks and discuss how some of the various elements can be related to the business world. Art-Work sessions are co-taught by Sarah Alvarez, the assistant director of Adult Programs in Museum Education at the Art Institute, and a corporate facilitator contracted by Catalyst Ranch. Alvarez brings her knowledge of art history and visual learning to each session while a corporate facilitator is chosen based on their specialized knowledge in one of four categories: communica­tion, creativity and innovation, diversity and inclusion and team and leadership development.

The “Art-Work” training program combines art and corporate business.

“I’ll get a group of people in front of a work of art and I’ll ask every one of them to say the first thing they see,” Alvarez said. “Nine times out of 10 you’ve got almost everybody saying some­thing different. It’s this reminder that we all see the world slightly differently and art is a really great way to have those kinds of discussions about how we see it.”

The second half of the session takes place back at Catalyst Ranch where the group reviews the concepts discussed at the museum and works with Alvarez and the corporate facilitator to make solid connections between the art and their particular business issues.

Facilitators are contracted based on their area of specialization, and Catalyst Ranch chooses from a handful of those known as experts in corporate training. If the staff is having difficulty with communication, Alvarez and the corporate facilitator will choose artwork they feel will help the team fine-tune their communication skills, she said. If cooperation, diversity or other sensitive is­sues are plaguing the group, the co-facilitators can select works from the museum that will create an environment conducive for healthy discussion about the topic.

“The art is beautiful and it’s incredible but there are skills to be refined, discovered [and] honed that apply back to the daily way that group will work with each other,” Soeder said. “It causes people to feel safer because they’re directing their conflict to the art rather than to each other.”

Aside from simply being a means for learning age-old corporate lessons, Art-Work is designed to help employers keep their staffs thinking in creative, innovative ways. By having both an art ex­pert and a corporate guru on-hand, clients are exposed to a dichotomy they might not otherwise have thought to explore, Alvarez said.

“Our driving goal is to engage audiences that think they don’t have time ... for a museum, to realize that, maybe, they do,” she said. “It’s not about coming in with a degree in art history or being able to paint something or other. It goes beyond that.”

Though no Art-Work sessions have been scheduled yet, both the Art Institute and Catalyst Ranch are hopeful based on the history of satisfied clients they’ve each seen in the past. The Art Insti­tute has worked with other businesses, teachers and medical professionals in arts-related pro­grams, and Catalyst Ranch has hosted a slue of creative meetings and events for corporations across the country.

Amy Shannon said she was one of the first to bring her staff to an off-site meeting at Catalyst Ranch when it opened five years ago. Though it may take corporate-types a bit of time to feel comfortable in an arts environment, Shannon believes the Art-Work program has great potential for teambuilding.

“In some ways it puts people on a level playing field because I suspect there’s not too many [people] out there that are in fact themselves experts in the arts,” Shannon said. “It enables people to come at a conversation from a bit of a different slant than what they might normally.”

Monkey See, Monkey Duplicate

Researchers get stem cells from cloned monkeys.

clipped from www.reuters.com U.S. researchers have cloned monkeys and used the resulting embryos to get embryonic stem cells, an important step towards being able to do the same thing in humans, they reported on Wednesday. Shoukhrat Mitalipov and colleagues at Oregon Health & Science University said they used skin cells from monkeys to create cloned embryos, and then extracted embryonic stem cells from these days-old embryos. This had only been done in mice before, they reported in the journal Nature. Mitalipov had given sketchy details of his work at a conference in Australia in June, but the work has now been independently verified by another team of experts.

Why You Should Include a Joker in Every Brainstorming Session

IMAGE: Ganymedes Costagravas'

The Fast Interview: John Morreall on the link between humor and innovation, why authoritarian bosses fear humor, and the funniest CEO in America.

From: FastCompany.com | November 2007 | By: Kermit Pattison

clipped from www.fastcompany.com Humor makes us think more flexibly. People who think funny do better on creativity studies. To put it really simply, humor loosens up your brain to think of more possibilities and be more open to the wild and wacky ones. There is a guy at the State University of New York at Buffalo named Roger Firestien who has a center for the study of creativity. When he teaches brainstorming, he says you should put a joker in the group -- somebody who will come up with preposterous ideas. Very often that will stimulate people to come up with ideas that will work. Let me give you an example. A bunch of paint engineers were moaning and bitching about how hard it is to get paint off a house. read full interview >>

Assessing the impact of societal issues: A McKinsey Global Survey

It has been amazing to see terms such as "triple bottom line" and "social return on investment" move from the social sector into the boardroom. This global survey details how executives feel and think about the soft stuff that have hard business consequences.

clipped from www.mckinseyquarterly.com Executives expect the environment, including climate change, to affect shareholder value far more than any other societal issue during the next five years. Their concern now exceeds that of consumers. Most managers are personally worried about global warming. Only one in ten reports not worrying at all, and just 3 percent say they do not believe that it is happening. Corporate political influence and involvement, health care and other employee benefits, and job losses from offshoring also rank high on the sociopolitical agendas of business leaders. Executives indicate that companies are getting a little better at managing sociopolitical issues and understanding what the public expects of them.

Nancy Andreasen: On Creative People

Nancy Andreasen, M.D., Ph.D.

Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at The University of Iowa; Institute of Medicine member; Editor in Chief, The American Journal of Psychiatry; 2006 Vanderbilt Prize Winner for outstanding woman in biomedical research

As part of the Discovery Series Lectures, Andreasen speaks on life, literature, science, children, women and creativity. Although they may have moments of self-confidence coupled with self-doubt, she finds creative people as having a natural innocent and humility that drives them to push against themselves. They are not driven by a "prize". Most often, creative personalities are driven towards answering a question or creating something.

"They are driven," notes Andreasen "by a sense that they haven't gotten it quite right."

This sense of disquiet comes from a profound acknowledgment. "Most find that creativity is a gift. If you've got something that is a gift, you don't feel that it belongs to you. That's what keeps creative people humble."

See videos>>

Monkey Mind: Fast Kids, Slow Brain Growth & ADHD

PHOTO: Sita Magnuson

My friend David Owens, a brilliant professor, product innovator and currently CEO for Griffin Technology Inc., calls it "monkey mind". So do the practitioners of Buddhism (see Taming the Monkey Mind by Cheng Wei-an). The Monkey Mind Manual aptly describes the metaphor and dedicates an entire blog to the subject:

Monkey Mind is a Buddhist term that vividly describes the way our minds stay busy, keeping us away from inner peace and true happiness. I think it is the antithesis of mindfulness. At times I convince myself that my monkey is more agitated and on worse behavior than many: it usually jumps to conclusions, has wild swings of mood, and growls too frequently. Really, though, I'm not alone. Our monkeys are all prone to such behavior.

Monkey Mind is, of course, endemic to human beings of all chemical make-ups. However, it is a serious challenge to kids who brim with the energy and distraction of ADHD--not to mention their parents, teachers, siblings and police officers! Of course, some of us who like the way we operate wear the label as a badge of honor. (Sort of like John Belushi's character, in Animal House who wears a food-stained sweatshirt that simply reads: COLLEGE.)

Those of us with diagnosed (medically or culturally) as living with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or Hyperkinetic Disorder as officially known in the UK, are generally considered to be dealing with a developmental disorder, largely neurological in nature, affecting about 5% of the world's population. Researcher have mapped the disorder to other affects on the brain's development.

clipped from www.reuters.com Children and teenagers with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder have developmental delays of up to three years in some regions of the brain, U.S. researchers said on Monday. "The sequence in which different parts of the brain matured in the kids with ADHD was exactly the same as in healthy kids. It's just that everything was delayed by a couple of years," said Dr. Philip Shaw National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health. Shaw said the delays are most pronounced in regions of the brain that are important for controlling thought, attention and planning. ADHD is a condition suffered by about 2 million U.S. children that often becomes apparent in preschool and early school years. Children with ADHD have a tougher time controlling their behavior and paying attention. The finding was based on imaging studies involving 223 children and teens with ADHD and 223 without the disorder.

Manic Comic Preachers

This group of international comic artists and illustrators picks a theme (kittens, hobos, moustaches) and dips their quills into the surreal every Thursday night. The results are posted on their blog.

clipped from stldrawingclub.blogspot.com STL Drawing Club OUR SKETCHBOOKS WEIGH A TON WE DRAW EVERY THURSDAY NIGHT clipped from stldrawingclub.blogspot.com STL Drawing Club has gone global with the addition of Maximo "Max" Vento. Max is an up and coming graphic novelist who hails from Spain. His first book is due out in his homeland by the end of the year. Clean shaven, baby-faced Max gives us his take on our mustache theme. clipped from stldrawingclub.blogspot.com In honor of the upcoming FBC mustache ride we all drew mustache themed drawings last night. You know what that means!!! NOTE: I'm not crying in that self-portrait, those are eye boogers. Although YOU'D probably cry if you were driving a hot-rod made entirely out of your own mustache.