Posts Tagged: education

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10
Jun 10

Knowledge vs Searching for Knowledge

Mark Pesce in his book The Playful World:

“For [the millennial child] the act of knowing something has become inseparable from the act of reaching for knowledge. She searches for what she needs to know; in a moment’s time, the answers are at hand. And anything known to anyone anywhere has become indistinguishable from what she knows for herself.”

Memorizing certain things has it’s value, but if you have the skills to find the answer to anything in 30 seconds using the smartphone in your pocket, what things are really worth memorizing? There are two things we should teach: the skill of searching and finding (ie, how to learn) and the skill to evaluate the quality of your sources. That’s it. Research and critical analysis.

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23
Mar 10

On Unleashing Innovation

Matthew E May (who wrote about Toyota’s production system in his book, In Pursuit Of Elegance) has some nice tips for innovation. My favorite is the first on his list of 10 tips for unleashing innovation:

“Let Learning Lead. Learning and innovation go hand in hand, but learning comes first. Learning is defined as the creation of new knowledge through experimentation.”

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29
Nov 09

Make More Mistakes

Pillar on Are You Building a Learning Suppression System?:

“You can’t learn anything from doing something right. If you did it right, you merely confirmed that what you already knew or believed was correct. Nothing learned. But if you make a mistake, you can identify it and correct it.”

And then identifies to types of mistakes: commission (doing what you shouldn’t have) and omission (not doing what you should have).

“Errors of omission signify a lack of innovation in your team. Maybe someone thought of a better way but was afraid to say anything. Or maybe nobody even thought about it.”

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3
Sep 09

Create a Vision and Reward Failures #agile2009

Jared Spool, a Researcher for User Interface Engineering, gave the closing keynote to the Agile 2009 conference. He had an informative and entertaining talk about what UIE has found with their research.

He used this video from Apple on the “Apple Computer Knowledge Navigator” as an example of a good experience vision and discussed how it directs the actions of the company. Here is a short write-up from Forrester on the talk. Of about 200 different company attributes, the UIE research found that the following three were the most useful in predicting long term success:

VISION – Can everyone on your team describe the experience of using your design 5 years from now?

FEEDBACK – In the last six weeks, have you spent more than 2 hours watching someone use your or a competitors design?

CULTURE – In the last six weeks, have you rewarded a team member for creating a major design failure?

The first two are (I think) rather self explanatory, however the 3rd has gotten double-takes for everyone I’ve discussed with. The theory is really pretty straight forward: discovering a major design failure is to be celebrated because it is informative. If the culture of an organization celebrates learning, then you will find learning occurs both with successes and with failures. Wonderful point of view.

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7
Jan 09

Five Traits of Innovative Companies

BusinessWeek recently interviewed Rajesh Chandy, Professor of Marketing at the U of M. Chandy identified five common traits of innovative companies in his recent paper, ”Radical Innovation Across Nations: The Pre-eminence of Corporate Culture.” Perhaps somewhat surprising, he found that corporate culture was the driving influence on wether your company was innovative or not.

Those five traits are:

  • Future Market Orientation – how much your managers and execs talk about what will be vs what is. Think about “the extent to which a firm emphasizes, in its market research activities, customers and competitors who are not currently in the markets it serves.”
  • Willingness to Cannibalize – how willing you are to destroy something you fought for (or created) in order to create something new. In paper format, this “is an attitude that puts up for review and sacrifice current profit-generating assets, including current profitable and successful innovations, so that the firm can get ahead with the next generation of innovations”
  • Tolerance for Risk – The more you are willing to take calculated risk, the more innovative you will be. 
  • Incentives for Enterprise – Innovative companies reward employee’s success in a significant way, and failure comes with only a mild reprimand. “By this practice, the firm refrains from rewarding only or primarily seniority or management of current products. Rather, it ensures that adequate if not large incentives are reserved for employees who venture to explore or build new enterprises for the firm.”
  • Empowering Product Champions – “By this practice, a firm empowers an individual with resources to explore, research, and build on promising but uncertain, future technologies. In effect, it embeds within the firm the enterprising spirit that enabled it to initiate the original innovation that brought it success.”

These rung rather true for me. 

Chandy ended the interview with Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina line: Just like “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,” innovative companies are all alike and un-innovative companies lack innovative in their own special way.

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