Posts Tagged: innovation

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1
Aug 10

Innovation Principle #1

Metacool says the first principle of innovation is:

“constantly seek to experience the world instead of talking about experiencing the world”

Certainly learn from others, but it reminds me of #9 in Bre Pettis’s Done Manifesto:

“People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.”

To make real advances, to innovate and to learn, will require that you try, fail, and try again. It’s called experimentation. And as they said at Grumman Aerospace in the 60′s, “1 good test is worth a 1000 expert opinions”.

Amen.

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4
Jul 10

Least qualified for

I love this question: “what would happen if everyone on the team did the job they were least qualified for & spent half their time helping others?” @KentBeck

Here’s what I think would happen:

  • The completion of work would slow down for a couple weeks. Maybe a month.
  • New talents would form.
  • Inter-team communication, understanding, and empathy would get amazingly good.
  • Cross training would actually happen, and single-points-of-failure would disappear.
  • The business would see fewer things down because ___ was on vacation.
  • Then the completion of work would start happening faster than it ever had before.
  • And new ideas for old problems would start cropping up all over the place.
  • And a whole bunch of “broken” things would get fixed (poor processes, kludgy systems, etc).
  • And the team would re- self organize, and perform like never has before.

It would be brilliant.

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21
May 10

The Playful World

I’ve been reading The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming our Imagination (you’ll have to read it slowly — it’s kinda dense):

“A tendency to overvalue the ends of technology has become one of the most persistent features of these heady times, but so much technology has been piling up for so long that we are now beginning to see how it transforms the way we thing. We are different for using it. This qualitative change can be seen most clearly in the World Wide Web, which grew from a simple, if subtle, idea into a global unification of all human knowledge, and, perhaps, a catalogue of human experience. Confronted with a space of ideas that has grown well beyond the ability of any person to “know” it, we find ourselves navigators in a familiar but impossibly vast sea of facts, figures, and fiction. Every individual who has become a web surfer has changed the way he thinks and the way he uses knowledge. Every business, as it encounters the Web, changes completely.“

[emphasis added]

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28
Apr 10

Why Businesses Don’t Experiment

Harvard Business Review:

“Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.”

The same can be seen with fighting fires: They don’t want to try something and fail, and they don’t want to be at fault if they do fail … so hire consultants!

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8
Apr 10

iPad for Techies

Alex Payne:

“if you work in tech, you should spend some time with an iPad. If it doesn’t change the way you think about what you do, you’re either a genius or an idiot.”

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