Archive for the ‘complexity’ Category

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The complexity of sales & marketing… it’s comedic

Tuesday, June 2nd, 2009

Peering up at the title, you might be expecting this post to be funny. It probably won’t work out that way…

I read Matt Ruby’s Sandpaper Suit comedy blog regularly, and yesterday’s entry was really terrific. He discussed Conan O’Brien’s first show as host of “The Tonight Show” and pointed out some really important characteristics of good comedy:

[O'Brien spoke in an interview about the challenges in hosting a nightly TV show:] “…There are 35 variables every night — what comedy do we have? What’s the audience like? Who are the guests? What time of year is it? What’s my mood? You need 15 cherries to line up to pay out the jackpot. And, every now and then, the stars align. And you keep chasing after that feeling.”

[Ruby writes:] All those variables are what make standup [comedy] so fascinating. So many things play a role: the room, the PA, the crowd, the host, your confidence, the placement of each word, little variations in timing, etc. It feels almost impossible to come up with a fixed formula because there are so many moving parts. But yeah, when you hit it and really lock in, there’s nothing quite like it.

This is a good a description of complexity in business as I’ve read anywhere. Just like in comedy, when you release a new product, or enter a new market, there are 35 variables, none of which you can control. Ruby’s comment is worth repeating: “It feels almost impossible to come up with a fixed formula because there are so many moving parts.”

So, like the comedian, the salesperson or the product manager or the channel manager has to deal with those 35 variables, work within them, try stuff out, sense what’s working and continue that, abandon quickly what’s not working, and try to get the stars to align. Failure is not only an option, it’s possible and even likely in some circumstances. Business these days is not easy, but when it comes together, it’s beautiful, not least because it’s so difficult to do well, like a comedy act or “The Tonight Show.”

Now, did you ever hear the one about the traveling salesman…?

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The voices say: time to read "War and Peace"

Sunday, November 2nd, 2008

Sometimes something tiny can influence us, such as a Tweet–this one:

Increasingly amazed (and worried) at the number of people I know and respect who do not read novels.

Then today I read this blog post: “Tolstoi’s Guide to Complexity,” about “War and Peace.” The post’s author, Jochum Stienstra, writes eloquently about how the book has influenced his thinking since he read it fourteen years ago.

Okay, I said. This is a message to me. Time to put aside the stack of unread business books and spend a little sabbatical reading an old classic. I’ve picked up and put down “War and Peace” perhaps ten times. Never read it.

Now it’s time. I dug my old Signet Classic edition out of the box and cracked it open. Again.

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"Innovator’s Guide to Growth": readable, productive prescriptions for disruptive innovation

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

I didn’t really understand Clayton Christensen’s “The Innovator’s Dilemma” when I read it many years ago. Perhaps like a lot of people employed by large companies, I suffered “innovator’s myopia.” But after experiencing disruptive products like Skype, Linux and salesforce.com it started to make more sense to me.

Christensen and his followers are still preaching the disruptive innovation gospel, and now, with “The Innovator’s Guide to Growth” I am finally getting the picture.

It’s the size and shape of a textbook, and works as one. Written by Mark Johnson, Scott Anthony and Joseph Sinfield, along with Motorola’s Elizabeth Altman, “The Innovator’s Guide” provides a rigorous introduction and a process for nurturing disruptive innovation. It guides a company through identifying opportunities, developing ideas, devising strategies, and deploying them.

There are no magic bullets presented–the core strategy, to find innovations that fundamentally reshape markets, is still difficult for market leaders to follow. Leaders’ instincts are to protect market share and “feature up” their products, precisely the wrong approaches to disrupt a market.

One tenet of disruptive innovation is to target “overshot” customers. These customers have grown disenchanted with the continual upgrades of a product and won’t pay more for new features. It occured to me that users of Microsoft Windows Vista–a huge product that just isn’t exciting anyone (and annoying many)–are just such overshot customers.

The chapter entitled “Mastering Emergent Strategies” was worth the price of the book alone. Referencing the work of Rita Gunther McGrath and alluding to managerial complexity as elaborated by Boone and Snowden in a recent HBR article, it lays out the case for an iterative approach to planning as opposed to an all-out march to a clearly-defined objective.

The authors define three critical steps for iterative planning: (1) identifying areas of uncertainty, (2) performing “smart experiments” and (3) adjusting and reflecting.

The rest of the book is similarly insightful. If you’re an innovator, or need to be one, this book should stay on your bookshelf as a valuable reference for many years.

Related posts:
Use your strategy to drive your acquisitions and vice versa
Rita Gunther McGrath

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Slow learner

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

I was talking to my old college roommate today and he was explaining the challenges of raising a teenager. “I told my daughter pretty clearly she needed to do something. I thought we had an agreement. Three days later she was doing 180 degrees different from what I asked. I said, ‘I told you to do something different and yet you’re doing this instead.’ And she said, ‘Yes, I thought about what you said, but decided that it wouldn’t work for me.’”

This reminded me of my days as a programmer. When a manager looked over my shoulder and started to micromanage, for example, saying “try this,” or “type this command now” or “don’t forget to do this.” I nodded politely, waited for him to leave and did it my own way.

The funny thing is that when I managed, I was often just like the ineffective manager who told me what code to write. In other words, I tried to work through my people, instead of letting them work. When I wrote the code, I had control. When someone else wrote the code, but worked for me, I thought I still had control. In retrospect, I treated management as an ordered rather than a complex system.

This is one of the problems with the promotion into management. The skills you need are so radically different that when pressed you revert back to what you know. Which is doing it yourself (or trying to do it yourself via another person). Can’t be done. Staffers are not marionettes.

It took me years to realize the lack of control I had, and to trust the people more. But I’m not sure I ever learned that lesson completely.

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What in hell do stories have to do with innovation?

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

Regular readers may be tiring of the constant barrage of story-related posts, or at minimum be trying to figure out how they relate to the title of this blog. Here are some words that I hope tie it together.

More and more products are launched and evolve in an iterative fashion. Version 1 does this, version 2 does that, and version 3 finally hits the mark and becomes the standard (exhibit A: Windows). Those iteration windows are becoming tighter, so good information as a basis of planning product changes is invaluable. Google in particular has turned this approach into an art form.

There are more and more ways to get feedback directly from users. Forums, call centers, social networks, Twitter, etc., etc., allow users to communicate their likes and dislikes about a product.

Now, to storytelling. Most business applications of storytelling focus on communicating outward–developing a story that helps communicate the essence or benefits of your product or company. Steve Denning, in his recent book “The Secret Language of Leadership” calls these indirect stories–stories that inspire stories in the mind of the reader or listener. Indirect stories are necessarily incomplete–they are not meant to immerse the listener in an experience (like, say, Harry Potter does). They are meant to create empathy and consensus.

What I’m talking about (as are Shawn Callahan & Mark Schenck of Anecdote, Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge and others) is inverting that model.

In addition to crafting stories and sending them out toward customers, staff, etc., what if we listen to the indirect stories coming from them? They are also necessarily incomplete–mere anecdotes–but if you gather a few dozen, a few hundred, or a few thousand, common themes and threads will become evident. To invert Denning’s language, there’s the possibility of inspiring stories in the mind of the company.

These stories might say things like:

  • People find our product really hard to use.
  • Feature X of our product is proving more valuable than we expected.
  • A group of people are using our product in an interesting way that we didn’t anticipate.

As a product manager, the above stories are very important to me. They help orient me toward things I should do to improve product packaging, add or delete features, alter its marketing message or improve its customer service or technical support. Also, the user stories are pre-hypothesis, meaning that they are free of bias that can come via hypothesis-based approaches such as surveys. They are not adulterated by groupthink, as can happen with focus groups. They are the voice of the customer.

None of the individual anecdotes may send clear messages about where innovation is working and where it isn’t. But the accrual of them can do so.

Companies don’t use this resource to improve innovation. They should.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

(For a powerful example of the accrual of “indirect” stories to create a compelling, nuanced, overall story, please refer to this earlier post on Haruki Murakami’s “Underground.”)

Related Post:
Stories that people tell about products are invaluable

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Posted in complexity, innovation, narrative, product management, sensemaking, storytelling, what-in-hell-is | Comments

Female guru alert: Amy Edmondson in July/Aug HBR

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Amy Edmondson of Harvard Business School appeared on our recent list of Overlooked Female Business Gurus, and she has also published an article in the July/August Harvard Business Review. Titled “The Competitive Imperative of Learning,” it’s a blockbuster that will cement her position on the guru list for some time to come.

Edmondson persuasively argues that a focus on efficiency in most companies chokes off resources for innovation and learning and creates an environment of harried, fearful employees rushing from task to task. Sound familiar?

In such an environment, given that the business, market and competitive playing field are changing continuously, the certainty is that the company will lack the learning, vision and insight to adapt itself to new realities. In essence, it will become a highly-efficient producer of last year’s products and services. The market will have moved on.

Edmondson’s work complements that of Dave Snowden and Mary Boone on the Cynefin Framework. Snowden & Boone describe simple and complex business contexts and the challenges these different contexts pose to managerial decisionmaking. In simple contexts, best practices and efficiency are the tools for success. But in complex contexts, learning, experimentation and adaptation are key.

As Edmondson points out, “the influx of knowledge in most fields makes it easy to fall behind.” In other words, the space where competitiveness is created today is the complex space.

Three key inhibitors to learning environments are time, safety and review. Efficiency-based companies don’t allow time to think and reflect–the emphasis is on processing and dispatching tasks quickly. (Gary Hamel discussed this issue nicely in “The Future of Management.”)

And few companies provide the psychological safety required in a learning environment. Learning requires failure, failure is stigmatized, therefore people try to avoid it. Or if it’s unavoidable, it is covered up or played down.

I can tell you based on my work to date on The Mistake Bank that psychological safety is a big issue. I have had numerous dialogues with colleagues, members, mentors, etc., which have involved the ramifications if someone were to discover the mistake the person has contributed to The Mistake Bank.

[My position on that matter is this: people who admit mistakes are more valuable to companies, customers and colleagues than those who don't--because we all know that everyone makes mistakes. No exceptions.]

Finally, Edmondson emphasizes the need for disciplined reflection and review. By evaluating, discussing and communicating the results of new ways of doing things, companies achieve the payoff of experimentation. My experience is that most companies don’t like to look back.

There’s a lot more to the article than I’ve discussed here. Read it when you have some time to think and reflect! (Better yet, talk about it with a colleague.)

Related posts:
Great innovation requires great teams
Leaders need to manage complexity
Toyota excels by revealing hidden problems
Stop studying the problem and just try something!
On Gary Hamel’s “The Future of Management”
For consultants, adopting the “Google 20%” is vital

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Posted in Harvard Business Review, collaboration, complexity, decisionmaking, innovation, learning, teamwork | Comments

Stories that people tell about products are invaluable

Friday, June 13th, 2008

I was listening to a Dave Snowden talk today, and this bit jumped out:

We’re capturing 150,000 stories a week from people as they consume a product. Because the stories that people tell as they have an experience are far more significant than customer satisfaction surveys.

Also this:

What people love… is numbers backed up by stories–numbers on their own, stories on their own have deficiencies. But numbers backed up by stories is quite powerful.

This idea–capturing & sorting stories from users to see how products are doing and how they can be improved–is something I’ve been messing with a bit, and it’s good to hear that this isn’t brand-new.

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Posted in complexity, narrative, product management, sensemaking | Comments

An important definition of sensemaking

Saturday, June 7th, 2008

In trying to talk to companies about using narrative techniques and other ways to mine the non-quantitative data they have but never make use of, especially for strategy and innovation, this post from Dave Snowden will be a significant asset.

Sensemaking is the alchemical step where the mess is sorted through and the themes, threads and weak signals are detected and clarified. From there, people can make decisions and act.

In other words, it’s the most important step.

Related post:
HBR article demonstrates that leaders need to manage complexity

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To progress in complex environments, experiment

Friday, May 16th, 2008

I was talking to my wife tonight about a discovery I’ll call the “Mistake Bank Manifesto” which I’ll post about later. The upshot of what I was saying is that the folks who wrote the Mistake Bank Manifesto (I named it, others created it) asserted that learning from mistakes, while exceptionally useful to senior leadership teams, is often highly unnatural for very successful leaders.

I disagree, said my wife. Most of the successful people I know are very good students of failure.

So I faced a conundrum. The experts from Harvard and the Hay Group said one thing, my wife (the Vice President of Common Sense) said the opposite. So I thought on it a moment. Then: aha!

I said, successful entrepreneurs tend to be students of failure. But those who rise through a corporate hierarchy don’t confront failures often (usually the results of corporate initiatives are ambiguous at best, and invariably termed successes of some sort), so for them learning from failure is unnatural. That’s what the book was saying.

OK, I’ll agree with that, said the VP of Common Sense.

This is an exceptionally long prelude to a post today from Dave Snowden at Cognitive Edge (Shawn Callahan at Anecdote has already posted a thoughtful reaction to this post) on “Coherence and Uncertainty” or, as I interpreted it, when the outcome is uncertain, try something to aim you toward your objective–in other words, experiment. (Dave calls these safe-fail probes.)

Experiments are probably worthwhile, according to Dave, when they are “coherent” (or consistent with what has happened or could happen), relatively cheap, and will provide useful learning even if they don’t succeed.

Which brings me back to the entrepreneur/corporate question. Entrepreneurs tend to have an objective, may be willing to use many different ways to reach it–but in the service of some coherent vision. Experimentation is natural for them. They usually don’t have much money. They are resilient. And they hunger to learn. Safe-fail for them is a way of life.

Corporate types? Well, no. The whole safe-fail approach is alien to the corporate environment. Heard the phrase “paralysis by analysis”? If you work in a large company you’ll hear it weekly. Creating the environment for creative experimentation will require a cultural shift in how companies view their workers and vice versa.

Who’s ready to get started?

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Posted in complexity, decisionmaking, experimentation, leadership, management, organizational behavior | Comments

Scott Berkun on learning from mistakes

Thursday, March 13th, 2008

While working on The Mistake Bank, I found this essay by Scott Berkun, author of books like “The Myths of Innovation.” Upon reading it, I was struck by how well-articulated his arguments are and how closely his thinking relates to what we’re trying to do with The Mistake Bank.

It starts off like this:

You can only learn from a mistake after you admit you’ve made it. As soon as you start blaming other people (or the universe itself) you distance yourself from any possible lesson. But if you courageously stand up and honestly say “This is my mistake and I am responsible” the possibilities for learning will move towards you. Admission of a mistake, even if only privately to yourself, makes learning possible by moving the focus away from blame assignment and towards understanding. Wise people admit their mistakes easily. They know progress accelerates when they do.

And there’s lots more. The section entitled “How to Handle Complex Mistakes” is particularly relevant–as is his discussion on the importance of keeping a sense of humor about yourself. Please give Scott’s essay a read, and please visit The Mistake Bank to see some stories and create some yourself!

Related:
Announcing The Mistake Bank
Mistake Bank #12 – Don’t Forget About Support!
Great Innovation Requires…Acceptance of Mistakes
Learning From Mistakes, Part 72

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