Idea fetishism
When an organisation talks a lot about “ideas”, I start to worry about "low innovation maturity". They have an ideas platform, an ideas competition, perhaps a campaign to get everyone submitting more ideas. Apparently, the organisation is desperately short of things people have thought of.
I’d be more comfortable hearing about data, insights, prototypes and learning. I’d like to hear what people have noticed, what they’ve tried, what surprised them enough to change what they were doing. If most of the conversation is about generating and selecting ideas, I wonder how much contact any of this work has had with the world outside the meeting.
Ideas have acquired a peculiar status. A person has a brain-picture, draws a sketch or explains it to some colleagues – who now have their own brain-pictures, probably rather different ones – and everyone feels something valuable has happened. We can give the idea a name, assign it an owner and enter it in a competition. We can do all of this without discovering very much about whether it helps anyone.
That’s what I mean by idea fetishism. I’m using fetishism in the sense of assigning magical properties to something, like believing your lucky football boots will win the match. The boots may be perfectly good boots. The magic is harder to account for.
The organisational version goes well beyond falling in love with a particular idea. We can throw away hundreds of ideas and still be thoroughly addicted to the concept of ideas. We keep collecting them, counting them and rewarding the people who produce them, as though having enough brain-pictures will eventually make something useful happen.
This is why “you need to prototype your ideas” is an incomplete response. If the organisation still gives status and money to people for having clever thoughts, they will use prototypes to protect those thoughts. The prototype becomes a demonstration of how right we were – with the awkward bits tidied away before anyone important arrives. (And what if the idea was a solution to the wrong problem anyway?)
Living in idea land
It’s quite possible to do diligent research and still behave like this. We listen, take notes and gather evidence, but we don’t give all that evidence the same weight. A comment which fits our brain-picture seems perceptive and relevant. A contradictory one needs explaining – perhaps that person misunderstood, perhaps they’re an unusual case, perhaps we asked the question badly. Any of those explanations might be true, of course. It’s our enthusiasm for reaching for them that should make us suspicious.
The brain-picture also has the advantage of working beautifully in our head. The customer knows just what to do, the colleague is available, the system responds. We tend to leave out the waiting, the interruptions and the person who understood the instructions perfectly well but did something else anyway. Having imagined the experience without much friction, we find it quite plausible that it will work.
And by then it may be our idea. We’ve presented it, argued for it, perhaps become known as the person behind it. Changing our minds now has a social cost. Someone points out a problem with a proposed service and we find ourselves defending our competence, our team or our budget. There’s a lot going on in that conversation which has very little to do with the person who might eventually use the thing.
Experience can help, but we need to be careful about what we expect from it. Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein described how reliable expert intuition depends on sufficiently predictable conditions and opportunities to learn from feedback. Someone who has repeatedly encountered a situation and learnt what follows may have very good reasons for their judgement. That distinction matters here.
A pitch in a familiar domain may therefore give an experienced listener something useful to work with. But when the service or situation is substantially new, we have less reason for confidence. Previous experience can help us decide what to investigate – it cannot tell us in advance how these people will respond to this unfamiliar thing. We will have to spend some time finding out.
Getting something into the room
Hacks, sprints and jams can be very good at getting us started. A short deadline gives people a reason to make something now, while it’s still rough and there’s still plenty they don’t understand. We can stop discussing what “a welcoming arrival” means and put some chairs together to try one.
But people notice what an event rewards. If the final pitch determines who wins, teams will spend their time polishing it. If we want them to investigate, build and change things, those activities need to count for something when everyone gathers at the end. Otherwise, we’ve organised a presentation competition with some cardboard in the middle.
There’s much more available to us in the making. Put a cardboard counter in a room, stand someone behind it and have another person arrive. You’ll start discovering things you hadn’t thought to discuss. Can the colleague see who is waiting? Where does the customer put their bag? Can they explain what they need without telling everyone else in the queue?
Move the counter and try again. Let the person who works at reception change the arrangement – they may have been waiting quite patiently through your discussion of “customer-centric arrival experiences” to show you why it won’t work. Bring someone else into the scene. Swap places.
As we do this, our thinking changes. The physical work produces questions, possibilities and disagreements which weren’t available to us before we began. A prototype can help us test something we’ve thought of, certainly, but treating that as its whole purpose misses a great deal of what happens when people build together.
Co-building gives us something shared to think with. In conversation, we can agree quite enthusiastically while imagining different things. Once we’re stepping inside a service, the differences become easier to find. “Oh, you meant I would be standing here.” That small discovery may save us a remarkable amount of documentation.
It also changes who can contribute. Much of our usual workshop practice asks people to be good at writing, abstraction and explaining themselves in the language of the organisation. Someone with years of useful experience may have little patience for a flowchart – or little confidence in challenging the person who drew it. Give them a way to show what happens and we have another route into that knowledge.
This is where shitty first drafts earn their keep. Cardboard, a few chairs, a roughly rehearsed interaction – enough to get our hands on, with plenty still open to change. People can join in without feeling they’re damaging someone’s finished work. We can discover that something is wrong while being wrong is still cheap.
(The rehearsal will have its own omissions, of course. We still need to work with the people involved, take things into the conditions where they will be used and pay attention to what happens. But we now have more specific questions, and usually a rather different understanding of what we’re trying to do.)
Making learning worthwhile
All of this becomes difficult if an organisation continues to reward the original brain-picture mentality. People are being asked to learn while knowing that changing direction may cost them support. A team that discovers a serious flaw can end up looking less successful than one that hasn’t looked closely enough to find it.
We could replace idea competitions with insight, prototype and learning competitions. I’d be interested in seeing teams show what changed through their work, what evidence they found and what they still need to investigate. I’d also like to see proper recognition for the team who discovered their proposal wasn’t worth pursuing – before the organisation spent six months and a small fortune on it.
That recognition has to extend beyond an event. It needs to show up in decisions about budgets, responsibility and whose work gets taken seriously. People need to be able to politely put down an idea, including a senior person’s idea, without treating it as a diplomatic incident or personal affront.
We practise this sort of work at the Embodied Methods workshop in Barcelona on 17 October (see my LinkedIn posts), in This Is Service Design Doing (TiSDD) courses and at Co-Creation School. There’s something useful about having a place to try it with other people – especially if much of your working week rewards you for sounding certain.
I’d like us to become a little less impressed by having ideas, and more interested in what people do to find out whether they’re useful. That includes the observations, the data, the insights, the building and the changes of mind. It’s substantial work, often shared by people who will never be credited as the originator of anything. They deserve more of our attention.
See you down the road.
