Category: Learning

The critical leverage point for an organization seeking more effective innovation is establishing new attitudes toward curiosity. Industrial organizations were optimized to extract value from tiny doses of curiosity and cannot tolerate larger doses. Today’s organizations require more frequent and intensive invention and innovation, which depends in turn on learning to foster and effectively channel curiosity in greater doses.

The industrial economy was driven off of very small doses of curiosity, carefully controlled and administered. New ideas were the province of either the senior-most leaders in an organization or their specifically designated deputies (industrial engineers, product designers, strategy consultants). Outside of this small cadre, the rest of the organization was charged with pulling on the oars and carrying out the execution of the designs created by this cadre. Industrial organizations are optimized to extract the maximum output from the least curiosity. Moreover, our schools and other social systems are built around throttling curiosity and channeling it into acceptable settings; isolating the most curious from the rest of the system. For those immersed in the industrial mindset, unfettered curiosity is a serious threat that operates at an emotional rather than rational level.

In the knowledge economy invention and innovation take a more central role. Success based on the ability to out-execute the competition is increasingly short-lived. The changing economics of information and communications technologies continue to drive down the costs of execution. They shorten the distance, in both time and money, between idea and execution. They also shorten the distance between innovation and duplication. The need for more systematic and effective invention and innovation is generally acknowledged. Curiosity is the necessary prerequisite and fuel for this invention and innovation.

Alan Kay tells a story of his days at Xerox PARC. The suits from headquarters in Stamford Connecticut had come to Palo Alto to inspect their investment in open-ended research. Alan carefully explained the nature and risks of research; that PARC was conducting experiments, that most experiments failed, but that even failures moved the research forward. The suits nodded politely, allowed as how they understood what Alan had said, and insisted that these experiments be designed to succeed.

Given the degree to which curiosity in most organizations is discouraged and often suppressed, the first task is to carefully reawaken it. Carefully, because too much curiosity will trigger corporate immune responses. Fortunately, despite all the best efforts of our school systems and organizational watch guards, the human animal remains fundamentally curious. We need to give permission for this curiosity to be engaged and protect its first cautious glimmerings.

Here is one place where RSS and blogging have an important, low threat level place inside the organization. Seth Godin captured this succinctly as quoted in Naked Conversations last year:

Not only are bloggers suckers for the remarkable, so are the people who read blogs,” said Godin. “This is the most curious segment of the population, the people who are seeking out the new and the useful. This is the audience that doesn’t need to be interrupted because they are already listening. They are alert, on the lookout for the next big thing. No need to yell. If you’ve invested the time and the energy and the guts to make something remarkable, this audience can’t wait to hear about it.

(Naked Conversations, Chapter 3, Word of Mouth on Steroids, p.40)

Find and encourage those in your organization who are already paying attention to do so a little more systematically. Encourage them to begin to pass along what they are finding to others who might also be interested.

The second task is to start channeling this nascent curiosity toward potentially useful deliverables that can be judged and evaluated. Incorporate an interesting discovery into the next presentation to a customer. Adapt a lesson learned to an improvement process about to launch. Craft a proposal to target a new customer or begin a joint effort with an adjacent department.

Understand that channeling curiosity is a leadership challenge not a management task. Like a parent with an inquisitive toddler, leaders need to allow room for exploration, risk bumps and scrapes (and possibly worse), and intervene only to avert real danger. If they opt to guide exploration into familiar paths, they will get familiar results.

If you are still unsure about the importance of curiosity, recall what Albert Einstein said toward the end of his life:

I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious.

 

There is an excellent discussion of learning as sensemaking going on over at Creating Passionate Users.  Dan Russell has a series of posts (Sensemaking 1, Sensemaking 2, Sensemaking 3) about his thoughts and practices when he takes on a new research based project. In addition to the value of Dan’s thoughts, each post has also sparked excellent discussion threads, which are also worth your time.

Here’s a definition of sensemaking that Russell gets to today:

Sensemaking is in many ways a search for the right organization or the right way to represent what you know about a topic. It’s data collection, analysis, organization and performing the task. [Sensemaking 3]

Sensemaking is a concept I’ve found useful and valuable in much of my work in organizations. I first encountered it in the writings of organizational theorist Karl Weick (e.g. .The Social Psychology of Organizing). Central to Weick and Russell’s thinking is that understanding is something you build over time as an active effort.

My sensemaking practices run along the following lines.

Data Immersion and Convergence. Like Russell and many of the commenters on his posts, immersing myself in the data is a primary component in my sensemaking practices. If I’m doing work inside an organization that includes getting my hands on whatever previous work I can find, public information, interviews, and keeping my eyes and ears open. I am a fan of Yogi Berra’s advice on this; “you can observe a lot just by watching.”

I’ll generally wrap up the initial data collection when things start to converge and get repetitive. Sometimes, this represents a plateau and more data collection will be needed later. More often than not, I have reached to point of diminishing returns and more data by itself won’t help.

Mindmapping and Issue Finding. I’ll draw a variety of mindmaps over the course of most projects. In them, I try out various ways of organizing and relating what I currently know and don’t know. In particular, I’m looking for issues and themes that provide a way to account for the data. With the advent of good software tools for mindmapping (e.g, MindManager), I have started to use my mindmaps as the primary tool to organize and link to the various data I am collecting.

Trip Reports. I’ve mentioned trip reports before as one of my sensemaking habits. At the end of a day collecting data I write myself a memo trying to understand what I might have learned. In my early days as a doctoral student, these were Word documents. They’ve since morphed into private blog entries. They are not transcriptions of my interview notes. Rather, they are first attempts to put my thoughts into story form.

Pictures and Diagrams. Stories are one form of sensemaking, pictures are another. I will play with various kinds of pictures and block diagrams to see what they might reveal about the subject at hand. I almost always start with hand drawn diagrams. If I need to share the drawing, I’ll create an electronic version in Visio. One problem that I sometimes encounter with sharing diagrams in Visio is that they may appear more “precise” than warranted. A partial solution I have had some success with is to use a font called Charette courtesy of the folks at Mindjet. This is a font the mimics the hand-lettering you might see on blueprints and helps convey the notion that what you are looking at should be seen as provisional and subject to revision and elaboration.