Category: Innovation
Complex Problems Require Rapid Experiments
“Multiple iterations almost always beat a single-minded commitment to building your first idea” – Peter Skillman Most of you will have taken part in the Marshmallow Challenge or a variant of it. It’s the team exercise where you get a load of spaghetti, some tape, a marshmallow, a piece of string, and 18 minutes to ...
Do You Default To Simplicity – Or Complexity?
Although it doesn’t show up explicitly in any personality test, some people seem to be more prone to creating complexity than others. Instead of cutting to the heart of an issue, they tangle it further; rather than narrowing down projects, they allow the scope to keep expanding –Ron Ashkenas Are you a simplifier or a ...
Know Your Customers, Just Never Ask Them What They Want
We do not really know what our potential users will really respond to, what they will understand or what they’ll hate until we really see them using it –Jonathan Courtney If you are working on any new service change or product there’s one question I guarantee will be asked of you at some point: “What ...
Why We Solve The Wrong Problems
Everywhere I look I see organisations and people investing heavily in new initiatives, transformation, and change programmes. And in almost every case the goals will never be met. One of the most crucial causes of the failure? The right questions were never asked at the outset. We default to ideas and plans. Too many of which ...
Embracing Challenge to Build a Stronger Innovation Culture
Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any antibodies. Add something new and it can get rejected. As Chris Bolton has written organisations can have immune systems and idea antibodies. As Chris says – It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism. ...
Why Collaboration Does Not Equal Innovation
Transformation can’t happen without discovery and discovery can’t happen without experimentation. It’s a new year and at Bromford we are planning a reboot of our approach to innovation (actually we are planning a reboot of everything). My emerging thoughts are we need less talk of accelerated fast fail innovation and more a systemic and systematic ...
Most Services Launched This Year Will Fail – Here’s Why
According to Clayton Christensen , 30,000 new consumer products are launched every year—and 95% of them fail. There’s no equivalent figure available for the public or social sectors – but I’ve been wondering how many services have been launched in 2016 and how many will have met their objectives by next Christmas. In the social ...
How To Fast Track Innovation
If you speak at conferences about innovation you’ll almost always encounter some frustrated people. They approach you at the end, or contact you a few days later. They often have one thing in common. They, and others like them , have ideas that are being shut down because they don’t fit the system. They tend not ...
Using Design Principles to Describe What Transformation Means
Digital transformation to me is about the transformation of organisations from silos, outsourced capability and murky strategic goals, to being an organisation that understands the vision, that knows where it delivers the most value and how to focus on it – Michael Brunton-Spall Right now – if my backchannel Twitter conversations are to be believed – ...
Lessons in Rapid Experiments and Learning from Failure
In 1943, the U.S. Airforce met with Lockheed Aircraft Corporation to express their need for a fighter plane to counter a rapidly growing Nazi jet threat. Because of the need for secrecy “Skunk Works”, as it became known, was allowed to operate undercover. No rules and no bureaucracy that could stifle innovation and hinder progress. ...
