10 Types of Innovation

The age of useful books is upon us. Alex Osterwalder remade the world by breaking through the dam of crappy consulting books with no visuals and a massive yawn factor after page 20. Thank goodness too because Larry Keeley, cofounder of the pathbreaking firm Doblin and my former professor and former employer has just published his book in the category of useful tools and he deserved a more receptive ground for this kind of tool. Ten Types of Innovation: The discipline of building breakthroughs is ingrained into my approach to the world of innovation but it is refreshing to review it again.

Larry and his co-authors Helen Walters, Brian Quinn and Ryan Pikkel did a terrific job of keeping the work out of the weeds to avoid, as Larry so often says, "making perfect the enemy of the good." This book is more than good, I have applied to Otabo's business and transformed the B2B experience in shoe manufacturing. I am indebted to Larry's wisdom and to the what you will find in the pages of the book.

Grab a copy of Ten Types of Innovation: The discipline of building breakthroughs

What you don't know about time

Experiences happen over time and experience designers are obsessed with how their designs play out over time and what people experience but after my recent agony with Comcast I realized that the value of time to the customer is not something I have seen teased apart. Time is relative, right? We know it can go fast or slow based on the experience we are having but what is the value of time to your customer?

You can read the background story of my trying, unsuccessfully, for almost 2 hours to sign up for Comcast services. I signed up for my electricity service in under 10 minutes. Now that should be pretty embarrassing for Comcast.

I do want to say that I appreciate, deeply, the challenges and the commitment Comcast has to making this experience better. It has gotten better but this experience is an exemplar of how far it has to go. It impacts me deeply because of my own work and the impact it has on people's lives.

How much time do we have?
I did some math and basically, if you have kids you likely have about 0-6 hours of personal time for choice activities, things that you want to do that you are not paid for. Without kids and with one job you are probably around 12-23 hours.  My free time is probably around 20 hours right now but I still spend a lot of that working on side projects.

How did Comcast impact me over those 2 hours?
Took 10% of my free time this week, time I meant to spent on my dream projects
Made me late to a dinner party
Took my time to shower for the party
Time for some chores to improve my home life
The value they had built with me at my other home

Comcast left me unserved, frustrated, making me a frustrated driver who told everyone at the party how awful they were. I don't want that for the work I do.

What I missed most was the priceless time when I my body is comfortable, my mind free and in rhythm to write. It is a very priceless time for me. Blood sugar and brain all lined up. It hit me then, time for most people, is not valued in dollars, it is valued by desirable experiences. That is what we mean when we say free time is so valuable. It is measured in time with friends, smiles, hugs, meals, stress, peach, joy, knowledge, all rich and powerful currency.

When you think about it that way, you can see how solving for that precious time makes businesses ripe for disruption. This post and the others like it are the sound of inevitability for cable. Think about some other giants that have fallen recently. Blockbuster, Microsoft, even Apple now faces potential disruption because their data management sucks and other companies are learning how design or at the very least, benchmark. Watch out majors because time, technology, audacity, funding, and most importantly, disrespecting people's most valued experience currency is going to kick your ass.

BACKGROUND STORY
Tone
First, I enjoyed the casual tone and politeness of the agent I was instant messaging with. Unfortunately, if you miss my goals as a customer then you have wasted everyone's time.

Choice
The access to someone for so long felt like a luxury till the agent starting steering me towards bad packages and extra services without trying to understand what I needed.

Trust
She almost cost me 24 months of free HBO, just about the only reason I was adding TV to the package. Ugh. Ok, so I can't trust her to help me choose.

Overcharging
Once I had chosen the package I chose the store pick up and self install option but was charged $30 install fee in my bill. When I asked the agent said "No! It is not an installation fee." But it said that on my bill...

Setup
I accepted the installation charges as it had been over an hour of working with the agent and it was getting old but when I went to log into my account I was unable.

Remedy?
The next agent, agent #2, said he could see that I signed up for phone service, I had not. When pressed he said he could not see my order. 20 minutes later I was on with another agent who asked me for the package I had ordered and it became clear that he was trying to place my order again. I was dumb struck. 

In the mean time, agent #1 called me to give me my work order and account number... uh, ok. So you have a work order, I have 2 versions of my bill and you can't sign me up. Wow.

Escalation
Agent #3 asked me how it was going and when I said bad, he told me not to worry, I could rest assured that I would get their services in the end. Really? Wow, you can figure out how to take my money? A miracle! Huzzah!

Turns out he couldn't.

The wait goes on.

Experience Architecture

An important talk on experience design/architecture and the internet of things. This is more than stuff, it is meaning.

Service Design Described

The presentation below from Adaptive Path, one of my favorite group of people, is an excellent overview of service design as a discipline. I understand that it is important to call our service design as a unique set of activities but what bothers me most is that service design implies that service is the answer. I am drawn more to experience design, despite its dominant notion being related to the web design, because it encompasses the most possible options for delivering value. Am worried that designers now have a respected hammer and everything is starting to look like a nail...

Obvious Rarely Is

NY Times Article on the Spuni

Solving problems requires you to find them and that can be hard. We don't want just any problem, we want worthwhile and meaningful problems. The trouble is that we assume too much and miss out on what is right in front of us because we think we know things about the world. They say wisdom is knowing that you don't know and I suppose that is a little of what I am getting at. We think things are obvious far too often. 

My super human friend Marcel Botha and a couple of his amigos rethought what a baby spoon could be and came up with Spuni. It would be easy to look at the baby market and think there was no room for a new baby spoon, they are perfect, right? Not so.

We are too clever for our own good.

Micromanagement Can Be Valuable

Whaaa?!

Just read another post saying you are bad boss if you micromanage, end of story, but I think you are bad writer if you don't dig into the idea of micromanagement to be specific about what you mean when say micromanagement. It is a disservice to readers looking for some real insight.

I have trained some bad asses by working with them on the down and dirty details. So closely and carefully we might talk through the strategy of an email down to single sentence and not necessarily an email that is a big deal.

Sounds like hell? Not really. It can be hard to sit still for it, I know that, but I am clear with my employees that I know that and ask them to hang with me. Once we start to dig into the idea, for example, that communication is subtle and strategic, it opens their eyes. This type of training definitely needs to be done in short bursts and combined with humility, optimism and a focus on clearly describing the value of the interaction to be successful. It also must be done persistently to improve habits.

The awareness and perspective that lazer like interaction brings can't be taught through clever sayings or a handbook. And to just let your employees hang and not benefit from the nuance of your experience is a waste of everyone's time.

Now, if you are NOT giving your employees freedom to try and fail AND are micromanaging every part of their job then you are a bad boss but let's be clear about the difference before scaring people away from being a caring coach.

Competitive Intelligence

Corporate intelligence is a lot more social than I realized. When I heard the term I think of sneaking into a company, dressed as a janitor and swiping the recipe for Coke but there is a lot more to it. The value of intelligence between the top secret recipe for Coke and the front line implementation of sales and marketing strategy or product introduction is significant and much can be derived through very simple behavioral hacks also known as social engineering. 

To find out more about corporate intelligence and the behavioral hacks that help get to deep info fast read this Inc. article.