Creative juices everywhere

Posted on May 20, 2010 by petervan

These days, when i kick-off an innovation workshop, i ask the participants “tell me about your hobbies/interests when you were 16-18 years old”.

The answers and the resulting effect are surprising.

First, it opens up people in a way they are not used to. The come out of their “i-am-at-work” comfort zone. Some people that you expect to be “emotional zombies”, suddenly have sparkles in their eyes and show leadership throughout the workshop. Having genuine interest in people unleashes nuclear creative energy.
Second, it is amazing how many creative juices you gave in your average workshop. People tell me about their dancing, painting, music instruments, fashion design, about crazy little (and big) things they did in life

I don’t know where it comes from, that attitude of “withholding” the best of yourself. Something that is for sure, is that once you tap into this creative well, the energy and engagement and idea generation increase by a factor 10.

Another example: a colleague from our German office came to see me on what our innovation team could mean for one of his customers. In stead of showing him a whitepaper or a slide show, i decided to show him some of our past productions. Again those sparkling eyes.

With hindsight, it is interesting to see how we almost unconsciously added some creative art/visual/audio layer to most of the things we do. You can call them “innovation productions”.

My German colleague was clearly surprised on the quality productions we do with relatively small means. “I have to let this sink” he said. “It’s all a bit overwhelming at this moment, but i am trying to grasp it all and how i can transfer the same excitement to my customer when going back to Frankfurt this evening”.

The point i am trying to make is that there are creative juices everywhere, and it only takes a little scratching or motivation to get the best out of people.

Here is an example of getting out the best in people. You remember by blog post on the Medici Effect ? Apparently it inspired my colleague Mela to some really video collage.

It’s beautiful. It touched me emotionally. Watch it. It’s only 5 min. You can use it as an inspiring start of your day as well. Or imagine starting a workshop after having played this video. The energy in the room is high. It’s a soft energy that makes you feel comfortable to share.

This video is used in our company to launch the next wave of internal innovation challenges.

Innovation Challenges are small competitions where we incentivize our creative people at all levels and locations in the organization to come up with ideas around a certain theme. The projects are presented to a judge panel that includes the CEO. The winner gets implemented. So the price is not money but personal fulfillment.

The Challenges of this wave are all run under the banner of “Create the Medici Effect”: bring together people of different expertise and with different creative and/or engineering skills, and let the power of intersections play.

It’s a powerful model.

You can expect this video at many of our events and workshops. Also at Innotribe @ Sibos this year in Amsterdam, where one of our labs will have a specific focus to amplifying the Medici Effect.

Nobody asked Mela to do this video. But she followed her own compass and did not wait to be called. Mela should not only start to blog. She should start her own “Mela Productions” company.

“Inspire other people to dream” seems to have worked. Creative juices are everywhere. Imagine if you could unleash this energy in a systemic way in your company and in your eco-system. Maybe we have to do a creative lab at Sibos where we ask teams to make a similar video on the topic Generation-Y and Banking and have it ready by the end of the conference for the closing plenary ? Any thoughts ?

I have to run now, but will polish up this post later in my usual way, but i wanted to get this off my chest and into the world as soon as possible.

Purpose Maximizers and Candies

Posted on May 15, 2010 by petervan

What is it that motivates people to come to work, be happy and do a great job ?

I am a bit bored these days with all sort of “manifestos” and all sorts of “Power of Now”, “Power of Push”, Power of Why”, “Power of…”

What about candies ?

If you company is looking into people and culture, here are 3 candies that could give you the answer to the question of motivation and happy people.

Candy #1

Start treating people like people

might be a good start

And find some good motivators. Here is a nice 10 min video scribe of Dan Pink’s presentation of his book “Drive” that is all about what REALLY motivates people ?

It’s really worth spending the 10 min video to understand why incentives that work in production environments don’t work in creative environments, and even have counterproductive effects.

It is the same as applying Lean efficiency programs that were designed for production environments, and applying them blindly to white collar creative and innovation environments. Nobody in his right mind would do this of course.

In essence motivators for creative workers are fundamentally different than classic bonus based motivators.

Candy #2

Create a culture of true personal leadership

My colleague Mela found the following interesting post on the Change This site.

I found this site last week, and if you follow my tweets @petervan you already knew about this site 😉

There is an interesting part about the difference between Systems Thinking, the linear engineering type of approach – where we treat people as individual components whose behaviors need to be analyzed and fixed – also called “Tamed Problems “, and “Wicked Problems”- where we have to look at the CONTEXT where the people live in.

Later, the author writes about “emergent properties” in nature, and then uses this as a metaphor for the emergent properties in the relationship leader – person being led.

In dictatorships, the emergent property of people being led is fear and lack of freedom.
When the individual is in the position to choose it’s leader, then the emergent property of people being led is freedom.

Many other things emerge when people can vote: innovation, wealth, power, competitive advantage, a free media, the attraction of talent and so on.

The important point here is that real freedom brings real success. Shared systems matter more than shared culture.

The most interesting part is in the section about emerging properties in the workplace and where he notes that in the dictatorship metaphor, the emergent property of the boss is power.

Dr. Harvey A. Hornstein, a retired professor at Columbia University and the author of the book “Brutal Bosses and their Prey”. Dr. Hornstein found that while bosses used power in expected ways like putting down threatening subordinates or making them scapegoats, their main reason for abusing power was far more monstrous. Managers abused their subordinates for the fun of it, for the sheer pleasure of exercising power

Wow ! Nobody would want to work for a boss like this. But many people don’t have the choice, especially in the current economic climate where a having a job is priority #1 for most people. Frequent readers of this post know that i claim you always have a choice, but maybe i am reasoning from a luxury position, and the folks getting fired as part of all sorts of efficiency programs think very differently. I see so many good people go, and not finding something decent on the marketplace. Some recruiters told me they have piles of high-potential CV’s on their desk, and they expect a massive exodus once the economy picks up again.

Dr. Hornstein’s “scapegoating” reminds me of my Leading by Bing training, where in the “Who am i in a group" section, we learned the hard way that also a group goes through maturation stages. One important stage is when a group gets into scapegoating. Every group does in its lifecycle. The maturation comes when somebody in the group stands up – takes his personal leadership – and says we had enough scapegoating.

So Candy #2 is really about creating a culture of true personal leadership, not the leadership of a boss commanding his staff, but the personal leadership as the personal courage and to stand up, stick out your neck, daring to say the things as they are, and not making the story “better” as it moves up the corporate hierarchy. In essence caused by the phenomenon of Groupthink.

Groupthink is a phenomenon in which a group of people — however smart — ends up making poor decisions by disregarding facts, just to maintain consensus

To prevent groupthink, James Surowiecki says in his book that the best way for a group to be smart is for each person to think and act independently.

Every company executive

and at least every level-1

should take

a deep leading by being training

to discover the best and the purpose in

themselves

and making their people and companies better

Talking about “better”, candy #3 is about “betterness” for the company as a whole

Candy #3

Create a culture of true corporate leadership

It all boils down to having companies that make our world better. Umair Hague did once again a fantastic post this week on why Betterness is good for you and your company.

He’s telling us to do betterness instead of business, pursue awesomeness instead of innovation — and maximize good, instead of quarterly profits.

The tectonic shift to social investing going mainstream is going to amplify the effects above as it gathers strength. It will ensure that every marginal bit of good creates even more shareholder value — and every marginal bit of bad destroys even more. It’s nothing less than the retuning of the global economic engine itself.

And he concludes:

Good, the evidence suggests, is the very opposite of Utopian idealism. The real utopia? That was the one economists, bankers, and titans of industry promised: in a world of perfect markets and infinite leverage, companies who blindly maximized profit would lead everyone, ineluctably, to unstoppable prosperity. It didn’t work out that way. Just ask Wall Street, Big Food, Big Media, Detroit, Greece, Spain, Dubai, or anyone from the American homeowner to the Chinese migrant worker. Today’s real idealism is this: pretending that business as usual is good enough for companies, countries, the world, or the future. It isn’t.

It’s time to get real: good is as sharp as a razor, as hard as a hammer blow. That’s what decades of research suggest. That’s why companies as different as Google, Wal-Mart, Pepsi, Lego, Starbucks, Nestle, Apple, Patagonia, Timberland, GE, Tata, are all, in their own ways, taking steps small and large towards it — and why customers, governments, and investors are joining hands with them on the way.

Welcome to 21st century business

It’s a movement to do meaningful stuff

Will be interesting to read Umair Hague’s upcoming book.

Maybe we should invite him to Sibos. The program has just been made available here. And our impressive Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 program can be found here.

As you will notice, the Innotribe sessions are coming from many sources of our company and industry. Indeed, since our first Innotribe @ Sibos in 2009 we have come a long way: from an event-in-the-event mainly driven by technology into something that is now fully part of the overall Sibos program and with contributions from many many different business and even social areas.

I have seen there is session on Doing good is good for Business, with following description:

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is much more than just embracing the ‘green’ agenda. How can smart CSR strategies contribute directly or indirectly on how we manage our planet’s resources and – at the same time – have a direct and positive impact on your bottom-line? In this pragmatic session, with the help of a leading academic and representatives from financial institutions who have already benefitted from CSR, we’ll examine how ‘doing good’ is equally good for business.

All this is very relevant for Innovation. What motivates people to keep coming up with new ideas during their free time ?

It will be very interesting to see how unions will react when they discover there are other things in life than paid hours for people to feel motivated, engaged and innovative. I am preparing another post on the relation between innovation and unions. Stay tuned

Let’s Prepare the Future !

Posted on May 4, 2010 by petervan

This article is a cross-post of an essay that i prepared for The Fifth Conference and that was published this week.

The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.

As mentioned in my previous blog post “No more collateral damage”, this is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future that it was for me a no-brainer to passionately accept the invitation of Frank Boermeester (co-founder of The Fifth Conference) to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, and being conscientious aware of the “understream” that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health. So here is the article:

Over the past 20 years we have witnessed a fantastic growth in and wealth of technologies. ICT technologies have started permeating our daily lives. Medical science and biotechnologies have increased longevity significantly. Other technologies (Nanotechnology, AI, Robotics, etc.) have kick-started.

However, in the last couple of years, we have witnessed the breakdown of a number of core systems:

Our worldwide financial system is going through a “meltdown”. The old game of greed is being replaced by an all important requirement: trust.
Ecological, ethnological and demographical shocks (see also Geert Noels, author of Econoshock) are turning our systems upside-down: Green and Energy conservation thinking are now the mainstream.

The East-West shock: economic power is shifting from the Western world to the new economies of APAC and BRIC+ countries.
New forms of communication via the internet (blogs, wikis, social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Netlog, etc.) propose a new paradigm in respect to privacy.

All these fundamental changes give us feelings of discomfort, disorientation, confusion and loss of control. Although our “collective intelligence” indicates that our old models do not apply anymore, our “hardware” seems not to have caught on. We have not adapted the way we are organized hierarchically; how we look at governance. Our traditional ‘system thinking’ got stuck and did not follow our ‘collective intelligence’.

On the other hand a new set of systems and tools are emerging:

Barack Obama describes it as the ‘audacity of hope’; innovators, planners, academics and authors are referring to ‘dreamtelligence’ as a new, vital, and visionary way to use play, fantasy, dream-thinking and innovation to kick-start ideas and stimulate community engagement.
A fantastic call for and revival of authenticity for ourselves and our leaders. Furthermore, having true leaders; with charisma, the power to attract, integrity and authenticity.
The Net-Generation (now young adults, 15-30 years old) have grown up as ‘digital natives’. They will be tomorrow’s leaders. What THEY think will co-form our future. The future will not be invented by today’s generation. This Net-Generation lives differently. They are “wired” differently. For them multitasking (multi-window chatting, gaming at the same time as listening to music, looking up information on the internet, being mobile, etc.) is very common. They also think differently (deeper and more authentically), and have a very strong sense of the common good and of collective and civic responsibility.

Our technological revolution has just started. To illustrate:

Today our technologists are capable of crafting a human ear in their labs. We are now in a position to create and grow cells, tissues and even bodies.
Artificial Intelligence is back: by 2030 our computers will be able to think, be self-learning, self-healing – some will even be able to have a consciousness.
Self-learning robots will soon be mainstream technology. Mercedes and BMW already have cars in the pipeline for 2012 that can drive entirely automatically, better than a human counterpart.
The emergence of Google brings forth the concept of the “Global Brain”. The internet today is already a tremendous source of information. Today’s search experience will pale in comparison to the mechanisms we’ll have in 20 years. All knowledge will be available anywhere, anytime, wirelessly via brain-implants.
Social networking is already revolutionizing the way people and companies are communicating. It is interesting to note that these technologies let us evolve from a system-to-system communication paradigm towards a human-to-human one.
Today you can order your personal DNA genome sequence in the USA for only $399. The company doing this is a Google backed start-up. Think of DNA in the ‘cloud’, with DNA comparisons between ancestors, relationships, etc …
Brain-wave helmets and chip-implants will give humans better sensory perception. By 2030 we will see the emergence of “super-humans”. In such a dramatically changed context, what will make us “human”?

A lot of these future scenarios are described by Ray Kurzweil’s “Singularity” concept. This is the moment when man and machine truly blend. Kurzweil claims this will happen around the year 2030.

And the pace of all these technological innovations is just increasing exponentially. In the next 20 years we will witness technological breakthroughs tenfold those of the same previous span of time.

All this evolution calls for a re-thinking of our value-compass for the future: We must carefully re- think how all this will influence the way we will work and live. What sort of quality of life should we aim for? What will be the socio-economic impact of all this? How will we want education to be structured? What areas of society will we still want (and be able to) influence?

How are we going to ensure that the

Technical and Value ‘Readiness’

of our region

are competitive in this new era?

Will we lead the change, as opposed to being mediocre followers? I believe it is time for action.

I believe The Fifth Conference and its organic network of inspiring leaders has deep within itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” addressing the long term future:

A movement and an energy

that prepares our Net-Generation

for the next 20 years,

with an emphasis on

our technical and value readiness

A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030, cross-pollinating each other’s disciplines. Indeed, “savants” from different contexts & worldviews can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live and work in 2030.

How our education is best organized will also be addressed. We will investigate what our ideal value kit for that era should be, beyond traditional corporate culture. Moreover, with a culture of sharing and exploring – where we live committed to teams, groups, communities, regions and countries –a deep respect for the participating individual humanistic identities will nevertheless be maintained.

We don’t have to wait until our politicians have made up their minds as to whether or not they should invest more in innovation.

We can do this ourselves

I cannot accept that it would not be possible to raise private funding for such an organization/movement/tribe.

The resulting new models and scenarios will demand speed, creativity, dynamism, perseverance, courage, knowledge and working together in a multi-cultural context. This new society makes a plea for the respect for individuality, freedom, mobility and quality of life.

This paradigm is all about designing, exploring and organizing change, learning and fine-tuning as we go. Giving guidance to teams, organizations and leaders on how to surf these waves is part and parcel with this. Missing the first technology wave of speed and creativity will result in loss of economic relevance. Missing the wave of the new value kit will result in losing our Net-Generation; our brains for the future.

This is about preparing ourselves and our region for 2030.

Who wants to join the tribe? Who is a believer? Let’s debate this idea on- and off-line for a couple of weeks. If there is enough interest, let’s meet and make this happen.

Innotribe your event: CPA and SWIFT

Posted on April 3, 2010 by petervan

Innovation is a key theme in SWIFT’s discussions with the community on how they can collectively address both complex and basic challenges. Via the launch of the Innotribe Program, SWIFT has embarked on a new way of promoting innovation amongst the financial industry. Innotribe is an initiative that leverages the collective intelligence of the SWIFT community to find new ideas, projects, and the infrastructure to let them grow.

“Innotribe your event” is a bit similar to “Pimp your car”, but then for events.

Through a soft collaboration with the Innotribe team, you can add some additional dynamics to your event. It’s part of our renewed SWIFT Innovation mission. Kosta Peric (Head of Innovation at SWIFT – i.e. my boss) wrote about this mission here and it goes like this:

“Build the Skills , Tools , Processes, Metrics , Values , Network , required to support collaborative innovation and transform SWIFT in an agile company,
able to succeed in a changing environment.”

This mission is btw inspired by the book “Innovation to the Core”, that i already mentioned several times on this blog.

The sentence in that book that got us inspired was:

In our experience, it can take an organization three to five years to build the kinds of skills, tools, management processes, metrics, values, and IT systems that are required to support ongoing, across-the-board innovation.

As you have noticed, we added the network dimension to it. I’d like to focus today a bit on that dimension of our mission, and more particularly what we do with events.

Of course we have our own SWIFT events, such as SOFA, SIBOS, the regional events and the business fora worldwide. In each of these events we try to put some innovation spices. For the complete list of SWIFT event, check out the SWIFT website events section.

But what is new this year is that we very selectively partner with third-party events. A good example is our event partnership with CPA (Canadian Payments Association) where we work together on CPA’s Biennial Conference. The conference is tagged as the 2010 Payments Panorama and CPA is inviting you to join industry leaders from June 16 to 18 in Vancouver as we explore the latest trends, technology and processes in the payments industry.

The year’s conference theme – Leadership, Change and Vision – forms the basis for plenary discussions and breakout sessions on mobile and person to person (P2P) payments, evolution and innovation in merchant retail payments, the need for international standards, who is driving technology, and crime and payments. Full program here.

SWIFT is excited to launch the Innotribe Progam to the Canadian Community during a half-day session on Wednesday, 16 June2010. SWIFT’s Innotribe Leaders, in partnership with the Canadian Payments Association (CPA), will immerse you in a workshop that is inventive, interactive and collaborative. We will demonstrate how collaborative innovation works in practice.

The workshop will help you promote your ideas, be it a new service, product or a small internal project. You will learn how to grow it, nurture it, develop it, promote it, get others excited about it and sell it – to your colleagues, to the internal stakeholders, to customers, to venture capitalists.

In a workshop, called “The Art of Pitching,” orchestrated by experienced facilitators and innovation coaches, you will be able to develop an idea from a rough sketch to a selling pitch. The ideas will be around two hot trends:

· Cloud computing and

· Collaborative Risk/Fraud and Security services

The workshop will conclude with a contest where a panel of judges will select a winning pitch. The winner will be showcased together with champions of Innotribe contests from around the world at this year’s Innotribe at Sibos 2010 Amsterdam, running from 25-29 Oct 2010.

What’s important is that this event is one of Innotribe events building up towards Sibos 2010.

The output of the Innotribe workshops of SOFA in NYC on 21-22 April 2010 will be the input of the CPA Innotribe workshop. Detailed agenda of SOFA here. You will notice that “The New Normal” and “Innovation” are prominent themes on this event as well.

We had a very good similar experience lately in our event collaboration with the EPCA Conference (presentations here) in Paris, France on 22-23 March 2010 and the related Florin Awards. In collaboration with Innotribe, they organized the “Best Product Pitch” Award which was won by the folks of AcceptEmail. We will showcase them as well during Innotribe @ Sibos 2010.

And earlier that month, we were hosting the EEMA European eID Interoperability Conference 2010 in La Hulpe, Belgium. I already mentioned this event in my previous blog post on “Identity Rights System 3.0”. After the event, we received numerous congratulations for the hosting facilities, the excellent content of the presentations, and the refreshing and professional approach of the Innotribe Labs.

We are still looking forward for an Innotribe collaboration with an Financial Services APAC organized event, ideally before summer.

Obviously, we are open to any other suggestion that helps creating a win-win situation: improving your event with Innotribe “spices” and confirming our credibility and innovative organization and catalyst in the financial services industry.

Don’t hesitate to contact me or one of the Innotribe team members to find our more.

The Medici Effect

Posted on March 1, 2010 by petervan

The Medicis were a banking family in Florence who funded creators from a wide range of disciplines. Thanks to this family and a few others like it, sculptors, scientists, poets, philosophers, financiers, painters, and architects converged upon the city of Florence. There they found each other, learned from one another, and broke down barriers between disciplines and cultures.

Together they forged a new world based on new ideas—what became known as the Renaissance. As a result, the city became the epicenter of a creative explosion, one of the most innovative eras in history. The effects of the Medici family can be felt even to this day.

These introductory words come from a book “The Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us About Innovation: What You Can Learn from Elephants and Epidemics” by Frans Johansson (Author).

The book is not that new (it dates from 2006), but it is very relevant to today’s innovation challenges. You can find the book on Amazon.com via the links above, but there is also a free PDF summary here and a Google Book edition here. And obviously, there is the website www.themedicieffect.com .

There was also a 2004 book The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures

The core of these books is about two types of ideas:

Directional ideas
Intersectional ideas

Directional innovation improves a product in fairly predictable steps, along a well-defined dimension. Examples of directional innovation are all around us because they represent the majority of all innovations. This is what we call incremental improvements (Innovation is in my opinion a bit on the optimistic, even window-dressing side).

The goal is to evolve an established idea by using refinements and adjustments. The rewards for doing so are reasonably predictable and attained relatively quickly. People and organizations do this all the time through increasing level of expertise and specialization. It is absolutely necessary if one does not wish to squander the value of an idea. Even an intersectional idea will, once it has become established, develop and evolve along a specific direction.

Intersectional innovations, on the other hand, change the world in leaps along new directions. This is what Guy Kawasaki calls “jumping the curve”. These ideas are game changers. I am preparing a whitepaper on how NIBC (Nano, Info, Bio, Cogno)) technologies are major game changers.

Although intersectional innovations are radical, they can work in both large and small ways. They can involve the design of a large department store or the topic of a novella; they can include a special-effects technique or the product development for a multinational corporation.

In summary, intersectional innovations share the following characteristics:

They are surprising and fascinating.
They take leaps in new directions.
They open up entirely new fields.
They provide a space for a person, team, or company to call its own.
They generate followers, which means the creators can become leaders.
They provide a source of directional innovation for years or decades to come.
They can affect the world in unprecedented ways.

The Medici Effect is about bringing together people of different fields of expertise and

let the magic of

cross-fertilization of ideas

happen

What sort of people do we need to invite ? In essence, we are looking for people who succeeded at

breaking down

their associative barriers

because they did one or more of the following things:

Exposed themselves to a range of cultures
Learned differently
Reversed their assumptions
Took on multiple perspectives

The explosion of concept combinations at the Intersection can offer a myriad of uniquely combined, extraordinary ideas.

I have a dream

That we can turn Innotribe.com into a Medici Effect: the place where different disciplines find each other, and through that intersection come up with intersectional innovations.

I have a dream

That we can turn the SWIFT Campus into a hosting environment, where we facilitate those intersections to happen.

I have a dream

That i can blend my personal interest of creating a Think Tank on Long Term Future with my professional endeavors at SWIFT.

I have a dream

That together we can write The Readiness Manifesto. The strategies and focus areas to prepare the Net.Generation – the 20-25 years old of today – to stand up as our leaders in 20 years from now in 2030.

But NIBC technologies are not the holy grail. There was a fantastic quote in one of Fred Destin’s latest blogs on Venture Capital 2.1:

The fundamentals of the business have changed. Technology is a quasi-commodity, the spread of ideas is instantaneous, competition is global, in other words the market is more efficient.

“Technology is a quasi-commodity”

Wow ! So what will be your differentiator ?

I believe it will be in the HOW of delivering products and services. And i can’t help re-quoting Umair Hague in his Good to Great Manifesto and my related post some days ago. Umair Hague proposes a number of new corporate principles:

First how, then who: “Do our people have the capacity to judge right and wrong, no matter how great they are?”
The Yoda/Hedgehog concept: “companies should only do what they can be great at, what makes tons of money, and what they’re passionate about.”
Ethical accelerators: “”transparency, openness, rules, and accountability. Most companies have not a single one of these”
A culture of meaning: “Production and consumption are meaningful when they actually yield durable, tangible benefits to people, communities, and society”
Confront reality:” Banks, for instance, confronted the “brutal fact” that selling toxic financial instruments was great for their bottom line. But they never confronted the simple reality that a classic asset bubble in housing was failing to do good.”

So, the question is not only “What will be the technical readiness kit that we will need to provide ?”.

The question really is:

What will be the value kit

that will have to underpin

this highly technological environment ?

As i mentioned in a previous post, I have accepted an opinion article/essay on technical readiness for The Fifth Conference. See also my posting “No more collateral damage”.

Below an extract of my initial input for this essay:

We must carefully analyze and think-through on how all this will influence the way we will and want to live and work in the future. What sort of life-quality we aim for? What the socio-economic impact of all this may be? How we want education to be organized? Where we still can and want to influence? How are we going to deal with the Technical and Value Readiness of our region to be competitive in this new era ? To lead the change, and not only be mediocre followers?

I believe it’s time for action. I believe The Fifth Conference and its natural network of inspiring leaders bears deep in itself the embryo for a sort of “think-tank/foundation” on long term future. A movement and an energy that prepares our Net-Generation for the next 20 years. To focus on our technical and value readiness. A place where “smart people” can meet. Where experts from different technological domains share their insights for 2030. Cross-fertilizing each other’s disciplines. With “savants” from different contexts & worldviews that can act as our “eyes” and offer a perspective on how we will live, work in 2030.

Or will we find ourselves in 2030 like this medieval knight trying to get his cup of coffee in the local deli ?

No, in 2030 we want our children to be in a position to lead and not be the “behaving” followers in some old-European country that is by-passed by countries and regions that work at the speed of light, that have higher education standards, higher ethical standards, in other words who have found the “how-differentiator”.

My desire is to create

a movement

a tribe

a Medici Effect

where the dream can come true.

Who feels connected ? Who would like to join this tribe ?

Let me know via the comments of the blog, or contacting me directly. Please also let me know where the model flaws. What you would add to it ? Do you believe i am on to something or just living an illusion ? Let me know.

Maslow for Stakeholder Relations

Posted on February 21, 2010 by petervan

If you have any role in Stakeholder Relations (in some companies this is called “PR” and/or “Investor Relations” and/or “HR”), i can recommend reading Chip Conley’s book “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow”

Conley, the CEO and founder of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, turned to psychologist Abraham Maslow’s iconic Hierarchy of Needs. This book explores how Conley’s company "the second largest boutique hotelier in the world" overcame the storm that hit the travel industry by applying Maslow’s theory to what Conley identifies as the key Relationship Truths in business with Employees, Customers and Investors.

To be honest, the essence of the book is in the first chapter. The other chapters are endless variations and illustrations of the same with rather simplistic, naive, and even romantic examples.

For those not-familiar with the work of Abraham Maslow:

Maslow studied mentally healthy individuals instead of people with serious psychological issues. This enabled him to discover that people experience “peak experiences,”high points in life, when the individual is harmony with himself and his surroundings. A visual aid Maslow created to explain his theory, which he called the Hierarchy of Needs, is a pyramid depicting the levels of human needs, psychological and physical. When a human being ascends the steps of the pyramid he reaches self actualization.

Maslow for dummies is summarized in the table below (all tables below come from Chip Conley’s “Peak” book).

In his book “Peak”, Chip Conley applies this hierarchy of needs to the three main groups of Stakeholders for any company:

Employees
Customers
Investors

Conley may be over-simplifying, as he reduces Maslow’s five layers to three.

But in the end, i found this an interesting way to assess and improves a company’s stakeholder relations.

1. Employee pyramid

Chris Conley basically says that most companies offer a salary and perks in compensation for the employee’s time. Fewer companies succeed in giving true recognition to their staff, and only a very few know that their company should shape the conditions for the employee to find meaning in his work.

2. Customer pyramid

The same principles apply to the customer pyramid. At the top, the customer is truly delighted. Not because you got a “”license to operate” (btw the minimum level pursued in the Lean “Kano” model, but because you address unrecognized needs. You will NOT identify those unrecognized needs through customer surveys, consultations or market research. And the risk exists - if your organization has been “leaned” to offer in a scalable way the “license to kill” satisfaction – that you won’t have any resources left to try to “create evangelism” by your customers.

3. Investor Pyramid

When we look at the relation with the investors, most companies are transaction oriented in their Shareholder’s Relations: when they assess the relation, they ask whether the Board member gets regular and sufficient information or whether the dining and site-seeing arrangements are to everybody’s satisfaction. However, the ultimate nirvana in Investor relations is that your investors are PROUD of being your investor. This is much more than “being treated well”. It’s much more that just being a happy shareholder, or somebody who would recommend doing business with you.

Reaching the top-levels for each of the three categories of stakeholders is already an unreachable dream for many organizations.

However, shareholder relations should aim for an even higher goal.

Anybody who has been reading Maslow, should be familiar with Richard Barrett. Chip Conley missed that opportunity. One of the best books to get familiar with the thinking of Barrett, i can recommend “Building a Values-Driven Organization: A Whole System Approach to Cultural Transformation”.

In essence Barrett is saying that Maslow levels focus on our personal self-interest – meeting the needs of the ego.

Beyond Maslow’s level-5 (transformation/self-actualization), Barrettt sees 3 higher levels:

Level-6: Internal Cohesion: this is about finding personal meaning in existence
Level-7: Making a Difference: about making a positive difference in the world
Level-8: Service: leading a life of self-less service

Barrett’s levels beyond transformation are about being ego-less, at the service of others.

The fears of the ego lead us to believe that we do not have enough of what we need. Consequently, we are never fully happy because we do not have enough money, we do not have enough love, and we do not have enough respect.

In this situation, we lead a dependency-based existence.

What if we would apply these upper-levels from Barrett to our Stakeholders Relations ambitions ?

Do you have the courage to assess your stakeholder relations based on the Maslow of the Barrett models ?
What would you change in your shareholder relations if you would just aim for one higher level then where you are today ?

It’s becoming a trend/pattern: today’s business is not anymore about transactional and technical readiness.

The more important under stream is to develop and execute a solid stakeholders architecture. It’s about an openness and transparency. Often Social Media tools are used to support such strategy and ambition. But they are just tools. They are worthless and only become “tricks for the quick fix” in the absence of a genuine stakeholders architecture.

Execution on this is what you could call innovation in stakeholder relations

In the end, our new-game economy is about doing good, giving meaning, and realizing your relationships.

In the end, its all a matter of

ambition

The level of ambition will define how innovative your company wants to be.

No ambitions leads to no innovation or incremental improvements at best.

Ambition will force you to look into other corners, will let you discover how you truly can redefine your marketplace and change the game.

Ambition will lead to radical innovation: in your products, services, and in your stakeholder relations.

So, what’s your ambition ?

No more collateral damage

Posted on February 20, 2010 by petervan

There was this week a really interesting article in Trends Magazine about “The Blue Economy”, about a guy called Gunter Pauli, and his ZERI foundation.

I started googling this stuff, and was amazed about what i found.

Apparently, Gunter Pauli is busy doing what he does for quite some time, as can be seen in the Fastcompany article dating back 1993 !

Surprise, surprise: Gunter is from Flanders, Belgium. He was co-founder of Ecover. In 1991, Pauli launched the concept of zero waste and zero emissions for industry through the clustering of activities at his detergent factory in Belgium.

Gunter Pauli is Member of the Club of Rome, a Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Creative Fellow of the Club of Budapest and a long term advisor to the Japanese Government and the United Nations. He is professor at the Politecnico di Torino in charge of “systems design” at the Faculty of Architecture and the School of Design.

“The Blue Economy” is introduced as:

a new business model to inspire entrepreneurs to shape a new economy based on competitive innovations, creating JOBS and SOCIAL CAPITAL”

“The Blue Economy: Cultivating a New Business Model for a Time of Crisis” is based on the new book “The Blue Economy: 10 years, 100 Innovations. 100 Million Jobs”, published by Paradigm Publications (New Mexico, USA) with the support of UNEP and IUCN.

I could not yet find the book on Amazon, but the paper that was input to the Club of Rome can be downloaded here.

From the intro:

The form of capitalism that has dominated world societies is entirely disconnected from peoples’ real needs. Some two billion people struggle to get by on less than two dollars a day, lacking access to food, water, health, and energy, the most basic requirements for survival. Over 25% of the world’s youth are unemployed. Yet one billion of us are over nourished and swim in 400 million tons of electronic waste with higher metal concentrations than the ores extracted from the earth. Conservatively, the top 70% of the world’s wealth is concentrated in the top 10% of the population.

Fortunately, times are changing. This book is about that change. As the second decade of the 21st century sets the stage for a new economy, the core question we answer is, “What is the business
framework we really need?”

And the Zero Emissions Research & Initiatives (ZERI) is introduced as:

a global network of creative minds seeking solutions to world challenges. The common vision shared by the members of the ZERI family is to view waste as resource and seek solutions using nature’s design principles as inspiration.

I continued clicking through the different ZERI sites, and was thrilled by the ZERI Education Initiative:

The opening song is

“I want to live in a better world”

This is about an innovative learning project for children, developed by Gunter Pauli and a team from ZERI Network of scientists, scholars, pedagogues and artists.

It’s about learning children to ask the right questions.

It’s about teaching children

the 5 intelligences

Academic Knowledge
Emotional Intelligence
Artistic Expression
Eco-Literacy
Capacity to implement change

Apparently Pauli and friends published a whole series of books “Gunter’s Fables”. And yes, you can buy them at Amazon 😉

Also check-out this fantastic talk "How Can We Use Finite Resources To Propel Ourselves In The Future?" of TEDxTokyo 2009, held on May 22 at National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation.

It all makes me think very much about the book “Cradle to Cradle” by William McDonough (Author), Michael Braungart (Author), a book that was a real eye-opener for me at the time, and a book that i already mentioned several times in this blog.

“Let the future emerge” is the tagline for this blog. And things seem to emerge with an astounding sense for synchronicity. Just last week, i discovered The Fifth Conference.

The Fifth Conference is a forum for vision. Part publisher and part conference, The Fifth Conference tackles the ‘big issues’, the factors that drive our future. Think ten, twenty, even fifty years ahead and try to imagine how we will live and work. What will this world look like? How will we have solved the economic, social and environmental challenges that we confront today? To answer those questions we talk to entrepreneurs, policy makers and experts. We analyse the facts, the forecasts and the arguments. And most importantly, we collect vision.

It is so close to my idea of the Think Tank for Long Term Future !

So, last week, i had a chat with Frank Boermeester, co-founder of The Fifth Conference.

Lots of synergies!

Frank invited me to draft an essay on Technology, with a focus on Technology Readiness in our region, for the next publication. Will certainly do so, and cross-post on this blog.

However, as we were chatting, we suddenly became aware of

the “understream”

that is driving all the changes and evolutions in Growth, Mobility, Green, Technology, Health.

Its about the theme of Cradle-to-Cradle that “reducing waste” is not good enough anymore, we need to “add value”. Its about the notion that Google’s “Don’t do evil” is not good enough anymore, and we need to “Do Good”.

It’s about what keeps Gunter Pauli going, and what he refers to in his video as

“no more

collateral damage”

And not anymore

and yes, create a sustainable society.

See also some related blog posts on this site on:

Innovation Traumas

Posted on February 13, 2010 by petervan

Interesting blog post from James Gardner in Bankersvision a couple of days ago.

Formerly Head of Innovation and CIO of Investment at Lloyds Banking Group in London, James Gardner is now Chief Technology Officer at the Department for Work and Pensions in the UK Government.

James has also written “Innovation and the Future Proof Bank”, a book that is on top of the pile of to-read books next to my “broken-foot-sofa”.

Anyway, the title of his last post was “When failure is not an option” (FNAO), a theme that i addressed many times before on this blog before:

The blog entry is triggered by the following question:

What are your thoughts on organizations were failure maybe is not an option. For example nuclear physics, NASA or a government organization that pays benefits. In these situations failure could be disastrous. What strategy would you recommend in these types of organizations?

James adds an interesting perspective: failure early in your project is better then close to delivery.

…the further you get into delivery, the more money you’ve spent. If you have to stop then, its very bad indeed. As innovators, you don’t want that situation occurring if you can help it. It leads to what academics call “innovation trauma” – the scenario where everyone is so burned by a failed innovation that no-one will ever sign up for anything new again.

And – what is scary if you are in your early days of an innovation program in an organization that has FNAO as one of its core assets:

Even one bad failure, though, can close down an innovation program. And clearly, in the cases that Malcolm mentions, that kind of failure has very dire consequences indeed.

One last point on this: “failure is not an option” is a mentality that leads to – you guessed it – failure. Trying new things is a process that requires lots of stops and starts. There will, inevitably, be more stops than starts, actually. In an organization that doesn’t celebrate good failure, what you get is a scenario where nothing new starts at all.

That, clearly, is a very bad situation to be in, and is one of the main reasons people complain they “don’t have enough innovation”

It’s also via this post i discovered James Gardner’s “The Little Innovation Book”.

This little on-line experiment has absolutely great content for innovators. Every page adds a perspective to innovation that i was not familiar with. A recommendation. You can also comment on-line as James is writing this on-line innovation book.

Would you be interested to have James Gardner at Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam (25-29 October 2010) ?

Let me know. We can invite him 😉 But would he accept ?

Innotribe.com: a Lift-Off in perspective

Posted on February 11, 2010 by petervan

Today our team launched www.innotribe.com ! Different announcements on swift.com and on swiftcommunity.net here.

This is an important lift-off. At first sight, it may look like the launch of yet another tool or process. But this is much more. It is part of an overall Innovation Architecture based on the principles of Open Innovation.

In many industries, innovation is generally recognized as a critical ingredient for corporate success. Until relatively recent times, most companies used internal research and development as their only method of innovation. However, companies are now proactively considering all sources of innovation, both internal and external, to remain competitive. Usually this is referred to as “Open Innovation”, a term coined by Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm.

Idea Generation is an effort to uncover new and unexploited innovation opportunities. This is not about conducting traditional market research—that is, asking customers to go through a questionnaire, either on paper, online, or by phone. Neither is it about going out and directly asking customers what they want. Methods like these rarely yield the most useful customer insights. Typically, the answers they generate are the obvious suspects: “I want it cheap,” “It should be easy to buy and use,” and “Make it work really well, too.”

Innovation Idea Generation is about “serendipity”. Serendipity happens by understanding that innovation is largely a numbers game—it it takes a thousand ideas to find a hundred with enough commercial promise to merit a small-scale experiment. From those one hundred experiments, only ten projects will be judged worthy of pursuing seriously with a substantial financial commitment, and of those, only one or two will turn out to be unqualified successes.

SWIFT has been very successful in late 2008 and through 2009 in engaging community and staff in an “open” innovation model. Under the “Innotribe” label, SWIFT is encouraging individuals and companies to submit their ideas pertaining to SWIFT or the SWIFT eco-system.

The idea generation part of the process is thus focusing on engaging the community, through social networking (e.g. swiftcommunity.net) or specific events (such as Innotribe@Sibos) and tracking the resulting ideas in a transparent and open environment (innotribe.com).

Experience at SWIFT and the industry shows that this open approach does generate results (in terms of the number of ideas generated), The same experience shows that 1 or 2 ideas out of 10 prove to be successful ideas. So it is very important to establish a screening mechanism – the “innovation funnel”.

As ideas flow through the funnel, they can reach different “maturity levels”:

Discovery: the actual idea generation stage
Orient: document the ideas gathered and “orient” them in the SWIFT context. For example some ideas may give innovative insights for standards, for interfaces, for networking, etc
Evangelize: some ideas may need further evangelization to fully grasp the possible impact on SWIFT’s strategy and roadmap
Proof of Concept (POC). A way to make an idea more tangible. Can be a whitepaper as the outcome of a number of dedicated workshops, a mock-up prototype, an animation, or a fully working prototype.
Idea management: the stage where we decided whether an idea will go for internal or external development. The external route is usually the scope of “incubation”
Idea incubation: process to bring an idea from the concept stage to a first implementation (prototype, “beta” etc)
Implementation: anything beyond idea incubation

There are many ways to do idea generation:

Ideas from Staff, Partners, and Member companies: in the spirit of “open innovation”, we want to collect ideas from the SWIFT eco-system at large.
Innovation Challenges: mainly SWIFT internal challenges to collect ideas from staff.
Innovation Gardens: An Innovation Garden is 1-2 days of off-site meeting with 4-5 executives of the customer and a mixed team from SWIFT.
Innovation Labs: similar to gardens, Innovation Labs bring together multiple customers in an idea generation setting looking for ideas in a pre-defined focus area. Labs have been highly successful for example at Innotribe@Sibos 2009, SOFE, etc
Innotribe.com. The subject of the launch of today. Ideas above will be collected via the brand new Innotribe.com site, a sophisticated web-based idea management tool. The idea management process links seamlessly into the transversal product management process
Innotribe Events: Innotribe@Sibos was a huge success. We intend to run localized Innotribe events, and to participate and collaborate with other industry events where we aim at joined branding to enforce the SWIFT Innotribe brand as the innovation initiative for the financial industry
Scouting: many companies that are aggressively looking outside their walls for new technology are using Innovation Scouts, specialists tasked to identify new opportunities for partnership, co-development, licensing or acquisition.

All the above activities are related to the supply-side of idea management. However, the Innovation Architecture should be very specific on the demand-side of idea management. I already highlighted this topic in my previous post on “Innovation to the Core”. How we deal with that will be explored in a future post.

In the meantime, go to www.innotribe.com, look around, and start submitting loads of innovative ideas.

Innovation to the Core

Posted on February 10, 2010 by petervan

I just finished “Innovation to the Core” by by Peter Skarzynski (Author), Rowan Gibson (Author)

This is a modern, up-to-date, and indispensible book on Innovation.

More precisely on how to make Innovation a core capability of everything you do in your company.

Anybody who is deeply or remotely

involved with innovation

must read this book.

It’s a book that explains why radical innovation is the only option forward.

It’s a book that clearly explains the tension between efficiency and innovation, and what to do about it.

Both efficiency and innovation have value. More, they should be equal partners ! If you are serious about innovation, then you should spend at least as much on your innovation program as on your efficiency program. Check out how much resources you spent this and last year on efficiency. Take that amount and number of FTE’s and there is your budget for innovation for the next 2 years.

So it is not about being Lean OR Mean,

it’s about being Lean ànd Mean !

My biggest lessons learned from this book:

Dare to challenge everything, and especially your company “orthodoxies”, the taboos that have been taken for granted for the last 10-20 years.
Let the focus area of your innovation emerge bottom-up. Don’t define your innovation priorities in a leadership group. If you want everybody to be an innovator, you need input from everybody at all levels in your company when defining your innovation architecture. If not you end up with an impossible sell exercise towards the basis afterwards.
Make your executives and regional heads accountable for innovation. Some companies make 30% of the bonus dependent on innovation objectives.
There is an enormous responsibility for HR in getting the creative and innovation skills trained across the company at all levels.

But THE biggest lesson learned is probably about the difference between managing the supply and the demand for innovation ideas:

I believe most of us do a decent job on the supply side: we have plenty of initiatives and tools to gather, generate and follow-up on new ideas. That’s the supply side
But there remains a lot to be done on the demand side. I love the suggestions in the book that each division, region, product manager, etc is held accountable for at least picking-up 3-4 ideas coming from the supply side. Stronger: each of these groups has to reserve 10% or more of their existing budgets to spend on innovation projects. And this without changing the existing performance metrics.

Getting innovation into the objectives of managers is key. The book refers to this as the

“Management Process Make-Over”

Regular readers of this blog know that i have a strong opinions about:

Radical innovation vs. incremental innovation

The role HR has to play

Getting innovation deep into the DNA of your company, at ALL levels, all regions, all divisions.

This book only confirms and reinforces the thinking that i have previously shared in following posts on this blog:

Petervan Studios

Artistic Interventions – Interruptions – Provocations

Category Archives: Innovation

Creative juices everywhere

Purpose Maximizers and Candies

Let’s Prepare the Future !

Innotribe your event: CPA and SWIFT

The Medici Effect

No more collateral damage

Innovation Traumas

Innotribe.com: a Lift-Off in perspective

Innovation to the Core

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