Under the sea of obviousness | Part 2 of 3 | A mental model to dive under the obvious

Obviousness has taken over the world. Innovation design has been reduced to slick formulae, and while the design industry prides itself on creating new paradigms, there’s a disappointing lack of novelty, originality and progress.

This three-part series articulates my mental model and the questions I ask when trying to dive under the sea of obviousness.

Read part 1 here.

I thought a good point to start would be to share my own philosophy and mental model for innovation. It’s an investigative model that I use during the development phase on an innovation design project to judge whether any new product, service, experience or venture has the potential for significant impact.

I’ve never attempted to put this down on paper before, but I thought I would try in case someone finds it useful. I would love to hear of any other mental models other people use for the same purpose.

Step 1 — Sustainability >< Actionability Assessment

Sustainability

In contrast with the widespread “fail fast” approach, I first assess whether the proposed innovation has potential to be sustainable. Not environmentally — also imperative — but from a business point of view. Can we envisage potential for growth over the long-term? Can the proposed innovation capitalise on a growth opportunity over a sustained period of time?

If yes:

· How long would the assumed initial competitive advantage be maintained for? How could it be extended?

· Would the proposed innovation be relevant to people for months, years, decades?

· What resources are needed to allow the business to deliver the new product for years? Burn-rate?

· What’s the year run-rate in financial and user terms?

· What are the long-term benefits for the user and the business?

· What’s the long-term operational impact for society?

Adding the Sustainability lens to the standard Desirability, Viability, Feasibility framework is critical when deciding whether to spend resources on any new venture.

Actionability

Is there clarity and simplicity on how to realise the desired end state?

Actionability lies somewhere between two extremes:

· Blinded by design
On one end of the scale are visionary teams that live in the ten-to-fifty-year horizon mark and provide incredible recommendations that move people forward to a beautiful future. The trouble is that the future they paint is as enticing as it is vague and abstract — such high-level concepts tend not to be grounded in reality and are so far away from execution that they’ll never be possible to realise.

· MVP minimalism
On the other end are the teams trying to realise a compelling future by reducing it to an MVP that simply validates/invalidates a tiny fraction of the ambition. I do subscribe to being lean, but sometimes small, incremental improvements lock teams into a long cycle of continuous iterations that lead to marginal value capture, far away from the original vision.

It’s about being able to envision sustainable, exponential impact and to convert it into a series of clear actions today that generate value along the delivery of the new product or service.

I ask:

· Is the team just obsessed about going live or realising value?

· Will the first three sprints realise any new value for the users?

· How far is the MVP from an MLP — Minimum Lovable Product?

· How is the team responding to changes in their hypotheses? Specifically, how quickly are validated/invalidated hypotheses converted into changes to the delivery roadmap?

· Can we convert value hypotheses into experiments — and the results of those into practical, pragmatic actions?

· How good is the team at sharing action plans that all stakeholders understand?

I truly believe a virtuous cycle exists between sustainability and actionability, and they feed off each other. The more clarity there is on the long-term impact, the easier it is to work towards realising it on a day-to-day basis. Similarly, the better the team is at transforming vision into daily actions, the higher the chances for long-term value realisation.

Step 2 — The four key elements of innovation

Once I have established that there’s opportunity for a sustainable venture and an actionable plan worth investing time, money and further mental calories on, I work inwards. The next step assesses to what extent the proposed venture scores against four key elements that I believe reinforce the sustainability factor: emotion, quality, simplicity and impact.

Emotion

Although emotions are central to human decision-making, somehow they’re overlooked by the basic innovation theories or reduced to plain, one-dimensional satisfaction and NPS scores.

In my view, a precondition to launching a new venture to market should be to achieve a deep, emotional connection with a person. This connection — along with the specific feelings we want to evoke with the new product, service or experience — needs to be designed, detailed and specified pre-launch, and tracked and analysed post-launch. When talking about experience and innovation design we should instead be talking emotion design.

I ask:

· Are we addressing an emotional trigger?

· Which specific feeling are we aiming to evoke?

· Which feeling correlates to which specific interaction?

· How can we track and measure these along the use of the service or product?

· Can we enhance the emotional connection to create a positive bond with the person involved in the experience/interaction?

· Do we build the emotion gradually?

· Can we build up the emotional connection over time to reinforce a positive connection with the provider of the experience?

Quality

I love quality as an element in innovation as it’s so ambiguous — it’s one of those words that’s easy to throw around when thinking about creating something new. Everyone mentions that they want a quality product, service, experience, organisation etc, but I’ve found that people struggle to define what quality is. It means completely different things to different people. Paradoxically, there seems to be some general agreement the moment people experience quality in a product in front of them.

Although it’s a very broad element that’s difficult to pin down, frameworks exist that allow us to deconstruct quality in a manageable and specific activity. I like the classic eight dimensions of quality, which breaks it down into performance, features, reliability, conformance, durability, serviceability, aesthetics, and perceived quality. While it was created for physical product and industrial design, it can be adapted to today’s innovation environment, and moves quality from a vague concept to a tangible one.

I ask:

· How much time is allocated specifically to quality activities?

· When will the time invested not yield significant improvements to the final experience?

· What review process is in place to ensure quality control and quality improvement?

Side-note: I imagine some believe that thinking about these different dimensions too early could reduce the speed of innovation. I disagree. Quality is essential from day one, and I think what needs to be thought through is the diminishing rate of returns devoted to quality across the different stages of the innovation cycle.

Simplicity

Another element to which not enough attention is given and — ironically — is often oversimplified, is simplicity. In my opinion, obsessing about simplifying experience, internal processes and procedures and anything that gets on launching the new venture is critical to success, and it needs to be designed.

My experience as a design and innovation advisor in large organisations tells me that people tend to fall for two common biases that hinder simplicity:

· The infamous complexity bias, which states that when faced with two competing hypotheses, we’re likely to choose the most complex one as it seems to pose fewer risks for the organisation and is more thought-through.

· What I call the bolt-in bias, which states that bolting in additional features will make the innovation more compelling. I’ve seen many projects get absorbed into the abyss of “feature-death” as a result of how the brain evolves a concept over time. Hence it’s important that a simplicity review of the must-have features is carried out regularly.

I ask:

· Has time been allocated for simplification after every sprint and once the output is ready for launch?

· Who’s responsible for thinking about how the solution can be simplified and has the authority to do so? (Ideally someone external to the innovation process.)

· Who’s responsible for thinking about any complexity that will be created when the solution is scaled?

· In the case of an existing product, what features can be removed to make way for newly created ones?

Side-note: I get terribly frustrated when people use risk management and alignment as excuses for not being able to deal with ambiguity and uncertainty. In reality, the opposite is true: innovative, bold solutions that are simple are easily manageable, and provide a safer route to mitigating risks.

And yes, “simplicity almost always comes at the end, not the beginning”.

Impact

This element might be more obvious ;-) but evidence of measurable positive social impact alongside positive business impact is still really rare.

Time and time again, I see innovators leaving their work at the proof of concept stage, rather than the proof of value stage. We need to change that dynamic and standardised measures that can be comparable, so it’s easy to demonstrate real impact.

I ask:

· To what extent have we demonstrated that the new solution will offer value to users, business, society and/or planet prior to going live?

· Have we iterated and learnt from any experiments to improve the solution to increase the utility function?

· What’s the depth of intent demonstrated by users during any tests?

I encourage everyone to dive under the superfluous and discover the depths of the non-obvious in which the fundamental elements of successful innovation can be found.

Read part 3 here.