Innovation Starts With a Perspective Shift
I understand innovation in the sense of Schumpeter’s creative destruction as destroying old structures and creating new ones. For me, innovation means not only improving but moreover renewing.
Latin origin: innovāre = to renew | from in + novāre = to make new | from novus = new
But how can we truly renew something?
In my opinion renewing or innovating always requires a breaking away from accepted possibilities. It is only when we find ourselves in a new relation to everything we thought we knew, that we realize there are more possibilities and alternative approaches.
“The task is not so much to see what no one has yet seen, but to think what nobody has yet thought, about that which everybody sees.” — Erwin Schrödinger
However, although we — as individuals or organizations — have throughout our lives created our own very specific lens which is constantly interpreting the world in a very specific way, we usually don’t even consider having such a lens. Most of the time, we assume that we are seeing the world just as everyone else sees it. Even worse, we mostly assume that the way we do things is the one right way.
For example, Westerners usually see time as linear and as a scarce resource: We imagine ourselves driving on a road into the future ahead of us, while the past is behind us. Indigenous Madagascans, however, see it almost the other way around: For them, the future is invisible and unknowable flowing into us from behind, consequently becoming the past which is visible in front of us. Both perspectives have substantial implications: The Western idea of the future being ahead of us might, for example, suggest that the future is discerned by looking ahead, prioritizing a foveal, focused viewing at the expense of a more peripheral, diffused one. The Madagascan idea of the past being in front of us, by contrast, suggests looking focusing on the wisdom of ancestors to understand the world and to solve problems.
Moving into the realms of business, a very prominent example of how perspective determines interpretations of the world is Kodak. Kodak defined its business as making cameras and film and saw the world through the lens of an analog camera and film maker. When digital cameras started to gain traction, Kodak wasn’t able to open its lens early enough to see its business as including this new technology as well as to see the vast amounts of possibilities that would come with digital cameras. Kodak’s demise wasn’t due to an unawareness of the trend towards digital cameras, it just did not renew its frame, its perspective to see a new future with vast amounts of new opportunities.
Your frame dictates and limits the answers to the questions you ask. By changing your frame, you will radically change the range of possible answers or solutions.
Albert Einstein is quoted as saying:
“If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”
Another example is Tesco. The grocery retailer shifted its perspective when it realized that most Korean urbanites simply do not have enough time for grocery shopping. However, these busy Koreans had one thing in common: They were all forced to stop their on-the-go lifestyles every day waiting for the subway. When others would have explored new ways of drawing people to their stores, making their shopping experience more convenient and faster, Tesco brought the store to the place where their customers had to pause out of necessity.
So how can we shift our perspectives?
How can we reframe our picture of reality and future?
In my opinion, this is an endeavor that requires both an introspection and a change of context. Because it is only when we become aware of our own frame, our own perspective that we are able to change it. And changing it requires us to hack into the process that leads to the construction of our frame in the first place, which is context.
- Introspection: Becoming aware of the frame and questioning it
- Change of Context: Becoming aware of the context that led to the frame and changing it
Introspection
Introspection requires a self-reflection that seeks to understand how you understand — i.e. identifying the determinants of the frame or lens that makes you interpret things in a specific way. The goal should be to become aware of your assumptions, beliefs, values, visions of the future, and the guiding principles that influence your decision-making.
Because it is our assumptions and expectations that determine how we construct new ideas in our imaginations. They limit us in what we define as true and believe as being possible. When these assumptions change, it changes what we imagine, the future that we envision and in turn what we create.
Ask the WHY question!
One way to become more aware of your or your organization’s embedded assumptions is to ask the why question. Tina Seelig, Prof. of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, explains the power of the why question as follows:
“If I asked you to build a bridge for me, you could go off and build a bridge. Or you could come back to me with another question: “Why do you need a bridge?” I would likely tell you that I need a bridge to get to the other side of a river. Aha! This response opens up the frame of possible solutions. There are clearly many ways to get across a river besides using a bridge. You can open the frame even farther by asking why I want to get to the other side of the river. Imagine I told you that I work on the other side. This, again, provides valuable information and broadens the range of possible solutions even more.”
This example already reveals two assumptions: 1. crossing rivers requires a bridge, and 2. work can only be found on the other side of the river. As illustrated, changing those assumptions broadens the range of possibilities and solutions.
See Simon Sinek explain in his TED talk how most organizations don’t ask the WHY question, and how those who do, are more successful:
If Kodak asked the WHY question, they might have defined their business as follows: enabling the world to capture and share moments. Consequently, this might have revealed Kodak’s basic assumption that capturing and sharing moments will always be predominantly done with analog cameras and film. It could have made the assumption more questionable, more debatable. Looking at the world from the perspective of enabling people to capture and share moments could have made it easier to see the vast opportunities of a shift to digital cameras. Kodak might have interpreted digital cameras as a powerful tool to achieve their purpose.
So do the following repeatedly:
- Ask WHY you are doing what you are doing
- Identify and become aware of your embedded beliefs and assumptions
- Question those assumptions by asking HOW else you could achieve your purpose
- Finally, ask WHAT is needed to achieve the purpose
Other approaches that help:
Futures studies Professor Sohail Inayatullah developed a method called Causal Layered Analysis which helps individuals and organizations uncovering underlying belief systems and myths. The image on the left illustrates the four layers used to analyze an issue. Following the method, one has to go from top to bottom, analyzing each layer and identifying the specific facts, systemic causes, worldviews, and myths. Then the dominant myths are questioned and changed. One goes back through each layer from bottom to top reframing the problem and searching for new solutions or possibilities along the process.
Another helpful tool is a macrospective or macrohistory approach, i.e. taking a big picture view of history and identifying the decisions that led you to where you are now. I am sure that individuals and organizations alike can pinpoint to several events or turning points in their past that defined what they consequently became. As an example, I could perhaps trace back my interest in this topic of shifting perspectives to my experiences made as a European, living and working in the U.S., Indonesia and South Africa and having many diverse and close intercultural interactions. This forced me to shift my own perspective many times and might have invoked my passion for the topic.
Change of Context
As I was saying earlier, our frames or lenses are constructed by an interdependence between our self and our context. Thus, another way to shake up your frame is to change your environment altogether. This is done by immersing yourself into environments which are contrary or different to what you are used to — again both as an individual and as an organization. I have recently read an article about so called trend or startup walks in Berlin: Executives from big corporations are lead through innovative Berlin startups, hacker spaces, innovation labs, co-working spaces and art galleries. They might even take part in some small workshops and are thus finding themselves completely immersed into a different context. For something to truly resonate with us, nothing is better than an experience. Because we do not resist change, we resist being changed.
You are a product of your environment. So choose the environment that will best develop you toward your objective. Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success — or are they holding you back? — W. Clement Stone
This quote already hints at another way of changing context, connecting it to the WHY question and purpose (or goal). Furthermore, surrounding yourself with diverse people and empathizing with their ideas and beliefs is a good way to shift your perspective. It sounds so obvious and simple, but be honest and think about how often you really try to empathize with people holding opinions you don’t approve or understand. In this regard, travelling and really immersing yourself into different cultures is an extremely powerful way to shift your perspective.
Start from Scratch
What if you purposely try to break your context all in all?! Try to ask yourself how specific systems, products, services would look like if one would start them from scratch again. For example, try to design a transportation device that can carry you from one part of the city to another if there was no car, train, bicycle industry.
Famous innovator and entrepreneur Elon Musk explained that he is using so called First Principles Thinking as a sort of core philosophy to look at the world. First Principles Thinking forces yourself to look at the fundamental facts of a situation without directly defaulting to the way the rest of the world thinks about it.
“Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.” With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?” It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?” It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.” — Elon Musk
Innovation labs or corporate think tanks such as Alphabet’s X lab and Amazon’s Lab126 are often established to foster such a “thinking from scratch” in a new environment. The goal is to provide a sort of fresh, unaffected space where new ideas can be thought of and developed. Alphabet’s X lab is virtually completely detached from Alphabet (or Google), creating a different context. This enables the lab to explore specific innovation projects from scratch as opposed to starting from a predefined (often biased) foundation, mental models, and corporate rules. In practice, such endeavors are obviously easier said than done, and one could argue that starting from scratch is never possible (there is always a frame, lens we look through). Nevertheless, already trying to destroy or change your context and to start from scratch triggers new perspectives and is therefore highly useful.
Finally, as already mentioned, introspection and changing the context are interdependent — becoming aware of my context, helps me change it; changing my context, on the other hand, makes me more self-aware and reflective. The goal should be to continually do both at the same time. Most of the above-illustrated methods are very obvious and simple. This might, however, be exactly the reason why they are so overlooked and ignored. In our daily lives, we are usually more concerned and busy with understanding the status quo, questioning it becomes the exception. This, however, only confirms and reinforces our frames or lenses. Thus, being aware of one’s frame and shifting perspectives is like a muscle: If we aren’t doing it, we unlearn it and we start to forget to have a frame. Everything around us becomes true as we see it, not as anyone else sees it. We start to disapprove of all other perspectives, which ultimately makes us complacent.
However, complacency in a rapidly changing world is an assurance for remaining behind, for improvement rather than innovation and for failure and demise.
