Welcome to the Rats Nest
Living with the pace of new technology is a challenging and thrilling proposition not only for users, but for creators as well. With Rat’s Nest, we’ve decided to cross the streams and share our thoughts and experiences about both the changes that technology is bringing to society as well as the ways in which we can get better at creating that change with technology.
At its core, the theme of Rat’s Nest is risk. The risk of new technologies, the risk of business disruption, and the risk changing culture in new and unexpected ways. The innovation business has always been a risky business, and it will only get riskier. At the same time, the opportunities for innovation and disruption are significant. Businesses and innovation leaders find themselves dealing with a double-edged sword: Pursuing innovation-led opportunities as part of your business strategy is a risky proposition. At the same time, not working to get in front of the wave of wide scale digital disruption is equally risky.
The question is, how do you balance risk and opportunity? Surprisingly, when it comes to the art and science of software-driven innovation there’s an incomplete toolkit. We need to finish answering this question and fill in the gaps in the modern innovation toolkit.
Three years ago, we were like a lot of other digital design firms. We had interesting projects with partners that respected and valued our work. We were up to date on the right tools and methodologies. We had a great process and were proud of it. We also knew in our gut that something was off. We decided to follow our hunch and started a long journey to understand the real challenges that our partners were dealing with. Through our research we discovered that far from being trusted, innovation partners introduced stress into the system. They made things riskier. As we dug in deeper we discovered that sensitivity to risk was high, but there was a disconnect in how the work was done. Risk management was an expectation, but it wasn’t always part of the process.
We believe that at its core, innovation is a risk management process. At the early stages of the innovation process, everything is ambiguous and poorly defined. Everything is an assumption. What’s scary right now is that innovation practice has swung into a culture of big bets and validation. Every organization has a lab, an innovation portfolio and a moonshot mission to create that single disruptive innovation that saves the company. The bets are big and everyone wants to succeed. And yet few companies are succeeding.
As we’ve begun to understand the real jobs that innovation teams are being asked to do, we’ve changed our focus. Validation is not enough. The job is to reduce uncertainty to support both innovation and leadership. You win when you understand how to take enough risk off of the table to make the bets manageable. That’s the focus of Rat’s Nest: sharing the best ideas from Normative and our peers on how to move innovation beyond its obsession with the big idea. We love the idea of the big outcome, and getting the best outcomes means getting serious about dealing with the myriad of risks that come from dealing with an new emerging technology like software.
So why the Rat’s Nest? A big part of our approach is turning assumptions into more concrete understanding through prototyping. It’s a useful risk management approach that you can apply on everything from user testing to business models. Last year we discovered a great article by Rik Higham where he proposed the “Riskiest Assumption Test” as an alternative to the MVP in software. The language was perfect, and we quickly found ourselves referring to RATs in our work. It made the idea simple and accessible both for our team and our partners: What’s your riskiest assumption, and how do you test it quickly!
Like many in the innovation community, we hold up Lockheed’s Skunk Works as the reference point for great innovation under pressure. We’ve always wondered what would it be like to get an inside view of Skunk Works as it developed. That’s the Rat’s Nest: an insiders view on the latest innovation thinking, techniques and stories that balance risk and reward to drive transformational outcomes.
