Innovation and control

From LLN

Innovation and control

Contents

How does a library foster innovation while maintaining enough control to keep things running? It's an inherent conflict, one that can be healthy but requires thought and attention. More than a decade ago, one AUL at an ARL library recognized the problem and put it this way: “We were so busy looking at the sky that we were forgetting to check the books out.” More often, perhaps, libraries are accused of focusing too much on checking the books out and failing to look at the sky.

Steven Bell discusses innovation and control in posts from Designing better libraries, excerpted and adapted for use here.

Nina Simon offers a related perspective from a related field, in what's now a multi-author essay. (Editor's note: I'll suggest that, in this particular case, libraries and museums are more alike than different.)

What makes an innovative idea actionable?

By Nina Simon. Excerpted and adapted from a June 22, 2009 post at Museum 2.0. Used by permission.

What do you do when you encounter a really great and unusual idea, one that you could implement but would require you to change some aspect of what you are currently doing? Do you jump in or do you shelve it? And what distinguishes the former from the latter?

Recently, I've been wrestling a lot with the relationship between innovation and impact. I'm working on a personal project (slowly) to open a cafe/bar venue that is also a design incubator for participatory exhibits. My goals are two-fold: to develop a dynamic, creative, social platform for my community and to distribute its successful elements to other civic learning institutions (museums, libraries, community centers). The further this moves towards reality, the more I'm focusing on how I'm going to serve the people walking in the door and the less I'm thinking about my colleagues.

Shining star or virus?

My strategy is: make it work really well, research what works and doesn't, and share the design lessons with the world. If the venue is successful and we share our honest results, won't others want to adopt some of our practices?

Maybe not. I was recently discussing this project with an audience research specialist, Peter Linett, who is working on a related project to encourage experimentation and risk-taking in museum practice. Whereas I'm taking the “make it as awesome as possible and they will pay attention and want to steal the ideas” approach, Peter is trying very deliberately to create a structure that supports participation from diverse museum professionals and museum venues from the very beginning. My model is the shining star. His is the virus.

Which has more impact on your actual daily practice?

Creative thievery

I draw design lessons from outside models all the time, so the “creative thievery” approach feels natural to me. There's a whole section of this blog called Unusual Projects and Influences. Whether it's an online game like Signtific, a tutoring center like 826 Valencia or an educational event like Living Library, my engineer brain wants to figure out what makes these innovative projects tick and then tinker with those design lessons in my own work.

When innovation is too alien

But I also remember the first time I participated in a RIG (Rapid Idea Generation) session with Julie Bowen, then of the Ontario Science Centre, at a conference in 2004. Julie got about 25 of us incredibly excited about their innovative three-dimensional brainstorming process. We loved it. And then at the end, when she asked how many of us could do this in our own museums, no hands went up. We all felt like the process was too alien to our work environments, too hard to sell, too hard to integrate. We saw that it was brilliant, but we weren't willing or able to make the changes so we could use it.

That's one big reason innovations don't get integrated: they are just too foreign to our standard practices and work environments. That's an internal barrier—something about ourselves and the way our teams approach new ideas. But Peter pointed out an external barrier I hadn't anticipated: some innovations just don't feel “museumy” enough. Get a few museum exhibit designers talking about their favorite museums and some serious outliers like the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the City Museum will pop up high on the list. And yet, as Peter pointed out to me, if we love those unusual standouts so much, why don't more museums adopt elements of their practice? Peter commented,

I did hear from several people that the museum folks who loved visiting the City Museum when they were in St. Louis were quick to add, “It's not a museum.” These categorical objections operate on assumptions that aren't really examined, and not just about educational values or the status of objects, but also about the personality and tone that define museums in some minds.

I was somewhat surprised by this. I'd always thought that museums didn't adopt more of the fabulous outlier work because it wasn't decoded in an understandable and actionable way. That's why I required my museum studies students to carefully document their Advice exhibition—so that the learning from that unusual project wouldn't be lost and could be applied in other places.

But Peter suggested that places and projects that are fundamentally not “museum-like” will not have impact on traditional museums. This worries me because the implication is that no matter how successful my venue is at connecting strangers in creative and intellectual play, museum professionals will look at it and say, “that's nice, but it isn't a museum.”

The further I go on my own personal design process, the less I care about this issue. I'm enjoying designing a place that I think is going to be successful and a hell of a lot of fun. I realize that it is presumptuous and a little silly to worry about field-wide impact. But I want to keep grappling with this problem, because my ultimate goal is to make existing institutions more dynamic, relevant, and audience-centered. I'm not interested in creating a whole new set of institutions to replace or compete with the old ones. But I do want to start by pushing from the outside where the ground rules and constraints are different. I want to make a well-documented model to serve as an engine of new physical ideas.

...What does an outside model have to have for you to be willing to take a risk and make some internal changes? Do you need research? Ticket sales reports? Does it need to take place in a venue similar to yours? How can I (or anyone) design a project that is both maddeningly challenging and incredibly useful?

Brief excerpts from the (sometimes long) comments

  • Dan Spock: Seems to me most museums put a higher value on continuity than the inevitable disjunction innovation requires. This is partly why museums stick around so long compared to businesses... I'm not really a big fan of innovation for its own sake. In each case, there has to be a compelling reason. When people sit around trying to be innovative for reasons of personal frustration, it too often pulls away from the important stuff...and can lead to a vortical, inward-thinking malaise. I think innovation gets propelled quite naturally by some problem to be solved or in response to an opportunity that presents itself. Defining the problem or opportunity is half the battle, then a long period of iterative gruntwork... I think museum people do well to keep the focus on the public in all things. People go to museums hoping to have their head turned around a bit, to encounter something different, get a new take, escape the routine. Try hard to serve, the innovation will follow. [Editor's note: Still don't see the relation to libraries? Read it again, substituting “libraries” for “museums.” Does that help?]
  • Create a Comic Project: ...I tend to prefer treating the environments I want my idea implemented in as a limiting factor... To sum it up, I'd say “elegance” and “simplicity” are two very strong factors in whether an innovation is adopted broadly.
  • Dan Spock: [Agreeing re simplicity and elegance] ...Some innovations are inherently adaptable... Then there are the things that seem more obviously to be one-offs... So elegance might be defined as a solution/innovation well-suited to the task, hence “actionable,” not merely something done for the sake of it, because you can or because the technology makes something possible.
  • Nina Simon: Some very common objects and experiences...become innovative when applied in unusual situations. Some of the projects that bring me the most delight are those that have taken “an old idea” and stuck it somewhere new... There are probably some true innovations that are literally new and indescribable in the context of familiar things. Maybe those ones will have the most ultimate impact but are the most challenging to push forward. In the meantime, I'm happy with a lot of unusual and exciting hybridization. Maybe that's one step down from innovation. That's OK with me.

Organizational tension between innovation and control

By Steven Bell. Excerpted and adapted from an October 24, 2007 post at Designing better libraries. Used by permission.

There is an inherent dualism within most organizations between the desire for innovative workers and the desire to control those same workers. After all, if everyone is off being innovative who’s going to be getting the work done? This seems to be a problem in the library world. I am reminded of a rant by David Lee King in which he claims that attendees at his presentations almost unanimously agreed that if they tried to implement innovative Web 2.0 technologies in their libraries they’d hit a brick wall with their supervisors and library directors. Is it that some library directors are simply resistant to change or do they fear that their organization will suffer if workers spend a few hours here and there experimenting with new technology—the result of which could be an innovative service enhancement?

This problem is by no means unique to libraries. It’s a challenge for all types of organizations, and it’s a conundrum that must be addressed by the organizational leadership. The problem and potential solutions are explored in a new book by Gary Hamel titled The Future of Management. I recently read an excerpt in Fortune Magazine. Though the book received just a fair review over at BusinessWeek, I think the excerpt offers some stimulating ideas, and I’ll want to see more of what it has to say about innovation. For example, Hamel writes:

When talking to senior executives about the need to encourage innovation, I often get the sense they’d like their employees to loosen up a bit, to think more radically and be more experimental, but they’re worried this might distract them from a laserlike focus on efficiency and execution... I’ve heard this concern expressed in a variety of ways: “Yeah, we want people to innovate, but we have to stay focused.” “Innovation’s well and good, but at the end of the day, we have to deliver.” “If everybody’s off innovating, who’s going to mind the store?” These sentiments reveal a persistent management orthodoxy: If you allow people the freedom to innovate, discipline will take a beating.

In other words, having more of one means less of the other. So what advice does Hamel have for organizations that would like to have their cake and eat it too? Hamel’s approach is to provide examples of companies that, in his words, have learned to “double dip” and have both innovation and worker discipline in the same setting (not just a separate innovation or design lab). His examples are Whole Foods Market, W.L. Gore and Google. One problem that most library managers might have with these examples is that they use some fairly radical organizational structures. This can include the use of small teams with with the power to make key decisions, highly flat structures where there are no titles and no supervisors, half-days off for “dabble time,” financial rewards for innovation and a host of other practices that may be difficult to implement in traditional library hierarchies. In fact, this is a problem that the BusinessWeek reviewer had with the book. How many organizations can structure themselves like these three companies? Even Hamel acknowledges that there have to be mechanisms to “keep things in check.”

So while it’s unlikely library organizations are suddenly going to re-structure themselves to resemble Google, there are some libraries that have organized workers into teams, others that are allowing for more experimentation time and others yet may be trying techniques that allow workers a bit more freedom and a little less control. If you know of some good examples or you are making progress in this area at your library, please share your insights.

Unfortunately, there were no comments between October 24, 2007 and April 8, 2008—but you can leave yours on the Talk page!

Innovation, not information overload, may be what 2008 is all about

By Steven Bell. Adapted and excerpted from a January 9, 2008 post at Designing better libraries. Used by permission.

Information overload isn’t just for librarians anymore. As long as I’ve been in this profession, and especially in the past few years, having more information than I can possibly cope with is the name of the game. Now everyone else is catching onto the challenges of capturing the most important information, applying it for decision making and storing it for future use. While some may think that the new year will be all about dealing with information overload, I think we’ll be focusing more of our attention and energy on stimulating our own innovation. Here are some signs.

Boxing in creativity

Even the New York Times is providing insight into if not outright advice on how to improve individual and organizational innovation. In a recent article the Times observed that “As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.” This exact point was made in my post about Thinkertoys (and see below)—that our expertise can blind us to possible solutions and innovative ideas because we are unable to see things from different perspectives.

Creating the innovation culture

I recently discovered two excellent pieces about innovation. If you are looking for ideas on how to create an innovation culture in your organization, begin your reading with an Innovation Labs white paper titled Creating the Innovation Culture: Geniuses, Champions, and Leaders. According to author Langdon Morris, an innovation culture is one in which innovation happens and does so consistently over time. He says organizations with innovation cultures have individuals who fill three essential roles:

  1. The creative genius whose insights develop into ideas and then into value-adding innovations.
  2. The innovation champion who supports innovation by helping creative people to overcome the obstacles that otherwise hamper innovation.
  3. The innovation leader who defines the organization’s expectations and policies so they favor innovation.

After discussing each of these three roles in greater depth, and supporting it with examples from the business world, Morris explains (via his Innovation Culture Table) that most business practices exist to maintain stability and standardization while extending the status quo. Does that sound like a library for which you’ve worked? If an organization is able to start its innovation culture by bringing together these three roles, then it should begin to remove the obstacles that inhibit the growth of the innovation culture.

Innovation as a learning process

Though its scholarly approach (and length) makes for more challenging reading, the article “Innovation as a learning process: Embedding design thinking” is worthwhile for its attempt to better understand the innovation process by blending ideas about design and learning—two skills set that are of increasing importance to the work of librarians. The article was published in the fall 2007 issue of California Management Review.

This blending results in a model that explains the innovation process as a set of four stages:

  1. Observation (contexts)
  2. Frameworks (insights)
  3. Imperatives (ideas) and
  4. Solutions (experiences).

The authors, Sara Beckman and Michael Barry, focus more on the work of teams in this article. The learning styles intersect with design within the innovation team itself. The most effective teams include a leader with a concrete experience style, an artist with reflective observation style, a writer with abstract conceptualization style and a speaker with active experimentation style. These are somewhat foreign sounding learning styles and the authors don’t do much to explain them, but there are a few good case studies which help to clarify things a bit. This is the sort of article that will demand several readings.

Good innovators are good information managers

Perhaps what one can take away from all these articles on innovation is that good innovators are good information managers. They have methods that make the best of information received, and they are good at identifying worthwhile resources, applying appropriate filters to channel the most appropriate information to themselves, then screening the incoming news to identify the most salient information, and ultimately disseminating that information to their colleagues or team members. So for all the talk about 2008 being the year of information overload, I’m going with 2008 as the year of innovation.

Finding your inner creativity

By Steven Bell. Adapted and excerpted from a December 19, 2007 post at Designing better libraries. Used by permission.

Some librarian bloggers complain about LIS education, with the number one complaint along the lines of “I didn’t learn anything.” My reaction is “Were you listening or thinking while you were doing all that reading, writing and fieldwork?” None of us recalls everything that happened in LIS school (or from our undergraduate days for that matter) but I have several memorable experiences that were indeed excellent learning events.

One came in my now ancient PL/I programming course. The instructor was awful, but trying my hand at computer programming languages taught me a great life lesson: to solve problems you must look at them from a completely different perspective and the more complex the problem the more perspectives one must think through. When my programs failed to run (and how I dreaded redoing those punch cards!) I realized the only way to attack my failure was to stop my linear thinking and turn the problem completely upside down. I had no idea then, but I was using a Thinkertoy technique to release my inner creativity

I had never heard of Thinkertoys until I came across an interview at IdeaConnection with the author of the book. Michael Michalko has put together an interesting collection of techniques for creative thinking, and collectively he refers to them as Thinkertoys, the title of his book on creative thinking.

While some of the suggestions will come off as platitudes (e.g., creative thinkers are positive thinkers), others are thought-provoking. For example, one of our greatest barriers to creativity is our own expertise. It leads us to use the same experiences and resources to approach problems in the same ways we have always used them. Sometimes that approach works fine, but mostly for simple decision-making scenarios. In other words ,it is critical to understand the context of the problem. If you attempt to resolve a problem with a complex context with techniques that work well in asimple context, you will likely fail (for more on this see an excellent article, “A leader’s framework for decision making” in the November 2007 issue of Harvard Business Review). Michalko says, “Learning how to look at problems in different ways with different perspectives, and learning how to generate a multiplicity of ideas is the key to solving any problem.”

Creativity and the opposable mind

What I found most interesting was the link between one of Michalko’s techniques for improving creativity to solve problems and Roger Martin’s new book, The Opposable Mind. Martin and Michalko both propose that in order to release creativity in problem solving one must be able to resolve “two opposite or contradictory ideas, concepts or images that exist simultaneously and that may even be beyond logic” (Michalko). This approach is what moves creative thinkers into the realm of seeing totally new perspectives on their existing problems in ways that free them from the biases of their routine approaches. We think there can’t possibly be another solution, that we’ve thought it all the way through. But when we explore options that are in complete opposition to our existing solutions, and then make the effort to resolve the two opposites a new solution is able to emerge. (In the HBR article the authors suggest that some decision-making situations are so utterly complex that one can only create an environment that allows solutions to emerge from the people affected by the problem. Master problem solvers and highly creative individuals have the knowledge and experience to both establish the right environment and avoid the urge to impose their own solution.)

I believe this is what I experienced in my PL/I course when I learned that, in order to get a non-thinking, highly logical computer to do what I wanted, I needed to stop reading the code commands in the book and instead attack my challenge from a completely different angle that had never before occurred to me. Unfortunately, that would usually happen only after many hours of frustration. But, like Edison I suppose, I was only exploring all the ideas that didn’t work before I found the one that did. Michalko has other good examples of this based on the methods of creative thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci and Albert Einstein.

Thinking outside the box?

Is what Michalko has to offer anything more than “thinking outside the box,” a platitude that suggests we need to move beyond our inner biases and mental limitations? He gives such basic advice as reading beyond the boundaries of one’s own profession (a key element of the keeping up philosophy I’ve been imparting for years) or seeking out experts from other fields for advice in solving problems. In seeking answers to these questions I will need to read the book and explore more of his creative thinking techniques. When I get to the end of it I will hope to be the monkey, not the kitten, when it comes to creative problem solving.

Monkeys? Kittens? Go read the interview.

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