Fresh Minds

Here’s something I wrote for Fast Company magazine many moons ago, the core of which I was discussing with someone late last night…

In his classic 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn argued that the people who achieve “fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have either been very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.” In other words, when it comes to innovation, organizations can be disabled by experience and specialization.

Einstein and Picasso were at their most original in their early years — the young Einstein invented the special theory of relativity in 1905 when he was just 26 years old. In 1907, a 26-year-old Picasso painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and effectively invented cubism.

Of course, the idea of youth was itself new in the early 1900s and it wasn’t until the 1950s that someone “invented” teenagers. But some companies still haven’t quite caught up with the idea that it’s young people (a company’s staff and customers) that are the most likely to invent the future.

There are plenty of reasons why the most innovative people in any organization are the newest recruits. Young people tend to have the most energy and the most confidence. They’re also outsiders and have little respect for tradition or orthodoxy. Their lack of experience can also be an asset because they’re not restrained by history or preconceptions. Older employees, on the other hand, know that it has all been tried (and failed) before.

This lack of experience was something that Seymour Cray (an early designer of high-speed computers) seized upon. Cray had a policy of hiring young, fresh-faced engineers because they didn’t yet know what couldn’t be done.

Another issue is that the longer you work for an organization, the more you adopt groupthink and the further removed you become from real life (how customers think, feel, and behave). I once worked with one of the largest automotive companies in the world who wanted to understand how people really bought cars. In one meeting we innocently asked a group of 35 senior executives when they had last bought a car on their own with their own money. Not a single person could remember. In contrast, the younger employees who were not given company cars had a real grasp of reality.

Another car company, Toyota, once put together a “board” of children to advise them on product development. Hasbro has done the same with toys, and Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center once asked some school kids to attend a series of brainstorming sessions on the future of technology. Indeed, as Groucho Marx said, “This is so simple, a 6-year-old child could understand it. Quick, get me a 6-year-old child.”

Just after the American Civil War, a doctor called George Beard got interested in whether there was a connection between age and creative ability. He found that there was — and that creativity peaks around the age of 40. Moreover, he estimated that 70% of global creative output came from people under the age of 45. A few years later, another study by Harvey Lehman observed that, whilst the finding was true, the relationship between creativity and age varied according to discipline.

Conversely, it’s also some of the oldest employees (and especially those that are closest to retirement) that have the best ideas because they have little or no responsibility for the outcomes. They’re not restrained by the practicalities of implementation, and they no longer care what anyone else in the organization thinks about them. Mix these people up with some young minds and the results can be explosive.

What are the practical lessons here for innovation teams?

• Involve some of the newest recruits. If you don’t know any find some.
• Think like a kid yourself sometimes – keep asking why?
• Hire curious people and don’t always get hung up on experience.
• Plug into the brains of older employees (even those that have retired).
• Mix innocence with expertise (new ideas often favour youth, whilst development and execution often suit experience).

Finally, ensure that teams are multidisciplinary. This doesn’t just mean getting someone from marketing and someone from R&D. Involve customer service, customer complaints, sales, finance, and production. And whatever you do, try not to put together a group where everyone is the same age, the same sex — and went to the same school. Because, guess what? They’ll probably all have the same idea.

08:40 to Manchester

On my way to Manchester today. Sitting on the train wondering whether to accept invitations to Lima and Tehran of all places. Bit upset that I had to say no to Moscow recently (a TEDx event) but it’s slap bang in the middle of school holidays.

Very interesting lunch with Napier Collyns yesterday. If you don’t know him, he worked at Shell Oil under Pierre Wack in the 1970s and was part of the original team that developed the use of scenario planning within commercial organisations. The night before it was dinner with Alan seekers, an equally lovely and fascinating man whom I hadn’t seen in 10 years. He was, until recently, a professor of Media. I miss living in Sydney on many levels, but I must admit that the people you can easily bump into in London makes the rain and David Cameron worthwhile.

So a quote:

“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed “- Charles Darwin.

Business to Business Trends

I attended a talk by Peter Sissons the other day (the former newsreader and moderator of BBC’s Question Time). He read a passage from a book that totally blew me away. It was about trivia.  The book is called Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman and is apparently a bit of a classic, although I’d never heard of it. I’ll blog the passage as soon as I can find it. There was also a section comparing 1984 to Brave New World, some of which I need to reference in one of my own new books.

Anyway, I’m attempting to write something about Business to Business (B2B) growth opportunities and it’s harder than expected because I’m usually so focused on the Business to Consumer (B2C) space (and have been for years).

Here’s a list of trends/ issues I’m working to:

• Globalization vs. Localization

• New biz models & new service models

• Unexpected competition (much cheaper and much faster)

• Legal issues around collaboration and open-innovation

• How to deal with Big Data

• Margin erosion

• More informed customers & competitors

Good bye to all that

What is it about human nature that means we usually react after the event? Its was pretty obvious that one day my main computer’s hard drive would crash to the point where it would be inoperable or it would be stolen. So why wasn’t everything backed up? Answer: Backing everything up was always important, but it was never urgent. It was always something for tomorrow not today.

Actually I’m be a bit unfair on myself. 99% of my files were backed up, but I somehow forgot about emails and email addresses. There’s also annoying little things like printer drivers and bookmarks.

Thought for the day:

“Loss is nothing else but change, and change is nature’s delight”
– Marcus Aurelius.

24,450 reasons to get in touch

Well brainmail is finally up. Two issues no less (don’t worry, that’s unlikely to happen again). BTW, if there are any journalism or media students out there that fancy helping out with future issues do get in touch.

So what else is new? Well I should have taken more notice of one of my computers when it said its memory was full. It crashed a few days ago taking 22,450 emails with it. All of the files were backed up, but none of the emails were. Hopefully I can get them back, although there is something rather liberating about having lost them all.

The books are going well. 50* is done and is being fact checked, although fact checking things that haven’t happened yet is proving rather fun. The other book (4*) is almost done, but needs a significant degree of polishing. Getting some scenario logic right is more difficult than I expected, as is separating the four scenarios, which have a tendency to merge together if you turn your back on them for more than a few days.

Other news? Some good stuff coming up with KPMG, GE and the London Business School and I’m almost back on the road with trips to San Francisco, Hong Kong, Lisbon, Frankfurt and Prague.

The image, btw, is the structure of the second book.

* Working titles.

Why ten is the safest number

A few years ago a statistical study of murders in New York City highlighted some interesting trends. The study, covering all 1622 murders that occurred between 2003-2005, found that men (including boys) were responsible for 93% of all murders.

Victims tended to be other men and boys and in more than 50% of cases the attacker and the victim knew each other. 75% of victims and offenders were also of the same race. 90% of killers and 50% of victims had criminal records. In other words, Joe Average has very little chance of being randomly killed in New York City.

The most likely time to be killed was between 1am-2am and children are usually
killed by a parent not a stranger. Age 10 is the safest age for kids because they tend to be too old to be abused or neglected and too young to get caught up in violence on the street. The most alarming adult crime trend was that 25% of murders were committed by complete strangers, usually due to a dispute of some kind. This was up 50% on 50 years previously. As for why (and why the overall murder rate had declined), the answer was primarily social factors. Crime ere generally the result of local poverty, family disruption, poor schools and a lack of recreational or work opportunities.

Idea of the week

In the UK you can get free off-peak bus travel if you are aged 60+ So here’s a thought.

If the vibrancy and creativity of a city partly depends on the number of young people living and working in and around it, why not do something similar for the 18- 25s? Free off-peak travel on all buses, tubes and trains and subsidized flats for anyone working or studying in what society decides is a ‘useful’ profession (i.e. people working or training to be in the police, hospitals, firefighting, schools and libraries, but also musicians, poets, painters etc).

Surprises?

What has surprised you over the last twenty years? My list? Life! Beyond this, 9/11 without a doubt. The internet to some degree. The Arab Spring, Facebook and Twitter addiction and the lack of real interest in things such as ethics and other people in general.

What is hidden in plain sight right now that’s likely to change the world over the next 20 years? I’d say societal ageing and resource prices. Also the speed of developments in areas such as genetics, synthetic biology, AI, brain-machine interfaces and so on.