The Conditions for Thriving Innovation

A while ago I wrote about Catalysts and also the Power of Collaborative Innovation, because as I see it - businesses stuck in the commodity market are desperately trying to figure out how to 'add value' to whatever it is that they sell and realising that doing this requires thinking about providing experiences. Catalysts are important factors in creating experiences, because to do it effectively you need your company to adopt a kinf of 'hive-mind', where people spontaneously re-organise themselves to deal with a particular problem or exploit a new opportunity. Doing things the old way, by putting people in boxes and waiting for orders from the top is simply too slow to react to many things. Relying on individuals alone is not enough though. Companies need to change the way they approach solving problems by changing structures, staffing of teams and culture to create optimal conditions for innovation. Lastly, if your company has a community - figure out how to enable more of your fans to participate in what your company does and open up channels to enable dialogue.

Individuals as Catalysts

On one hand, values are what bring people together better and more efficiently than boxes. Breaking down boxes also create room to deal with previously unforeseen situations - it puts emphasis on people's knowledge and experience, more than restrictive 'roles and responsibilities' the modus operandi becomes the potential to outgrow those roles than merely sticking to them blinkering oneself to things going on nearby. It is an approach which encourages knowing what is wrong with any given product or situation, but equally, taking the view that one has power to find solutions and not being discouraged when the solutions produce unexpected results.

There used to be a clear division between people who give orders and those who receive them. There is a third group, previously rarely recognised, but a crucial component in making the 'hive-mind' work and those are the intermediaries. Intermediaries are catalysts who can achieve more than their own personal talents permit. The idea of catalysis gives intermediaries a new status. Previously, they were mere links or hyphens, supplying needs felt by others. As catalysts, by contrast, they have an independent existence or purpose: they can create new situations and transform people's lives by bringing them together, without having any arrogant pretensions themselves. To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking they can control it, wish to influence its direction.

And it is the catalysts who invariably see the power of collaborative innovation - or as the Japanese proverb puts it 'None of us are as smart as all of us' - that surely has to be the raison d'être of collaborative innovation, working across disciplines, departments, locations to create more meaningful and relevant solutions to problems that one could ever have achieved whilst stuck away in a silo somewhere.

Enabling Collaborative Innovation in Business

1. Know the experts - The bigger an organisation, the harder it is to know the unique skills and abilities of your staff, particularly in creative fields. Moreover, companies often forget that many of the true experts in their products are in fact not employees, but avid fans who have formed communities around your product. It is a match-making task, finding the right people to work on your project and equally, being committed in involving fans in improving your products - but infinitely more rewarding.

2. Feed the minds - Business, development and innovation moves ahead at a breakneck speed and there are no excuses for not keeping up with trends, industry developments, research and headline news. Effective collaboration enables information to get through effortlessly and this is where corporate communications should partially re-direct its efforts from being a insular company-only news media to serving the company with tools to stay on the cutting edge of the latest relevant information

3. Use technology to enable collaboration - Use the intranets to enable on-line knowledge share, take the wiki approach of creating web pages around a topic which can be modified by anyone with access and use that as a virtual meeting room, encouraging contributions, ideas and input.

4. Encourage entrepreneurship - Collaboration will not grow and flourish in structures continuing to employ command-and-control approaches. This stifles creative thinking and creates a cynical, passive attitude, as there are no incentives in doing things in an unconventional way. The benefits of unconventional methods are increasing speed, flexibility and innovation in solutions, but mechanisms net to be set in place to reward and encourage this behaviour - otherwise it is far too simple to do things the way we have always done.

5. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts - Great ideas happen when timing, expertise, collaboration and geographic locations all come together in surprising, unpredictable, but effective combinations. Intranets, entrepreneurship-schemes, time can all be set aside to achieve this, but it is ultimately down to a shift in mindsets and a greater degree of personal ownership and responsibility of the outcome, which creates the necessary sparks. You need advocates, passionate champions of a new way of working to publicise the efforts, and all the other dimensions to be in place and last but not least, a profound understanding of the power of collaboration.

Community-driven co-creation

Creating meaningful links with communities sounds a lot simpler than it is. It actually requires a very particular type of person to instigate meaningful exchange and bring the best out of people, rather than cramping their style. Designers are naturally poised for this role, because of their continuous involvement in product development and the holistic view required to do this properly. However Laszlo & Lazslo draw a fascinating analogy between generations of designers and of conversations facilitators. In social systems design they differentiate among five generations of designers (Laszlo, 1992).

1. The first generation designer is consider an expert and specialist in the design process. She studies the situation of the group and decides which is the best solution for them. 
2. The second generation designer is akin to the classical consultant who asks for information from the members of the group, and then analyses it and gives them a solution according to her perception of their needs. These two first generations design for others.  In contrast, the last three generations of designers design with others. 
3. The third generation designer gets the group involved in the creation of alternative solutions, but at the end of the process, she nevertheless selects the best alternative for them. 
4. The fourth generation designer works to create an adequate group environment that facilitates the processes of generating alternatives and selecting solutions. 
5. The newest generation, the fifth generation, not only involves the group in the design process, but also helps the group to learn how to learn to facilitate.  A group that does so can sustain the continued design process by themselves (Banathy, 1996.)

How are these designer generations roles related to the role of the conversation facilitator?  We believe that a facilitator of a conversation cannot operate out of the values and assumptions derived from the first two generations.  That is to say, there is no possibility for an authentic conversation facilitator to “design for others” or to assume a position of authority and control over the conversants.  The conversation facilitator cannot be an external agent to the community but rather needs to be just another member of it.  In fact, many thriving conversations are characterised by a shared facilitation process in which the role of the facilitator is not assumed by only one individual but rotates among the members of the community. The facilitator of a conversation can function out of the framework of a third, fourth or fifth generation of designer. But facilitators of thriving conversations tends to work from the basis of the fifth generation — completely integrated into the group, sharing the facilitation functions and responsibilities, and helping the group to become more and more capable of facilitating their own process evolutionary change and transcendence.

Bela Banathy (1996) suggests a set of guardianship roles to share responsibility and accomplish the tasks of the group.  These roles include:
- the guardian of participation
- the guardian of keeping the focus
- the guardian of selected group technique
- the guardian of documentation
- the guardian of accepting and honouring all contributions
- the guardian of values
- the guardian of “keeping the fire burning”
- the guardian of time and coordination
Each role is descriptive of the functions that a facilitator carries out, but in thriving conversations, they are not assumed by just one individual but shared by the community as a whole.