Catalign Quarterly - March 2012

Catalign Quarterly is an attempt to put together insights relevant for fostering a culture of innovation in organizations. This is the second issue of the Quarterly.

Theme for this Quarterly is “Intuition & innovation”. There are five articles in this issue. The first article is a book review of what I believe is a landmark book on the theme of this issue. It is written by Nobel Laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The second article is on the legendary mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan and marvels & flaws of his intuition. The third article explores the relationship between creativity and intuition as discussed by Kahneman. The fourth article explores a classic bias called fundamental attribution error through the question "Is poor idea flow a people issue or situation issue?" Finally, the fifth article looks at the metaphor of weighing scale as a type of measure and its relationship with culture change.

Hope you find some of the articles helpful.

1. Book review: Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman (Nobel Laureate and the living authority on the subject)

2. The marvels and flaws of expert intuition: story of Ramanujan’s first letter to Hardy

3. Is creative thinking an oxymoron?

4. Poor idea flow and fundamental attribution error

5. Weighing scale, intelligent gossip and the culture of innovation

Next quarterly will be based on the theme: Design of strategy as if implementation matter.

Poor idea flow and the fundamental attribution error

Imagine you are looking at the flow of ideas coming into your idea portal. You see the rate of ideas languishing for the past several months. What will you conclude? Will you, for example, feel that the employees don’t know how to think creatively and need some kind of training on tools / techniques for generating ideas? In case you feel this way, you may be committing what psychologists call fundamental attribution error. It is a deep-rooted inclination to attribute people’s behaviour to the way they are rather than the situation they are in. In this article, let’s explore how lack of ideas could potentially be a situation problem.

A few months ago I facilitated an idea generation session for a corporate finance team. The expectations weren’t high. Traditionally finance folks are the low scorers on the innovation activity. We thought of first gathering “top of the hat” ideas and then after 10-15 minutes when we begin to get long silence breaks, prompt with some leading questions. The session began with the manager highlighting the importance of small ideas and how when added up they can cumulatively create a large impact. It was pointed out that one of the participants has submitted an idea in the past and was recognized by the organization. And then the idea generation session began. And to my surprise, it continued uninterrupted for the next hour when 53 ideas were gathered. Many ideas were built on top of each other’s ideas. At the end, every participant among the 18 had given at least one idea.

What happened here? Did the participants become more creative? Did they learn any tool? No. What happened was that a space & time was created where idea generation was the primary focus. There were no other distractions. People were told by their manager that small ideas are welcome. And in this case people believed him. What changed was the situation not the people.

There could be several reasons why ideas don’t come into your suggestion box or portal. Here are a few:

Unresponsive: The system could be slow in responding to submitted ideas. For example, it might be several months before you receive any response. You lose faith.

Lack of transparency: Similar to Roger Smith’s experience you might get a “not selected” response with no further explanation. You don’t even know if there is a well-defined criterion and if so, it is being used.

Conflicting message: On the one hand, the campaigns may be saying that small ideas are welcome. One the other hand, top management rewards / mentions only BIG ideas. You doubt whether you have any BIG idea.

There are several ways to tackle these specific issues. Scott Cook of Intuit talks about how an environment of experimentation shifts the decision making related to idea selection from politics and power point to validation through low-cost high-speed experiments. This reduces the burden on the idea selectors and improves responsiveness. Similarly, organizations use social networking features – peers commenting, doing “like” on ideas to improve both transparency and speed of idea movement.

This does not mean that tools / techniques for idea generation are unimportant. In the organizational innovation ecosystem I identified learning & development as one of the five key dimensions. Besides, training programs also tackle the situation problem by bringing the people out of their cubicle and creating a space conducive for idea generation – irrespective of the tool / technique. The point is that we sometimes view training programs as the primary lever for improving innovativeness and ignore the other dimensions.

Next time when you label something as a people problem, ask yourself, "Am I committing the fundamental attribution error?"

Related articles:

1. It's the situation, not the person, 3:23min video by Dan Heath (YouTube)

2. Fundamental Attribution Error, wikipedia.org

Is creative thinking an oxymoron?

Eckhart Tolle quotes Einstein in his bestseller “The power of now” that goes – “Thinking plays only a subordinate part in the brief decisive phase of the creative act itself”. And then Tolle writes further, “So I would say that the simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don’t know how to think but because they don’t know how to stop thinking!” Contrast this with Edward de Bono, famous for his work on lateral thinking. De Bono is the proponent of creativity as a learnable skill and his thinking tools are part of school curriculum in over twenty countries. de Bono says, “Creativity should be producible on demand. Formation and design of new ideas can’t merely be left to chance.” Is creative thinking a skill that can be learnt like de Bono says or is thinking a hindrance to creativity as Tolle says? Let’s explore.

Let me start with one of my favourite stories on creativity in the last 25 years – Andrew Wiles proving Fermat’s Last Theorem on 15^th Oct 1994 – a famous mathematical problem open for 350 years. This is how Andrew views the process leading to the moment of insight: “Often you write something down to clarify your thoughts. In particular when you’ve reached a real impasse, when there’s a real problem that you want to overcome, then the routine kind of (mathematical) thinking is of no use to you. Leading up to that kind of new idea there has to be a long period of tremendous focus on the problem without any distraction. You have to think about nothing but that problem – just concentrate on it. Then you stop. Afterwards there seems to be a kind of period of relaxation during which the subconscious appears to take over, and it’s during that time that some new insight comes.”

Andrew’s version of the moment of insight looks closer to what Tolle & Einstein are saying. In particular, Andrew is saying that there comes a time when one type of thinking (he calls it routine kind of thinking) stops and another type of thinking (he calls subconscious thinking) takes over. Daniel Kahneman calls the former – slow mode of thinking or system-2 thinking or rule governed thinking. And the latter – fast mode of thinking or system-1 thinking or intuitive thinking.

The intuitive thinking involves brain reaching out to a vast associative network of ideas already present in our memory. In the last one year before Andrew published his final proof, he had been struggling to solve one glitch in the proof that was discovered by one of the manuscript reviewers. The technique that finally helped Andrew overcome the issue was something Andrew had worked on and abandoned a few years ago i.e. the technique was present in his vast associative network of ideas all the time he was struggling. He remembers the moment, “I couldn’t understand how I’d missed it.”

Kahneman advocates following definition of creativity attributed to Sarnoff Mednick: Creativity is associative memory that works exceptionally well. Mednick’s definition of creativity connects both Tolle and de Bono. When Tolle says that thinking should stop, I feel he means that the interference due to the slow mode of thinking (system-2 or rule governed) should stop and let the intuitive thinking take over. Similarly, de Bono’s six thinking hats technique is trying to help you reach out to those areas of your associative network that you will not go to in the normal course.

In short, whether creative thinking is an oxymoron would depend upon the type of thinking involved.

Sources:

Einstein quote from “The power of now” by Eckhart Tolle, p 20

Andrew Wiles quote from “Fermat’s last theorem” by Simon Singh, p228

Kahneman’s definition of creativity is from his “Thinking, fast and slow” p 67

Impossible problems and successful approaches: story of Fermat’s last theorem (my blog, Oct 2008)

Technical Leadership: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

I was invited at an IT services company in Bangalore to give a talk on technical leadership last Friday. During the talk as well as in the Q&A session several questions were raised. I realized that there is a need for a platform where engineers transitioning from being a technical expert to becoming a technical leader can turn to for raising doubts, discussion and guidance. I also realized that there are several people out there, some of whom I know personally, who are in a better position to answer the questions than me.

With this background, here is an attempt to create an FAQ forum for questions related to technical leadership. To get started let me use following definition of a technical leader - we can always question the definition later. A technical leader is someone whose sphere of influence due to his technical expertise is significantly greater than his span of control. As per this definition, engineers on the technical ladder (Product / Solution Architects, Principal / Chief Engineers, Technology Consultants, Scientists) are technical leaders. Moreover, managers who are able to influence people beyond their team with their technical expertise are also technical leaders.

Please give your views by clicking on any specific question and then adding your comment. You can also raise a new question.

FAQ:

1. In IT services companies, one needs to move from project to project - each lasting only a few years. How does one balance breadth vs depth?

2. I like to work alone and not worry about other peoples’ salary / leave etc. Does it mean I should opt for technical career path?

3. I am a Java person with 6 years of experience. What can I expect to be doing 4 years from now? Where do I begin?

4. Will the IT industry in India need more managers or more technical leaders in future?

5. Technology such as .Net or Java changes very fast. How do I cope up?

Thinking, fast & slow: A landmark book in intuitive thinking & decision making

"What is E=mc2 of this century?", our son Kabir asked me a few days after we watched the NOVA film "Einstein's big idea" together sometime last year. I thought about it for a few moments and said, "Psychology is the physics of 21st century, Kahneman is the Einstein and his work on happiness is like E=mc2". My answer and speed with which it came surprised me more than it surprised Kabir. I was clearly under the spell of Kahneman. Who is this Kahneman? And what is his work about? If you want to know, your best bet is to read Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman's bestselling book "Thinking, fast and slow". It has come out a couple of months back in India. It is a landmark among the psychology literature intended for layman, more specifically about intuitive thinking and decision making under uncertainty. It covers a vast spectrum. Let me articulate a few nuggets of wisdom from it.

Answering an easier question: When I look back at my answer to Kabir's question, it is clear that the answer was given off-the-cuff. In fact, I was in no position to answer the original question because I am clueless about most of the recent breakthrough developments in various sciences including those in psychology. Then what happened here? Kahneman explains it in chapter 9 titled "Answering an easier question". Whenever we are asked a question whose answer we don't know, the fast thinking mode answers an easier question. And unless the slow thinking mode checks & rejects the answer, it is given out like it happened with me. In my case the easier question that got answered was, "Among the scientific results I know, which one appeals to me the most?" Kahneman calls such shortcuts "heuristics" and we use them all the time. They work mostly and trick us real bad occasionally. When we are asked, "How happy are you with life these days?" we tend to answer the easier question, "What is my mood right now?"

Expert intuition: when can we trust it? I wrote an article last month about mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan and the marvels of his expert intuition. The article also highlighted how the intuition tricked Ramanujan occasionally creating incorrect results. In chapter 22 which is titled "Expert intuition: when can we trust it?" Kahneman presents the exact criteria under which experts develop real expertise. You acquire skill when (a) you have an environment that is sufficiently regular to be predictable and (b) you have an opportunity to learn these regularities through prolonged practice. In some cases like that of stock analysts, the environment isn't sufficiently regular. On the other hand, chess players and basketball players do develop real skills.

Illusion of understanding: Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection last month. All the related stories published in Economist, Wall Street Journal, Wharton School of Business, an HBR blog had one thing in common. None of them contained the phrase "bad luck". Most of them sited some story or the other related to poor management decision making, the most common being the Kodak's invention of digital camera and how Kodak didn't pursue it's development etc. Implicit in these articles was an assumption that bad management decisions cause bad outcomes like bankruptcy and randomness or bad luck plays insignificant role. Kahneman calls these generalizations where randomness is substituted by causation "illusions of understanding" (chapter 19). It stems from 3 things: (1) We believe that we understand the past. However, in reality, we know a story of the past constructed from very limited information easibly accessible to us. (2) We can't reconstruct the uncertainty associated with the past events. It leads to things like the HBR blog suggesting Kodak should have created a photo sharing social network. (3) We have a strong tendency to see causation where there is none. Many times a single story such as Kodak's digital camera story is good enough for us to label Kodak management as the root cause of its debacle. I don't know how much of strategy literature suffers from "illusion of understanding".

Kahneman's law of happiness: Ask yourself "How special is your car to you?" and then ask yourself "How much do you enjoy the commute?" Psychologists have found a decent correlation (0.35) between the first question and the blue book value of the car. And, they have found zero correlation between the second question and the blue book value of the car. Such observations have led Kahneman to formulate the following law - Nothing in life is is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. Your car's importance to you is exaggerated only when you think about it. Unfortunately, you spend significantly more time driving it than thinking about it.

Kahneman's confession about the book: "I don't think reading this book will prevent any of you from making any significant mistake. Because even writing it hasn't helped me." said Kahneman in an interview. Then what does he hope to achieve? Well, Kahneman wants to see more sophisticated water cooler gossip about biases in decision making, mostly of others. I love the book and I am sure I will come back to it again and again in the future.

Kahneman videos:

TED talk “The riddle of experience vs memory”

“Explorations of the mind: Intuition” talk at University of California at Berkeley

“Thinking fast and slow: Conversations with Kahneman” interview at London School of Economics”

What innovation programs can learn from Quality Circle (QC) activity

I got an opportunity to attend 24^th CII QC Circle Convention involving finalists from 4 states in South India (Tamilnadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra) held in Le Meridien on Dec 20, 2011. Each of the 15 participating teams had already excelled in the statewide competition. They were representing companies like Amar Raja, Ashok Layland, BEL, Kancor, Kochi Refinery, Lucas TVS, Rane Madras, Toyota-Kirloskar etc. My objective for attending this event was to understand (a) How does QC activity happen in manufacturing industry in India? (b) What can innovation programs learn from it? Here is my take:

A Quality circle is a volunteer group, a team of four to seven workers with the possible inclusion of their supervisor that understood the methodology of identifying and solving problems. For example, one of the teams named “Gold Star” had five members aged between 23 and 55 years. Two of them were 10^th standard, two had PUC and one had Diploma in Mechanical Engineering. Four of them were machine operators and one of them was a Quality auditor. The team had a patron who was a manager.

From their presentations, following things struck me as worthy of emulating by innovation programs in other sectors.

1. Team activity with gamification: QC circle is a team activity. Contrast this with the suggestion schemes where individuals are the heroes. Each team identified problems, set goals and systematically went about solving them. Weekly/fortnightly one hour was reserved for this activity (e.g. every other Wed 3-4pm). A typical project lasted 2 to 5 months. Each team had created an identity – some called themselves Kadamba warriers, some were Red Chillies, others were New Millennium etc. Each team competed against others within the company to do better at innovating within their environment. In at least some of the participating companies it was a decade long initiative with 100% participation as shown by the picture below.

2. Problem selection criteria: Selecting which problem to solve is given a lot of importance in QC activity. All the teams presented the list of problems they identified first – about 50 to 70. A commonly used technique for selecting the problem was called SQPC analysis. It meant to rate each problem on 4 dimensions – Safety, Quality, Productivity and Cost. In some cases these parameters were crisply defined. For example, safety – zero accidents, quality - < 2 defects per vehicle, production – MTBF > 3 hrs by Mar ’12, cost – 5% saving in allocated budget. See the picture. Depending upon the scope of innovation, this criterion may vary. However, it makes sense to identify some criteria in selecting problems to solve.

3. Genchi Genbutsu: This is a Japanese phrase meaning “go and see for yourself”, which is a central pillar of the Toyota Way. Genchi genbutsu is sometimes referred to as “get your boots on”, which has a similar cadence and meaning. Toyota-Kirloskar team presented how they did brainstorming at workplace to identify and solve the problem better (see the picture). This is similar to immersive research of P&G.

My learning: I derived following learnings for the innovation programs: (1) They can introduce innovation as a team sport - it just makes it more fun. These teams could be Communities of practitioners (like Java / SAP developers) or theme based teams (e.g. sustainability). The teams could compete based on a simple scoring mechanism (no of ideas submitted, no of prototypes demonstrated, no of ideas implemented, business impact etc). (2) Organizations can help innovators in developing a challenge-book. Similarly, organizations can define strategic priorities for selecting problems where it is willing to make non-trivial investment. These could be specific technology areas, customer segments or consumer/social/regulatory trends (3) Organizations can make “immersive research” an important aspect of problem understanding and solving. For example, Intuit’s “follow-me-home” or P&G’s “Living it, working it” programs do this.

Note: Thanks to Prof. Rishikesha Krishnan for the suggestion to make the learning explicit.

Dr. Gururaj Desh Deshpande’s insights on entrepreneurship and innovation

I got an opportunity to listen to Dr. Gururaj Desh Deshpande on “Can Social innovations and Technology innovations leverage off one another?” at the IIT Alumni Club Bangalore event held at Bangalore International Centre, Domlur, last morning. It was a fantastic talk. Here are a few of the insights Desh mentioned in his talk and during Q&A:

· Concurrent innovation: In a place like MIT where Desh is a Board member, there is no dearth of technology innovations. However, for the researcher or the faculty member working on the innovation, the primary interest could be elegance and publishability – criteria that matter for tenure and impressing peer group. The challenge is to create an atmosphere where innovations get connected with relevance to create an impact. This is what Desh calls concurrent innovation where innovators get connected to the real world up front as opposed to much later in the life cycle. Over the last 10 years MIT has funded 80 projects and a third of them have generated $100 M or more.

· The sandbox for social innovations: In social sector, the equation (innovation + relevance = impact) needs to be turned around. The real challenge is in understanding the problem. Then you bring in the ideas to solve the problem. We need to create an environment where this happens systematically. 6 years ago Deshpande Foundation created a sandbox in Hubli to do that. What is this sandbox? It encompasses 5 districts: Belgaum, Dharwad, Gadag, Haveri, and Uttar Kannada, and is home to about 10 million people. Ideas / interventions that need to be proven get experimented within this sandbox first and successful ones get scaled. Help is provided in the form of access to advisory network, teaching, additional resources from corporate / NGOs and of course, grants. Akshayapatra (mid-day meals), Karadi Path (learning through Karadi Tales), Agasthya Foundation (sparking creativity in rural India), Sikshana Foundation (improves quality of teaching in Govt schools) are some of the organizations that were incubated in the Hubli sandbox.

· Sustainability of social ventures: In many social ventures, the beneficiary does not have buying power (e.g. mid-day meal in state schools). Hence, there is a donor. Every time the donor wants to add value to the organization, he projects his risk tolerance on the project. Unfortunately, from his standard of living, he finds everything risky. Very quickly the product does not cater to the requirements. The idea is to take the performing assets, scale them and make them sustainable. i.e. find those interventions that are already working and scale them.

There are three ways a social venture becomes sustainable: (1) By becoming part of free market economy (2) By becoming part of Govt & (3) By supported through broad based charity as opposed to funded by a few rich people. Sometimes it is a combination of the three. For example, Akshaypatra combines (2) and (3).

· Role of value system in innovation: Entrepreneurship or innovation is just a tool. It allows you to do something faster and better. It quite doesn’t say whether it is for the good of the world or for the bad of the world. So you need a value system on top of it. That is a bigger issue we need to resolve. World economy is based on consumption. In the 70s there used to be a debate between capitalism and socialism. About 10 years ago, it looked like capitalism all the way. But now we are beginning to see cracks within capitalism. Consumption based economy means everybody has to consume more and more and more which will just rip apart this whole world. There will be nothing left. So the bigger challenge is to re-think on what winning means. Does winning include sustainability, goodness? Etc. In some area where we see this happening. For example, in energy, 10 years ago it was all about producing more energy. Now, people are realizing that the low-hanging fruits in energy are efficiency and savings and you could save up to 40-50%. Now there are 50 startups in Boston area and another 50 in Silicon Valley who are trying to figure out how they can get access to the low-hanging fruit – efficiency. People are building huge database of every building and then you do audit on a building and show what you can do to achieve how much saving.

· Role of technology in education: Majority of school going kids in India still don’t have access to computers and Internet. In fact, a lot of little things like eraser, pencil, 5-10 pieces of paper, old newspaper (acts as a reading material) have much bigger impact than the computers (For example, see “spot prizes” intervention of Sikshana Foundation – it is the oldest and most popular activity). This is not to say computers are not useful. It is just that getting tablets to villages and putting them to use is a little unrealistic at this point. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t continue to experiment on these things. One of the best experiments Desh has seen being carried out in a few California schools is as follows: Suppose you want to teach Pythagoras theorem, then the students will be asked see Khan Academy video in the evening at home and come and do the homework in the school the next day. It is changing the whole paradigm. You need a lot of interaction / debate / discussion during the homework. There are going to be a lot of innovative ways of educating each other. In Desh’s opinion, the biggest problem in education is always inspiring kids to want to learn. So any intervention that inspires kids to want to learn is going to create significant value. Technology has been trying to intervene in education for a long time. But it hasn’t. Next 10 years are going to be exciting. MIT just announced a new initiative – MITx - which will offer certification through free online courseware.

Sources:

Photo from thehindu.com