A few years ago I came across an essay by David Mamet called “The Audience: Or, lessons from duck hunting. (Bambi vs. Godzilla, 2007)

It has resonated with me ever since.

“A duck decoy doesn’t need to look like a duck. It needs to look like a duck to a duck.  Wisdom, therefore, lies not in the phenomenological question ‘What does a duck look like?’  But, rather, in the practical ‘What is a duck looking for?

“A wealthy hunter might bespeak a decoy realistic to the nth degree. This decoy might be realistic in every particular of size, form, color, and yet the poor hunter in the next blind down might be attracting all the ducks with his roughed out and unpainted decoy.  Why is that?”

It was a metaphor for the evolving relationship with movie producers and the audience.

But it applies equally as well to marketers.

Typically, a client will say they need a brochure.  We marketers who are consistently in the wooing mode, say “we can do that.” Sure, we can create a wonderfully-crafted decoy.

What we really want to say is “Do you really need a brochure?”  “Who is the audience and what do you want them to feel, think or act?” The good agencies do that.  But most are still in the decoy business.  

The yang problem is that often the audience doesn’t or can’t articulate what they want.  The classic story, probably apocryphal, is from Henry Ford. “If I asked people what they wanted, they would probably say faster, more comfortable carriages.”

So how do we stop creating decoys?  That’s the value of creativity. Don’t start with answer. Start with a question.  How might we get more people to attend our college?  How might we get more people to invest with our bank? Or how can we start building trust with a prospect?

One answer may be a brochure. Or maybe it’s better word of mouth. Or something no one else is doing.

I’m bringing a duck to my next meeting.  How about you?

It all began with a spontaneous comment by host Saul Kaplan on the second day of the BIF5 Collaborative Innovation Summit.  After thanking two of the speakers, he made the observation that there is a strong connection between vulnerability and innovation.

The bloggers and tweeters, all noted the remark. During the next break, I asked Saul what he meant. He told me he was reacting to each innovator’s openness to new and often contradictory ideas.

Melissa Withers, Executive Director of the Business Innovation Factory, echoed the same idea a few days later in an interview with Ted Nesi of the Providence Business News.   “I saw a deep and authentic vulnerability that was inseparable from their strength. In both cases, they showed that innovation requires an openness to the world that most of us are afraid of, whether we realize it or not. It was as though a flashbulb went off in my head, and now I can see things – about my business and about myself – that I couldn’t see before.”

Both observations, reveal another paradox of innovation. Innovators need a healthy degree of both confidence and openness to succeed.  Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company says, “I find that the best leaders demonstrates a capacity for vuja dé.” It is the flip side of déjà vu – experiencing  the familiar in a whole new way.  It is an openness to reevaluating the status quo.

The idea of “openness” isn’t new, but what makes it provocative is that we continually have to watch for our own evolving blind spots.  It is a continual process of rethinking what works and what doesn’t.  I think it is a variation of what Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein call “Schooling the Imagination.”  It is about schooling an “innovation mind-set.” It is being open when staying closed would be easier alternative.

BIF is all about vuja dé.  It is putting ideas under a collective microscope and seeing what new species of ideas we can find.

A former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Maeda taught media arts and sciences there for 12 years and served as Associate Director of Research at the MIT Media Lab. Today, he is the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, a place world renown for nurturing artists and designers of all stripes.

At BIF5, he was interviewed by co-host Bruce Nussbaum, Professor of Innovation and Design at the Parson’s School For Design. Considering their mutual interests, it was an interesting pas de deux.

The interview was an odd mélange of non sequiturs that got the audience laughing when host Saul Kaplan said, “I hope someone will provide a good translation of what just happened.”

But it’s all part of the art of BIF. Ironically, it made many in the audience want to discover more about both Maeda and Nussbaum.  Each has made an impact on how "innovation" and "design" are framed in current discussions in both the classroom and in corporate America.

If Maeda could design a new curriculum for innovators, he would start with a pencil, paper and sketchpad. These supplies would not be for taking notes or brainstorming ideas. Rather, Maeda would use art as a way to open the mind, stimulate creativity and cultivate truly radical ideas.

“If you think of design as a way of making ideas, I think art is the idea itself. Art thinking is everything that design thinking isn’t,” he says. “If you think of an image, you have the image and then you have everything that sits in the white space. Art is the part that isn’t defined yet and I find that perspective quite exciting.

“So many organizations and companies are downtrodden in this economy -- they are dead inside -- because they have lost the ability to imagine. They need something more vibrant, more emotional, and more connected to being human. When asked to distill down to the basic principles of art thinking, Maeda thinks it starts with reacquainting ourselves with an “almost child-like fascination with the world.”

In many ways, it echoes the core of Matthew Crawford’s excellent book, Shop Class as SoulCraft.  Crawford’s book is about the loss of manual competence and Maeda’s is about disconnecting temporarily from the digital world and reconnecting with “thinking” and expressing ideas in the simplified realm of pencil, paper and thought.

In the past year, Bruce Nussbaum took on a new career --  Professor of Innovation and Design at The New School at the Parsons School For Design.

As BIF’s Christine Flanagan writes, “Nussbaum recently launched the university’s core lecture series “Life in Beta” to show students how design tools, methodologies and approaches can move us forward in today’s environment. His class focuses on the demographic, technological, cultural, economic and political changes that are disrupting our social organizations and personal lives.

“I really want to push students to think widely about the forces shaping their lives,” explains Nussbaum. “Gen Y is perhaps the most dynamic cohort and it’s critically important they learn to harness the tools and methods of 21st century design.”
 

Nussbaum believes that design holds the key to change because of its ability to redesign large-scale social systems: “Design gives people the ability to be one with the consumer culture–to be anthropologists and sociologists and deeply understand the myriad cultures around them. It has a set of tools and methods that can guide us towards a much better way of doing things.”

In the relatively tiny geography of business magazine world, it was the equivalent of a pre-1981 Beatles reunion. Alan Webber and Bill Taylor, co-founders of Fast Company magazine, took the stage together at BIF5 for the first time in many years.

It was easy to see the synergy they brought to an enterprise that became the fastest growing, most successful business magazine in history. Webber talked about his 5-year experience as managing editor and editorial director of the Harvard Business Review.

 He lead the journal’s visual redesign and created the architecture for its editorial performance that continues to this day.

The idea for Fast Company began when Webber spent time in Asia and began to see China and other emerging markets as a big idea. But HBR wasn’t as enthusiastic about Webber’s perspective.

So, he and Taylor worked on a model for a magazine that would push the envelope beyond the clinical to include a social perspective of business. Fortunately, they had the serendipity to enter the market just as the internet began its ascendency.

Bill Taylor has been a strong supporter of BIF since the first conference and has co-hosted the event for the past years. Seeing them together was a glimpse of their complementary strengths. Taylor is adrenaline and Webber is cerebral.  But the joy is seeing them reverse roles.  They are both good listeners.

 Later in the day, Webber gave a 25-minute talk based on his new book “Rules of Thumb: 52 Truths for Winning at Business without Losing Yourself.” was published this year to great reviews. Webber said, “Rules of Thumb is in part a memoir: In writing it I drew from more than 30 years of work and life experiences. Some of the rules come from the 1970s when I worked in the Mayor's Office in Portland, Oregon; some come from my time working as the editorial director of the Harvard Business Review; quite a few derive from the experiences I had in launching and editing Fast Company.”

The 52 rules come from real-life lessons learned and recorded on 3”x 5” cards, a technique borrowed from one of the many mentors whose teachings Webber captures in his book.

Here are just two of the 52 rules. 

Rule #5. Change is a math formula. Webber faced the crowd at BIF5 and said, “Change is really a math formula.  Change happens when the cost of the status quo is greater than the risk of change.  C(SQ)>R(C).

(This echoes Pip Coburn’s Change Function “most people will not adopt a new technology until the perceived benefits outweigh the perceived pain of trying to learn something new.”)

“I learned this lesson more than 30 years ago,” adds Webber.  “Since then I have been involved and written about dozens of change efforts.  Usually they involve deeply committed people who believe in their cause, are convinced they’re right, and are prepared to sacrifice their careers, if that’s what it takes to win. Most of the time, they lose and sacrifice their careers.”

Webber says it’s not enough to be convinced you’re right.  The other side is equally convinced it’s right. “On the other hand, if you really want to win, rather than settling for dying for a cause, there are some techniques and tactics that can help change the math in your favor.”

“It’s not enough to be against something that’s bad – you’ve got to be for something that’s better.  This is particularly true if you’re trying to convince the boss or the voters that the status quo isn’t good for them.  Frustrated as you may be by the status quo, keep your powder dry until you’ve worked out the details, the arguments, the economics, and the math of your much better alternative.”

“Learning to make change is all about learning to do the math of change. Done right, it’s not just a soft art, it’s also a hard science.”

Rule #10.  A good question beats a good answer.

Webber writes in his book, “Questions are how we learn. Which means questions are how we create change.  Why? Because questions are dangerous. Imagine being alive and the mid 1500s and asking whether the sun revolves around the Earth or the Earth around the sun?

Questions are liberating.  Questions are useful.  Questions are how we avoid disasters.

“So,” Webber says, “why is it so hard for companies to embrace the art of asking good questions?  It’s not what you don’t know that will hurt you and your business. It’s what you don’t bother to ask that will kill you.

Asking questions can be dangerous.  Not asking them can be fatal.  Now, any questions?”

Creativity Central weighs in with another rule.  “Bad leaders don’t invite questions.”  I have seen this phenomenon at advertising agencies, colleges, financial institutions and hospitals.  Questions seem to threaten rather than intrigue poor leaders. 

Tom Monahan, in his terrific book, The Do-It-Yourself Lobotomy,” writes about one of his top creative tools:  “Ask a better question.”

One of the core ideas that have emerged from each of the BIF conferences is that top innovators have asked a provocative question. At BIF4, Dennis Littky asked “is the a smarter way to educate kids?” Debra Books, the Michael J. Fox Foundation co-founder asked how can we bring together the best minds and ideas to help treat and eventually cure Parkinson’s Disease?

At BIF5, the questions were equally as provocative.  How can education evolve to better meet the student’s experience?  Is there a better to (un)mass produce a car?  What value can an “independent” diplomat bring to the table?  Can an health insurance company authentically sell “wellness?”

Which brings me to Webber rule #52.  Stay alert. There are teachers everywhere.”

This is less a story about teaching the elephant to dance than teaching the pachyderm how to collaborate.

Helmut Traitler is the Vice President of Innovation Partnerships at Nestlé and he is doing what many have failed to do: re-orient a behemoth multi-national corporation around the proposition that “sharing-is-winning.”

Traiter's resume is impressive. He has published more than 60 scientific papers and 25 International patents. He received an Honorary Professor for Chemistry from the University of York, UK (1999).  He is gifted at applying science to innovation models.

But the story begins at BIF4. Last year, David Yaun, V.P. of Corporate Communications at IBM  told us about the mercurial experience of spearheading the computing giant’s Global Innovation Outlook Program. 

The idea, backed by IBM’s CEO was for the company to take the unprecedented step of opening up their annual technology and business forecasting processes to the world.

Yaun said, “The GIO is rooted in the belief that the very nature of innovation has changed in the early days of the 21st century. It is increasingly open, collaborative, multi-disciplinary and global. This shift means that the truly revolutionary innovations of our time require participation across multiple silos and organizations.”

Despite a lot of pushback and “are you crazy?” comments internally, the GIO has been a success. 

Open innovation, like open source, seems counterintuitive to larger companies.  Their competitive advantage is often (Like Apple) is about holding intellectual property close to the vest.  Open innovation is he deceptively simple idea that companies integrate external ideas and capabilities into their internal innovation strategy.

According to BIF’s Melissa Withers, “Until a few years ago, Nestlé, like most organizations with fully developed R&D capability, depended almost entirely on its internal R&D capability to drive its innovation agenda. “The only area where external innovation was traditionally used was in packaging, where we probably had 70% of all innovation were coming from outside,” says Traitler.

All this changed in 2005 when the team deepened its focus on open innovation.  Nestlé set out to expand its network of global partnerships and fully embed the “sharing-is-winning” slogan in its corporate strategy.

Innovation is not an option for Nestlé , it’s a necessity, reports Withers.  Nestlé’s growth targets hinge on the company’s ability to create an additional $5 billion in growth each year. The immensity of this figure speaks for itself because a significant part of this growth must be generated through innovation.

This explains why even during the recent economical crisis, Nestlé continues to spend more than $2 billion annually on R&D.

Nestlé's size was both an advantage and a hurdle to building momentum for a truly open innovation framework. To overcome these barriers the team has adopted a few rules of the road. The first: move fast. Then move faster. It’s important to demonstrate results and successes quickly.  Beyond the organizational hurdles open innovation advocates must clear, he cites an organization’s authenticity as a major driver of whether an effort succeeds or fails.

Taking the stage with Bruce Nussbaum, Traitler said, “open innovation” is a buzzword – “when people don’t know what they’re talking about, they coin buzzwords.”  Then, he gave an example of a recent innovation initiative at Nestle.

ice cream without keeping it cold and solid throughout the process of making it and distributing it?  This is not an inconsequential problem if the cost of transportation in cold storage vehicles and maintaining it through the final sale is freezing most of it’s profitability.

His question. “Can we make a foam that can ship warm then be cooled before selling?  Nestlé’s approach to open innovation is not to invite the world to participate and show competitors their strategy, but to selectively invite outside experts to add enhance their process.  The problem is given to outside experts in a disguised way and then revealed as Nestlé collaborates with them.

What intrigued me is what I have continually discovered with innovation gurus like Gerald Haman and Arthur VanGundy. The core of innovation is asking the right questions and inviting answers from diverse sources.”

You could feel the BIF audience raise a collective eyebrow with the idea of foam-based ice cream. But for an innovator, the question is a fascinating one.  What if you could save billions by how you create the product?  What if the product actually tasted as well or better than the ice cream we have today?

Pringles asked a similar question about stackable, “unbreakable” potato chips. 

So we’ve seen two elephants dance and collaborate in the past two years.  Big isn’t always better but it’s getting a heck of a lot smarter.

A few weeks before BIF5, I wrote a small catalyst note for an upcoming article. I wrote “Either/Or and Sometimes And”

This was followed by a borrowed mathematical term “binary thinking.”

Basically, the vague thought was about how many companies approach innovation. It is an either/or proposition. Generally, they know two things about innovation from the media. One is innovate or die. And the other is that a high percentage of innovation efforts fail.

Both are right and both are gross misinterpretations of how innovation can work in a company.  The typical decision model focuses on alternate choices but I notice the simple word “and” is not used as an innovation tool.

All of which brings me to Jonah Lehrer. A 29-year-old graduate of Columbia University and a Rhodes Scholar, Lehrer is the author such books called How We Decide and Proust was a Neuroscientist.

Think of Lehrer as the Carl Sagan of the brain.  He has a remarkable ability to translate the complex functioning of the brain, as well as the latest research, into humanese. 

At BIF5, he took the stage and gave the audience a provocative “And.”  “We weren’t designed to be rational creatures,” Lehrer asserts. “Instead the mind is a messy network of different areas, many of which are involved in the production of emotion.  The simple truth is that making good decisions requires us to use both sides of the mind. For too long, we’ve treated human nature as an either/or situation. We are either rational or irrational.  Not only are these dichotomies false, they are destructive,” he adds. “Our brains are definitely pluralistic.”

At BIF, he talked about Antonio Damasio, a neuroscientist at the University of Southern California. In the early 1990s, Damasio began publishing a series of landmark papers describing the symptoms of patients who, after a brain injury, were unable to perceive or experience emotion. Most scientists assumed that such a deficit would lead to more rational decisions, since the patients were free of their irrational instincts.

Damasio found just the opposite: these dispassionate patients made consistently bad decisions. Some made terrible investments and ended up bankrupt; others started drinking heavily and getting into fights; most just spent hours deliberating over irrelevant details, such as where to eat lunch. The takeaway? When people are cut off from their emotions even the most banal decisions become all but impossible.

While this research has led to a new appreciation for the powers of the unconscious - it's no longer seen as a bizarre Freudian underworld - this brain system isn't perfect.

According to Lehrer, there are lots of unconscious cognitive hiccups, isolating the "heuristics and biases" that cause people to do everything from overbid on eBay to not invest in their 401(k). “These flaws are rooted in a part of the mind that people can't control - the unconscious is often referred to as the "automatic system" - so intelligence is no antidote.”

Lehrer is like a good referee, he brought an appreciation for seeing the brain as a complex system with a host of checks and balances.  And that for truly effective decision making it’s not either or, it’s an “and.” 

A lesson for companies is not to see innovation as a go or no go.  It's about creating value whether it begins with a small team (Like Humana's wellness initiative) or a widespread innovation culture like GE or IDEO.

For some more insights into Lehrer, check out:

http://fora.tv/2009/02/19/Jonah_Lehrer_Inside_My_Mind

His attention was clearly focused as he took the stage at BIF-5 to talk about innovation and education. Two words that aren't typically found in such close proximity. His charisma and passion are infectious. This upbeat sense of urgency has served Schlesinger well in his long career on both the academic and private sides of business. “At the end of the day, on the things that need to get done, my orientation is to get it done before it’s not interesting,” he says.

He commented about a huge shift he is seeing.  The shift from a knowing - doing model to a doing - knowing model.  It's a thought that resonated with the crowd of 300 innovators.  "There is a kind of information paralysis,"  he says, that focuses on learning by knowing."  The classic Yoda-like proverb  "to know and not to do is not to know" shows that it's not a new thought.  But the shift is in about how we need to be more ambidextrous in how we learn.

This thought was echoed earlier by Roger Martin, dean of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Martin, the author of four books on business innovation, talked about how our current
methods of educating college students aren't innovative.  
 
Two leaders in education.  Both with a healthy dissatisfaction with how things are.  

The uphill challenge Schlesinger faces now is to keep Babson financially strong in the midst of a recession and a changing educational environment. A decade ago, colleges and universities attracted new students with impressive new construction. But those days are gone, according to Schlesinger, and schools have to find new ways to stay competitive. Babson’s new Fast Track MBA, for instance, requires only 30 percent of face-to-face class time. It has been a major booster of the college’s enrollment and tuition dollars.

Just don’t show up unless you’re ready to play. Only “naïve organizations” try to get everyone on the bandwagon, but Schlesinger says you only need a large enough critical mass to get things done.

Schlesinger is doing.  And we're learning.

A few nights ago, the comedian Lewis Black raged against the machine and asked, "does anyone really love their health insurance company?"

Greg Matthews, Director of Innovation at Humana has a true Quixotic mission -- to change people's perception of what a health insurance company means.  As he took the stage at BIF-5, he flashed a slide on the screen that said if you boil it down to the pure essence "insurance companies like Humana are in the 'sickness and death' business."

No spin. Just the facts.  

But the C-suite at Humana asked Matthews and other executives to explore how Humana was perceived in the marketplace and how they could change that dynamic.  Reluctantly, Matthews, who was in Human Resources at the time, presented an alternative vision for the company: Health and Wellness.  He said, reluctantly because it flew in the face of logic for a traditionally conventional industry.

But Humana's reception was positive.  Matthews inherited a new job title and the task of building consumer percpetion of Humana as the health company of the future. His strategy is to leave the premium-claims side of health insurance to the financial gurus and focus instead on the purest side of the business.  “The future,” he says, “is going to be in creating and promoting health.”

The innovation team at Humana has augmented its social media platform to spearhead several programs that get people walking, biking, calorie counting, dancing—and while they’re at it—treating the environment respectfully.  So far, the experiment seems to be paying dividends, even for Matthews.  Since he started at Humana, he has dropped 20 pounds and became a runner.

His new role in leveraging social media has connected him to a growing community outside the company.  At the same time, the face of Humana is changing. Part of this new initiative is Humana’s Freewheelin’ bike-sharing program in Louisville, Kentucky, where the company employs almost 9,000 people. 

Humana’s employees tool around the city on shared bicycles while charting miles covered, calories burned and carbon saved.  The company has created a joint venture company called Sensei, Inc., a mobile wellness enterprise that delivers daily nutrition and exercise tips via cell phone and PC.  Humana is connecting to seniors with an annual Senior Games competition and some lower-key activities like casual dancing at the Humana Guidance Center in Las Vegas.  Seniors come in to the Center with health coverage questions and spend most of their visit fox-trotting to a Dance Town video game.

To attract Generation Z, the Humana team has linked its “Operation Planet Savers” (OPS) online game—a competition that gets kids out in the back yard on weekly “missions”—with the new Disney movie “G-FORCE.”  The company has also placed what Matthews calls “completely goofy” videos on YouTube that invite viewers click onto the Humana web site and take part in a “Healthy Games” idea competition.

Matthews is a rare kind of executive.  He is a practical unrealist.  He knows that health is about the ability to do things in life and that the spectre of illness and incapacitation (as well as the financial burden) is a shadow that clouds a "feel good" mission. But his goal is to plant the seed and deliver on the promise of how a health insurance company can focus more on health and less on the second half of their name.

That's more than innovative, it's healthy change for the better.

A few steps from the Trinity Theater, home to BIF's 5th Collaborative Innovation Summit, there was a moment worthy of a classic photograph.  John Rogers Jr, a retired Marine dressed in a green flight suit and Carne Ross, an ex-British Diplomat walked together sharing a story. These are just two of the unusual suspects that make BIF such a draw to top innovators.

John Rogers, left the Marines and co-founded a innovative idea for a car company. Called Local Motors, it is an open-source design company that is about to roll out its first automobile called the Rally Fighter.  The vision is to create vehicles in micro-factories using local resources.  

At 29, Carne Ross became head of the Israel-Palestine Middle East Peace Section for the British Government; completed foreign service tours of Germany and Afghanistan. When he was 32, he moved to New York to be head of Middle East policy for the United Kingdom's mission to the United Nations.  "I was the British lead on Irag, negotiating international law on hard-core issues of national security -- like how to deal with weapons of mass destruction and how to respond to Al-Qaeda after 9/11. He resigned and wrote a scathing account of his experience and his growing realization of the closed and undemocratic nature of the world's diplomatic forums.

Rogers and Ross both told their stories to a sold-out crowd of 300 at the conference. But to understand the significance of BIF, you have to look beyond the stage and into the lobby, the hallways and the street beyond the theater.  This is what Saul Kaplan, Co-founder of BIF and Chief Catalyst calls a mingling of the unusual suspects.  Innovators who normally wouldn't cross paths meet and exchange ideas.

Can a ex-British diplomat and a maverick car maker (Think Tucker) influence each other? They are both taking high-risk and innovative approaches to professions wedded to convention for decades.  If you ask Kaplan, he'd say the seed has been planted and let's watch and see what happens.

Pretty good for a short walk.

More about Carne Ross:

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/

More about John Rogers

http://www.independentdiplomat.org/

He met with Richard Saul Wurman, the guru of information design, and he showed him his matrix of ideas for bringing innovators together. Wurman replied, "Saul, you've got a lot to learn about connecting emotionally with the community.  Why not think of it as a big dinner party and invite interesting and provocative people and let the ideas flow.  Toss that matrix away."

The core of BIF is innovators telling stories.  These stories inform, inspire, and ultimately become catalysts for other people's own creative and innovation journey.  Over the next few days, I will be blogging and sharing these compelling stories sans matrix.

Stay tuned...