Leigh Householder, VP/Managing Director of Innovation Strategy

…Or, the post in which we play Dave Sonderman’s favorite new game.

Brett Mannes is a producer at Second City Communications (how cool of a job is that?)

Second City has been making comedy for 50 years. In that time, they’ve been co-creating they just call it improv. Here’s how Mannes described how it works:

• On stage all they have is their team and chairs
• They build improv by asking for input from the audience
• That shapes and builds the show
• In short: Co-creating with an audience gets them to a product they could have never got to another way

Now a Facilitator Named Sue has us play a game:

Gather a group of three people:

• Person 1: Take two minutes to describe the most amazing party you could create. A party that will be remembered for years.
• Persons 2 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with no, we should…

Then:

• Person 2: Your turn to describe the party…
• Persons 1 & 3: Your job is to meet every response with yes, but…

Checkin here:

What effect did the no, we should have? It left the ideator thinking they needed to go back to the drawing board or give in and do something entirely different. What about the yes, but?  For some it forced them to make the idea better, but generally had the same negative effect.

No is a great answer for a lot of questions, but it’s not a great answer for ideas.

Try it again:

• Person 3: Describe your party
• Persons 1 & 2: New rule of engagement, respond with yes and…

And, of course, the experience builds bigger and bigger ideas and people lean in. Yes and shares the risk and the success – it’s how we accept, acknowledge and add to ideas.

The hard part is that you lose control of the idea.  That’s uncomfortable.  But that’s where innovation happens – when seemingly disparate ideas or entities come together to create an exchange.

Four more helpful tenants of co-creation at Second City:

• Love every idea for a minute (try it on, you might be able to find the one piece of it that could actually move forward)
• How you do the work impacts what you get
• Bring a brick (a small idea we can build on) – not a cathedral (an exhaustive plan we have to accept or reject)
• At Second City, conversations are better than monologues by about a billion

Dr. DJ Patil, Data Scientist in Residence, Greylock Partners coined the term “data scientist” – a powerful little specialty in growing demand. He was a member of Generation Flux highlighted in the recent Fast Company article – and he’s kind a pretty proud and happy little numbers geek.

We all know data is important. It’s on the covers of magazines, trending on Amazon. It’s experiencing a powerful resurgance in value.

Patil set up a two-foot-long metal bar – a double pendulum. It’s hinged in the middle, so it can fold in on itself. Another hinge on one end is attached to a clamp, which is secured to the edge of a table. He asks us to predict when it will last flip. The bar begins to swing wildly, circling the spot where it is attached to the table, while also circling in on itself. There seems to be no way to predict when it will end.

In this situation, we’re each a data product. Trying to analyze and predict. But it’s wild and hard to figure out – chaotic.

Patil says, you’re competing againt this simple system with only four variables and you can’t do it. If you can’t figure out this.

You need two things to manage life on the edge of chaos

1. Timely, accurate measurement.
2. Low latency high speed controls

In other words: high speed observations and wicked fast reaction time.

Patil shared one of his favorite stories about how data managing life at the edge of chaos: People You May Know

Jonathan Goldman (data scientiest #2 at Linkedin) is an experimental physicists. Incredibly clever. He had this insight that there’s a feeling that you have when you walk into a conference room for the first time – you look for people you know to latch onto and you feel incredibly different when you find them and know “my people are here.” There’s that same initial feeling of alone/uncomfortable when you get to a social network for the first time.

The People You May Know module teleports people from a browser to a community. You know the algorithm for this. It’s the same triangle closing we do every time we meet someone: Where do you work? What do you do? Where did you go to school? Oh, do you know…

It’s now one of the most popular features on the social web. All because one guy through about how to deploy data in a clever way to simplify a complex world.

Doing that in your organization takes two big thing:

ACCESS. How can you give the people in your organization access to data and empower them to apply it in novel ways.

CURIOSITY. We reward success and massively penalize failure. How can we reward the creation, the novelty and treat failure like trial.

CONVERSATIONS. Use data to start a conversation, not to make a decision. You know things that the data doesn’t know. If you let it, data will drive you off a cliff.

I hope our friends at Battelle are reading today because we just learned about innovation from an Army general who I think they’d love.

General (Ret.) Stanley A. McChrystal, U.S. Army; Founder, The McChrystal Group, is addressing the headline we keep seeing: ”Americans don’t lead well anymore.”

There’s a lot of data to support that – Katrina, the debt ceiling, etc. It’s not the events that happen to us, but the ways we deal with them.

How did we lose our edge? The problem may be that we were too successful. For years, we knew how to run the system. Our cohesion and assurance became almost tribal.

Then things changed. They started happening more quickly; there was more competition. Organizations didn’t work the way we were used to.

That created a leadership gap. The sport we were trained to play wasn’t the game anymore.

The military dealt with exactly this same gap. (This is a General talking – so, we’re going to go into a real operation now:) Operation Eagle Claw was ordered by President Jimmy Carter to attempt to put an end to the Iran hostage crisis by rescuing 52 Americans held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran on 24 April 1980. The humiliating public debacle that ensued damaged American prestige worldwide.

The military knew it needed a new kind of leadership to make sure that never happened again. It created the Joint Special Operations Command.  It was effective, but very focused.

Then 9/11 happened. Everything we’d defined as the enemy and the way things worked fundamentally changed.

We had a new gap. The Joint Special Operations Command was too narrow – the military suddenly needed more, broader resources. Across jurisdictions, across countries, across interests.

The goal was matrixing organizations around the world together into one true network, with a shared consciousness and understanding of the context so that they could work with smart autonomy.

But trying to create an organization out of people no one leader commanded  didn’t fit the organizational model we all knew. How do you build a team of people you don’t control?

So the military did what most businesses do: when faced with a new challenge, try to do what you always do better. Shoot straighter, fly faster. It works for a while, but eventually we run into physics. The military realized they weren’t winning (which is a military euphemism for losing).

The only way to innovate was to get that shared consciousness and purpose. It’s not comfortable, but it’s doable with the right leadership and design.

The general shared some of his learnings from that transition – telling us what works and what doesn’t:

No longer works: Traditional decision making
Now works: Shared consciousness and purpose

No longer works: Information ownership
Now works: Inclusion and transparency (a primary role of leadership is pushing context down)

No longer works: Organizational equities
Now works: Team

No longer works: Command and control
Now works: Trust