The Quest for Provocation
The Deliberate Management of Inspiration
There I was, crammed into a hotel room with the senior operations management team of a giant global insurance company. These were the guys who looked after how information flowed around the company, how call centres were managed and how technology supported various insurance products. We called room service. Not because we were hungry, but because this hotel was famous for its room service. There were over 40 separate service standards dictating how to deliver a burger and fries to a room.
This kind of highly regulated system normally produces ‘cookie cutter’ service – employees learn the drill but seem incapable of going off script when an unusual request or situation presents itself. We were there to learn how this hotel could deal with the weirdest requests. So there we were, ordering burgers with every imaginable topping, cancelling orders and generally making a pain in the arse of ourselves and all the time the waiter was smiling, taking it in his stride.
So somehow, the hotel had cracked a way to have service standards and allow the waiters to use their intelligence to overrule the system when required. It was a trait this insurance company desperately wanted their people to have. The insurance call centre staff were frequently criticised for ‘acting like robots’; they were inflexible and lacked empathy with customers.
The next morning we met in a very different environment; a café in a run-down housing estate. We paired off and spent the day with its low or no income residents. These were the kind of people the insurance company’s research programme dismissed as ‘off-strategy’. We went inside their homes, met their friends and observed how they spent their money. We learnt that they lent and borrowed among themselves, using new-at-the-time services like Wonga and PayPal. If there was a disaster, it got sorted out within the family, not through an insurance company. Banks and insurers simply weren’t on their radar.
Later in the day we all gathered in a small terraced house to share our observations. The homeowner asked the executives to take their shoes off when they entered. We spent the session squeezed into a small room discussing our findings in stockinged feet. I think the ‘shoes off’ thing made a big difference. In some way it was a great leveller and big signal that we were a long way from the office.
In our quest to provoke these executives, we also introduced them to a convicted insurance fraudster, people who didn’t ‘believe’ in insurance on religious and ethical grounds, and even employees of their own company who had been buying competitors’ insurance products.
The rich mix of provocative insight gleaned from the exercises above was unlike anything the insurance company had done before. For years they had commissioned the same type of research amongst the same type of customers, even using the same researchers. But the experience of the excellent room service, the disenfranchised homeowners, the fraudster and the insurance non-believer had shaken free a stream of insights and ideas. Eventually the Operations Team developed new ideas that affected many parts of the organisation; who they hired, how complaints were dealt with, a new ‘common sense’ basic training scheme and much more.
The serendipity formula at its most basic level is ‘garbage in = garbage out’. In other words, if you fill your head with the same old things, then the same old things will come out. Provocation is the deliberate quest to have your view of the world challenged. It’s the search for a new stimulus that tells us why our assumptions about the world might be wrong. A rich mix of provocation is the raw material for serendipity and a springboard for innovation. The quest for provocation takes us out of the office to experience all the things our customers experience. It takes us to meet people who have an extreme relationship with our products and to experience others who’ve cracked similar problems but in other markets.
The quest for provocation is by definition uncomfortable. It takes real balls to design a journey with the purpose of challenging the status quo. We need to feel both inspired and a little threatened as a result. Provocation also has a competitive edge. Do you know whether your competitors are working from the same data that you are? Or are they looking in different, more stimulating places and making more connections? Provocation – and the clues, connections, and insights it generates – is fundamental to innovation and competition.
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‘Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while … they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.’
Steve Jobs in a Wired interview with Wolf (1996)
It’s a fact of life. The same route to work, the same coffee from the corner shop, the same faces, the same issues at work – we can’t help but get good at repeating today what worked yesterday. Once we’ve invested heavily in the past, our neuronal pathways get burnt into motorways set into deep ravines, with ever-fewer exits.
At a collective level, whole organisations can lose their peripheral vision and get stuck in a rut. History is littered with stories of clever people engaging in groupthink with disastrous results. In 2012 the Kodak Eastman Company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, its digital camera business having finally given up in the face of left-field entrants like Apple’s iPhone. Contrary to popular belief, Kodak hadn’t been blind to innovation. It had a surprising string of firsts: the first digital camera, the first Wi-Fi camera and the first touchscreen camera. Its profits and market share were high, even after digital cameras took off. But even though its executives could hear the train coming, they didn’t move fast enough, they didn’t move off the crossing – and when they did, it was too late. An anonymous Kodak executive recently said that ‘The difference between [Kodak’s] traditional business and digital was so great. The tempo is different. The kinds of skills you need are different. [The management] would tell you that they wanted change, but they didn’t want to force pain on the organisation.’
In the same way, Encyclopaedia Britannica failed to capitalise on the digital revolution. First sold in 1768 in Scotland and then from 1901 headquartered in the US, sales of the 32-volume tome had dwindled from a peak of 120,000 in 1990 to only 4000 just ten years later. Sales of the printed set ceased in 2012.
Like Kodak, it wasn’t that Encyclopaedia Britannica was blind to the digital revolution. They launched EBlast, a curated web directory of sites when no one knew what a web directory was. They experimented with linking their content to current news stories on the net; just click from the news article through to Encyclopaedia Britannica for more content, was the idea.
The problem was that Encyclopaedia Britannica was in a rut. They had such an authoritative editorial board, such august contributors (Nobel prize winners amongst others) and so much history in diligently collecting and editing the facts that they couldn’t see that it was ‘access’ and not the quality of the content providers that had become the main thing.
Encyclopaedia Britannica was always an aspirational purchase, mainly by working class parents who wanted a better life for their kids – opportunities they never had. They switched to buying PCs (about the same price as the 32 volume set) that came with free Encarta encyclopaedia software. Still Encyclopaedia Britannica clung to the notion that content was king even though many of the weighty books were never taken off the shelves. Today Wikipedia has the power of vast numbers of editors and the ability to immediately update. Clearly these are huge benefits compared to rarely edited paper books. But it wasn’t technology that killed Encyclopaedia Britannica, it was their failure to recognise that the voice of a thousand ‘Joe Publics’ is as important as a single Nobel laureate.
All the answers were outside Kodak and Encyclopaedia Britannica’s office door, but understandably the fear of cannibalisation of their sunken capital limited their ability to think and act flexibly.
They are not alone. Tesco is a £72bn global retailer with 6234 stores in 14 countries. Fuelled by years of spectacular results they opened Fresh & Easy supermarkets in Nevada, California and Arizona in 2007 and 2008. Tesco researched the market diligently with over 60 families who opened up their homes and shopping habits to its Brit executives for two weeks. But initial sales results were disappointing; somehow the store layout and the product mix wasn’t working.
Looking back, Tim Mason (Chief Executive Officer and President of Fresh & Easy since 2006) candidly admits in an interview with William Kay (2009) that the mistake was to not look in customers’ garages. If they had done so they would have found chest freezers stocked with bulk-bought produce purchased on special offer. ‘There’s less loyalty in the American market’, said Mason. ‘A Brit has to hear it a few times before you accept that people make up their mind where to go each week when they check out the special offers round the kitchen table’.
So even the most sophisticated operator can get stuck in a rut. To get properly provoked we need to be creative and audacious in our approach, but we also need to plan it carefully. None of us have infinite time or money to blow on getting endless provocative stimuli.
So where shall the quest take us first?
Sometimes all the provocation you need is so close you can’t see it. Sometimes your own customers or colleagues can tell you your innovation strategy – in minutes – so ask them first. You might just save yourself a lot of time and money.
It’s incredible how much duplication or missed opportunities exist because people work in silos. Very often the answer has been researched and developed in another department – right under our nose. Some organisations are stealing the tech start-up concept of hackathons. They’re locking their staff (not literally) in a room for 48 hours. They have all the research that’s ever been done and a constant supply of pizzas. These events work well if they are cross-departmental, each brings their research for another department to read. Seeing what the adjacent silo is working on always throws up opportunities.
‘A good breakfast sets you up for the day’ went the challenge from our client, a traditional English baker and bread supplier to supermarkets throughout the UK. The problem was that breakfast seemed to be going out of fashion and sales of bread were dwindling. Our client’s understanding of how families consumed bread was restricted to either their own experience or to ‘focus groups’. Knowing that in research people tend to either forget or fantasise about the reality of their true behaviour, we asked our clients – a bunch of middle-aged men – to get up early and spend breakfast with a family. Each director would adopt a family and have Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday breakfast with them. Clearly they had to fit around the families’ schedules, even if that meant getting up very early.
Initially the directors were keen, but as the sessions approached they all cancelled, one by one. They seemed uncomfortable about spending this much time out of the office and in such an unusual, uncontrolled environment. Undeterred we rearranged and in some cases re-rearranged. There comes a point when you have to put your foot down.
Finally we had a full house, and eight directors got up early on Monday morning and set off. Later they admitted to us that they felt a little nervous about the breakfast experience. Maybe they were imagining housewives in negligees or husbands with hangovers? We met each director outside the house and accompanied them into the kitchen.
In all cases the scene that played out in front of us had Mum on fast forward while Dad was on pause. He was either standing up while eating, head in newspaper or tapping out an urgent email. While mum was busy on mute, the volume on the kids was turned up. The tension rose as the clock ticked, mum working all the time to feed the kids, pack the bags, remind about after-school activities and deal with the inevitable outbreak of sibling hostility. Finally the front door closed and peace descended.
The discomfort at the thought of the breakfast experience is long forgotten but the learning still lives with our clients several years on. What they saw was a game of brinkmanship in which Mum pushes the kids to eat breakfast and the kids wield their power to obstruct. They saw the impact of Dad opting out, and the relief felt by Mum as she completed the hardest task of the day – delivering her kids fed, on time and in the right mood to school. For the directors, perched slightly uncomfortably in the corner of the kitchen, this was a revelation. They recognised themselves as the upstanding, opted-out cereal eater.
It’s impossible to innovate without experiencing discomfort. An innovator cannot be ‘too posh to provoke’. People involved in the innovation process generally experience anything from mild discomfort to outright panic when they step outside the office to spend time with customers. One of our packaged goods clients was very nervous about the prospect. Faced with a choice between ‘student house’ and ‘couple with two kids’ he insisted he didn’t want to do the student house – he was afraid they’d be punks or squatters. Imagine his relief when he arrived at his ‘couple’ house and was greeted by a shaven-headed, tattooed gentleman, a pit bull and a proudly displayed gun collection.
The lesson here is: Be bold. And remember, you will have paid customers to meet you, so get maximum value from the experience. You don’t have to like them, and they don’t have to like you.
Human beings view their lives holistically; they don’t distinguish excellence between different types of product or service. Think, for instance, about the intuitive way I can use iTunes to curate my music; anywhere, anytime I can reorganise and view my music collection. I get updates and downloads seamlessly. There’s a real pleasure in curating the collection.
But only seconds after I download a new tune, a couple of letters come through my door. One is from my bank telling me about an unauthorised overdraft and the fee I have to pay for it. I can’t remember what I’ve been spending and scrunch the letter into a tight ball. Then I notice another letter from the same bank asking me to take out a new type of credit card.
In that moment the contrast between the smooth, intuitive world of curating music and the impersonal world of understanding money is felt. This is how people see the world; today, what sets the standard in one market, sets the standard for all.
This is why we need to look beyond the market or category in which our products or services exist. We need better peripheral vision. What is setting the standards for our consumers – across a variety of markets, throughout their day or wherever they are?
Take the cocked-up bank communication example above. To understand a customer’s life beyond bank communication might mean we observe several customers throughout a day (literally, we trail them) and log all their points of communication. We might observe that he or she:
As we build a long list, we might underline all the points of communication where we observed our customer smile, respond or frown. Each of these then needs more exploration. We might observe that the one-line text message from a friend in broken English with no punctuation or signoff elicits the biggest smile:
c u 8 cnr 2 n StMarks :)
(Translation: I’ll see you at 8pm on the corner of Second Avenue and St Mark’s Place. The smile will make sense to the recipient. Maybe it’s a peace offering, maybe it’s a promise, or maybe it’s just the sender being friendly.)
This scrappy message is an interesting clue. It might be telling us that formal communication is less effective than short, sharp and friendly messages – something that could have huge implications for the bank. Later we’ll collide this interesting clue with another and then another, and maybe we’ll generate a powerful insight and idea.
Research budgets are limited, meaning that most research tends to focus on ‘target markets’. (A dreadful phrase: we line a customer up in our sights and fire.) But inspiration for innovation is unlikely to come from ‘normal consumers’. An innovator already has a mass of data on ‘normal consumers’ and his or her competitors are probably looking at the same data.
Innovation is fermented at the margins with the angry, the ambivalent, the rejecters and the ‘do-it-yourselfers’. To some extent, provocation comes from getting inside the heads of the very people who have rejected you – or at least those who have an extreme or downright strange relationship with your brand or category.
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Innovation is fermented at the margins with the angry, the ambivalent, the rejecters and the ‘do-it-yourselfers’
Below is a digest of the weird and wonderful people we visited on three different projects. To find them was a creative process. First we developed a long list of people who had an eccentric or extreme relationship with our clients’ product or service. Then, using all our contacts, we hit the phones and persuaded them to talk to us, or we went where they went and talked to them face to face. This type of activity takes guts and tenacity, some people are good at it and some people aren’t. The financial investment in this type of ‘stimulus’ is always quite modest, but the provocation invaluable. Here are the three projects with a selection of the people we met up with:
A pizza food chain looking to break into the breakfast ‘day-part’
New banking ‘pay for’ advisory service
A new anti-dandruff shampoo for men
Bet you’re thinking that these projects look kind of fun? They are, but they need to be edgy. No point just talking to someone who likes you; it’s much more provocative to meet someone who really hates you, who rejects you or uses your product or service in a way you’d never intended. Although it may be unpleasant listening to these views, within them are the seeds of something useful. I’m not saying that you need to wear a bulletproof vest to innovate, but you do need to step outside your comfort zone.
So far we’ve picked up clues about how our customers see things beyond our market, segment or category. We’ve gathered clues from people with extreme or eccentric relationships with our product or service. So the lens of provocation we’ve just peered through could be termed the customer or consumer lens. But we’ve only just begun our quest. Now things are about to get really exciting. There are many other lenses of provocation beyond the customer lens and we need to gather more clues through them.
One lens or provocation we often look through is the ‘capability lens’ – the skills and capabilities the organisation possesses. Think of this as ‘supply side’ creativity. Before we got the bakery company we previously encountered to hang out with their customers over breakfast we asked them to describe the skills and capabilities of their business. Their list was uninspiring:
Our aim was to get the executives to reframe their organisation’s capabilities so that they might ‘see’ their business in a new way. So we asked the bakery’s executives to re-express their capabilities. To make it easier for them, we asked that they imagine they were addressing a 5-year-old. The list that came back was very different:
This exercise surprised even the bakery executives. Suddenly a world of ‘new business’ ideas opened up: ‘Maybe we could joint venture our distribution with other businesses that work at night, such as newspapers? Maybe we should start a cookery skills campaign to teach the lost art of bread making?’ Many more ideas tumbled out once they reframed ‘who’ they were.
A clever trick on the quest to provocation is to ask of your organisation: ‘What if what is true about ourselves is false?’ This sentence is quite a mouthful, but it’s so useful I’m going to repeat it: ‘What if what is true about ourselves is false?’ This is provocation on steroids. Many of the world’s greatest innovations have come from contrarians: ‘What if we could fly? What if we could go to the moon? What if we could offer holidays in space?’
Just to illustrate the point let’s take a simple product like shampoo: How do you break the rules?
| Rule | What if … |
| Liquid | We were solid, maybe a sculpted bar? |
| Use in shower | We were a pre-treatment for dry hair? |
| Cleans | We add gunk? |
| Morning | We were used before bedtime? |
| Sold in shops | We were made at home? |
The broken rules are often illuminating. Each is a starting point for creative exploration. I’ll bet you’re quite surprised at how much potential my rule-breakers have? In the spirit of serendipitous discovery, grab a paper and pen and write down the rules in your industry. How would you break each one?
A comforting axiom of innovation is that very few challenges are genuinely new. There will likely be someone or something who has tackled a challenge related to yours. At ?What If! we call this a ‘Related World’ and finding them is an essential key to innovation.
Related natural worlds have long been a source of serendipitous invention:
Looking to a Related World for provocation takes guts in a large organisation. It’s an unconventional thing to do, but the pay-off can be spectacular as BP found out.
As the story illustrates, the quest for provocation can take us to some interesting and unexpected places. But the barrier to a Related Worlds exercise is often within ourselves: ‘What will people think of me? Will my colleagues realise what I’m trying to do?’ Carefully choose a few Related Worlds exercises and explain why you have picked them. In the story above when I mentioned ‘herbal doctor’ I bet you raised your eyebrows? That’s the reaction a Related Worlds exercise often gets. But when I mentioned the scale of the payoff, I’m guessing it all made sense.
Looking out into cyberspace where people are having conversations about the topics they care about can be a great source of challenge and inspiration. Special interest sites and blogs are an established part of the provocation armoury. There are specialist websites for everything from breast cancer to bankruptcy to left-handed golfers. To be able to get involved in the kind of informal and unfettered dialogue that these sites have is very revealing. Somehow people really let themselves go in cyberspace. They spew out their feelings, full of passion, with minimal editing and few revisions. Brilliant! For an innovator it feels easier interjecting with online discussion groups – the anonymity of it all means you can provoke and push in a way you probably wouldn’t do face to face.
Mapping the flow of cash and profit in your broader market – suppliers, customers and influencers – can be a great source of provocation as well. Where are the best margins? Where is all the growth? Where is all the intellectual property? Where are salaries higher? Who gets all the glory? Stand back and allow yourself to inhabit the skin of others in this ‘value map’. This will surely prompt you to throw out some clues. Some of the bravest innovators are unafraid to explore above and below themselves in the value chain. IBM has been very successful in morphing from making weighing machines to mainframe computers to laptops to consultancy.
Organise your smartphone using randomised tools such as Flipboard, Pinterest and StumbleUpon. Flick through the pages and allow yourself to get lost in one of these apps. It’s the modern-day equivalent of walking around a library and picking up a book to read at random. This is where serendipity can really kick in. You can connect two seemingly unconnected pages or connect your challenge with a page selected at random.
When Pasteur said ‘In the field of observation, chance only favours the prepared mind’ he meant that we’ve got to do our homework. We need to prepare ourselves so that we can really see things and hear things for the first time.
So first we’ve got to tune our antennae. Executives, understandably, find it hard to switch from head-down operational mode to open-minded customer observation mode. It’s important to tune your antennae out of ‘opinionated’ frequency and into ‘no preconception’ frequency. I like the description of this as ‘looking with soft eyes’. I’ve stolen this from an episode of HBO’s hit series The Wire. Episode Two, Series Four is a must-see for all about to embark on the quest for provocation. The detective stands back and allows the facts to wash over her. She doesn’t dive in with preconceptions. This gives her the ability to see what all the other bullheaded detectives can’t. In the end she gets the bad guy.
There’s an antennae tuning exercise we invented at ?What If! called ‘Consumer Shoes’. It works for an innovation team, sponsor team or a wider group of stakeholders. Here’s how it worked with the directors of a global confectionary company:
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When Pasteur said ‘In the field of observation, chance only favours the prepared mind’ he meant that we’ve got to do our homework
I started by sitting the guys (yes, all men) in a circle facing me and got the usual jokes about how this felt ‘like an AA meeting’. Then I gave them unpopular news: ‘Today you are going to roleplay customers’. I explained that we were going to focus on a key segment; teenage females. I then gave the director to my left an identity. I told him: ‘You are Phoebe and you’re 18 years old’. The next director was Samantha, 17 years old, then Jane, then Jill – you get the picture. The mutiny started when I asked them to respond to my questions in the first person and in character. We have better things to do they insisted, but I held my ground and the directors were soon enjoying themselves.
I started with general questions about customers’ lives:
These were great questions to get my roleplayers in the mood and thinking like their alter ego. Then I ask questions that are about the market or category, in this case it was confectionary, or more broadly treats. So:
The final group of questions is about the brand:
Over the course of an hour the directors tried hard to answer my questions as if they were their consumers. There was a lot of laughter but quickly they realised this was a serious exercise. It’s the commercial equivalent of asking a politician how much a pint of milk costs. Finally, I released them from the exercise and asked them how they thought they performed. They felt they had done well on pricing and distribution questions but not so well on general ‘day in the life’ type questions.
But the Consumer Shoes exercise had only just begun. Having asked the directors to move to a circle of chairs in the outside of the room I opened a side door and in walked the real Phoebe, Samantha, Jane, Jill and the rest of them. The room was silent as my executives realised what was about to happen. I sat the girls down in the same places as their male alter egos had been sitting and asked exactly the same questions in exactly the same order. You could have heard a pin drop. The answers of course from the ‘real’ customers are not representative of all customers, but nonetheless it was fascinating to contrast the two sets of answers.
Some of the directors were much better than others at understanding their consumers. Some clearly hadn’t a clue. Some directors had accurately predicted what a typical night out with friends was like and could also paraphrase how they would feel if the brand was discontinued. Other directors really struggled with the night out – they didn’t know where their customers would go, what they might eat or drink or what type of conversations they would have. They also predicted the customers’ world would fall apart if the brand was discontinued, something that wasn’t true.
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Until an innovation team or their sponsors recognise their expertise, biases or knowledge gaps, they will find it hard to listen openly to others
This is not an exercise in humiliation, but rather one that seeks to illuminate who in the group has genuine insight, and who is biased towards one point of view. Clearly the game is dynamite if mishandled, but in all cases I have found it immensely powerful. Since we invented this exercise I think we have run it over a thousand times and all over the world. Until an innovation team or their sponsors recognise their expertise, biases or knowledge gaps, they will find it hard to listen openly to others. Either they will not pick up clues because they think they know it all and keep reverting to a pet theory (a theory someone never lets go of, which reappears year after year), or they may actually fear they know nothing and overcompensate with too many opinions.
The exercise is particularly good for confident veteran executives who ‘have seen it all before’. These guys can be a pain in the innovation butt. The Consumer Shoes exercise enables them to realise just how much the world has moved on. Plus it’s very convenient as the exercise can take place in the office.
So now we’re totally tuned up. The quest for provocation can begin. But where shall we look first? After 20 years of ‘preparing minds’ to find provocation, there are places I’d always try first.
Great clues are found when people are forced to DIY. Recently I came into work in a taxi and took this picture of the driver. This guy was addicted to his screens and he’s providing us with a big clue. Clearly the auto manufacturer isn’t giving him what he needs and he’s had to make it up himself. When people develop their own solutions then they are giving you a big fat clue.
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When people develop their own solutions then they are giving you a big fat clue
Another hot hunting ground for clues is when you spot a ‘contradiction’. We once partnered with a global bank looking at innovative new ways to deliver better service. We visited a whole range of loyal and lapsed customers. We visited them in their homes and asked to talk in the place where they made most financial decisions. We squeezed into home offices, kitchens and even bedrooms. We heard most customers tell us how important money was to them, how they counted their pennies and how essential it was to have the same attention to detail in a bank. In fact these consumers were very critical of the bank’s attention to detail. But when we asked them to open up their desks, their account book or online files we saw something surprising. In fact we saw very little at all. Most customers had no idea what financial products they had, what rates they were charged or how healthy their financial performance was. It was an extraordinary contradiction and, again, a big fat clue.
A final point on ‘preparing to see’ is to not be afraid to let things get a little messy. It’s amazing the things you observe when people shrug off social convention and reveal the raw emotion underneath. The issue is that many people won’t tell you what they really think about your product or service. Maybe because your product, the product you love, is pretty boring to them. Or maybe it feels too painful to talk about some issues, for instance the overweight talking about cholesterol or smokers talking about smoking. Sometimes the subject matter is just plain embarrassing – like erectile dysfunction, body odour, haemorrhoids, bankruptcy or illiteracy. Sometimes we need to give these people a little nudge to get them talking.
We once explored how recently divorced men and women managed their finances post split-up. To spice up the dialogue we organised two rows of chairs facing each other. In trooped five recently divorced men and five recently divorced women. We asked them to sit opposite each other. Within a few minutes the two sides of the room were getting very heated with each other. One woman admitted that she’d known from ‘the day I walked down the aisle’ that the marriage wouldn’t last. Many of her fellow females agreed and this sent the men into a spiralling series of intimate counter-claims. Before chairs were thrown, we halted the session. It had been extremely rich in clues for the financial services company – none of which conventional research had uncovered.
Another way to nudge people into talking is to use humour. Before the US launch of Unilever’s brand Axe’s, Axe Brand Director Neil Munn and ten of his team spent a day in a comedy club in Chicago. They were joined by sixty 18-year-olds. The lights dimmed and, on stage, comedians cracked gags all about the dating and mating game. The first comedian told a story about how a young guy approached a group of women intent on pulling. The audience laughed and squirmed with embarrassment as his pathetic lines were brutally dissected by the female pack. After the laughter died down, the house lights came up and Munn led an analysis with the audience about why this was so funny. The clues flowed: ‘We learnt more that day than we’d ever done’, says Munn, ‘the levity and shared experience allowed those guys to open up about their emotions, their vulnerability, like nothing else.’
Paradoxically, another way to shrug off convention is to create a sense of normality. Once we held a clue-gathering session with psoriasis sufferers in a swimming pool. We were all in our swimming costumes, all the same – you can imagine how much easier it was for people to compare conditions and speak openly in a place they usually avoid.
In the same vein we undertook a project called ‘The Future of Sex’ for a condom manufacturer. Before the project started, our team and the client’s team met to ‘normalise’ together. This involved us meeting and talking about sex, using as many sexual words and definitions as we’d ever heard of. We carried on until words and concepts that were normally taboo were easy to say. Without this process we couldn’t have talked openly with each other.
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Significant inventions are not mere accidents. The erroneous view (that they are) is widely held, and it is one that the scientific and technical community, unfortunately, has done little to dispel. Happenstance usually plays a part, to be sure, but there is much more to invention than the popular notion of a bolt out of the blue. Knowledge in depth and in breadth are virtual prerequisites. Unless the mind is thoroughly charged beforehand, the proverbial spark of genius, if it should manifest itself, probably will find nothing to ignite.
Nobel laureate Paul Flory, upon the occasion of receiving the Priestley Medal, the highest honour given by the American Chemical Society.
Serendipity, Accidental Discoveries in Science. Royston M. Roberts
Think of a detective movie. The crime scene is where we gather clues. Back at the station detectives are gathered in the incident room. The walls are covered with clues; it looks a confusing mess and the detectives stand back, stroking their chins, trying to spot a pattern.
Innovators everywhere follow an equivalent procedure. We’re looking at the facts, the clues, and we’re thinking to ourselves ‘Why is that?’ At the same time we’re looking across clues garnered from all our lenses of provocation. Within this bubbling mental soup connections are made and hunches are formed.
We call these hunches ‘insights’. An insight is an important concept to innovators. It gives us a deep understanding of why people do what they do – so penetrating is a good insight that it naturally generates potential solutions. A good insight is like a well-fertilised garden – it can’t help but generate ideas. The converse is true. A lack of insights is like a desert, only weak ideas will grow here.
For the sake of tidiness I’ll conclude our detective metaphor; the ‘arrest’ is the insight that drives an idea and the ‘conviction’ is a successful launch.
To make the clues to the insight process real, let’s say we’re exploring ways to improve the consultation a patient will have with a doctor. Some of clues we have are:
Note that these clues are observations, they may not be representative but they are clean objective observations. They are a mix of observations about how people behaved, what people said, what things cost and how things work. A clue always starts with ‘I heard …’ or ‘I saw …’ or ‘I read …’ This is an easy way to remember the difference between a clue and an insight. Also note that the list above is a rich mix of clues derived from looking through many lenses of provocation. This is where serendipity happens – it’s the mixing of lenses of provocation that counts.
Some of these clues could connect to make the following insights:
Insights can be inspirational or they can be mediocre. Insights 1 and 3 above are dull but insight 2 is very exciting. A good insight propels you to have novel solutions. In this case I’m immediately thinking of ideas. Maybe a more highly trained receptionist could handle part of the ‘advice’ stage. Maybe doctor surgeries could have an incoming receptionist and a dispatch type receptionist? The dispatch receptionist could make sure patients aren’t leaving the surgery with any unresolved issues, or take their time with confused patients and explain how to take their medicine? Or maybe I’ll combine insights 2 and 4. Now I’m thinking that after the doctor has seen the pathology report, the same receptionist can call the non-critical cases with the test result.
In this chapter we’ve explored how some organisations force themselves out of a dangerous thinking ‘rut’. A quest for provocation might take a few weeks to set up, a month or two to execute and a couple of weeks to extract the gold. Your checklist might look something like this:
There are many lenses of provocation. The trick is to look through several but only extract observations or ‘clues’ (‘I heard, I saw, I read …’) at this stage.
The main lenses are:
Get in the Incident Room and look across the hundreds of clues you’ve gathered. Collide them together to create new insight. This is the foundation of ideas and innovation.