In the previous chapter, we discussed the power of uncovering hidden assets, both in yourself and in others, and we alluded to an old adage of improvisational theater, “bring a brick, not a cathedral.” In this chapter, we offer another lesson from improv. “Yes, and” is considered the first rule of improvisation. In an improvisational skit, it means that when a fellow performer offers something – a line, for instance – the other performers accept the line as stated. That's the “yes” part. Then another actor expands on it. That's the “and.” For example, suppose one person started an improvised scene by saying, “Can you believe Maria is just dropping everything and headed to Australia for three months?” The next person would accept that as fact in the scene and build on it; they might continue the story with, “Yes, and apparently she's had a lifelong interest in learning to play the digeridoo.” The story would continue with each performer accepting what has come before and building on it. There is no way to tell where the story of Maria will end up.
Agile leaders not only uncover hidden assets, they also see how different assets could be linked, leveraged, and aligned, and can help others see that potential as well. A mere list of assets is not enough. The magic happens when assets get combined.1 Combining assets can create new value that is greater than the combined value of the parts. Doing so is a skill; in this chapter we provide some guidance to help you do just that. Making these kinds of connections is useful in many contexts, but is critical in a network (rather than a hierarchy) – it provides the platform from which collective solutions to our most complex challenges will emerge.
Linking and leveraging assets can help us be more innovative. Here's an example of linking and leveraging assets in action:
It was Saturday of the Fourth of July weekend and the restaurant was packed. Every table was full and had been all day long. The line of hungry customers never seemed to get any shorter. Provisions were beginning to run low, including some of the key ingredients for the two salads offered on the menu. Not wanting to miss any sales or disappoint customers, the owner thought fast, pulling a few items from the shelves, putting them on a cart, and wheeling the cart into the bustling dining room. He took the cart to each table where a salad had been ordered and said that even though they were out of the two menu salads, they were in for a very special treat: a new house salad, prepared and served tableside. With the flair of a magician the owner placed leaves of romaine lettuce into a bowl, adding a drizzle of olive oil, Worcestershire sauce, a squeeze of a lemon, and two coddled eggs. He added salt, pepper, and grated Parmesan cheese with a few flicks of his wrist. Rather than tossing the ingredients he gently folded them, coating each leaf with the creamy dressing. The salads were plated, croutons added, and served to the hungry diners.
The owner called the salad The Aviator in honor of the many Navy airmen who made their way over the border from San Diego to eat at the establishment: Caesar Cardini's Tijuana restaurant. It would be a few years before it became known as the Caesar Salad, invented on July 4, 1924.
We love this story for a couple of reasons. First, who doesn't love a great origin story, even if it's a recipe origin story? Although it is in a different location now, Caesar's is still in operation and still preparing their famous salad and serving it tableside. The other reason we love this story is because it is a story of innovation, specifically recombinant innovation. Let's stick with food to help further illustrate this notion.
In a 2015 journal article, Italian researchers recounted their work looking to chefs to learn some lessons about innovation. They were specifically interested in how new dishes were developed. The research found that among Italy's top chefs, new dishes usually feature a combination of separate ingredients that the chefs have used for a long time, but have put together for the first time in the new dish.
For instance, a chef might have been using pumpkin in several desserts over the years. He also had a great gorgonzola blue cheese that he used in a salad, and, of course, every Italian chef uses a lot of fresh herbs. Then, one day when the chef was thinking about a new dish for the fall, he came up with a recipe for Pumpkin Gnocchi with Gorgonzola and Crispy Sage. The gnocchi was a big hit – so popular that the restaurant was able to charge a premium price that yielded a higher than normal profit margin. This pattern appeared over and over: taking ingredients the chefs were very familiar with and combining them in a previously untested way. There was an additional finding: often, one more ingredient was present in those popular new dishes, an ingredient that was completely new to the chef's repertoire, often an obscure flavor they had encountered when traveling to a different part of the world or that was brought to the chef's attention by a kitchen's staff member from another culture. That's what is meant by recombinant innovation: taking things that already exist and combining them in new ways.
This is also what we mean when we talk about linking and leveraging assets. Let's go back to Caesar Cardini's restaurant for a moment. When faced with hungry diners, Caesar did a quick inventory: he had romaine lettuce, eggs, olive oil, lemons, croutons. He had a cart he could wheel into the dining room. He also had a couple of skills: knowledge about the basic components of a salad dressing (an oil and an acid), and critically, a flair for the dramatic. Put all these together, and you have a dish that has continued to command a premium price as a “special” dish for almost a century.
Since most of us are not chefs, here's an example from the world of technology: GPS or global positioning systems, are a remarkable innovation that link, leverage, and align satellite technology with atomic clock technology with radio transmitter and receiver technology. Those technologies were separate assets, probably each resident as bodies of knowledge in different experts' heads. The assets didn't align themselves automatically. When someone (probably a group of someones) wondered, “What if we combined them?,” a breakthrough in modern navigation was imminent.
Sometimes these breakthroughs happen serendipitously, or seemingly so, but you can follow a discipline to help structure that serendipitously. The right framing question, for instance, can serve as the invitation for conversation to those people who might hold one of those key assets in their heads. A safe space is also important in order to have the deep focused conversation to explore the possibilities. Agile leaders can then help people see the opportunities that emerge when we begin to link, leverage, and align our collection of assets.
How important is this skill? Think about this: the emerging Internet of Things allows us to connect anything with anything through a digital link. On the factory floor, RFID tags guide a production line to customize each item according to the preferences of individual consumers who have placed online orders. Our automobile can signal to a billboard to advertise the next gas station when we're running low. In the kitchen, our refrigerator can order milk when we are almost out and have it delivered. Our opportunities to link, leverage, and align assets are literally endless. Individuals who understand and can put in practice processes such as recombinant innovation will lead the world to places we can't even begin to imagine today.
Many of us have a natural tendency to think vertically – that is, to explore specific topics in depth. Experts in any discipline are by definition good vertical thinkers. Academics and technologists can be especially prone to vertical thinking. Vertical thinking is useful when we need to reflect deeply about things. It is also, however, helpful to think horizontally, across different disciplines, fields, or bodies of knowledge. New insights can occur when we think horizontally. At Purdue, for example, there is a group called the Regenstrief Center for Healthcare Engineering (RCHE). Here horizontal thinking occurs on a daily basis; in fact, it was horizontal thinking that resulted in the idea for RCHE, in response to the appreciative question, How might we improve the healthcare system by bringing engineers together with nurses and pharmacists? “Healthcare Engineering” as a field of practice and research was born. Engineers have assets. Nurses have assets. Pharmacists have assets. Linking and leveraging those assets requires horizontal thinking.
Here's how all this works in practice: let's take the example of infusion pumps. These are the devices that hang by the bedside in a hospital and deliver fluids, such as nutrients and medications, into a patient's body. While these pumps provide a high degree of accuracy in the delivery of medications, there are also significant safety problems. Malfunctions can result in the overdelivery or underdelivery of medication. RCHE has established the infusion pump informatics community of practice among more than 100 hospitals in the Midwest. Through a web‐based tool, these hospitals can now share data, analysis, and best practices to improve patient safety.
Sometimes horizontal thinking occurs as in the RCHE story, when people who look at the world differently get together. In other instances, an individual (whether by design or serendipitously) learns something about another field or context, and they are led to a new insight. A number of authors have written excellent books exploring the power of horizontal thinking. Franz Johansson calls the creation of insights at the intersection of different fields and cultures “the Medici effect.” Stephen Johnson, in his wonderful book Where Good Ideas Come From, shatters the myth that innovation comes from a “Eureka!” moment. Instead, good ideas emerge over time out of different patterns of connection. Johnson identifies seven of these patterns. One he calls the “adjacent possible.” In describing how incubators have evolved, Johnson points out that innovations can come from exploring the edges of what currently exists. Each advancement of the incubator over its 140‐year history relied on recombining existing parts originally designed for other purposes. Through this recombination, a new idea emerges. We cannot leave this section, though, without pointing to the remarkable work of science historian James Burke. In his book Connections (and a companion television series), Burke traces multiple innovations through history to show how ideas jump from one field to another. An agile leader develops the skills to do each of these things: to see assets in different domains and spot their intersections and or connection possibilities, as well as to bring people together to reveal their hidden assets and then spot the link‐and‐leverage opportunities.
If you are not someone for whom thinking horizontally comes naturally, there is good news. This is a skill that can be learned. Imagine you are working on a real “head‐scratcher,” trying to solve a particularly perplexing problem. This is a good time to take a thought walk. The idea of a thought walk comes from engineer and creativity expert Michael Michalko.
A thought walk could be a quick loop around the office; on a nice day it might take you outside to the parking lot, or maybe even to run a few errands. A thought walk could even be a thought “drive” or subway trip. Wherever it is that you go, note things you come across randomly, pick up, or purchase. In the office it might be the water fountain or a tape dispenser. On a walk outside, you possibly encounter sounds of birds chirping, the daffodils that are starting to bloom, a discarded water bottle, or just about anything else. On an errand it could be the items you pick up at the store.
Don't look for things that are related to the problem or idea you are working on, rather, select items with no apparent connection to your problem or idea and no apparent relationship to one another. When you return from your thought walk jot down the characteristics of the items you encountered or acquired. For that tape dispenser, you might write down words like sticky, transparent, spinning. Now try to find a connection between one or more of the characteristics and the problem or idea you are working on. Here's an example from author Michalko of how a thought walk generated new insights for one engineer.
An engineer was working on safe and efficient ways to remove ice from power lines during ice storms. He had run out of ideas and none of the ones he had seemed right. He took a break and went for a walk. On his walk, he visited a store that had several different varieties of honey for sale in a variety of different containers. The store advertised the honey with a cutout of a large bear holding a jar of honey. He bought a jar to take home and returned to his office.
At his desk, while simultaneously thinking of honey, the cutout bear, and his power line problem, he came up with a pretty “out there” solution. Imagine, he thought, putting a honey pot on top of each power pole. This would attract bears and the bears would climb the poles to get to the honey. Their climbing would cause the poles to sway and the ice would vibrate off the wires. Although this was a silly idea, it led him to think about the phenomenon of vibration, which led him to a vibration‐related solution. The solution the power company implemented was to bring in helicopters to hover over the iced power lines. Their hovering vibrated the ice off the power lines. The solution had nothing at all to do with either honey or bears, but he may not have gotten there without them (Michalko, n.d.).
When a group of people begins to think horizontally they are literally thinking together – and thinking together is a fascinating phenomenon. When we think horizontally together we are actually creating an extended mind. This idea was first introduced by philosopher Andy Clark and cognitive scientist David Chalmers. According to Clark and Chalmers, a person's mind and cognitive processing are not limited to their head or even their body. The extended mind extends into the person's world, including to objects. For example, the use of to‐do lists to augment one's memory is a simple way of way of extending the mind. Of course, we also use other, much more sophisticated storage and retrieval devices like computers and the internet to extend our minds.
In their book The Knowledge Illusion: Why We Never Think Alone, Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach build on the extended mind theory, noting that one's mind also extends to the people around them. Furthermore, we are constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact. What we might call “assets” are thus everywhere.
As we saw in Chapter 4, our approach to designing and guiding complex collaborations begins by identifying assets that could contribute to potential solutions – skill assets, physical assets, capital assets, social assets. When we do this with a group, we are essentially mapping our collective extended mind. We invariably end up with a rich collection of assets. The team can then draw on these varied assets to design an array of possible solutions.
Say a group of five to seven individuals has been tasked with designing a strategy to address a complex issue. If each person identifies five assets the group then has 25 to 30 assets in their collective asset inventory. As we saw in Chapter 1 when we looked at the innovation of the telephone, mixing and matching different combinations of these assets to form potential solutions gives us a nearly endless set of possibilities.
Complex challenges will require us to consider and experiment with many different strategies or options. We can build that list by taking our assets and combining them in different ways. This approach is a simple but effective way to achieve the variety of options needed to deal with complex challenges. If we identify our assets, even those that are hidden, we can connect them. Connecting them allows us to literally think horizontally together. Linking and leveraging assets by thinking horizontally and helping others to do it as well is a skill that can be learned. Solutions to today's complex challenges will not be developed in hierarchies. They will be designed in networks that link and leverage assets. They will be designed collectively by thinking horizontally, and they will be designed with the help of agile leaders.
The skill of linking and leveraging assets is one that some people find easier than others – the natural horizontal thinkers take to it quickly – but it's also a skill that can be strengthened through practice. To begin, you could start with identifying a small set of assets – perhaps a few assets in each of the categories from the last chapter. Select three to four at random and see if you can come up with a way in which they could be combined – a hypothetical new product, service, program, or initiative that might have some value. Suspend your evaluative instincts and go for quantity over quality. When you've exhausted the possibilities for your first set of three to four assets, repeat with another set. You can use this same technique “in real life.” Devote some time to simply brainstorming new possibilities from combining the assets you have at your disposal – if you're stuck, pick out a few at random and ask, “What if we combined these?” “What about these?” With even a few assets, the number of possibilities you can create will surprise you.