Magic happens in the interstitial space between silos, disciplines, organizations, and sectors.  The word interstitial comes from the Latin “interstitium” which was derived from “inter” meaning “between” and “sistere” meaning “to stand” therefore to stand between.  Optimum learning, innovation, problem solving, and value creation happens when we stand between.

To fully realize the potential of the 21^st century we must get more comfortable and better at standing between.  The imperative is to go from interdisciplinary to trans-disciplinary.  Only by celebrating the interstitial space between us will we invent new disciplines and system approaches to enable transformation in our important social systems including education, health care, energy, and entrepreneurship.

And yet we spend most of our time in silos.  It is comfortable there.  We know the language spoken.  We know what is expected and our roles.  We know the people who inhabit our silos.  There are clear rules dictating our behavior within silos and even clearer rules if we dare to dip our toes into the interstitial space outside of well-marked boundaries.  Incentives, performance reviews, and job ladders all reinforce insularity.  While technology screams permeability, organization infrastructure and operating norms lean against it.  Standing in between anything is often considered a career-limiting move. Read more

It’s time for me to come clean.  In today’s social media crazed world it will come out sooner or later anyway.  I have one high school varsity letter and it’s for bowling.  Yes, you heard right, bowling.  And it wasn’t ten-pin, but candlepin bowling.  Anyone who grew up in New England, with parents like mine who looked for ways to get the kids out of their hair on rainy Saturdays, knows exactly what I’m talking about.  Candlepin bowling rocks.

For those of you who aren’t from New England, candlepin bowling is a unique version of the sport invented in 1880 in Worcester, Massachusetts by a local bowling alley owner, Justin White.  Candlepin bowling is clearly evidence of New England as a regional innovation hot-spot. For the most part candlepin never caught on outside of New England and the Canadian Maritime provinces.  In the region candlepin bowling enjoyed a cult following including its own local television shows.  I remember Candlepins for Cash, which was a Saturday morning staple and may well have been the first reality television show.

The first noticeable difference from the more popular ten-pin variety of bowling is the small size of the balls.  Don’t look for holes for your fingers because there aren’t any.  The ball is 4 ½ ” in diameter weighing only 1.13 kg.  It fits in the palm of your hand and can literally be thrown rather than rolled down the alley at the pins.  I have seen many errant candlepin balls launched across lanes. Personal injury insurance is a must.  Back in the day I owned a set of balls (spare me the cajones jokes) and yes of course the required bowling ball bag.  The balls were a pearly white with wonderful lime green marble swirls throughout. Come to think of it I wonder where they went.  Most likely my wife sold them at a garage sale when I wasn’t paying attention. Read more

I have been thinking about regeneration.  While it is common knowledge, it still amazes me, that salamanders can regenerate body parts, including their tails, upper and lower jaws, eyes and hearts.  Yet mammals including humans can’t. Salamanders are the highest order of animals capable of regeneration. Do mammals know something that salamanders don’t? Cosmetic surgery, implants, and promising regenerative medicine research aside we humans are stuck with the body parts we are dealt for now.

I wonder if our inability to regenerate at the biological scale also impedes our ability to regenerate at a social system scale.  It seems obvious that our important social systems including education, health care, and energy need serious regeneration.  These systems have evolved over a long period of time, were built to support an industrial era that is long gone, and have built up incredible mechanisms to resist and prevent needed change.  It is not technology that is getting in the way of social system change.  It is humans and the organizations we live in that are both stubbornly resistant to change. Why are humans so incapable of regeneration at both biological and social scales? Read more

Nooks and crannies are important to both English muffins and innovation.

I haven’t been able to get a picture of a lightly toasted Thomas’ English muffin with butter and strawberry preserves oozing into those marvelous nooks and crannies out of my head.  Maybe it’s because I’m resisting the temptation while on one of my frequent short-lived diet and exercise delusions.  More likely it’s because of a story that caught my eye last week about an executive who left the company (Bimbo Bakeries, I’m not kidding) that makes Thomas’ English Muffins to join the arch enemy, Hostess Brands.  It seems that Bimbo is suing to prevent the executive from joining Hostess because they suspect he has absconded with and will divulge the secret of how to make English muffins with perfect nooks and crannies.

You heard right.  The row is about protecting the trade secret for creating nooks and crannies in an English muffin.  Bimbo claims there are only seven people who possess the trade secret and of course the executive leaving to make Twinkies is one of them.  I find it hard to believe that only seven people have the know-how necessary to create great nooks and crannies. It sounds more like a marketing ploy. But what do I know.  I thought it was just using a fork to split the muffin!  Think about it.  Samuel Bath Thomas left England headed for America in 1874 with a recipe for his muffin baked on hot griddles.  Surely in over 135 years more than seven people have accumulated the know-how for nooks and crannies. And how are we to know if Samuel Thomas didn’t borrow the formula before heading for fame and fortune in America. Not to accuse Samuel Thomas of pilfering the recipe and starting an English muffin revolution but it does sound eerily similar to Samuel Slater escaping England with the trade secrets for the textile mill, which of course started the U.S. Industrial Revolution! Read more

Innovators leap across learning curves exploring new ways to deliver value the way Tarzan swung from vine to vine across the jungle.  Innovators thrive on the steepest part of the learning curve where the changing rate of learning is the greatest.  Watch how innovators manage their careers and lives. They always put themselves on a steep learning curve.  I know I always have.  Staying on a steep learning curve is the most important decision criterion for any career decision an innovator makes. Along the way innovators make many career moves none of which are primarily about titles, offices, number of direct reports, or money.  Innovators believe those things are more likely to happen if they keep themselves on steep learning curves. Every choice to take a new tack or direction is about the next learning curve. Innovators are self aware enough to know they do their best work while learning at a rapid rate and are bored to tears when they aren’t.  Steep learning curves matter most.

I have known many people who sacrificed learning curves for money and other extrinsic rewards and in the long run most ended up unhappy. In my experience innovators who follow their passions and are in it for the learning always end up happier and making more money anyway. Read more

I spent an amazing weekend in NYC immersed with 50 warm, passionate, talented, and crazy designers from around the world.  It was a think and do tank brought to a constant boil by the high heat of a Bunsen Burner applied literally by the 100 plus degree heat outside.  This was the fifth annual convening of Overlap, a self-organizing group of designers sprinkled with a few innovation junkies like me who like to hang around designers in the hope that some of their coolness will rub off.  Overlap is an intense peer-to-peer connection experience limited to 50 invitees per year. I had been asked to attend previous Overlap events but this was the first I was able to swing it.  I am very glad I did.  It stretched my thinking, strengthened some existing connections, and enabled many refreshing new ones.

Each year volunteers from the group agree to plan and host the next Overlap in a different city.  Kudos to this year’s organizers, Marcel Botha with Mutopo, a cool social production colaboratorie, and Debera Johnson from the Pratt Institute of Design. Urban retreats are a logistical nightmare, Marcel and Debera, pulled it off with grace and competence. Well done. Our working sessions were held at Pratt providing great space and a welcoming design vibe to enable the magic.  A wonderful mix of Overlap veterans and rookies took it from there.  The theme for Overlap 2010 was Scalable Actions.  How do we get our passionate ideas off of the white-board and in to the world where they can solve real problems and provide value to real people.  I think a lot about scale and have been riffing about innovation @ scale for many years.  The chance to immerse myself among so many brilliant design thinkers to ruminate about scale and how to advance our scalable ideas was most welcome. Read more

Being an innovator is both a blessing and a curse.  Innovators are constantly seeking to improve things by finding a better way.  A questing personality is a blessing providing innovators with a source of personal pride, accomplishment, and exhilaration.  At the same time an innovator’s job is never done.  There is always a better way.  A sense of perpetual incompleteness and never being satisfied torments most innovators I know.  I think this blessing and curse dichotomy is the secret sauce that makes innovators tick.  It motivates innovators to take personal risks, collaborate with unusual suspects to find a missing piece, and jump through incredible hoops seeking a better way.   Innovators wouldn’t have it any other way.

There is always a better way.  It doesn’t matter how innocuous or small a thing from everyday life it is.  You can always tell an innovator because they fixate on addressing small things with the same child-like enthusiasm they readily deploy to large complex societal problems. It’s the little things that often get innovators the most riled up.  I learned this lesson the hard way and share one of many personal examples.  After a long career as a road warrior strategy consultant I found myself at home trying to figure out what I was going to do next in my career. One morning I came downstairs and opened the cupboard that housed breakfast cereal for our three children and found it filled with twelve half-opened cereal boxes. You know the one I am talking about.  Tell me you can’t relate to this important dilemma. I fell into the trap and loudly proclaimed, isn’t there a better way to organize this cereal.  The response was immediate and resounding, thanks for the input, now go find something else to do, preferably out of the house!  I know my wife is groaning reading this thinking, no, not the cereal box story again.  Can’t you come up with a new story for heaven’s sake?  P.S. regarding the cereal box story, the children and the cereal boxes have left home and I miss them both terribly.   Innovators can’t help themselves, no matter how small the challenge, there is always a better way and they are driven to find it. Read more

A friend asked me this week, what is the single most important thing holding our economy back?  Without hesitation I said our psychology is bad and negativism is getting in the way.  We have allowed cynicism to slow progress, growth, and innovation.  I am as cynical as anyone.  Here in New England we are born with a well-developed cynical streak.  In my home state of Rhode Island we have taken the art of cynicism to entire new heights.  I am convinced we won’t climb out of this economic mess until we become more confident in our selves, our communities, and our opportunities.  Psychology matters.  A strong innovation economy creating higher wage jobs result from the decisions made every day by organization leaders and entrepreneurs.  It is the sum total of these decisions on the margin to hire one additional employee or to invest one additional dollar which determine the trajectory of our economy.  While many factors influence these choices in the end it comes down to psychology or confidence.  We must find a way to move beyond our cynicism.

The imperative is to unleash the animal spirits.  John Maynard Keynes had it right in his book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, when he described animal spirits as the emotion which influences human behavior measured in terms of consumer confidence.  Keynes got the math right. Positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations. Our decisions to do something positive can only be taken as the result of animal spirits, a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.  Amen. Read more

I tried.  I really did try to take a break from all the design and innovation buzz while on vacation last week in Spain.  It didn’t work. Throughout an incredible ten-day sojourn across northern Spain design and innovation reminders were everywhere.  It wasn’t premeditated.  I am sure the lens through which I view the world has a lot to do with it but I also credit Spain, which has a clear case of the design and innovation bug.  Then again maybe my perspective was colored by all of the great Rioja wine.  Here are the design highlights from this innovation junkie’s summer vacation.

We started our Iberian adventure in the great city of Barcelona.  On our first day we set out to see Casa Battlo and La Sagrada Familia designed by Spanish architect Antoni Gaudi. Both were on our must do list and unanimous recommendations from many Twitter friends who had been to Barcelona. Goodbye jet lag.  Wow.  I wasn’t familiar with Gaudi before our trip but will never forget his work after seeing it.  Gaudi was ahead of his time.  He was more modern than the Modernist Art Nouveau period in the late 19th early 20th century he lived and designed in. Throughout Gaudi’s life, he studied nature’s angles and curves and incorporated them into his designs.  His works are iconic and seem to flow directly from nature. Gaudi said, “The great book, always open and which we should make an effort to read, is that of nature”.  Amen. Read more

I have to admit when I was growing up and when we raised our children I thought weird was out.  Weird was isolated, ostracized, dismissed, and definitely not cool. Turns out I was wrong. Weird is in.  Weird is unique, refreshing, remarkable, and definitely cool.  It just took me a while to figure it out.  The evidence is all around us.  Two personal reminders of how weird can be an advantage are a recent trip to Austin, Texas and reading Delivering Happiness by Zappos CEO, Tony Hsieh.

I was asked to give a talk on business model innovation to a group of association leaders in Austin, Texas.  It was my first trip to Austin but the city’s reputation for embracing weird preceded my visit.  I love the city mantra Keep Austin Weird.  How many cities would have the guts to rally around such a weird positioning?  I think it is brilliant.  It is differentiated and sends a clear message to both residents and visitors that Austin is an edgy and interesting place where creativity is central and you just might learn something new.  It makes me want to live and invest there. The night I arrived the positioning was realized immediately as I joined an eclectic crowd forming on the Congress Street Bridge to watch North America’s largest urban bat colony emerge from under the bridge. You don’t experience that every day.  It was delightfully weird and the gathered crowd was a great manifestation of Austin’s community aspiration for a collaborative fission of coordinated individualism. Read more