Forward looking organisations take the need for innovation seriously, seeking original ideas that help avoid disruptive threats and pursue original opportunities. Unfortunately, these much needed initiatives often fail to deliver on their promise of impactful change.
There are a number of common stumbling blocks. Good ideas may fail to earn the required investment, while even those that are funded find that they are unable to muster on-the-ground support necessary to drive adoption. Unexpected barriers, tangled dependencies, and ongoing change in the surrounding environment can also derail the innovator’s plans. Perhaps the most disappointing projects, are those that succeed only by staking out a small vision, taking incremental steps that make little impact on future success.
Surprisingly, these varied failures are seldom driven by a team’s incompetence or lack of creative imagination. Instead, they are more often tied to a specific, but crucial, step that is missed in the creative process. In a team’s rush to embrace a solution, they fail to first immerse themselves in the full messiness of the problem that underlies an important challenges.
Rushing to Design
Innovation typically begins with lots of energy. Well trained innovators listen attentively to those who are immersed in the area where change is needed. They use these insights to identify a good idea and then quickly move forward with design decisions that are informed by user engagement (option #1 on the diagram). They fail fast and learn quickly.
This approach drives directly to a usable solution, yet a strong case must be made for inserting an additional step early in the process. Even a fast moving innovator can benefit from taking time to understand the root cause of the problem that is behind their User’s need (option #2 on the diagram). This insight helps inform good design decisions. Still, there are limits to this targeted look back. Focusing only on the specific problem behind a user’s need often leaves the original vision unchallenged. The innovator may do a slightly better job in design, but still rushes ahead with the same fundamental solution.
Innovation teams may justifiably feel that they are doing a good job when they use these first two strategies. Yet, these seemingly well tested practices still fall short.
The unrecognised challenge is that neither genuinely important problems nor truly impactful solutions are as simple as they appear in this rush to design. In real world systems, diverse individuals and organisations are tangled together, so that even simple activities are the result of dynamic collaborations involving varied skills, resources, and motivations.
Seeing Beyond the Keyhole
This fact requires a non-trivial addition to conventional fast moving innovation methodologies. Before rushing forward to solution design, there is a need to pause and intentionally look back at the messy systems that are at the heart of the problem. (#3 on the diagram)
Understanding these systems demands a fundamentally different way of thinking. While a User’s specific challenge may be quite real, it is just a fraction of a much bigger picture. When an innovator focuses only on a specific need, it is as if they stare at the world through a keyhole. What they see is true, but it is hardly a complete view of what is inside the room.
This small actionable view comes at a cost. The unobserved complexity and challenges that lie outside the User’s and the innovator’s immediate view become stumbling blocks. Unrecognised complexity undermines business cases, casts doubt among potential stakeholders and leaves innovators surprised and unprepared for barriers and setbacks.
Innovators fail when they assume the world is simpler than it is. Of course this isn’t always the case. If an idea is small enough, or already thoroughly understood, it is possible to confidently make a small tweak or addition based on a narrow view of a problem and solution.
Yet, when innovators ambitiously seek to drive more substantive and sustainable change, it is no longer possible to assume that important problems can be addressed with simple ideas. To be truly impactful, the solution must embrace the true complexity of the problem and be suited to the scale of the challenge.
The embrace of the real world’s messiness begins by letting go of the original idea. Instead of supporting a preordained path to addressing a challenge, the user’s need can be treated as a symptom of the challenges found in complex real world systems. This broad-based, systems perspective looks at the diverse actors involved and seeks to understand how the world works. In real world systems, if something good or bad happens it is because of the way these tangled webs of actors, interactions and incentives connect. Understanding the rich complexity of these systems opens the door to a far more sophisticated view of the challenges and possible solutions.
The Power of Embracing Hard Problems
Investing time and effort in building a big picture view of a problem requires significant investment. This can be difficult to embrace. Just at the moment when everyone is excited to drive forward with realising the solution, the journey seems to take an about-face. Sponsors and participants in the creative effort may worry that the project is becoming mired in “analysis paralysis”. Fortunately, this thinking does not have to be bogged down in a never ending swamp of details. Rather, the effort should look down from above, doing just enough big picture work to see the important patterns of the system and its actors. This big picture systems view is broad but not necessarily deep.
With a top down view of the systems behind the problem, it possible to leverage four powerful creative capabilities:
Claim Bigger Problems – A bigger picture of the challenge naturally encourages broader thinking about the nature of the challenge and the scope of the solution. A particular User may have identified a specific issue, but it is far more likely that making a substantial change that impacts the future will require addressing a more substantial version of the problem.
Stretching the problem can help the innovator to strengthen their case for change. Smart organisational leaders naturally guide their investments to big urgent problems. Stepping back and understanding the full scope of the challenge allows the innovator to claim a bigger more compelling problem.
Design More Sophisticated Solutions – It’s easy for an Innovator to look naive when they propose a simple solution to genuinely hard problems. Seasoned experts in the field quickly identify shortcomings, challenge the idea, and withdraw their support, often taking others with them.
While an individual User may see a particular aspect of a challenge, working with system’s view makes it possible to see the many interconnected elements that are in play. Understanding the complexity of the problem makes it possible to recognise dependencies, trade-offs, and barriers that are only apparent when the entire system is considered. The innovator can then propose a sophisticated solution that rises to those challenges.
Tap Complexity’s Bigger Toolkit – There are many moving parts and dynamic interactions in a real-world system. Understanding this complexity can be a challenge, but it also offers a creative gold mine of resources and capabilities that can be used to build solutions.
Seeing a broad-systems view offers the use of a big toolkit that includes varied actors, capabilities, technologies, and existing resources. These resources can be reassembled in new and creative ways, building powerful solutions without starting from scratch. Shaping solutions with this holistic view also allows innovators to take advantage of synergies and emergent behaviours which are only visible at a systems level.
Enable Creative Agility – The final advantage of beginning with a systems view of the problem is tied to the actual development of the idea. As innovations become bigger and more ambitious, the more they face unknowns and uncertainty. It’s simply not possible to plan a large creative change in advance.
Powerful solutions are not just about coding a piece of technology and releasing it. High impact innovations require a wide variety of people, institutions, and technologies to evolve together, progressively transforming the current real-world systems.
At any point on this journey an unexpected barrier may rise up to derail the effort. The best way for innovators to respond is to pivot and adjust as they go. Rooting an innovation in a broad understanding of the problem, rather than a specific solution, gives the innovator the flexibility to nimbly adjust their vision. When necessary, they can take a significantly different approach the solution, because they can see alternative ways to solve the underlying problem.
A Worthwhile Creative Discipline
Because a systems understanding of the problem is so useful throughout the innovation lifecycle, it is important to begin thinking about it early in the creative effort. This is not a bit of busy work that delays the real job of the innovator. While rushing forward into detailed design and implementation may feel tangible and productive, it is in fact an indulgence that borders on creative negligence.
Taking the time to think deeply about the messiness and deeper challenges, when everyone is anxious to drive quickly forward, can be a hard sell. Nonetheless the creative payoff is substantial. Building an early understanding of the system behind the problem makes it far more likely that the idea will eventually be big enough to matter and will survive the winding journey to adoption.
About Dan and Outsight International
Dan McClure has spent over three decades working on the challenge of disruptive systems innovation. He has advised global commercial firms, public sector agencies, and international non-profits in support of their ambitious efforts to imagine and execute agile systems level innovation.
Outsight International is an organisation specialised in providing services to the humanitarian and development sector in an efficient and agile way. Outsight International builds on the range of expertise offered by a network of Associates in order to deliver quality results adapted to the specific tasks at hand. If you’d like to discuss working with Dan and the Outsight team, please get in touch or follow us on LinkedIn for regular updates.