My Innovation Journey

Are you innovative? Does this fit your persona?

I manage a great team at Hastings Mutual Insurance and I am looking for someone that has a true passion for web development. Does this fit your persona? If so, contact me ASAP at rpeel@hastingsmutual.com

I need someone who likes to attend .NET user group meetings and enjoys reading about and staying up to date on the latest development methods. I need someone who can look at a web page that another company has developed and be able to figure how it was developed and have a drive to want to make something better than that. I also need someone that will listen to users and code to specifications but also isn’t afraid to suggest something that is new. I need someone who is creative and innovative and likes to be first in the marketplace. I need someone who is versatile and can give me examples of how they developed the code for both an application (back end) AND a user interface (front end) for the same project. I need someone who knows what a user story is and why they are important to web development. I need someone who has attended a conference like Code Mash because they wanted to and not because they were told to go. I need someone who is likes to have fun at work and browses book stores just to see what new technology they can read about. I need someone who is enthusiastic about listening to users but can also “bring” technology to them through quick yet well thought out verbal communication. I need someone who is very eager and wants to learn how to code in the latest technologies such as Silverlight and HTML5. I need someone who wants to work in an environment where challenges abound and your opinions are heard.

 

8 steps to improving your facilitation of online Innovation Games®

Recently, I facilitated an online Innovation Game®. The technology just worked and I was really happy with how it turned out. I did a little retrospective and recalled 8 things that I did to make the experience better. Here they are.

1. Write down the question you are trying to answer. You've absolutely, without a doubt, unquestionably got to understand and be clear about the question you're trying to answer. Make this the first thing you do in planning for your game. Reserve one entire page in your planning documents and write it down. I use my favorite 36pt font and make it the first page of my prep documentation. I don't allow myself to get into the fun part before completing this step. Tip:  The Innovation Games(R) site has a set of tools and templates to help you plan.  Here's the link.

2. Start out with a simple, universally understood image or graphic. The next step in the planning process is to start developing your visual collaboration image. My general rule of thumb is the simpler the image is, the better. My last game was about soccer so I started out with a soccer field. Even if you've never played soccer, odds are that you know what a soccer field looks like. You can identify where the goals are and where the out-of-bounds lines are. Paying notice to these simple but important details can become vital metaphors that will guide your participants to provide more insight and make your game results even better. In the next step you will use this image as the base for your visual collaboration "canvas". Tip: If you're good at sketching, you can draw your own graphic or you can find royalty free images on the web for very cheap.

3. Paste your image into PowerPoint and resize it – right away. Right now, the Innovation Games® site works best with images that are exactly a ratio of 94.13% width to height. Don't worry; you don't have to bust out the calculator. Fortunately, there's an easy way to achieve the optimal ratio for your image right in PowerPoint. The Innovation Games® site looks really good with images that are 546 pixels wide by 580 pixels high. After you paste the graphic in, go up to the Picture Tools – Format tab. You'll see a couple fields to enter the image dimensions (in inches). To get the right ratio, I just enter in 5.46" x 5.80" and voila, you have a canvas to work with! Tip: If you're image looks too weird for your liking because of the aspect ratio, you can search out other ones but in my case I didn't worry about this. The point was, it looked like a soccer field and that's what I wanted.  Additional Tip:  Invest $49 in the Snag-It program from Techsmith.  You can use it to easily capture your PowerPoint graphic and save it in png format for uploading to the Innovation Games site.

4. Enhance your canvas using simple shapes. You want to guide your participants to give you the insight you're looking for without skewing their contributions. To do this, I try to use very simple arrows. Here's the graphic I ended up with. I added a simple arrow on the left hand side that represents a "rise in popularity level". I also added some logos (Tip: check on copyright usage first) and added a callout to give the participants a tip on the kinds of things that would be in that zone. I'm not sure if this really helped but it's something I did.

5. Treat your graphic regions like metaphors. I used the metaphor of "Attacking" equal to "Rising in Popularity". I named my layer that way to avoid confusion during game play. Here's a snippet of the game play interface. Players saw this during the game. I wasn't able to take a screen capture of the game setup that shows the outline of the regions but just by reading the names of the regions and layers, you can probably guess where the regions are located on the soccer field. I named them in such a way that gave the players vital in-game understanding. I think this helped avoid confusion about what the regions mean to the players.

6. Be creative but pick powerful symbols for your item images.  I used soccer balls as well as yellow and red penalty cards for my item images.  The concepts of scoring goals (with soccer balls) and being penalized (with yellow or red cards) has a strong base for understanding and are also quite inspiring for the game players.  I can tell you that in the Innovation Games(R) software, these images are best when sized 27 pixels by 27 pixels square.

7. Develop a script. I've facilitated a few online games now and I have a pretty good template that I use. The soccer game that I facilitated really seemed to go well. Click here to get the script I used.

8. Go agile on your facilitation and hold a retrospective. Here's a copy of the result of the game I facilitated. One of the things that I thought would happen but didn't is that players would put penalty card items in the attacking zone. There was one but I think the strength of the penalty metaphor was too much of a stretch to understand that you cannot make progress by having a penalty when you're attacking. The game turned out fine but I think the next time I'll probably make my item graphics even simpler.

Hope you enjoyed this and found it useful!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Facilitating Innovation is a Lot Like Playing Shortstop

Spring has sprung here in Michigan (finally!) and my attention is turning to baseball.  I grew up in Michigan so I am a huge fan of the Detroit Tigers.  I can't tell you how many hours I spent throwing a tennis ball (they bounced much more wildly than a regular baseball and they didn't dent the garage wall - which my dad preferred) against the outside wall of our garage, practicing my fielding skills while listening to Ernie Harwell call the Tiger games.  I kept at it and before I knew it, I was good enough to play shortstop for my high school team and eventually at the college level.  There were a lot of people better than me but I was solid and could hold my own.  I'm not playing baseball any more but that tennis ball throwing/fielding has taught me a important lesson in facilitating innovation at my company.

Facilitating innovation takes practice.

The shortstop is arguably the most important player on the field.  He/she is the one that can call off anyone else on the infield for fly balls.  They have to be athletic, have a strong arm, and possess the ability to see the entire field and be in the right position at the right time (if you watch a game and pay close enough attention, you'll see just how much the shortstop backs up throws - on EVERY throw from the catcher back to the pitcher with men on base).  Never tiring, doing the job that needs to be done.

The athletic ability that goes into making the backhand snag in the hole to then turn and throw the speedy runner out at first base takes strength training and practice.  Recently, I got the opportunity to go to NYC to take Luke Hohmann's Innovation Games® class.  I started as a corporate innovator but left a certified Innovation Games® facilitator (which I think of as a license to learn). 

Anyway, the class was kind of like attending a baseball clinic.  Luke Hohmann (creator of Innovation Games®) was the coach.  He explained and demonstrated how to play the games and he ran the drills.  Metaphorically speaking, he'd pick up the bat and hit ground balls to the infielders (class) and we'd work on our fielding skills.  He'd offer encouragement and advice along the way, making us all better, preparing us to succeed. When we made mistakes, he'd encourage us and help us understand what we needed to improve upon.  He was agile in that he tailored the clinic to the needs to of the participants (all shortstops in the making).

Now that I've taken the "clinic" I am feeling more prepared and I think I have some good Innovation Games® athleticism built up but the rest is really up to me.  It means spending time throwing the tennis ball against the garage wall or, in this case, facilitating as many Innovation Games® as I can so that I can someday have the opportunity to call myself the shortstop of innovation at my company.

 
Derek Jeter, shortstop for the New York Yankees.  Arguably, the best shortstop of all time.  (He's also from Kalamazoo, Michigan)

Grand Rapids buys "Lack of Red Tape" and other features in fight for Google Fiber

On 3/23, the entire Google Fiber for Grand Rapids Facebook fan base was invited to play in an online Innovation Game® called "Buy a Feature".  At least two games were played.  Here are some of the thoughts people had after the game was over.

• "...an interesting way to negotiate."
• "...it is quite an enjoyable game."
• "...we all collaborated in an innovative fashion and it was fun!"
• "...this was kinda fun."

I facilitated both games and while the results have not yet been fully analyzed, here are the "features/traits" that Grand Rapidians purchased.

• We are a city committed to eliminating red tape and bureaucracy.
• We are a city ready for a transformation to a new economy.  We need this speed to facilitate the transition.
• The medical research/care facilities of Grand Rapids are world-class.
• The city is loaded with industries that will find ways to use the ridiculously fast Internet to do amazing things.

In this case, what the players "purchased" in the Buy a Feature game outlined for Google what the community thought were the top characteristics of Grand Rapids that Google should consider. Hopefully these characteristics match Google's goals.

The online game is going to continue through Thursday, March 25th.  To play, you only have to click on the game link and then wait for 4 other people to show up in the lobby.  If you have friends, send them a link to the game so you can see what all the buzz is about.

Example Game Results:

Innovation + Collaboration (30k Facebook Fans) = Differentiation

I want to give a shout out to an organization that is doing one heck of a job putting the problem-solving power of innovation to some pretty good use.

In my own grassroots effort, I recently partnered with GamesforDemocracy.org (G4D for short) to help Grand Rapids differentiate themselves from the other cities that are vying for the 1 gigabit Google prize. G4D is a not-for-profit organization that "... promotes democratic discourse through the use of serious games..."  They are powered by the technology of The Innovation Games ® Company. And G4D has put the technology to some good use, like prioritizing features for National Health Care Reform by running a "Buy a Feature" game that "unlike voting or polling ... is collaborative and the results are a measure of our collective intelligence and wisdom."  A copy of the results of the game can be found here.   

Much the same way that G4D did with National Health Care, I am trying to differentiate Grand Rapids from all the other cities vying for the Google prize.  With G4D's help, I crafted a series of questions that were designed to engage the 30,000+ fans of the Google for Grand Rapids Facebook page in an attempt to get them to "Remember the Future".  The questions were written as if Grand Rapids had already been selected by Google and the citizens and businesses were celebrating the amazing things that had been done with the new technology ... an innovative way to extract memories from the future and to show Google how forward-thinking we are.

Here's what I've tried to do so far.

1. The Facebook fans were invited to my blog to "Remember the Future" to tell us how the network will have been used.
2. During the week of 3/15, the fans have been submitting their ideas and I've been reviewing/compiling them.

Here's what's left to do.

1. Continue promoting the blog and get people to submit their ideas.
2. Analyze the results and group the responses into a top ten list of features that Grand Rapids will have implemented "in the future".
3. Invite all the fans to play the online version of the "Buy a Feature" game just like G4D did with the features identified in the National Health Care Reform.
4. Compile and analyze the results.
5. Share the results of the "Buy a Feature" game with the Google as well as all the Facebook fans to show them how we, as a community, were able to pull together and use our collective intelligence and wisdom to have some idea as to what the network would be used for.

The Google Fiber for Grand Rapids committee has done a superb job coordinating lots of activities and events, and in short order.  I can only imagine the behind-the-scenes roadblocks they've had to overcome to pull off the event in downtown GR on Friday afternoon. 

Introducing Innovation Games ® to the Facebook group and inviting them to participate is my personal contribution to reaching the goal of bringing Google Fiber to Grand Rapids.  I think I will have been successful differentiating Grand Rapids if the Facebook fans can get involved in the process and participate in the online game.  The results of the game will be shared with Google and I think it will have demonstrated to them how we as a community can do things on multiple fronts, all working toward the same goal.

Need inspiration for innovation? Then take a trip to the hardware store.

I've discovered a great way to learn more about innovation and I thought I'd share it.  It doesn't matter what line of work you're in, if you Google search for software related to your field, you'll undoubtedly find an ample supply of products to choose from.

I've been thinking a lot lately about ways to create the "surface" for innovation at my company.  I've been brainstorming in my own head about the various roadblocks and challenges to implementing an innovation program.  I thought up a few roadblocks and how I might handle them but I still had a gut feeling that there were some pretty big unknowns that would lie ahead.

So, I decided to go shopping at the hardware store.  Well, sort of.

I made some calls into a couple of the leading software solution providers in the area of idea process management.  I made my intentions pretty clear to them when I called.  I told them I was just doing research and wasn't ready to buy but I did want to know, "What problems has your software solved?"  The people I spoke to at these companies were very helpful.  I took good notes as they explained their products and what problems they were solving for companies.  After a few follow up calls and online demonstrations, I had a great picture of several problems I knew I'd encounter in my own journey to implement a bonafide program at my company.  I compiled my notes and started formulating solutions to the problems I thought I might encounter at my own organization.

I liken this experience to walking through a hardware store ... especially the paint supply aisle - because I despise painting.  I'll bet if you think about the last time you walked through a hardware store, you'll remember a time when you saw a product and said to yourself, "Man, I wish I had known about this product 3 months ago when I did that one project!  It would've made my life a lot easier!"

That's kind of what I wanted to do when I called these software solution providers.  I thought it worked pretty well.

How well do your users understand their own problems?

It didn't start out that way, but I had a great conversation w/ some co-workers the other day regarding a project we're working on in 2010.  When the group started talking about features for the project I think I found myself continuing to circle back to the question of whether or not we were contemplating building the right things for them.  I kept challenging the meeting attendees hone their metacognitive skills by thinking about the way our users may be perceiving the problems (or pain points) that they have using our applications and reports.

Eventually, I think I made my point but what I think it boils down to is that while our users are the best at experiencing the problems that we (either purposely or inadvertently) create, they aren't always the best at understanding their own problems.

So, how well do your users understand their own problems with the software you develop?  I'm in the camp that believes there are some savvy users out there that are actively aware of how they are completing a task and can also articulate the potential pain of doing that task.  I think those users are few and far between though.

Here are a couple things one could try to really understand their user's problem(s).

• Find the right Innovation Game ® that meets your needs and facilitate an event.
• Read Steve Krug's book Rocket Surgery Made Easy : The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems and then conduct usability tests.  Try it on your own site first.  Then, maybe try it on your competitor's sites.

My favorite definition of innovation is "...understanding a problem well enough to solve it in a new and novel way." (Credit goes to Luke Hohmann).  This definition encapsulated what I was trying to convey to the meeting attendees.  The challenge going forward and the next steps was figuring out, what can we do to get to the root of the problem so that we at least have a chance to innovate and differentiate?  Some of the ideas above can get you there.

Creating a surface for innovation to grow

First of all, keep in mind that I work for an insurance company so some of my thoughts will be directly related to the experiences that I've had working there.

For my first post, I've decided to rattle off a few of the ideas that I will probably write more about at one point or another.  I've given each one of these concepts various levels of thought.  Some of them I know quite a bit about while others are just concepts that I heard about but want to explore.  Some of the ideas are my own original thoughts and some have been gleaned from others.

Potential Components of an Innovation Growth Surface

Innovation Games ® Anonymous Opinion Markets Usability Testing Idea Process Management User Environment Immersion Carrier Collaboration User Experience Measurement Screen casts Problem Repository Contests for Top Ideas

Visual Process Library Idea Repository Awards Employee Education User Stories Innovation Lab Conversations Process Redesign Thinking out Loud