A street view of innovation
We'll be more effective innovators if we switch our view from systems and culture to people
Monday, January 23 2012 || Comment || BY Ed Bernacki
People say it feels like Europe. They love the outdoor cafés. Yet 20 years ago the inner city was empty.
In 1994, Danish architect and urban design consultant Jan Gehl was invited to Melbourne. He believes cities were once designed on a ‘human’ scale. He defines this in terms of what you see when you travel at 5 kms per hour, perhaps walking or riding a bike. There are places to sit, talk and shop.
He says this changed about 1960 when the focus changed to cars. Traffic planners were hired to design cities to, in his words, “make cars happy.” City planning went from a street level perspective to an airplane view, where neighbourhoods became linked by roads. How people experienced the city was less important than how cars moved around it.
I have lived in Ottawa and Auckland. In both cities tram lines were ripped up to welcome cars into the centre of town. Now each has traffic problems and faces investments of a billion dollars to replace tram lines.
I thought about this in the context of the innovation conversation happening in New Zealand. It seems to me the conversation is at airplane level. We talk about national innovation ecosystems, tax incentives for R&D and international rankings. While this is interesting, does it change anything? It also seems to ignore the fact that people innovate, not systems or cultures.
Gehl’s idea about the design of public space has a parallel inside organisations. Let’s call the water coolers, meeting rooms and desks where people come together to talk, solve problems and make decisions our corporate public space. We cannot collaborate without meeting. I can still remember the meeting in 1996 when I realised that the people around the table did not have the skills to brainstorm new ideas. This led me to study creativity and innovation so I could understand how people sitting around a table could create better ideas.
David Irving, a founder of the Icehouse, recently said, “To improve our economic performance we need to focus more on management capability inside the firm, rather than ‘outside the firm’ factors such as exchange rates, tax rates, infrastructure, regulation and the like.” I see a parallel with Gehl’s philosophy. If we designed our management systems ‘inside the firm’, with a street level perspective, what would be different?
We may stop thinking of innovation in simplistic ways and start to study how people innovate.
We may be more concerned with how people solve problems, make decisions and deal with change. We would then be more concerned with what could help them be effective. We would notice if people have the skills to solve problems and manage ideas.
My observation, with much research, suggests we don’t have enough skills. It is assumed that smart people know how to use their smarts. When I speak on innovation, people laugh at the slide about the most common mistakes in problem solving. If teams of people cannot solve basic problems well, they will not innovate.
From a street level view we would watch how effectively people collaborate. We may notice that people find it easy to collaborate with those who think like them. Yet do people think alike? Some like to question everything as a way of exploring an idea. Others see this questioning as cynical. There is 40 years of research on cognitive diversity which shows we have excellent tools to notice these differences in thinking styles yet we rarely do. I suggest most organisational strategies assume people think alike.
Most importantly, we would notice if there is a plan to shape the experience of the corporate public space. I’ve asked many CEOs interested in innovation if they have an innovation strategy and the answer has been no.
Gehl’s plans for Melbourne prompted change. What if 100 organisations created a plan to improve the effectiveness of their public space meetings? What if this led to people feeling engaged, ideas to serve customers better and greater sales? What if other businesses noticed and enhanced their own public space? Would this make a difference to innovation? I suspect so. Gehl’s concepts are important. You will be able to judge his ideas because he is working to design a new Christchurch full of engaging public spaces. He says it is a rare opportunity in a city that must reinvent itself.
Ed Bernacki is the founder of the Idea Factory. He is working on a PhD in innovation in the service sector
info@wowgreatidea.com
