3 strategies to human-proof your innovation
There is no denying it – innovation doesn’t happen without people. At the last RIA’s Innovation Conference, this message was shared, heard and agreed on many times. For truly creative innovation worthy of a “wow”, it does take the illogical, the connection of the seemingly disconnected – the combination of arts, technology, empathy, and emotion – such feat calls for the Human!
But humans can be irrational, biased, with brains wired in a way that really can deter the path to innovation. The human factors of innovation is something that I got to share in my keynote at the conference, and here I wanted to explore some of the strategies to ‘human-proof’ your innovation projects.
1. Our inherently lazy brains
Our brains have evolved for survival and to conserve energy whenever possible this means that our brains can sometimes be lazy when it comes to critical thinking and decision making.
With the daily demands of staying alive, concerns for wellbeing and caretaking duties for our loved ones, challenges and stressors including the what seems to be innate inability to come off mute in a timely manner … our brains certainly feel spent. When your cognitive and mental energy reserves run low your brain “helps out” by conserving energy when it can, even if it means jumping to conclusions and using flawed reasoning.
For innovators, this is bad news – our tendency to conserve energy by rushing to solutions before we have a chance to fully understand the problem means that our products of innovation may not actually be as valuable as we think. Our brain doesn’t worry about questions it should be asking to get more clarity about the problem space and worries more about getting to the answer. Yet, questions direct and dictate our mind’s search for information - just like a thoughtfully worded search query in your search engine of choice will yield more useful results.
Human-proof strategy:
Get more comfortable exploring the problem space. It may seem unnatural, and may feel unnecessary, but make sure in your process of innovation, to understand the problems that are truly worth solving.
Ask better questions. As Elie Wiesel wrote “In the word question, there is a beautiful word - quest.” So, let good questions guide your quest for innovation!
2. Our inability to let go of things
Our minds do not like discomfort of uncertainty, the unknown – change doesn’t come easily to us and of course we have evolved to resist anything that may incur loss or carries a risk.
My home is full of back issues of Wired and New Scientist magazines that I can’t seem to bring myself to throw away.
My bookshelves are full of books that I’ve not gotten around to read -some of them have been waiting for over a decade for me to get to them.
In my closet, I have several items of clothing that may no longer fit, and I’ve not worn in years but again I struggle to part with them.
These are all examples of a phenomena psychologist’s call “sunk-cost bias.” It’s our tendency to continue investing in a losing proposition because of what it’s already cost us.
I refer to this as the waiting for the bus phenomena – this is when you have been waiting for the 328 for over 15 mins and although at this stage you’ve lost faith in the bus arriving at all, and in fact you would have already been half way to your destination had you walked, yet you persist, because what if it’s going to show up just as you start walking away from the bus stop.
Human-proof strategy:
The course of innovation is not immune to sunk cost bias – whenever people are concerned, despite perhaps the project, the experiment you are running no longer serving or even showing promise of a good outcome, we stick with it … to the end.
This is why as an innovator who is encouraged to fail fast, experiment, cycle through many ideas – it’s hard for me as the more energy, resources I put into my innovation project the more challenging it is to let go. Recognising that failing fast is unnatural for humans is a first step.
3. Our tendency to add for value
Now this sunk-cost bias phenomena shows itself up in other interesting ways as has just been reported in the Nature magazine.
I’ve learned to ride my bike as many of you and many generations before, thanks to the training wheels attached to my bike. But increasingly parents choose to train their children with balance bikes, pedal-less two-wheelers that enable children to develop the coordination needed for cycling—a skill that is not as easily acquired with an extra set of wheels.
Given the benefits of balance bikes, why did it take so long for them to replace training wheels approach?
Well, it turns out, thanks to our friend “sunk-cost bias”, when faced with a problem, people tend to select solutions that involve adding new elements rather than taking existing components away. Additive solutions have sort of a privileged status—they tend to come to mind quicker and easier. Even though subtractive solutions are not necessarily harder to consider - they simply take more effort to find in our search engine of a brain.
While the tendency for businesses and organizations to lean towards complexity rather than simplification was previously known, the novelty of this latest research shows that that could be down to the human trait of adding to solve a problem, even when subtracting might be better.
As an innovator, it’s important for me to know that I lean towards addition rather than subtraction even though taking something away might just be the right course for innovation.
Human-proof strategy:
Don’t let “sunk cost bias” deter you from dropping ideas that do not work. Innovation doesn’t have to be something net new – it may be about taking things away.
In conclusion …
Putting people, and what it means to be Human, front and centre of the innovation process, means that you can watch out for the gotchas whilst supercharging the process with those fresh, diverse perspectives and creativity which are the key to true insight.
References and inspiration
On Lazy Brain
The concept of a lazy brains is something that’s been brought up in many studies but more recently, I’ve come across this term in HAPPY SEXY MILLIONAIRE by Steve Bartlett who refers to our brain as a “lazy CEO”.
On asking better questions
On questions, or the need to ask better questions, there are plenty of super terrific books. An article that inspired me is by the brilliant Ellen Langer on the subject Ask a Better Question to Get a Better Answer | Psychology Today which offers a couple of really simple examples that demonstrate how easily the way we ask the question can constrain our thinking
On sunk-cost bias
Check out this great article by Dr Margie Warrell in Forbes - Sunk-Cost Bias: Is It Time To Call It Quits?