I’ve taught the tutorial How to innovate on time a few times now, and the big takeaway for most is the need to carve out time for failure. That’s right, failure.
Plenty of notable innovation quotes talk about the need to fail, for example:
If you want to succeed, double your failure rate. - Thomas J. Watson
Failure is the gateway to innovation - Ashley Ball
Whoever makes the most mistakes wins - Ralph Keyes
But few know how to convert that into action. How do you guide failure towards innovation?
The answer is 3 things:
- Make interesting failures. An interesting failure is when you learn something through failure you could not have learned any other way. Scientific experiments are attempts to fail in interesting ways: the thing doesn’t work, but why it doesn’t work reveals a new set of interesting questions. This is different from a mistake: a useless, avoidable failure than isn’t interesting and doesn’t teach you anything you didn’t already know.
- Budget time for experimentation. If you want new ideas, you have to give people time to find them. Google’s 20% time, an upgrade of 3M’s 10% rule, builds in experimentation at the individual level. But nothing prevents a manager from doing the same thing at the project level. Instead of the generic Design, Implement, Test style scheduling, shown here:
Divide time into quarters instead and reserve part of the schedule for experimentation, prototyping and interesting mistake making.
Even if you don’t budget 25% of the project time, you can still offer a week, a day, a half-day, for individuals to experiment and try things out without requiring anyone’s approval. Even small windows of time are better than none (Also see hack day, for putting experimentation at the corporate level). Once the design phase starts the risk taking declines, but all decisions now benefit from the interesting failures during experimentation.
- Pick specific areas for innovation. If you have a schedule commitment, you can’t risk big changes across a project. Instead leaders have to decide on specific areas where more risks (e.g. more innovation) is warranted, and ensure that the rest of the project will be managed conservatively. Just like how a smart general doesn’t fight wars on several fronts, a wise leader doesn’t innovate on several different areas at the same time, especially when under schedule pressure.
Slides from How to Innovate on Time tutorial (4MB PPT).
译文:
如何准时创新
我已经教过《准时创新指南》几次了，对多数人来说最大的收获是要挤出失败的时间。没错，是失败。
有许多关于创新的名言是跟失败有关，比如：
如果你想成功，就把失败率加倍吧。——Thomas J. Watson（托马斯·约翰·沃森 IBM创始人，译者注）
失败是通往创新的大门。——Ashley Ball（著名音乐剧演员，译者注）
但是很少有人把它转化为行动。怎么带领失败走向创新呢？
答案有三点：
犯有意义的错。一个有意义的错是指你能从该错误中学到东西，而这些东西是从别的地方学不到的。科学实验总会把错误变得有意义：这个东西不起作用，而为什么不起用又揭露出一些新的有意义的问题。这和失误不同：一个是无用的，可避免的错误，相比之下是没有意义的，不能教会你任何事情的。
为实验预算时间。如果你想要有新的想法，你要让人们有时间去寻找。
Google 20%的时间，3M公司10%的规章都用来把实验留在个人水平上。但是这也阻止不了一个经理以项目层次为名做同样的实验。
代替了一般以设计，执行，检验为流程的安排，如图
他们除了保留原有的时间段外，还加分了一段以犯有意义的错误为原型的实验时间段。
就算你没有做出25%项目时间的预算，你仍可以提供一周，一天，半天的时间让个人能不需认同的尝试一些事物。即使是很少的时间也比没有强（也可见hack day，把实验扩充到社会层次中）。一旦设计状态开始有下滑危险时，所有从有意义的错误中得到的结果现在都对实验有益了。
选择明确的创新领域。如果你有时间表的约束，你就不能在项目中冒太大的风险。然而领导必须要确定好明确的领域，在这一领域里，更多风险（比如更多的创新）是被准许的，而且也能确保项目的其它部分正常运作。就好比一个好的将军不同时在几个前线作战，一个明智的领导不需要同时在几个不同领域创新，尤其是在有计划进度的压力下。
How to Innovate on Time tutorial的幻灯片（4MB PPT）