I am reading an excellent book on how to do Productive Thinking in a business setting: Think Better by Tim Hurson. In essence he describes a sophisticated systematic way how to better do brainstorming sessions combined with critical thinking to come to creative answers. In the six step process he uses step 3 is the most important one: What’s the Question?  Quoting Peter Drucker:

The most serious mistakes are not being made as a result of wrong answers. The truly dangerous thing is asking the wrong question.

I think that this is an entirely correct statement and also in my experience the most common reason why initiatives such as in marketing, sales or product design, product development fail is that the wrong questions have been asked to formulate the challenge or problem and then all efforts are targeted at solving the wrong problem.

Tim Hurson writes that the ultimate question - a truly Catalytic Question - must be figured out first and unless you don’t do that it doesn’t matter how good the rest of your work is.

Idea management software solutions such as the one we represent - Kindling - are excellent tools to not only find ideas but also find the right questions to start with before all efforts are made to try to solve the wrong or not core issue.

This week a client of us attends the LTE World Summit event in Amsterdam. It is the major LTE conference and also has a vendor exhibition attached to it. The volcano ashes from Iceland came back though and the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam is closed. I just exchanged an e-mail with one of the speakers who can not come anymore and I suppose many others will also not make it.

What a mess for the exhibition organizers, the companies who brought their booths and also the speakers who prepared themselves and all booked flights and hotels and set up business meetings.

I think there is one clear solution now that also will not cost too much:

1. Provide a web presentation event

2. Offer a virtual exhibition event using a social community platform, where the vendors can showcase their products still

This would be totally independent of any airport and flight closures and also would be relatively inexpensive still. The other alternatives would be to cancel the event entirely and reimburse the people. Or reschedule with the risk that it will again not happen and of course I assume that the costs would be way too high as well to make this a viable option.

Update: the event could - fortunately - happen afterall when Schiphol airport reopened on Monday afternoon. Still, virtual events are an alternative, a backup and most importantly extend an event to an all year around meeting place increasing the number of people attending. Real example: VMWorld Virtual Pavilion

The EU is right now collecting lots of money for Greece to reestablish some confidence in the markets and with that avoid having to pay even more. There are also fears that the other PIGS countries Spain, Portugal and Ireland may call for help.

Now Ireland being a nation that has been through lots of economic hardship in its history but also enjoyed an EU-wide unmatched boom not too long ago, is currently hit hard as well. Being a proud nation that likes to take its fate into its own hands, its President Mary Mac Aleese is calling its citizen to submit ideas in eight categories on how the country can direct its policies. The event is called quite appropriately “Your country your call”.

I think what we see here is only the beginning of something that many other countries should and will do as well at some point. Calling for the combined knowledge of a whole country will certainly lead to new and better ideas. I consider it as a true democratic way and this even seems an improvement over what we have enjoyed in Switzerland for quite a long time already: letting people decide about their matters and not some professional politicians only with lots of self-interest, who are also quite limited in their judgements and overall understanding of most of the subjects that they have to decide about. Online Social Communities seem ideal for governments enabling them to run such calls effectively. Something Switzerland, which is otherwise probably the most advanced country in applying democracy, should also make use of. Not to mention practically all other so-called democratic countries. The eight categories plus “Other” where Ireland is asking its people for ideas are:

• COMMUNICATIONS & TECHNOLOGY
• DESIGN, ENGINEERING AND MANUFACTURING
• EDUCATION & THE ARTS
• ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT
• FOOD AND AGRICULTURE
• HEALTH, SPORT, & NUTRITION
• PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
• TOURISM AND HOSPITALITY
• OTHER

Only a week after CERN in Geneva could successfully create electron collisions that could lead to new understanding of how the cosmos started, another French Swiss (in the French speaking area of Switzerland) world first was achieved. The first solar-powered plane took off with a test pilot setting an important milestone for this ambitious project called SolarImpulse trying to fly around the world with a purely solar-powered plane.

I asked myself why it is that the Romands (as the French speaking Swiss are called) seem to be so much into world’s first recently.  Is it coincidence or has it to do with a certain attitude and entrepreneurial spirit that they have in their genes? I was also quite amazed to see how openly both events were celebrated which was so much different than the cool banker style that one otherwise gets to see on TV (and in movies like James Bond) when it comes to the Swiss nature.

From a more general view you could also say that the good guys are in the West of Switzerland (creating great positive public news) and the bad guys (if you want to use that word) are in the East where the bankers are at home. Uuups that comparison might not go well though with the folks in Zurich I suppose.

But let’s get back to the SolarImpulse project. Congratulations to a great achievement and a great PR event. The website contains also great social community ideas and crowd financing approaches such as the possibility to buy a solar cell and name it your own for just 200 CHF. With 12,000 solar cells integrated into the wings that also adds up to a nice 2.4 million CHF. Well done too guys and good luck for the next milestones!

Maria Azura’s new book The Social Factor writes about IBM’s very own experiences using social networking and describes the tremendous success that Wikis, Blogs, and other social tools have. The numbers are mind-boggling and were also for IBM beyond their highest expectations. This lead Maria to ask in her book:

Is there a correlation between the success of IBM and the social tools now used extensively by IBMers?

• within a year more than 150,000 IBMers were creating, accessing, or updating wikis, this represents about 40% of the total workforce
• after six months the active blogs topped out at approximately 5,000; the traffic continued to grow, however

When I read this in a Twitter post I thought, “Wow, finally they get it and try to do something good and different to fight back.” Well, big was the disappointment then when I checked out their blog and Design by Community announcement. Very disappointing, very. This community campaign once more lacks any thought and preparation. Simply bad. I can’t believe that a company the size of NOKIA constantly screws things up so badly. They need help urgently but I fear for them that they won’t admit it.

Being in high-tech business for nearly two decades I have seen many new ideas come and many more never become mainstream or disappear after only a short amount of time. Also the time it takes - while it seems this is getting shorter and shorter these days - can be relatively long before a new technology becomes used and adopted by the masses.

One reason in high-tech b2b markets why it takes so long to adopt new things is that there is an existing working infrastructure that is good enough and does mostly the job. New things need to be substantially better (10x in price and features) to make a quick impact. Problem here is of course that what is better cannot easily measured and quantified often so it is not even obvious even if companies sales and marketing will find all kinds of use cases showing ROI in a short amount of time.

One other reason are the human beings themselves. Used to do it one way or the other for a long time make them feel comfortable, they enjoy a certain amount of security and the feeling that they can deal with it well. New things are for most people - in particular conservative ones and the older generations - seen more as a threat than an opportunity. Also there is not so much desire to really try out something new, “why change anything?” they ask themselves, “we are doing very well”, so there is no reason really to change anything. We have just seen such thinking with the old boy group at the world soccer organization FIFA (its president Sepp Blattner is 73 and enjoys half the voting rights, whow, how is that possible?) where they ruled out any technical aids such as goal cameras or sensors in soccer balls. This despite the public, practically all coaches and players in favor of using new technologies to reduce the amount of mistakes when it comes to goals and also it is used in other sports (ice hockey, tennis) already. The arguments that the FIFA published are some that could be easily applied to the nay sayers in technology, here an extraction:

Fussball muss, erstens, weltweit nach den gleichen Regeln gespielt werden. Für Teenager in einem kleinen Ort etwa sollen die gleichen Regeln gelten wie für die Profis. Zweitens bringt es nichts, die Verantwortung für einen Entscheid vom Schiedsrichter der Technologie zu übertragen. Selbst Zeitlupen würden keine Klarheit bringen, und zehn Experten hätten zehn Meinungen, wie eine Situation zu beurteilen sei. Drittens kann die Anwendung von Technologie wie zum Beispiel zur Überwachung der Torlinie (mit Kamera oder Chip im Ball) sehr teuer sein. Viertens schliesslich ist Fussball ein dynamisches Spiel und kann zur Überprüfung eines Entscheides nicht einfach unterbrochen werden.

Quite funny some of these arguments. They basically have only one goal: don’t touch our nice world and confront us possibly with challenges that we don’t understand.

Despite this NO, I am convinced that in only a few years, when some of these people are retired (finally) technology will come where it makes sense and where it clearly helps to make better decisions. Grassroot movements and opinions cannot be stopped, only delayed. New ways in discussing opinions in blogs, communities, news portals will help to keep the pressure up. Below an online survey done in the Swiss newspaper Tagesanzeiger. 72% say about the FIFA decision “total nonsense”.

How innovation is handled is of course quite different depending on which country you live in. To try out new things in China or India is so much more the norm than in industrialized countries like Germany, France, UK or - where we are based - Switzerland where long time existent processes demand to be followed and the need to do something new is not seen daily. There is probably only one place in the West where that might be different and that is Silicon Valley in California.

The success of any company largely depends on how much better they can bring new or improved things to the market. This is not a sole function of product management and R&D in product and service innovation though but actually of everybody in a company since there are so many touch points with employees, clients, partners, products, services etc. that can be improved and lead to competitive advantages.

In fact I am convinced that the future in about just any industry in light of the strong competition from Asia and here of course in particular China is how well one can motivate and leverage each employees know-how and skill towards a joint goal: innovating better and faster. Innovation has to be seen in a broader sense here encompassing all company functions but of course products and service innovation are key since they pay the bills.

But as it turns out in day-to-day business these improvements, ideas or innovations are difficult to collect and often even difficult to create in many in particular big companies. So how could one revive or jump start an internal process that leads to a culture where people love to come up with new ideas? Before being able to answer such a question I collected some of the reasons why it is difficult for so many companies to innovate, here are some:

• there is simply no time set aside for employees to collect ideas or even communicate them
• there are no or only hardly achievable incentives defined in case someone has a nice idea
• how decisions and new products/services are created is a non-transparent process and only clear to a few
• hierarchical barriers make it difficult for lower ranked employees or departments with less visibility to communicate ideas up, one might simply not listen to them
• innovation is in the hands of a few so called experts and not a grassroots motivated approach
• being wrong with an idea does not mean that was bad, in contrary it needs to be made clear that it is much better to be wrong many times trying than not proposing anything at all, unfortunately too many companies are still not encouraging to try out something new
• there are no software tools available on companies and made part of every employee’s work tool that foster an innovation culture

This is a very small list. A bigger (50) and more comprehensive, also with a positive angle, list you can find here: 50 WAYS TO FOSTER A SUSTAINABLE CULTURE OF INNOVATION.

The Obama campaign has shown how the future will look like not only in politics. Do you have a plan like this for 2009?

Traditional way: use journalists, voter lists, phone banks, direct mail

vs.

Obama’s way: social networking on the Web, can use now an opt-in e-mailing list to bring the message directly to the people, also helps during the transition period see http://change.gov/

This quote in the New York Times sums it up nicely:

“Thomas Jefferson used newspapers to win the presidency, F.D.R. used radio to change the way he governed, J.F.K. was the first president to understand television, and Howard Dean saw the value of the Web for raising money,” said Ranjit Mathoda, a lawyer and money manager who blogs at Mathode.com.

“But Senator Barack Obama understood that you could use the Web to lower the cost of building a political brand, create a sense of connection and engagement, and dispense with the command and control method of governing to allow people to self-organize to do the work.”