Why Innovation Is On The Decline

You’ve experienced it firsthand, innovation is slowing down (and yes, it’s quite disappointing!).  

Do you feel compelled to get a new smartphone, TV, or just about anything else…or do you already basically have the latest and greatest technology, even if it’s a couple of years old now?

But imagine, if something great and new did come out…we’d all be dancing in the streets and eager to buy. 

That’s right, innovation is not what it was…according to the Wall Street Journal, there is “An Innovation Slowdown At The Tech Giants.”

The question is why is this happening?

No, the tech companies are not copying Washington politics (sleepy, sleepy…)! 

But instead, we may have become our own worst enemies to our ability to innovate anew. 

The New York Times today explains that our minds have a toggle switch between being focused on a task and being free to let your mind wonder and innovate. 

You can’t do both at the same time, no you can’t.

And these days, we have so flooded ourselves with information overload with everything from 24/7 work and “big data,” email/texting, social media, and thousands of cable stations and billions of YouTube videos, and more that we are forever engaged in the what’s now, and are not allowing ourselves to rest, recuperate, and think about the potential for what’s new. 

If we want more from the future (innovation, creative problem solving, and sound decision making), then we need to allow some space for our minds to restore itself.

Whether that means daily downtimes, weekly walks in the park, monthly mediations, or semiannual vacations…we need to stop the diminishing returns of constant work and information arousal, and take a little mind breather. 

Instead of chugging along our insane nonstop routines of endless activities and firehose information engagement, we will do ourselves and our children and grandchildren a great service by pulling the train over for some rest and relaxation…and only then will real innovation begin again. 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Alert, Alert, And More Alerts

No this is not an alert, but some strategic thinking about alerts.

As a kid, we get our first alerts usually from the fire alarm going off in school and practicing the buddy system and safely evacuating.

As adults, we are used to get so many types of alerts:

– Homeland Security threat alerts
– Breaking news alerts
– Emergency/Disaster alerts
– Severe weather alerts
– Smog alerts
– Transportation delay alerts
– Accident alerts
– Fraud alerts
– Economic and financial alerts
– Amber missing child alerts
– Internet security alerts
– Power loss alerts
– Home or business intruder alerts
– Fire alerts
– Carbon Monoxide alerts
– Medical/health alerts
– Chemical spill alerts
– Product safety or recall alerts
– Unsafe drinking water alerts
– Active shooter alerts
– Work closure alerts
– Parking garage alerts
– Dangerous marine life alerts
– Dangerous current or undertow alerts
– Air raid siren alerts
– Solar eclipse alerts
– Meteorite or falling space debris alerts
– Special sale or promotional event alerts

With the arrival of highly successful, mass social media applications like Twitter, we have alerts aggregated for us and listed chronologically as things are happening real-time.

The brilliance of the current Twitter-type alerting is that we can sign up to follow whatever alerts we are interested in and then have a streaming feed of them.

The alerts are short–up to 140 characters–so you can quickly see the essence of what is happening or ignore what is irrelevant to you.

When more space is needed to explain the details behind an alert, typically a (shortened) URL is included, which if you click on it takes you to a more in depth explanation of the event or item.

So alerts are a terrific balance between short, attention grabbing headlines and links to more detail, as needed.

What is also great about the current alerting mechanism is that you can provide concise alert information, including:

– Message source (for ensuring reliability)
– Guidance (for providing immediate instruction on response).
– Hazard (for specifying the type of incident)
– Location (for identifying geographic or mapping locality)
– Date/time (for implications as to its currency)
– Importance (for determining severity such as catastrophic, critical, etc.)

While we remain ever, hyper-vigilant, we need to be careful not to become anxiety-ridden, or at some point, simply learn to tune it all out, so we can actually live life and get stuff done.

It’s good to know what’s going on out there, but can too much information ever become a bad thing? 😉

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

The Information High

A new article by Andy Blumenthal called “The Information High” at Public CIO Magazine (29 November 2012).

“In addition to being slaves to our things–including technology gadgets–we are also addicted to the data and information they serve up.”

Hope you enjoy! 😉

Andy

(Source Photo: Andy Blumenthal)

Dashboarding The Information Waves

I had an opportunity to view a demo of a dashboarding product from Edge called AppBoard, and while this is nota vendor or product endorsement, I think it is a good example to briefly talk about these types of capabilities.Dashboard products enable us to pull from multiple data sources, make associations, see trends, identify exceptions, and get alerts when there are problems.

Some of the things that I look for in dashboard tools are the following:

– Ease of use of connecting to data

– Ability to integrate multiple stovepiped databases

– A variety of graphs, charts, tables, and diagrams to visualize the information

– Use of widgets to automatically manipulate the data and create standardized displays

– Drag and drop ability to organize the dashboard in any way you like to see it

– Drill down to get more information on the fly

While there are many tools to consider that provide dashboards, information visualization, and business intelligence, I think one of the most important aspects of these is that they be user-centric and easy to implement and customize for the organization and its mission.

When making critical decisions (especially those involving life and death) and when time is of the essence–we need tools that can be can be easily navigated and manipulated to get the right information and make a good decision, quickly.

As a fan of information visualization tools, I appreciate tools like this that can help us get our arms around the “information overload” out there, and I hope you do too.(All Opinions my own)

>Ads Here, There, Everywhere

>

This is wild–Adzookie, a mobile advertising company that puts location-based ads out on cell phones, is doing some unbelievable advertising of its own…

They are offering to paint people’s houses and even pay their mortgages every month that you let them have their brightly colored billboard painted onto the side of your house.

In less than a day, they got applications from 1000 homeowners (and even one church)!

Is this a sign of the tough economic times or what?

A number of important lessons here:

1) In case we already didn’t learn from Google, advertising is really big business–my G-d, this company will pay your mortgage for you just to advertise on your house. (okay it is a big advertisement and all…)

2) Advertising going online, is old news; the new news is that it’s going mobile, big time. Folks, the ads are following us. Wherever we go, the ads will be there. From print to TV to billboards on the side of the road and at bus stops, to the Internet and to our smartphones–there is no escape!

3) People will do almost anything for money (this is an old lesson revisited)–even make their “home sweet homes” into the laughing stock of the neighborhood–or do some people actually think this looks cool?

4) Technology is an enabler to make our lives more convenient (news, shopping, etc.) and a richer experience, but it also lets those obtrusive advertisements pop up or crawl across the computer screen when/where NOT desired. As technology is part of virtually every facet of our lives, the potential for advertising here, there, and everywhere can really go overboard. Perhaps, the time is ripe for additional privacy settings on our computers/phones, so that we could block ads (when we want to) and have the equivalent of a “do not call list” for those pesky ads that just never seem to give up–like the Energizer Bunny–“they just keep going and going and going.”

When it comes to technology (and the rest of our environment), I believe that we have to be able to control the flow–whether it’s information or advertising.

Even too much of a good thing, can be a real eye sore.

>Balance, Not Brute Force

>

There is a new documentary called “Race to Nowhere.”

It is about our 24/7 culture with it’s relentless pressure to succeed and how it is adversely affecting our children.

Directed by Vicki Abeles a mother of one of these children, who was literally getting sick from from the “race to be the smartest, to test the highest, and to achieve the most.“

The message these days to children and adults is “produce, produce, produce.“

But what are we getting from all the hypercompetition?

As one girl at the beginning of the trailer said “I can’t really remember the last time I had the chance to go in the backyard and just run around.” And another boy said, “School is just so much pressure, every day I would just wake up dreading it.”

This is not exactly the picture of happy, satisfied, and motivated children or of a dynamic workforce for the future.

What are we doing to our children and ourselves?

We have better technology and more information available now than ever before, yet somehow people are seemingly unhappier than ever–and it’s starting with our children, but it doesn’t stop there.

With the change to an information society, our innovators forget to create a shut-off valve (or filter) so people would be able “turn down the volume” on the information pouring in 24/7.

Adults can’t keep up, our students can’t keep up, no one can–we have opened the floodgates of INFORMATION and we are drowning in it.

No learning is good enough because there is always more to learn and no productivity is productive enough because the technology is changing so fast.

I remember a boss who used to always say “what have you done for me lately” (i.e. it didn’t matter what you achieved last week or yesterday, he wanted to know what did you do for him today!)

It’s the same now everyday and everywhere for everyone, yesterday is history–when it comes to learning and achievement; the competition from down the hall or around the globe is right on our tail and if you are not doing something new just about every minute, you risk being overtaken.

We know “failure is not an option” but is pushing until we have the equivalent of a societal nervous breakdown, success?

Like with all good things in life–love, vacations, chocolate, and so on–we can’t overindulge. Similarly with information overload and work–there has to be a “balance,” a happy medium–we can’t push the engine until it overheats. We need to know when to put the peddle to the mettle and when to throttle back.

If we can handle ourselves more adroitly in these competitive times (and less like a flailing drowning victim running frantically between activities), manage the flow of information smarter (not like sucking on the proverbial firehose) and alternate between productivity and recuperation/rejuvenation (rather then demanding a 24/7 ethic), I think we will see greater joy and better results for ourselves and our children.

We can all excel, but to do so, we have to learn to moderate and take a breathe–in and out.

Success and happiness is not always about more, in fact, I believe more often than not it’s about an ebb and flow. Like night and day, the ocean tides, the changing seasons, even our own life cycle, we have to know enough to compete intelligently and not with brute force, 24/7, alone.

So what if we turned off our Blackberry’s for just a couple of hours a day and let our kids do the equivalent…to be human again and find time for spirituality and community and rejoice in all that we have achieved.

>"Your Brain On Google"

>

Amazing video called “Digital Nation.”

Some great points from the interviewees at MIT, Stanford, and more:

– “We are immersed in technology all the time.”

– “Technology is like oxygen.”

– “Well over half our lives exist in the digital world now.”

– “We are constantly multi-tasking and distracted.”

– “The world has sped up.”

– “We just want to push the pause button.”

– “The Internet has changed from things one does to how one lives.”

– “We are changing what it means to be human.”

– “We are rewriting the rules of interaction for human beings.”

– “Can we solve the alienation that technology has created with more technology?

– “Does increasing use of technology have diminishing returns at some points?”

These questions and thoughts really resonate with me.

Looking back in my own life, things seemed so much simpler 10, 20, and 30 years ago.

Then we were less connected online and maybe a lot stupider intellectually, but more connected in real ways–doing real things with family, friends, and community.

Life is certainly faster now, but are we happier as human beings?

Are we losing ourselves and becoming part of the vast interconnected cyberspace almost as half-humans and half-machines ourselves?

>Internet, Anything But Shallow

>

Over time, people have transitioned the way they predominantly get their information and learn, as follows:

1) Experiential—people used to learn mostly by doing—through their experiences, although these were usually limited in both time and space.

2) Reading—With the printing press, doing was supplanted by reading and information came from around the world and passed over from generation to generation.

3) Television—Active reading was upended by passive watching television, where the printed word “came alive” in images and sounds streaming right into our living rooms.

4) Virtuality—And now TV is being surpassed by the interactivity of the Internet, where people have immediate access to exabytes of on-demand information covering the spectrum of human thought and existence.

The question is how does the way we learn ultimately affect what we learn and how we think—in other words does sitting and reading for example teach us to think and understand the world differently than watching TV or surfing the Internet? Is one better than the other?

I remember hearing as a kid the adults quip about kids sitting in front of the TV like zombies! And parents these days, tell their kids to “get off of Facebook and get outside and play a little in the yard or go to the mall”—get out actually do something with somebody “real.”

An article in Wired Magazine, June 2010, called “Chaos Theory” by Nicholas Carr states “even as the Internet grants us easy access to vast amounts of information, it is turning us into shallower thinkers, literally changing the structure of our brain.”

Carr contents that the Internet is changing how we think and not necessarily for the better:

1) Information overload: The Internet is a wealth of information, but “when the load exceeds our mind’s ability to process and store it, we’re unable to retain the information or to draw connections with other memories…our ability to learn suffers and our understanding remains weak.”

2) Constant interruptions: “The Internet is an interruption system. It seizes out attention only to scramble it,” though images, videos, hypertext, email, IM, tweets, RSS feeds, and advertisements.

3) “Suckers for Irrelevancy”: “The stream of new information plays to our natural tendency to overemphasize the immediate. We crave the new even when we know it’s trivial.”

4) “Intensive multitasking”: We routinely try to do (too) many things online at the same time, so that we are predominantly in skimming mode and infrequently go into any depth in any one area. In short, we sacrifice depth for breadth, and thereby lose various degrees of our ability in “knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection.”

While I think that Carr makes some clever points about the dangers of Internet learning, I believe that the advantages of the Internet far outweigh the costs.

The Internet provides an unparalleled access to information and communication. It gives people the ability to get more information, from more sources, in more ways, than they would’ve in any of the other ways of learning. We are able to browse and search—skim or dig deep—as needed, anytime, anywhere.

With the Internet, we have access to information that exceeds the experiences of countless lifetimes, our world’s largest libraries—and TV isn’t even a real competitor.

At the end of the day, the Internet is a productivity multiplier like no other in history. Despite what may be considered information overload, too many online interruptions, and our inclinations to multitasking galore and even what some consider irrelevant; the Internet is an unbelievable source of information, social networking, entertainment, and online commerce.

While I believe that there is no substitute for experience, a balance of learning media—from actually doing and reading to watching and interacting online—make for an integrated and holistic learning experience. The result is learning that is diversified, interesting, and provides the greatest opportunity for everyone to learn in the way that suits him or her best.

Moreover, contrary to the Internet making us shallower thinkers as Carr contends, I think that we are actually smarter and better thinkers because of it. As a result of the Internet, we are able to get past the b.s. faster and find what we are looking for and what is actually useful to us. While pure linear reading and thinking is important and has a place, the ability online of the semantic web to locate any information and identify trends, patterns, relationships, and visualize these provides an added dimension that is anything but shallow.

>Information, So What?

>

It’s the information age and for most of us that means we are living and working with various forms of information technology every day giving us access to information through—voice, data, and video—thatshows up on our computer screens, smart phones, tablets, and more.

We are rich in information.

Many would say that we are overloaded with information, because there is so much and we can’t seem to possibly process it all no matter how hard we try–there is always more email to reply to, more YouTube videos to watch, more news and research to read up on, and more people to communicate and collaborate with via social networks, wikis, blogs,
tweets, and so on.

So what’s the point of all the information and collaboration? Is it just for fun and entertainment—like one big game of Trivial Pursuit? Or is it for getting a professional edge—i.e. the more you know and the more people you know, the better you are to advance and succeed?

Ultimately, information serves many purposes—it is the lifeblood of our humanity…it nourishes our curiosity, it feeds our learning and growth, and it enables us to make intelligent decisions in our lives.

Without information, we are just “flying blind” as they say, and couldn’t expect much in terms of personal or professional results for our organizations or ourselves.

So information is critical to improving our decision-making. Information and information technology is how we overcome poor decision-making based on gut, intuition, politics, and subjective management whim—all sure ways to get in a “why did you do that”
pickle!

An interesting article in Defense Systems Magazine (May 2010) called “Getting Inside the Enemy’s Decision Cycle” talks about how the military seeks to disrupt the enemy’s information and decision-making to degrade their war-fighting capability.

“Success in battle is increasingly about making decisions more quickly than your adversary can.”

In the military, the decision cycle is frequently referred to as “OODA Loop”—observe, orient, decide, and attack.

If we can disrupt the enemy’s decision cycle or OODA Loop, we can “decide and act faster than they can.” The result is “I’m going to outmaneuver you” and win!

In short, information translates to decision-making and to action.

– Disrupt that cycle and we are sitting ducks.

– Enhance that cycle and we are stronger for it.

Ultimately, there are lots of important lessons about the criticality of IT to decision-making that comes out of the battlefield:

First, we all need information to survive and thrive.

Second, if we improve information quality and speed of delivery, then the better the decision-making and the impact on and off the battlefield.

This is why information and information technology is truly our competitive advantage and at the heart of our national security.

I believe that this necessitates that we treat IT as not just another budget line item, but rather as a strategic investment.

The vision for IT has always been to bring greater effectiveness and efficiency to the rest of the business and to the mission. Unfortunately, IT has not always lived up to that vision.

Despite some disappointments, we cannot afford to be second-rate in IT, because there will be a negative cascading effect throughout all of our industries and government agencies that rely on information and information technology.

The key for us is to continue investing in technology (wisely), investing in our people (profusely—they are the brains behind the machines), and keep focusing on using IT as an enabler to improve the business and mission of everything else we do.

>Right In Front of Us, but We Are Blind to It

>

Last week, there was a 13-year-old boy, with Asperger’s syndrome, who ran away from home and rode away in the NYC subway system for 11 days undetected!!! The boy went missing with $11 dollars in his pocket. “According to CNN, the boy’s mother says he survived on fast food and candy he purchased in the subway system. He spent the majority of his time riding the trains. He wore the same clothes for the duration and lived underground, sleeping in subway cars and using underground restrooms.” Many people were out looking for this boy, including the police, but neither the searchers nor the extensive surveillance apparatus in New York picked him out. Apparently, no one on the trains reported seeing this kid riding endlessly around 24×7, and the boy was invisible to the myriad of hardworking transit workers and officers who are all over the transit system, until day 11 when finally one officer recognized the boy from his missing picture. How can a boy be there for almost two weeks, but be seemingly invisible to the thousands of riders and workers passing thru the subway system and what can this teach us about leadership and organizations? Information Overload—This is truly the information age. We have morphed from not having enough information to being flooded with it and not being able to process it. With the missing boy on the NYC MTA subway system, he was literally lost amidst the more than 5 million riders a day and 468 stations. This is a common situation these days where we have access to stores of information, on databases and through the Internet, yet we frequently struggle to find the golden nuggets of information that really mean something. Post 9-11, our military and intelligence communities are being flooded by sensor information from a vast network of resources, and the challenge now is to find innovative ways to process it quickly and effectively—to find the proverbial “needle in the haystack” and to stop the next potential attack. Our organizations in the public and private sectors need faster, more accurate, and finely tuned systems to find the dots, connect the dots, and see the picture. Process Matters—According to Digital Journal, “the disappearance was reported to police immediately, who treated it as a runaway. After five days had passed, it was being treated as a missing persons case.” The police were following their processes in handling this little boy, but it resulted in five days passing without the assumed more intense search that occurs with a missing persons case. Lesson to note is that having standardized, documented business processes are important in efficiently managing operations, but we should not get so caught up in the process that we become rigid and inflexible in handling cases according to the specific situation. While I am not an expert in this, the question does come to mind, whether the search for a child with a known disability may have been escalated/elevated sooner? And the point, I am really trying to make is that we need to keep our organizations and processes agile and responsive so that we can act meaningfully and in time. Break through the Apathy—Having been a former New Yorker (and I suppose, it never truly leaves your blood), I am well aware of the accusations and jokes made about rudeness and apathy from people in the “city that never sleeps.” NY is a tough town, no doubt. The people are quick and sharp. They work and play hard. They are good, productive people. But living in a city with 8.3 million people in one of the most dense urban centers of the world can take a toll. Even with major clean-up efforts in recent years, NYC still has its fair share of crowding, pollution, and crime and this can take a toll on even the best people. I remember daily sights of panhandling, poor and ill people, aggressiveness not limited to the yellow cabbies. I suppose, one disabled boy could get lost amidst the city chaos, but the challenge is to break through the apathy or callousness that can easily overtake people and continue to care for each and every person that needs our help. This is no small challenge in a city with a 21.2% poverty rate (US Census Bureau 1999), let along in a world where 1 in 4 (or 1.3 billion persons) live on less than $1 a day. As leaders, we need to push for caring over apathy and for seeing and acting versus blinding ourselves to the pain and misfortune of others. Could we have found this little boy sooner? Maybe. Could it have ended a lot worse? For sure. While this missing persons situation is now over, we need to prepare ourselves for future events and contingencies. We can do this by continuing to create better systems and mechanisms to process information better, faster, and cheaper—it’s not longer just the quantity of information, but the quality and it’s timeliness and relevance; by reengineering our business processes so that we are alert, nimble and responsive—rigid processes lead to hard and fast rules that serve no one; and building camaraderie with one another—seeing that we are more the same, than we are different—and that everyone matters—even a kid underground in a subway system spanning 656 long and winding miles. And lest anybody think I’m giving New Yorkers a hard time, believe me when I say – it is “the city” that has given me the street smarts to navigate the Beltway and challenge anyone who says that something can’t be done!