Leading Multi-Disciplinary Innovation - Innovation for Organizational Success

Leading Multidisciplinary Innovation

Organizing for complex-challenge success

By
Bruce Tow, Synovation Solutions.
June 30, 2009

Think Innovation | © 2004 - 2009 All Rights Reserved

Profile – Bruce Tow, Synovation Solutions

 Principal with Synovation Solutions - helps enterprises with complex,
multidisciplinary challenges.

 Leading architect and designer of enterprise applications and applications-
development technologies, having designed more than 100 such applications.

 Founder and CEO of Synthesis Institute, a non-profit devoted to advancing the
art and science of multi-disciplinary problem-solving.

 Co-author of "Synthesis-an Interdisciplinary Discipline," published in the May-
June, 2009 issue of The Futurist.


Agenda

Introduction
What we hope to accomplish
Terminology
Multidisciplinary innovation
Managing multidisciplinary innovation
Ensuring long-term success
Summary


What we hope to accomplish

Share our insights into how to succeed at multidisciplinary endeavors:

 Align you with applicable concepts

 Help you recognize impending challenges

 Help you understand how to optimize an endeavor
 Organize
 Execute
 Ensure its optimal completion

 Help you understand and recognize a special class of individuals
 Key to addressing/resolving these unique challenges

 Help you best organize to resolve future challenges


Terminology

Term Description
Breakthrough A breakthrough is a key event in an endeavor at which the team discovers a
fact, insight, etc. that provides substantive progress towards ultimate resolution.
Breakthrough A breakthrough profile is a document that records insights into a given
profile multidisciplinary endeavor's needed breakthroughs, both significant and
additive.
Coupling Coupling is the act of combining information from different-discipline sources.
Enterprise- An enterprise-wisdom repository is a library or other knowledge-storage site or
wisdom database that records and makes available insights, breakthroughs, etc. gained
repository from both the enterprise's successful and its unsuccessful activities.
Multidisciplinary A multidisciplinary endeavor is a project or other finite-timeline activity to
endeavor solve a challenge that requires input from specialists in two or more disciplines,
and which requires for its success breakthroughs resulting from insights and
other inputs from multiple disciplines.
Multidisciplinary- A multidisciplinary-capable enterprise is an enterprise that has mastered the art
capable enterprise and science of resolving complex, multidisciplinary challenges.
Synthesis Synthesis is the art and science of solving problems by gathering and
combining information from diverse sources.
Type N A Type N person is a person who gets a significantly greater brain reward from
learning something new vs. extending existing knowledge in a discipline.
Type M A Type M person is a person who gets a significantly greater brain reward from
increasing mastery by adding to their existing domain or specialty knowledge
vs. learning about something in a different discipline.


Agenda

Introduction
What is multidisciplinary innovation?
Special challenges of multidisciplinary innovation
Understanding specialists vs. generalists
Special roles in multidisciplinary innovation
Case study #1 – ROI calculation
Summary


What is multi-disciplinary innovation ?

Multidisciplinary innovation is innovation that combines and
blends the skills, knowledge and attitudes of two or more
specialties in order to address and resolve challenges that do
not fit any single specialty
•Recognizable when no one specialist is available whose skills and experience fit the
problem

Specialties Sub-specialties
Problem to solve

Special challenges of multidisciplinary innovation

 Multidisciplinary innovation is unique and poorly understood

 Specialists are used to working with others in their field
 Rarely have experience working outside of their specialty

 Asking specialists to work outside of their comfort zone is easy
 Getting them to work outside of their comfort zone is hard

 The challenge to be solved looks differently to different specialties

 Terminology can create confusion, concern and even disdain
 Can result in innovation-squelching attitudes
 More often unconscious than otherwise, thus more difficult
 Multidisciplinary challenges, almost by definition, fall outside of any given
assigned specialist’s area of strength or interest


Special Challenges - Continued

Medical
Specialist

Biologist

Problem to be Computer
solved Scientist

Finance
Specialist Circus Clown


Understanding specialists vs. generalists

Specialists/sub-specialists/hyper-specialists
• Focus on achieving depth in a narrow field
• Prefer learning that extends their specialized mastery (Type M)
• Are essential to progress in their fields
• Have tendencies that can be counter-productive within complex, multidisciplinary
endeavors
Generalists
• Often have a specialty – at least formally
• Prefer learning that exposes them to something new (Type N)
• Can be restless – and even disruptive – within their specialty
• Are like “yeast” during complex, multidisciplinary endeavors
• Are fairly rare (we think about 5%)
Cross-disciplinary specialists (e.g., urban planners)
• More likely to be specialist than generalist by nature


Special roles in multi-disciplinary innovation

Bridge
 Generalist personality whose primary motivation is synthesis
 Role is somehow to induce “coupling” between specialists
 Assigned typically to activity primarily for specialist expertise
 Benefits from enough time/space (~10%?) to induce coupling
 May or may not benefit from special training or orientation
Gatekeeper (optional)
 Generalist personality whose primary motivation is organizing
 Role is to be recorder/organizer/historian/librarian
 Probably benefits from specific training
Specialists
 Likely don’t need specific training
 Encourage simply to do what they do best
 Just let Bridge-induced coupling work its magic
Executive or project manager
 Organizes and manages the endeavor
 Ideally understands at least basic multidisciplinary “principles”


Case Study #1 – ROI Calculation

In 2008, we helped an enterprise with a difficult and seemingly contradictory ROI
situation:

•Happy existing customers – All in-production customers were ecstatically happy
they’d bought the product

•Uncompelling tangible ROI – Tangible benefits (mostly time savings) seemed to
be about 1-to-1 (i.e., $50K benefit for $50K cost)

Background
What we did
Results
Commentary


Agenda

Introduction
Phases of a multidisciplinary endeavor
Crafting your endeavor
Kicking off your endeavor
Monitoring the exploration phase
Monitoring the exploitation phase
Managing closure
Case study #2 – SRI’s experience
Summary


Phases of a multidisciplinary endeavor

A multidisciplinary endeavor has special characteristics which affect success
substantively; in order to focus on these characteristics we use a unique vocabulary
to describe endeavor phases
•Crafting – Design your process, taking into consideration challenge characteristics,
staff strengths and characteristics and endeavor-specific “vocabulary”

•Kickoff – Get everyone involved started off on the right foot

•Exploration – Manage pre-breakthrough activities in order to uncover
breakthroughs quickly – or fail quickly and educationally

•Exploitation – Exploit your breakthroughs

•Closure – Make sure you gain maximum benefit from your success – or your
failure


Crafting your endeavor

 “Map” specialty areas that apply to your specific challenge

 Match to specialized-staff “maps”

 Defining an effective coupling strategy

 Identify and assign staff
 Seeding your staff with a Bridge
 Deciding whether you’d benefit from a Gatekeeper
 Assign needed specialists

 Designing your endeavor’s breakthrough profile

 Skewing towards possible early-and-educational failure


Kicking off your endeavor

 Orient and align your team

 Begin and start to use endeavor-specific vocabulary

 Assign – formally or informally - special roles
 Bridge – always
 Gatekeeper – if available and appropriate

 Communicate breakthrough profile

 Communicate that if failure, should be early and educational

 Do not push specialists to work outside of their specialties
 Unnecessary – and possibly counter-productive



 Focus on achieving breakthroughs – or early/educational failure
 Keep Bridge’s workload light enough to encourage coupling
 Brainstorm frequently but keep sessions short (under 45 minutes)
 Gatekeeper, if any, is perfect note-taker and facilitator
 Actively try to recognize – and document – breakthroughs
 Find and cherry-pick serendipitous results (good Gatekeeper role)
 Shift to exploitation phase upon finding last needed breakthrough
 Suspend or cancel A.S.A.P. if detecting irresolvable failure
 Expect specialist boundaries to blur toward problem to be solved:



 Project lead can fall back on more-standard project management

 You may be able to reassign your Bridge - or share with other endeavors
if still needed for own-specialty expertise

 If you have a Gatekeeper, probably should keep throughout
 Optionally, reduce hours or use to augment other activities


Managing closure

 Closure activity is like that of more-specialized projects

 Take time to revisit and seek serendipitous results
 These can be worth even more than original endeavor!

 Allow your Gatekeeper, if any, adequate time to “tidy up”


Case study #2 – SRI experience

 In late ’70s, SRI realized usefulness of “bridge people”

 Genesis was request to Dr. Joseph McPherson to find out why some multidisciplinary
projects succeeded – while others failed

 He found nearly 100% correlation between success and inclusion of a special type of
person (“bridge person”) on the project

 SRI never published results for proprietary reasons

 Another SRI staff member, Dr. Stewart P. Blake, mentioned “bridge persons” briefly in a
book published in 1978
 Listed 14 personality characteristics of a bridge person (essentially describing a “Type N”
personality)

 I (Bruce Tow) was introduced to McPherson by Blake, and interviewed McPherson twice in
early ’80s

 SRI never tried to exploit beyond simple inclusion of a bridge person in selected projects as
seen to be desirable (and when such a bridge-type person was known and available)


Agenda

Introduction
Learning from success - and failure
Leveraging special long-term roles
Managing your multidisciplinary “repository”
Summary


Learning from success - and failure

 From success
 Document breakthroughs (and what you felt led to each)
 Harvest participant strengths/weaknesses in complex, multidisciplinary situation

 From failure
 Don’t assign fault – you want to encourage future risk-taking
 Never punish specialists simply for being specialists

 Always
 Harvest serendipitous results (easiest if you included a Gatekeeper)
 Expect specialist borders to snap right back afterwards


Managing your multi-disciplinary repository

 Your repository includes
 History of complex, multidisciplinary challenges – successes, failures and serendipitous results
 Vocabulary – which builds and matures between challenges
 Staff “mappings” and history to aid future assignments
 Staff classifications on “Type M to Type N” scale (below)

 Ownership of your repository is key
 Gatekeeper (or ideally, Ordinologist) – with advanced training
 Do not assign to a Bridge – not likely organized enough
 Do not assign to a specialist – too narrow a viewpoint

 Technology for your repository could be low- or high-tech


Agenda

Introduction
Summary
What we’ve learned today
About Regalix
Questions and answers


What we’ve learned today

 Special challenges of and techniques for succeeding at complex, multidisciplinary
endeavors

 Special rules and personal characteristics affecting them

 How optimally to organize and execute a complex, multidisciplinary endeavor

 Importance of planning to cover early and educational failure

 Importance and benefits of harvesting serendipitous results

 Importance of maintaining an enterprise multidisciplinary repository


About Regalix

 Forefront of Online Marketing, Research and Web 2.0 portals

 Multi-disciplinary Leadership Team

 Fortune 500 and Venture-Backed Customers (B2B and B2C)

 Global Operations: HQ in Silicon Valley, 4 Offices

 150+ Team, Built on 8+ years of research

 Recognition

Think Innovation | © 2004 - 2009 All Rights Reserved © 2009 Confidential | Think
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Innovation

Thank You!

Learn more about Regalix at:
www.regalix.com
Contact:
Email: info@regalix.com

Learn more about SynOvation Solutions at:
www.synovationsolutions.com
Contact:
Email: btow@ix.netcom.com

Think Innovation | © 2004 - 2009 All Rights Reserved 27

Leading Multi-Disciplinary Innovation - Innovation for Organizational Success

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