4. Innovation Silos
Potential Silos
• The Research Scientist
“Without him we
wouldn’t have a
company”
“Assumed right – onus
on testing to prove
otherwise”
5. Innovation Silos
Potential Silos
• The Research Scientist
• The Architect
Introducing new
“Frameworks”
Often prototype quality
code
False impression of
release readiness
Delegated responsibility
for quality
6. Innovation Silos
Potential Silos
• The Research Scientist
• The Creative Agency
• The Architect
The source of ‘ideas’
No discussion with
technical roles as to
practical feasibility
9. Not perceived as a creative activity
Low appreciation of the skills of testing
Isolated from other development roles
We’re not pushy
Seen as coming in ‘at the end’ of
process
Why Are Testers Left Out?
10. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
Edison didn’t invent the
lightbulb, he ran a research
company that refined previous
inventions.
Lone creators are often used
as a useful marketing
figurehead for an efficient
research and innovation
group.
11. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
Studies of ‘creative’ people and
‘non-creative’ people have
show no difference in their
personality dimensions using
widely adopted measures of
personality
Studies on twins have shown no
genetic link between genes and
creativity in individuals
Categorisation of individuals
and roles can result in
promoting or suppressing
creativity
12. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
Eureka moments are usually the
outcome of a period of
reflection or ‘incubation’ after a
period of intensive study into a
problem.
Insight comes through a process
of
- Preparation
- Incubation
- Insight
- Evaluation
- Elaboration
It needs preparation and
incubation
13. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
Experience and expertise don’t
always create better innovation.
Youth and fresh thinking can
generate the greatest leaps
forward.
14. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
Providing incentives to innovate
does not drive innovation.
Intrinsic motivation in the form
of engagement with the
problem is a greater driver of
innovation.
15. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Originality Myth
Most innovations are not new
ideas but rather a progression
or combination of existing
ideas.
16. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Originality Myth
• The Constraints Myth
Removing constraints doesn’t
permit greater innovation.
Constraints don’t suppress
innovation.
Innovation loves constraints as
long as they are not too
restrictive to support our ability
to progress.
17. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Originality Myth
• The Constraints Myth
• The Cohesive Myth
We don’t all have to get along
to be creative.
Whilst personal grievances are
not constructive, disagreement
and conflict around a challenge
can result in better results
18. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Originality Myth
• The Constraints Myth
• The Cohesive Myth
• The Mousetrap Myth
Just creating a great product
does not guarantee success.
Keely’s “Ten types of
innovation” suggests that many
innovations fail due to too
much focus on the “Product
System” and not enough on the
supporting elements around
organisational configuration,
and customer experience.
19.
20. What drives innovation…?
Dispelling some myths…
• The lone creator
• The creative type
• The ‘eureka’ moment
• The expert myth
• The Incentive Myth
• The Originality Myth
• The Constraints Myth
• The Cohesive Myth
• The Mousetrap Myth
• The Brainstorming Myth
Chucking people in a room with
some white-boards and post-its
will not automatically yield
great results.
Brainstorming can be effective
but needs to be done in the
context of prior research and
understanding – a bringing
together of ideas rather than a
blank canvas.
22. What actually drives innovation…?
Domain expertise
People willing to engage
Culture supportive of new ideas
Creativity Relevant Processes
What we really need…
23. What Actually Drives Innovation
Research by Gallup has identified that 59 percent of
engaged employees believe their job brings out their
most creative ideas, compared to only 3 percent of
disengaged employees.
25. What Can Testers Offer?
Domain expertise
People willing to engage
Culture supportive of new ideas
Creativity relevant processes
What we really need…
Yes
Absolutely
No Problem
We can help
26. What Can Testers Offer?
• Knowledge across systems to make
connections
• Understanding of users and their needs
• Identify risks, impracticalities and flaws early
• Lateral thinking
• Validating ideas and Testing approaches
Plus…
28. So what are we here to do?
The RIG
How Can We Get Involved?
29. What Can We Do About It?
So what are we here to do?
1.The RIG does not own all of the innovation, we aim to foster a culture of
innovation across the whole of River
2.The RIG is an open community and encourages participation from people
across the business
3.We encourage cross-functional knowledge and thinking and look for
opportunities to innovate in all areas, not just products
4.We aim to continuously improve and question and innovate on our
existing ideas as much as new ones
5.We don't dismiss any ideas and celebrate any failures as opportunities to
learn
6.We aim to empower and encourage people to be confident in owning their
The RIG
Principles
30. THANKS
Photo by Josh Boot on Unsplash
Adam Knight
linkedin.com/in/adampknight
@adampknight
Notas do Editor
Hello and welcome.
For those of you who don’t know me my name is Adam and I am currently head of Product and Testing at River
I’m going to talk about a subject that is often not associated with testing, that is innovation.
In this session I’m going to share some personal experiences around innovation and why we as testers may suffer from being excluded
The format will be that I’ll present through some slides, and at key points I’ll open up the discussion to the room with a question around testing and innovation.
I’ll try to be open around the discussion but if it’s veering off, particularly into a later section, I’ll reel it in and I may need to move on to keep to time.
So why would we want to be involved in innovation?
Well – in my recent work I’ve been particularly focussed on the area of employee engagement.
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And it turns out there is a strong correlation between innovation and employee engagement.
The landmark 2009 Mcleod report on employee engagement devotes significant content to highlighting the correlation between employee engagement and innovation.
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It’s easy to see why. Looking at classic psychological theories of human motivation such as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the work of Fredrick Herzberg who presented a ‘two factor’ theory of motivation separating motivators from more basic ‘hygiene’ needs – being involved in creative work is intrinsically motivating and something that we naturally aspire to.
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Innovation is also typically something that receives greater recognition in organisations , and recognition for our work is again a strong motivator that fulfils our desires for self-actualisation.
It’s natural then that, given how engaging it is being involved in innovation, some folks might want to keep it to themselves.
One reason that testers may be excluded from innovation is that, to put it simply, most people in the company are excluded from innovation.
Can anyone tell me what this is?
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Yes it’s a silo - (this is not a discussion break by the way)
interesting phenomenon in the US where trees grow in disused silos, protected from the environment outside.
Similarly I’ve seen a number of situations where innovation within a company is siloed off and protected from others, with pretty damaging results.
One situation I’ve seen in startups is where one of the founding members takes the job of ‘research’ scientist (sometimes as CTO)
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They are seen as fundamental to the existence of the company and they therefore are afforded the freedom to go off and try new things.
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I’ve encountered this and one of the challenges here was that, each new creation was assumed to be brilliant, even when they weren’t
for a more inexperienced tester the onus was on me to prove that these new innovations were flawed.
I remember having to test and retest a new data importer module for a previous product to prove that it was less performant than the one that we already had, which was daunting when the developer was one of the company founders.
Architects.
Give an architect enough time and they’ll develop a framework.
Whilst often the role of a more established company than the research scientist, architects are still often afforded a lot of slack and have the remit to create new architectures as they see fit.
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I’ve encountered more than one situation where these frameworks were developed away from testers , and The code is often prototype level,
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Yet presented to leadership as release ready.
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Usually what then happens is some poor testers and developers are delegated the task of releasing the new framework into product,
Inevitably this is the point at which all of the problems are found and inevitably those poor individuals are the ones that come under pressure for the poor quality
An interesting one I discovered at River was where we have a creative comms team who worked exclusively with an external agency on ‘creative’ work including design.
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All the ideas and designs came in via that team and were handed to the development teams to deliver,
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This was done without any consideration for whether the designs were practically deliverable
So what are the consequences for those people who are not part of the innovation activities.
They end up with all the responsibility of delivery but no ownership of the ideas
They resent the products and the flaws in them
They feel that their own ideas are suppressed
They feel emotionally detached from the product they are working on
Interestingly Risk has an inverse relationship to perceived value
- This detachment from the value actually results in a higher perceived risk around delivery of those products
I’d like to look more specifically at Testing now.
I’m going to open it up to the room for my first question.
It’s a common complaint amongst testers that they are not included in innovative activities.
Why is it that testers are excluded from innovation?
Here are some of the reasons that I came up with
Are these reasons valid.
I read a great book last year entitled the “Myths of Creativity” by Steven Burkus.
In it Burkus examines some of the false beliefs that propagate around innovation he identifies 10
The first is the idea of the lone creator…
Included light bulb here as one of the most famous stories of innovation relates to the first myth.
Thomas Edison didn’t invent the light bulb alone. He’d created a facility called Menlo park from previous earnings in which he employed many people who innovated and tested inventions which he then put his name to.
.
I’ll bring it up here as an aside – Keely’s 10 types of innovation provides a great canvas to understand the different areas that your company might innovate.
QUESTION POINT?
If these 10 myths don’t drive innovation
What do we think are the elements needed to support effective innovation?
Well Burkus quotes extensive studies into innovation by Harvard professor Teresa Amabile
She suggests what we really need for innovation are 4 factors
Domain Expertise are the domain relevant skills that will navigate us through the creative process
People Willing to Engage and are motivated to innovate
A company acceptance of New ideas – is our social environment set up to accept and promote new ideas?
And processes that are supportive of creativity
None of these are exclusive to specific roles or people, and only the company culture sits outside the domain of things that can be learned or adopted by any individual.
I’ll at this point also refer back to the link between engagement and innovation.
Whilst causation has not as far as I know been proved either way
What we can say is that people who are regarded as ‘engaged’ in their work are far more likely to feel that they are able to provide creative ideas to their work than those that are not
As this stat from Gallup neatly demonstrates.
So now we have a better understanding of what actually is needed to drive innovation
What do we think that testers specifically can offer?
So my final discussion point is this
Given that we can clearly offer so much
How can we get more involved in innovation in our companies?
I’ll finish with one idea.
At River we set up an open group called the River Innovation Group or “The RIG”
I run the group – however it’s an open group that anyone in the company can join , and we encourage them to do so.
We try to meet once a fortnight. But we don’t meet to innovate.
What we do is meet to try to promote innovation in the company.
Here are our principles….
Read – 1 - 6
So if you are struggling to think of ways to promote inclusive innovation in your company
Consider setting up a RIG of your own.