Greetings ! (NOTE: Your Weekly Trend Report is below, but I wanted to share some innovation insights from NASA :) )
This week I had the chance to help NASA prototype the Journey to Mars. On one hand, NASA's space quest is epic like an inspiring movie, but behind the scenes, they are a team that has to face and conquer the same innovation challenges that the rest of us do. How do you build alignment, fostering a culture of innovation, move on from past success, overcome the complacency of success, get support for your work and ultimately, get
Better and Faster?
LIFE OR DEATH - To help NASA think about getting to the red planet, I prepped with space commander Chris Hadfield who explained that the innovation Journey to Mars is kind of like sitting with the Wright Brothers to talk about crossing the ocean. If you try to go to the moon, it takes 3 days and if you make a mistake, your ship will drift back to Earth. But if you decide to head for Mars, you have 12 minutes of launch to maybe abort, and after that you are space bound for 6 months and hopefully you are going in the right direction.
IMPORTANCE OF FOCUS - The dream and vision all seem possible, but there's still a couple decades of scientific discovery that you'd have to plan for. And that requires organizational alignment. For example, some at NASA think we should race to Mars just to plant a flag. Others want to retrieve a whole lot of space rocks for analysis. And others want to send "Noah's Ark." Any of these choices would require a couple decades of prep, but it is too easy to put the choice off to keep working on whatever you're doing now.
PROTOTYPING - In my workshops, my specialty is helping companies change when change is hard through scenarios and rapid prototyping. For NASA, if you put yourself in their shoes, they are working on something that seems fun, but it is also life or death when you put people in a space ship, and there's certainly a lot of public pressure. So to sort through the best ideas, you need to involve a lot of people in the process of figuring out the future. For example, you might have something you really want to do, but someone thinks we should do something else, someone else is concerned about a dozen things, and someone else is not convinced of the current mission so they just keep doing what they did before.
If you really want to learn how to prototype, you should come to our
FUTURE FESTIVAL, but in the mean time, here are a couple thoughts on extracting the best ideas from a group discussion:
1. EXPAND INVOLVEMENT - You need to involve a lot of people to get buy-in and extract the best ideas, and the best ideas happen when you have diversity of thought (not just gender/age/race, but also introversion/extroversion and different learning styles)
2. BUILD SCENARIOS - You need to make it real. Create multiple scenarios that help people to understand what the future could look like under different conditions.
3. FILTER AND FOCUS - After you get a lot of concerns out, you need to filter down to just a few areas of focus. You cannot solve all the world's problems and you need alignment to win. I like to compartmentalize brainstorming so that instead of just solving your giant problem, you figure out the most important levers of change, and then you get incredibly detailed on each lever.
4. STRUCTURE YOUR IDEATION - I could go on and on about this one, but people are generally horrible at brainstorming, so if you want to get the best ideas from people, regardless of their tenure, seniority, role, age, introversion vs. extroversion, then you need to create a system for discussion that extracts ideas from everyone. So set your rules for your brainstorming discussions, and feel free to change them around for each meeting.
5. SEPARATELY PURSUE TACTICAL OUTCOMES - You want people to dream big, but end your innovation meetings with a separate round of tactical outcomes (short and long term) that you can execute. You want to make sure you have tangible output always so that each brainstorm has a purpose.
I've spent my life working on reinvention with a couple hundred brands, CEOs and even a dozen billionaires, so this is my favorite topic and I don't really share enough of it in these newsletters (although you can learn more in my books: Exploiting Chaos and Better and Faster). So hopefully the above sparks some ideas that could help you with your next projects.
AUGUST 31 HOTEL DEADLINE - If you are like this stuff, get excited for
Future Festival and book soon because the rooms are booking up and there is an August 31 Deadline for the room discounts. :)
Enjoy!
Jeremy Gutsche Chief Trend Hunter & Keynote Speaker -
JeremyGutsche.com