Farliga Idéer (Alf Rehn)

Reading a book in my first language was refreshing. This book on creativity and innovation has been published in English as well, but since the original version was written in Swedish, I decided to read that version.

This is a book that promises to shock and disgust. The author sets out to shake the current corporate culture regarding creativity and innovation, which in his opinion is too nice, consensus-seeking and comfortable. Parallels are drawn to punk rock and medieval heretics, all in the hope of awakening passion in a culture that has become luke warm and "lagom".

One interesting detail is the definitions the author uses for the term creativity and innovation respectively. Creativity is the unhampered creation of new and radical ideas. Innovation is creativity with a touch of realism, which imposes limitations on the ideation process with the purpose of reaching tangible results. In other words, creativity is thinking new stuff up, while innovation is getting new things done (my interpretation of the author's definitions.)

Was I shocked and shaken by this book? Not really. I still think this is an important contribution to the discourse around innovation and creativity. I fully agree with the author that it is far too easy to hop on the cozy creativity band wagon, and buy the message from nice creativity consultants with fun games geared towards making the audience feel good about themselves. On the other hand, I worry a bit about the new generation of creativity consultants that this school of thought may foster. It's far too easy to create a cargo cult around this message, where conflict and friction are artificially introduced, just because Alf Rehn says you can't have creativity without it.

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering (Laurent Bossavit)

The Leprechauns of Software Engineering is a work in progress with the purpose of critically analyzing software engineering and its research community. Bonavit illustrates the current state of affairs by debunking some of the myths of our field, such as the cost of change and the 10x programmer. He critically analyzes some of the more influencial work in the field and points to misinterpretations and misquotes.

The book was an interesting, albreit somewhat discouraging read. Bonavit is very eloquent and argues his case in a clear and humoristic way. He effectively tears down the current body of research in software engineering. The chapters where he will suggest a better road ahead are still missing.

As a researcher in this area, currently struggling to define a reliable method for validating a metrics model, I can certainly agree with most of what Bonavit is saying. I especially agree that we suffer from discipline envy. We tend to forget that software engineering really is a social science, where terms such as defects or cost are not absolute units of observation but rather open to interpretation that varies between individuals, projects and organizations.

I'm looking forward to reading the finished book with the constructive part included. As a discipline, we are still quite immature, and we can all benefit from taking a look in the proverbial mirror and trying to weed out our own leprechauns.

 

Building Blocks of Agile Innovation (Oza and Abrahamsson)

Building Blocks of Agile Innovation is a book that summarizes the findings of a large European research project. It reads as a collection of separate papers, the quality of which is varies greatly. Some chapters are really insightful and well written, while others are barely readable, sometimes due to unfortunate language problems. The book is freely downloadable as a pdf. Below I describe my favourite chapters.

Chapter 3: Agile Principles and Innovation Enablement by Nilay Oza and Jari Still

This is one of my favourite chapters in the book. The authors list the principles of agile development and compare them to the current state of the art in innovation. The finding is not surprising: agile methods inherently support innovation. Especially the emphasis on interaction with the customer and on supporting the motivation of the decelopers are seen as innovation enablers.

But there are still many things companies can do to support innovation, according to the authors. Ensuring that there is time for innovation is one such thing. Providing an innovation infrastructure with clear visibility for and fast feeback on new ideas is another.

Chapter 9. Innovation Challenges in an Agile Context by Minna Pikkarainen, Kaisa Koskela and Xiaofeng Wang

The authors describe a case company trying to improve their innovation. They have an innovation database, but are not seeing the benefits they want from it. The challenges found are related to both inefficient innovation handling and incorrect application of agile methods. Examples of the former are that not everybody has access to the innovation database and resources for analysing the database are not allocated. Examples of the latter is project managers unwilling to yield their power and lack of coordination between Scrum teams.

Random ideas and quotes

• Luke Hohman, Innovation Games
• Install an idea repository, in order to not lose any good ideas.
• Creativity is a characteristic of an individual, and a prerequisite for innovation, whereas innovation is the process of transforming an innovation into action within an organization.

 

Tribal Leadership (Logan, King, Fischer-Wright)

I picked up this book Thanks to a tweet from an agile friend. Lately I've been hearing the term tribal leadership in different contexts, so I decided to find out what all the fuzz is about.

The first impression is positive, as the authors set the scene by explaining the vast amount of research (10 yrs, 25000 subjects) that forms the base for this work. Still, the languge is easy on the brain, and it is clear that a substantial effort has been invested in making the book accessible to a wide audience.

The authors describe five stages that organizations and individuals may go through. Each of the stages are summarized as a t-shirt slogan that a person in that stage may wear. Of course the stages are described in detail as well, but I found the slogan to be especially helpful as a memory tool. Each of the stages are illustrated using real case examples from various fields, starting with criminals for stage one and ranging to extremely productive medical research companies for stage five. The picture below is a screenshot of my notes of the overview of the five stages, with the t-shirt slogans in the shaded ovals.

For each of the stages, the reader is given a list of signals to look for when identifying the stage of a given group of people as well as hands-on advice on how to coach people on their journey through the stages. Interestingly enough, the authors claim that we all have to go through all the stages in order to hopefully advance to the highest, fifth stage. That helps remove the element of judgement in the model. A group in stage three, for instance, is not a bad group; they just happen to be at that stage of their journey at this moment.

Tribal leadership is certainly one of the more inspiring books I've read lately. The five-stage model helped me better understand situations I've found myself in during my professional life. This is the kind of book that has the potential to make the world a little better.

www.triballeadership.net

 

Business Model Generation (Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur)

Business model canvas is the new hot thing and "Business Model Generation" is the book that describes it.The first thought that popped up in my mind when I got my hands on a copy, was "Wow, this is gorgeous". Which in my suspicious mind turned into: "Ok, so what are they trying to hide behind all this glossy surface."

But after reading the book, I have to put my suspicions to shame. This is just an unusually beautiful book, where a lot of time and effort has gone into graphical design with the purpose of better getting the point across. The contrast between this and my previous read (The Four Steps to the Epiphany) was quite striking, especially since the copy I had of The Four... was a weathered library copy.

But looking beyond the surface, it is clear that Osterwalder et. al. share some of their basic tenets with Steve Blank. The process of creating a business model is an iterative, incremental one that requires customer interaction. But when Steve's main focus is the process for building a successful business, the Business Model Generation authors are more interested in creating new and innovative business models ¹. They give practical tools to this end, more specifically the business model canvas and long list of practices to aid in the creative process, such as empathy maps, visual storytelling, prototyping and storytelling.

The thing I valued in this book is all the practical examples of business models and how they could have been modelled using the canvas. Of course, the picture can be interpreted too simple-mindedly if one, e.g., reads the Apple example in the book and believes that the iPhone AppStore was born as a result of good business modelling. All of us who have at some point jailbroken their iOS device knows that the AppStore came from a clear need loudly communicated by the end-users, rather than the innovative business vision of Apple. The value of examples like the AppStore for me lies in developing a better understanding of the visual language that the canvas represents. This also helps in seeing and understanding patterns of business models. The list of patterns in the book is another valuable asset.

For more details on the business model canvas, check out their homepage.

¹Actually, comparing the Steve Blank and Osterwalder is a bit unfair, since they deal with such different aspects of business modelling. To my defense, I'm not the only one who's made the connection. For a clear description of how the two go together, check out this presentation by Alexander Osterwalder or this blog entry by Steve Blank.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steven Blank)

As I started to dig in to the world of business modelling, Steve's name kept popping up. I poked around his blog and watched a few of the videos, and soon found that he's an excellent presenter with a lot of experience to share. So I was more than happy to find a weathered copy of "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" in the library.

The gist of the book is that one should not expect to be able to create a business plan, execute it and then just watch the money roll in. Business planning - just like product development - is an iterative, incremental process. Another important point is that new business development is in many respects the opposite of standard operations of established companies. This point he summarizes nicely in this blog entry.

The main content of the book is a detailed description of the process of taking an idea from inception to a successful business. The focus of this process lies on frequent and intensive interaction with the customer, and to stress this point, he uses the term Customer Development in contrast to Product Development. The process is described through advice and interesting examples from Steve's impressive career. The advice ranges from the quite abstract to very detailed practical pointers. As such, the book gives a bit of a piecemeal impression. It's all probably really good advice, but it makes the reading experience a bit hard.

Quite early along in the book, I realized that the structure of the process actually reads as a mind map. To keep things clear in my mind, I started recreating the mind map on a piece of paper. This is what the first two chapters look like as a mind map. I would be curious to see if the book would be an easier read if it were presented as a browsable process description rather than a paper book.

What Steve presents works well with the agile software development mindset. Where agilists strive to get early and frequent feedback about the product, Steve strives to get early and frequent feedback on the business model. He even uses agile terminology, such as "The ability to embrace constant change" (p. 39).

For me, a programmer and product developer at heart, this book painted a colorful picture of the business side of the story. In the agile world, we have lofty ideals about satisfying the customer, but rarely do we give credit to the hard work that is done in locating and establishing interaction with the customers to be satisfied by our brilliant products. At the very least, "The Four Steps to the Epiphany" should help us understand that rarely is business life so easy that "they will come if we build it."