MISC: Searching for Excellence by MISC

a journal of strategic insight and foresight VOL. 24 2017 $12 USD $12 CAD £7.50 GBP DISPLAY UNTIL 04/30/2017

Simplicity Does Not Equal Excellence P.30

The Crisis of Management P.34

When Innovation Labs Don’t Work P.48

Rethinking Excellence for the Imperfect Consumer P.94

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The University of Houston’s Foresight Program offers a Master’s Degree in Foresight, a four-course Graduate Certificate, and a week-long intensive bootcamp overview, each of which prepares students to work with businesses, governments, non-profits, and others to anticipate and prepare for the future. Established in 1974, it is the world’s longest-running degree program exclusively devoted to foresight. Some students enroll to become professional futurists, while others seek to bring a foresight perspective to their current careers. Students have three major areas of focus: understanding the future, mapping the future, and influencing the future, blending theory and practice to prepare graduates to make a difference in the world.

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Kaospilot is an international school of entrepreneurship, creativity, and leadership. It was founded in 1991 as a response to the emerging need for a new type of education – one that could help young people navigate the changing reality of the late 20th century. The program’s main areas of focus are leadership, project management, creative business, and process design. Promoting a hands-on approach, case studies are replaced by immersing students in real projects with real clients. Out of more than 600 graduates, one third have started their own company, NGO, or other similar initiative, the remaining hold management positions. Kaospilot also offers a wide range of courses for professionals in creative leadership and educational design.

Co-Publishers

Publisher

ideacouture.com

As publishers of MISC, our aim is to provide a new level of understanding in the fields of insight and foresight. We navigate the blurred boundaries of business, design, and innovation through in-depth articles from some of the preeminent voices of design thinking, technology, customer experience, and strategy. Idea Couture is a global strategic innovation and experience design firm. It is the innovation unit of Cognizant, and a member of Cognizant Digital Works. We help organizations navigate and innovate in complex and uncertain environments. We use design thinking methodologies to solve problems and exploit business opportunities – generating new growth, meaningful differentiation, and economic value. By taking an insight and foresight lens to our explorations in MISC, we can thoroughly examine the impacts and opportunities for change in a vast range of industries, allowing businesses to plan for the present and the future.

Publisher / Editor-in-Chief Idris Mootee

Theory, So What? 8 Signal, So What? 10

Publishing Advisory Council Dr. Andy Hines Michael Novak Christer Windeløv-Lidzélius Lenore Richards

Insight, So What? 12

Head of Media & Publications Ashley Perez Karp

How Being the Worst is Not the Actual Worst 32

Managing Editor Esther Rogers

When Innovation Labs Don’t Work 48

Editor Mira Blumenthal

In Search of Excellence 52 Future Food Service in the Age of Digital Convenience 84 The End of Purpose 92 Rethinking Excellence for the Imperfect Consumer 94 Experience 107

Art Director / Design Sali Tabacchi, Inc. Additional Design Lena Rubisova Additional Editing Taylor Dennis Dominic Smith

Distribution (US/Canada) Disticor International Distribution Pineapple Media Subscription Enquiries subscription@miscmagazine.com Letters to the Editor letters@miscmagazine.com Contribution Enquiries contribution@miscmagazine.com Advertising Enquires advertising@miscmagazine.com MISC (ISSN 1925-2129) is published by Idea Couture Inc. Canada 241 Spadina Avenue, Suite 500 Toronto, ON M5T 2E2 United States 649 Front Street, Suite 300 San Francisco, CA 94111 United Kingdom 85 Great Eastern Street London, EC2A 3HY

Contributing Writers Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar Charles Andrew Robert Bolton Maya Boritz David Braid Ana Brant Kyle Brown Ian Cosh Christina Doyle Robert Evans Scott Friedmann Theo Forbath Dr. Paul Hartley Dr. Andy Hines Timothy Jason Dr. Marc Lafleur Jayar La Fontaine Robert Merki Ester Moher Christopher Neels Will Novosedlik Gemma Rogers Shane Saunderson Valdis Silins Dr. Michelle Switzer Dr. Rimma Teper Dr. Ted Witek John Wither

Based in Monterrey, Mexico, CEDIM takes a design, innovation, and business comprehensive approach to education. Design is promoted as a core philosophy, and the faculty consists of active, young, and experienced professionals who have expertise in a broad range of fields. Students are engaged with real and dynamic work projects, and are encouraged to immerse themselves in these active projects in order to participate in the realities of the workforce long before graduation. As a result, students at CEDIM develop an extensive sensitivity to their social, economic, and cultural environment, and go on to make real, pragmatic change in the world of design and innovation. cedim.edu.mx

All Rights Reserved 2017. Email misc@miscmagazine.com The advertising and articles appearing within this publication reflect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or editors. We are not to be held accountable for unsolicited manuscripts, artworks or photographs. All material within this magazine is © 2017 Idea Couture Inc.

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Contents

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OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight and Innovation program (SFI) can claim a place at the leading edge of pedagogy and foresight practice. The SFI program is creating a new kind of designer – a strategist who sees the world from a human perspective, rethinks what is possible, and imagines and plans a better future. Recognizing the increasing importance that design thinking can play in positively impacting society, enhancing business success, and managing organizational change, students in the program address the complex dilemmas of contemporary society. This interdisciplinary program interweaves design and foresight methods with social science, systemic design, and business, while providing the skills and knowledge to identify critical issues, frame problems, and develop innovative and humane solutions to better implementation plans.

These are interesting times.

Renowned philosopher Richard Rorty wrote an essay in 1996 called “Looking Backwards from the Year 2096,” which explored 20th century America from the end of the century. Rorty drew on the works of Freud, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Quine, among others. Although he said that “no area of culture, and no period of history gets reality more right than any other,” he maintained that the most optimal society was a liberal democratic one, as it permits competing beliefs to coexist while creating a public community at the same time.

This belief is now being put to the test. Rorty’s vision suggested that we would be experiencing the commencement of the Dark Years in 2014, lasting until 2044. It is now 2017 and post-election, and it’s interesting to reread what he wrote 20 years ago; his narrative allows us to see how much foresight was correct. But regardless of what he got right or wrong, we can agree that we are seeing a major cultural shift in our relationship to the past and future, as well as our perception of “excellence.” Over the last few decades, our past – and our memories of it – have undoubtedly shaped our discussions about the future, particularly around how technology (and artificial intelligence) is going to make our lives either a lot better or a lot worse. We are seeing a major shift away from discussions in which the future and progress are primary topics of conversation. What is the future when it’s no longer an intellectual or philosophical debate but a strategic dialogue that needs to be taken seriously? The philosophical debate should end now. Throughout their book, In Search of Excellence, Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman provide pragmatic ideas on what management should be. Their dialogue, however, sounds much like a couple of romantics talking about design, empowerment, and diversity. “Excellent firms don’t believe in excellence,” says Peters, “only in constant improvement and constant change.” Peters’ ideas were poetic, and those ideas came to be taken seriously in a time when every manager was conditioned by

Taylorism – a system of scientific management advocated by Frederick Winslow Taylor that held the view that the task of factory management was to determine the best way for the worker to do the job. Taylor broke down each job into individual parts, analyzed these to determine the parts that were most essential, and timed workers with a stopwatch. This meant that workers followed a set routine, much like machines, and any unnecessary motion was eliminated, thus increasing productivity. Workplaces in general became mechanic, and this is still the operating paradigm of many organizations today. This laid the foundation of excellence in management, on which Peters built his ideas. The contradiction between the romantic and the scientific cultures in business and management can be seen everywhere. Thinking of the scientific culture as being wedded to the idea that there are truths that reason will discover for us, and the romantic culture as contradicting that idea, has resulted in an ongoing, 50-year-old quarrel. In a world full of theories (social, economic, management), many of them are increasingly less relevant to the world we are developing. Managers are big consumers of theories – but theories don’t create excellence. Creative managers create excellence. In this issue, we allowed Peters’ In Search of Excellence to serve as an inspiration, a baseline from which to explore. In my article, “Still Searching for Excellence,” I break down Peters’ philosophy in comparison to my own for achieving excellence, to see where we diverge and where we come

together. Rob Evans and Gemma Rogers explore excellence within the fintech industry in “Intelligence Delivers Excellence,” while John Wither’s “You’re the Actual Worst” addresses how being the best isn’t always necessary for being excellent. And Ian Cosh takes an anthropological lens to the term in “Excellence: A Cultural Keyword.” Finally, in our special feature, six high profile executives talk about excellence in their respective industries, including Beth Viner, General Manager of Kickstarter, and Alex Knox, Design Director of Dyson. Whatever your definition of excellence, I know that you’re striving toward it. We all are. I hope that we have offered up both interesting and contrasting views on what this term means in a number of fields and that this issue serves as a source of inspiration and a call for action. So how will you define excellence today – and in the future?

Idris Mootee Publisher / Editor-in-Chief

FORESIGHT

Foresight: + Houston Preparing

University of Houston College of Technology Foresight Program

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Theory, so what?

9 In this regular feature, we pick a social theory, explain its relevance to everyday life, and then explore how the theory’s implications could impact the future of your business, industry, or category.

High Modernism

designed around a large central “monumental axis” that knitted together separate commerce and living quarters into a giant city-sized corridor. All public spaces were tightly regimented into archetypal structures, like the stadium and the square, making spontaneous meetings nearly impossible. Streets gave way to roads designed exclusively for cars. The monumental architecture never made noisy, clumsy, and expressive humans feel as though they were a welcome addition to the otherwise austere settings of the city. As Scott writes, “Although it was surely a rational, healthy, rather egalitarian, state-created city, its plans made not the slightest concession to the desires, history, and practices of its residents.” To this day, life in Brasília is a life without crowds, full of voids and quiet, a place that is “to São Paulo or Rio as scientific forestry is to the unplanned forest.” Although the 20th-century era of state-wide command and controlled planning of the natural and social world is largely at an end, elements of its influences persist in management science and practice in both the public and private spheres. Recent world history has not diminished our desire to effectively manage and intervene in human systems, in order to bring them into line with a preconceived vision of excellence. Professional planners maintain the Pollyanna-like belief that collective excellence, given the right technology and the proper plan, can be meticulously planned – in spite of clear evidence to the contrary.

What High Modernism Can Tell Us About the Excesses of Planning and Rationalism

Overview Of the many things that future historians will find curious about the first half of the 20th century, the most remarkable may be the enthusiastic and self-assured way in which powerful professionals sought to restructure whole societies and economies around grand narratives – and the subsequent abject failure of each attempt at large-scale central planning. With the benefit of hindsight, the technological and scientific developments made in the early decades of the 20th century formed a powerful juncture, allowing humans to attempt the scientific management of human affairs. The technologically mediated, state-wide planning efforts of the early 20th century were influenced by an intellectual milieu that included breakthroughs in physics and engineering sciences; the rise of reductionistic psychological research programs, such as psychoanalysis and behaviorism; and radical politics that sought to reshape humans in service of

an ideal future state. These developments made a strong case that human systems could – and should – be organized and managed via emerging telecommunications and media technologies in a way that is analogous to how the flow of electrons is managed in a circuit. Planners even adopted the concept of efficiency from engineering, as the standard of excellence they used to guide their own efforts. The paradigm that emerged from this thinking has been called “high modernism.” Proponents of high modernism believe that the reordering of humans and nature through scientific planning is the golden road to civilizational excellence. In this model, all excess is excised, and the totality works like a perfectly calibrated machine for producing a world of ideological purity. In his book Seeing Like a State, political scientist James C. Scott provides two compelling cases of planning that demonstrate the fragility and stagnation which are the hallmarks of high modernism: the “scientific” forestry practiced by the early German state, and Oscar Niemeyer’s high modernist city, Brasília.

Scott reports that the entry for “forest” in Diderot’s Encyclopédie “is almost exclusively concerned with the utilite publique of forest products and the taxes, revenues, and profits that they can be made to yield.” All other functions of the forest – especially its role as a habitat – are de-emphasized. This is in keeping with the orientation toward forests at the time, which was reflected in the way that forests were exploited, planned, and made uniform and predictable. While easier to manage, these regimented forests, with their low biodiversity and cleared underbrush, were vulnerable to various system shocks, from infestations to fires to soil degradation. The hidden complex of systems that previously governed the homeostasis of the forest had been decimated. A new term, “forest death,” entered the German vocabulary to describe the worst cases. Niemeyer’s design for Brasília also reduced a complex function – this time, the function of human settlements – into highly atomized units that were legible and measurable. Brasília was

A convinced ideologue, assured of the infallibility of his view of history, might attribute failures of state planning to the seditious actions of traitors and the machinations of state enemies. For a systems thinker, on the other hand, the failures of high modernism were caused by system shocks. The proper response to a system shock is not to fervently cling to the same system with its exposed vulnerabilities, to retreat into ideology, or to radicalize. Rather, the proper response is to insulate against the shock by making the system itself more resilient – which is to say that it should be more complex, messy, and adaptable. This will mean that the system’s boundaries need to be redrawn. For an ideologue, this can be an unthinkable task. But thinking in systems means having the humility to recognize that system boundaries are always provisional; the edges of the system will inevitably be vulnerable to disruption in the normal course of the system’s development. A choice-restrictive or highly regimented system may run effectively for some time. However, once conditions outside the system begin to change and impact its function, and once exceptions and contradictions pile up within, the system’s unresponsiveness will make it brittle and vulnerable to shocks. Ideologically, the boundaries of a system can define a non-negotiable worldview. Practically, these boundaries merely circumscribe space for provisionally comprehending a problem and for exploring possible solutions in a flexible way while fully recognizing that our ability to comprehend the world must always and forever fall short.

Weak Signals of a New High Modernism / Technologies like blockchain and IPv6 represent early potential for new connective technologies. These technologies are knitted together and offer a way to assign IP addresses to every object in our lives, creating a new kind of universal metadata that will label, describe, and define things in an increasingly connected ecosystem of objects. / Mongolia’s national post office will start referring to locations by a series of three-word phrases instead of using house numbers and street names. This system, which is designed for the 75% of the earth’s population who have no mailing address, aims to solve issues around opening bank accounts, getting deliveries, and being reached in an emergency. / Rio-based company BVRio plans to use big data to assess whether potential sellers are in compliance with US and European restrictions on illegal wood imports. The group recently took its first step by launching an app that allows buyers to assess the provenance of a wood order by entering its barcode. / myGenome by Veritas Genetics will sequence an entire genome for USD $1,000. The app explains individual genetic health risks and provides updates based on medical advancements. The app’s news feed is also tailored to include the latest developments and innovations specific to an individual’s DNA.

What If? PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

B Y J AYA R L A F O N TA I N E

So What?

/ In what ways might your internal tendencies toward making your customers more comprehensible be creating blind spots in your understanding, and how might these gaps lead you to diminish your customers?

/ How can your business find the right balance between creating legibility around your customers and allowing them to self-organize in spontaneous ways?

/ How will your business resist the tendency toward high modernism when exploring new technologies for making the world legible, like blockchain applications, biosensors, environmental sensors, and big data analytics?

/ In what ways does your view of excellence in your business practices rely on aspects of a high modernist worldview? //// Jayar La Fontaine is a senior foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

Signal, so what?

11 In every issue, we highlight a weak signal and explore its possibilities and ramifications on the future of your business, and how to better prepare for it.

Stumbling Toward Excellence: Wandering and Tolerating Ambiguity

// When we talk about some of the greatest discoveries in science and technology, the moment of discovery is often marked by the metaphor of stumbling upon it. //

pathways, from variation-reducing, Black Swan-exposing bubbles of homophily. For instance, Likeways – a mapping app developed by Martin Traunmueller, a PhD candidate at University College London’s Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities – encourages getting lost in cities and learning to slow down, notice details, and return to what we might call the original big data: sensory experience. You’ll still get from point A to B, only you might learn to tolerate vagueness and uncertainty along the way and discover something you didn’t know you were looking for. The key is this: You can’t force serendipity. You can only provide the conditions to maximize it and encourage a prepared mind to tolerate the unknown. //// Valdis Silins is a senior foresight analyst at Idea Couture.

Overview

So What?

Stumbling – that awkward moment while walking where muscle memory is interrupted, where the fear of being seen, being judged, and being less-than-perfect surges. Self-identity frayed, we regain our walk as quickly as possible. It’s no surprise, then, that we’d hesitate at the thought of a company that is doing well suddenly stumbling. And yet, when we talk about some of the greatest discoveries in science and technology, the moment of discovery is often marked by the metaphor of stumbling upon it. Radar, penicillin, vulcanized rubber, Velcro, the laser. They all have one thing in common: their progenitor didn’t know ahead of time what they would find and, in many instances, interpreted results that stemmed from mistakes or failures rather than successes. But it doesn’t mean these discoveries occurred simply by chance either. As Louis Pasteur wrote, “In the field of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.” These were prepared minds, studious and able to recognize the value of their discoveries, and willing to throw enough darts at a vaguely defined board to maximize their exposure to serendipity. Which is also how Nassim Nicholas Taleb defined his anti-Black Swan strategy – by maximizing exposure to serendipity. A few years later, around 2010, Silicon Valley was abuzz with the concept of “engineering serendipity.” First came CEO Eric Schmidt’s announcement that Google would become a serendipity engine, able to prompt search results that pushed unrelated but serendipitous outcomes to users to wow them in a moment of discovery. Maybe they’re still working on it. Then came the social apps that tried to analyze personal data on networks like Facebook and LinkedIn in order to introduce us to nearby strangers because we shared an interest in the same film, played the same game, or worked with the same colleague. But the clumsy matchmaking of social discovery apps removed the mystery and surprise of meeting someone new, highlighting instead those around us who were “like us.”

Our tendency to associate with people like us, who think like us and hold our values – what sociologists call value homophily – has been accelerated in recent years through the emergence of “filter bubbles” in social media. Algorithmically presenting us with what we’re most likely to click, social feeds reduce our exposure to divergent points of view and pieces of information. By making the world in our image, they reduce our preparedness for unexpected events and ambiguous information, creating feedback loops of less and less prepared minds. However, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Early internet pioneers saw the potential in the world wide web to mirror the functionality of history’s greatest serendipity engine: the city. They saw users as a digital update of the late 19th-century idea of the flâneur – an urban figure who wanders the streets, seeking to expose themselves to new sights, sounds, and pieces of information without a map or plan. But as industrial society boomed, producing more and more goods, shopping malls stepped in to capture that wandering within the confines of a rule-bound, air-conditioned safe space, where the only thing to surprise us anymore was the credit card statement at the end of the month. While history doesn’t necessarily repeat itself, it does rhyme, and what happened to the original flâneur also happened to the digital one: capture. The gardens of GAFA – Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon – reined in our wandering, providing us with paths, efficient routes to delight, and discovery that could be endlessly optimized and personalized. And in a time-strapped world, with more choices about what to buy, who to be, and how to spend our time than ever, efficiency was a potent lure. So what is the way out? Recently, in the context of the increasing connection of people, places, and processes promising to make everything smart, some designers are using digital tools to break us out of our endlessly optimized gardens of delight. As the world becomes software, we’ll need exits from those non-branching

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY VA L DIS SIL IN S

Insight, so what?

13 In every issue, we explore a topic through an anthropological lens in order to better understand its impacts on a wide range of industries.

What Is an Excellent Insight?

The power of an excellent insight lies in its ability to critically reframe our understanding of the problem at hand. Excellent insights are crafted by anthropologists, trained in the art of exploring all the strange and wonderful contexts that shape and underpin the experiences we seek to understand. An excellent insight is a kind of excavation; it is an unearthing of meaning that exposes the taken-for-granted assumptions that make up what counts as common sense. American anthropologist Clifford Geertz was well known for what he called a “thick description of culture” – an explanation of human action and experience that relies on context to unpack the meaning of how and why we do the things we do. Geertz often described the significance of the thick description using the

A pharmaceutical company asked us to help them understand the “moment” of injection undertaken by people required to self-inject medication to control a series of autoimmune diseases. The client believed that by understanding the moment of injection, they would be able to provide support services that would improve the patient experience. By exploring the broader experience of illness, we discovered that there is in fact is no “moment” of injection; the injection experience transcends the entire treatment journey and is only one of many difficulties that make up the broader experience of people who live with these diseases. This understanding of the problem recast the client’s hypotheses and led to a series of service designs that better address the holistic experiences of their patients.

A global shipping and logistics organization asked us to help them redesign one of their key offerings by fixing what they believed to be the stickiest pain point for their customers. However, our ethnographic insights uncovered that this pain point was actually quite irrelevant to the company’s customers; it was a complex operational problem that, for the most part, lived below the line of customer visibility. There were actually several other key service touchpoints that were far more critical to experience of their customers. This shift in understanding the problem led us to design a future CX that targeted the parts of the journey that mattered most to the company’s customers.

A title insurance provider was looking to improve uptake of a digital platform for lawyers by understanding its value for users. They believed a lack of clarity on cost and time savings was a key barrier to use. Insights uncovered the fact that the central problem was actually that they didn’t understand what mattered to their core users, who were actually clerks. This shift in understanding both the problem and core users led us to create a set of design principles and target critical areas for redesign that addressed the needs of the users that mattered. ////

Patient Experience Design: Understanding the “Moment” of Injection

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

In the economy of innovation consulting, insights are an important currency. Insights are how we package our understandings of human experience, and they are bought and sold every day because business leaders know that the human context is the heart and soul of meaningful and differentiated offerings. Insight is core to how consultancies deliver value and how they power up the innovation process. So, what makes an insight excellent?

example of the difference between a blink and a wink. On the surface, the blink and wink of an eye may appear identical; both gestures consist of a rapid shutting of the eyelid. However, there is a world of difference between these two seemingly similar movements. One is an autonomic physiological reflex, part of how our body moistens our eyes and keeps them free from dirt and debris. The other is pregnant with social meaning; it could be a conspiratorial gesture, a way to convey a secret message across the room, or even an expression of sexual desire. The point is that only a thick description of the blink/wink provides us with enough context to decipher the difference. By excavating the context surrounding it, we start to see the gesture in an entirely new light. As anthropologists working in the context of innovation, we apply a thick description to the projects we do, and in doing so, we are able to share narratives about human experience that reframe the client’s understanding of the problems they are trying to solve. Whereas most researchers might ask, “how do you like your steak?” we prefer to ask, “why are you eating? How does eating make you feel? When do you choose to cook, and when do you prefer to eat out?” By asking these kinds of questions, we recast human experience, showing it in a new light and gaining new perspectives for problem solving. Over the years, I have worked with many great anthropologists to bring this level of understanding to clients. The following three cases illustrate the power of an excellent insight to reframe critical assumptions and show new ways of solving a business problem.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

B Y D R. E M M A A I K E N - K L A R

Designing the Future of International Logistics: Mistaking Operations for Service Experience

Financial Product Redesign: Understanding Value for Core Users

Dr. Emma Aiken-Klar is VP, Human Insights at Idea Couture.

Excellence: A Cultural Keyword

Excellence is an abstract noun and is part of a word family that includes the adjective excellent and the verb excel. These are English descendants of the Latin excellere, meaning to rise above others, to be eminent or lofty. The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb excel as “to surpass others” in the performance of some action or in the possession of some quality. Excellent refers to something that excels, and excellence is “the state or fact of excelling.”

Words are influenced by the physical nature of our species. The excellence word family communicates superiority through the physical imagery of rising. In human experience, through our evolutionary adaptation to our environment, height has become a competitive advantage. If we had evolved on a planet made entirely of gas in which we floated around, we would probably have different imagery for talking about achievement and advantage. Even on Earth, there are many creatures who would not share the human assumption that it is better to be tall or to occupy a higher position in our physical space, because things don’t work the same way in other lifeworlds as they do in our own. For example, if dolphins, bats, and groundhogs had ideas of superiority, they probably wouldn’t communicate them in terms of rising above others. Even trees, for whom rising is important, might place equal or greater value on what goes on below, at their roots. Words are also influenced by our social systems. What does the definition of excellence tell us about the society that produced and uses it? The society must be competitive, and it must believe the outcome of competition is good. The concept of excellence is inherently competitive; logically, in order for some to surpass, others must be outdone. Excellence can only exist in scarce quantities. And the dictionaries suggest it is also a good quantity – with only a few exceptions, words in the excel family are used for

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY IAN COSH

// The concept of excellence is inherently competitive; logically, in order for some to surpass, others must be outdone. //

activities or characteristics that are socially valued. By contrast, when we refer to exceptional levels of things not valued, we typically turn to the word family of excess. An excellent performance is a good thing; an excessive performance is bad. Knowing the rule that distinguishes excellence from excess would tell us a lot about a given culture. But aren’t all societies competitive? Isn’t competitiveness universal? And, therefore, doesn’t every culture have an equivalent concept of excellence that they value? Not quite. Actually, humans have created a wide variety of social systems that regulate competition in different ways. For example, most hunter-gatherer cultures have had “leveling mechanisms” to limit how much an individual can excel. No one is (or was) ever praised for being an excellent hunter or gatherer; on the contrary, an exceptionally productive person is likely to be mocked. Food, shelter, and luxury goods are shared equally regardless of who produces more. There is still competition within hunter-gatherer societies, especially for sex and marriage. But the culture is designed to discourage competition and limit its effects, perhaps because this helps keep the peace and ensure collective survival. Being an excellent worker in many traditional societies of southern Africa or (pre-colonial) Aboriginal communities in northern Canada might make it easier for you to pair up with the sexual partner of your choice, but it will not

gain you much else. Furthermore, it would be dangerous for anyone to call you “excellent” in a society like this, as aspiring to excellence would mark you as a threat to society. The extent to which such hunter-gatherer traditions still survive today is debated among anthropologists, but it is clear that this egalitarian ethos was the bedrock of many cultures prior to colonialism. Today, this is worlds away from the culture we’ve become accustomed to – one that celebrates excellence in centers, mission statements, and LinkedIn profiles. It would be difficult to translate the concept of excellence into the language of a hunter-gatherer society or within the semantics of other pre-capitalist societies. This translation would require us to explain not only the dictionary definition of excellence, but also its emotional meanings and its connection to individuals’ self-esteem, which begins developing in childhood. Children are socialized in schools, where teachers praise excellent work and excellence is shown as a category in grades or on report cards – even if some students never achieve this desired outcome, it is always waiting to be fulfilled. Excellent means an A or A+, the top of the ranking system. Parents are deeply concerned about their children’s ranking, because they believe it will influence their child’s future wealth and status; this can profoundly affect how parents relate to their children and can make them happy, angry, stressed, or even sad about their child’s status. The early attachment experiences of children, which shape their lifelong habits of relating to themselves and others, occur within this emotional field of excellence. It should also be noted that as university administrations have increasingly embraced the term excellence, rates of anxiety and depression among university students have gone up. Correlation does not prove causation, but we would be wise to study the psychological effects of excellence considering how intensely we inculcate it in our children. There is much that an alien observer might find interesting about our culture of excellence, including this: The text that informs the religious beliefs of more than half the world’s population tells the story of a god who created the universe in six days. According to most English translations of this ancient text, on the sixth day of creation, the god concluded his work when he saw it was “very good” – not excellent, just “very good.” This is how most English speakers have understood their god, and it is intriguing, because at most universities in the English speaking world, “very good” is a B+, a grade that will rarely get you a scholarship or admission to grad school. Many parents would not allow their children to settle for less than “excellent,” So it seems that a remarkable culture shift has occurred whereby the youth of the culture are expected to do better than their god at creation. It is valuable to ask certain questions to ourselves: When and why did humanity, or at least our part of it, become obsessed with being excellent? Can we learn something from societies that place greater importance on collective achievements and on being just “good enough”? Where is the drive for excellence taking us and our planet? Ambivalence about excellence may already be unconsciously expressed in our popular culture. Consider how many of us enjoyed the transparently absurd motto of Buzz Lightyear (from the movie Toy Story): “To infinity… and beyond!” It’s interesting that he was such a popular character; the fact that we found him both likeable as well as ridiculous says a lot about us. After all, laughter is often a way of expressing ambivalence about our values – in this case, excellence. //// Ian Cosh is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

In Search of Excellence, written by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman and published in 1982, is arguably one of the most popular business books of all time. With the release of this title, Peters ushered in the trend of the business guru, which has since grown tremendously thanks to the many self-proclaimed experts and their easy access to a blog platform and YouTube channel. The book was a fine piece of work, with the authors analyzing 62 organizations for financial performance over a 20-year period across multiple industries, concluding and publishing some of their best practices. Peters brought a fresh voice and new inspiration to the world of business management and pioneered management styles that are very popular today. In short, many of his ideas still matter.

Many organizations in the book, however, have disappeared – including Digital Equipment Corp and Emerson – while some are thriving – such as McDonald’s, Johnson & Johnson, Caterpillar, and Boeing. But given the tumultuous and disruptive business environment of the last decade, the companies that are still here are definitely masters at survival and transformation, if nothing else. The book’s list of companies, of course, does not include newer giants like Apple, Amazon, GE, Google, Uber, Tesla, and Walmart, which are probably considered the most successful businesses of all time. The question is, if we were to use the same methodology as in the book and apply it to business today, what top ten companies would we end up with? Would Amazon, Google, Tesla, and Facebook make the list? In business, what does “excellence” really mean? If you ask 10 CEOs and 10 business professors, you will get 20 different answers. The main challenges faced by CEOs and their boards today are disruptive business models, low-cost competitors, and finding growth in a post-growth era. Many industries are faced with structural challenges, while the rapid shifting needs of customers are now spurring interest in design thinking as a way to help companies solve wicked problems. As the progress of technology accelerates – allowing every person, organization, and even object

to be interconnected – local problems can quickly become amplified and uncontrollable. As our world is becoming more connected, the need for global collaboration and solutions has never been greater. Many of our global issues and crises are interrelated and cannot be solved by a single domain, government, or organization. We need to approach these challenges in a systemic manner, and that demands new levels of thinking. Management was originally designed for a very different kind of world – one that involved managing repetitive tasks, improving economic efficiency and labor productivity, and increasing automation. On the other hand, Peter Drucker represents the story of the rise of modern management, which fueled the increase of dispersed, global, multinational corporations. In the 1940s, Drucker introduced the idea of decentralization, which became the bedrock principle for virtually every large organization in the world. Having worked with some of the best companies and CEOs over the last 20 years with a focus on strategic innovation, I have my own list of practices that were published in my book, Design Thinking for Strategic Innovation. It would be interesting to compare this to Peters’ and see how the world has or hasn’t changed over the last 30 years. Between these two lists, I invite you to pick your own top five.

Tom Peters’ List A Bias for Action This is Peters’ “ready, shoot, aim” philosophy. There is no room for “paralysis by analysis” – organizations must focus on lots of small, experimental trials, learn from inevitable mistakes, and try again. Fail fast, fail often.

Stay Close to the Customer Customers “intrude” on every nook and cranny of a company, are highly valued, and are often considered partners or stakeholders. There is an obsession with quality, reliability, and customer service. Customers truly are the queens and kings – not “necessary evils.”

A Mindset of Autonomy and Entrepreneurship Innovation is pushed to the front lines as a primary responsibility. Risk-taking, “bootlegging,” and “championing” are encouraged. Employees are not penalized when things go wrong. Successful products or program champions rise quickly up the ranks.

Stick to the Knitting Robert Wood Johnson, founder of Johnson & Johnson, said, “Never get into businesses you don’t know thoroughly or know how to run.” The most excellent of companies expanded and diversified primarily internally, taking one small, manageable step at a time.

Simple Form, Lean Staff Contain risks and get out if it’s not working. One employee, one boss: this is all about the “flat organization.” People know who they report to, and organization realignments are rare. Responsibility for results, along with commensurate authority and resources, is pushed far down the line. Warren Buffett is said to require just one piece of paper from his division presidents in advance of the upcoming fiscal year with just two numbers to which they commit: revenues and net profits before taxes.

Simultaneous Loose-Tight Properties The key values of the organization (quality, service, ethics, etc.) are articulated and known. All employees are charged with tightly adhering to these values, but employees are given wide latitude as to how the daily business is done. A “cookie cutter” approach is rare.

Idris Mootee’s List

The Search Is Not Over

Become a Design Thinking Organization

Maintain Fluid Organizational Boundaries

Companies need to be better at solving problems. Design thinking is an intellectual process that integrates both the emotional and the rational, combining left- and right-brain thinking. It creates order by working with other modes of thinking and closing information gaps. By leveraging the best of both analytical and design thinking, it establishes a more sensitive, powerful, and potent analytical tool kit that escalates a company’s thinking and processes to a new level. In contrast to the “hard management systems” of organizational structure, employee hierarchies, and processes, design thinking is comprised of “soft management systems” – it’s the creativity, sensibility, empathy, and social bonding that holds an organization together and brings out the imagination of its people.

Rigid definitions of business and organizational boundaries are causing companies to consciously ignore or turn a blind eye to the fact that their business models have expired. Firms today need to understand how to create flexible organizational design and structures so that talent can be moved around and people can bring their distinct skills and expertise to organizations on an ad-hoc basis. Since business activities are becoming more and more knowledge-intensive and creative-driven, effective utilization of internal and external experts who can bring distinct expertise to the organization is increasingly important; this is blurring the formal boundaries that once were.

The Need for Speed and Agility

For the last three decades, the rapid growth of information systems has led to the wide application of technology in the workspace and has become part of our everyday workflow and management decision systems. We started researching human-computer interaction (HCI), which aims to present ergonomic properties such as friendliness, usability, and transparency. Modern machines don’t just process information; they are managing many things on our behalf and could even begin to manage people. Firms must now navigate how human-machine cooperation (HMC) can be leveraged to address the new stakes that have come into play as a result of this. The new forms of human-machine relationships will involve machine learning and AI, to the point that every manager will have an AI colleague as part of their team. The question is not about training managers to be team members, but rather about training machines to fill that role.

Agility is the ability of an organization to renew itself, adapt, and change quickly in a rapidly shifting, ambiguous, turbulent environment. While management strives to achieve stability when there isn’t any, embracing agile methods in business management can help companies handle change – or even benefit from it. But for big, successful companies, it’s extremely difficult to get agile. These companies have a legacy. They have grown, and most of them have been successful by actually using what we call a “managerial hierarchy” – a classical way of managing from the top down, with strict job descriptions, specific boxes to tick, linear hierarchies, and clearly defined structures and process descriptions. But now they are trying to experiment and become more agile, give employees space, and allow them to embrace failure, allowing employees to build more solid relationships and partake in life-long learning.

Practice Strategic Foresight A lot of managers understand the value of foresight, but most don’t know how to make it tangible or integrate it into business strategy planning. Firms don’t need to master this; rather, they need to be humble students of practicing strategic foresight. Foresight is not “planning,” in which one needs to consider a multitude of factors in the present operational environment while employing finance measures and extrapolating data for future use. Instead, foresight considers first what the future could hold before giving you multiple visions to allow for a meaningful strategic dialogue and, subsequently, a roadmap to close any competency gaps between today’s market and tomorrow’s. Foresight is very outward-focused and future-oriented, whereas strategic planning is market-focused and operations-oriented.

Manage Human-Computer Relationships

Striving for excellence indeed lives on in today’s business world, and Peters’ principles largely remain relevant. Yet, refreshing what we define as “excellent” and how we get to that point is necessary if businesses are to succeed in today’s uncertainties. We are all facing an environment that has been exacerbated in recent years by, among other things, globalization or the end of globalization and the growing interconnectedness of the world – and the search for excellence has never been more important. //// Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture.

Create a Human Story We are seeing the end of the command and control era. Financial incentives alone cannot motivate employees, partners, and stakeholders. Firms need purpose-driven, growth-oriented narratives that elicit emotional inputs and responses from stakeholders and partners; these should infuse the organization with optimism while offering the opportunity to uncover anxieties about the future. This creates stronger internal bonds between stakeholders – both within and outside of the organization – by using human-centric narratives to foster a common purpose. Here, diverse personal feelings, perspectives, assumptions, expectations, and aspirations can be shared, illustrated, and addressed by everyone involved. The resulting dialogue allows organizations to accommodate and unify a large number of diverse perspectives that may or may not initially align. This newfound cohesion allows the newly energized organization to become more fluid, agile, and efficient.

// If you ask 10 CEOs and 10 business professors what excellence is, you will get 20 different answers. //

// It takes vigilance and energy to overcome the presumption that in achieving excellence, one’s work is done. //

Pursuit of Excellence

B Y T H EO FO R B AT H

PHOTO: MILLES STUDIO

Paradox of Perfection

The New Yorker ran an essay by Tad Friend describing the growing effect of entrepreneurial boot camp Y Combinator on the prevailing ethos of Silicon Valley and the funding practices of venture capitalists. The piece profiled Sam Altman, the successor to Y Combinator’s founder and its guiding spirit, Paul Graham. If Graham’s name sounds familiar, it’s because he was co-founder of Viaweb in 1995, by general report the first application service provider (and, by his own description, the first software-as-a-service company). Viaweb was later bought by Yahoo for $49M – no doubt incentivizing Graham to a life of both invention and venture investing. A computer scientist, he also wrote the first Bayesian spam filter, for which we can all be grateful. Two decades later, Graham is a leading light in the Silicon Valley ecosystem who has driven major advances in our innovative technology-driven economy. He’s an essayist in his own right and a widely applauded thinker with respect to innovation and venture capital. Not coincidentally, he’s a champion of thoughtful design. In addition to earning his BA at Cornell and his MBA at Harvard, he studied painting at the Rhode Island School of Design and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence. As Graham’s successor, Altman also has serious chops, including acting as co-founder with Elon Musk of OpenAI, the nonprofit focused on ensuring that artificial intelligence doesn’t grow so strong that it threatens humanity’s existence.

Friend’s article on Altman is a fascinating read – well worth the quarter-hour it takes to get through. As I read it, it struck me how professionalized and formulaic the practice of fostering young businesses has become in Silicon Valley. Maybe one size doesn’t fit all in the world of so-called “seed capital,” but it does appear from reading Friend’s essay that the Y Combinator model – which has helped startups worth some $80B – is a process that works, that young companies strive to get into, and that produces the occasional unicorn. I also found myself being reminded of the importance of the principles of design thinking not only for startups, but also for established companies seeking to innovate and even revolutionize their own businesses. Innovation today is very much about a pursuit of excellence – even perfection – that can never be realized. Does the Y Combinator process always work? I’m sure not. But it surely reminds us of the fragility of any innovation. “Excellence” is a word describing something that has reached its zenith. “Perfection” signifies something that cannot be improved. In the technology realm, achieving excellence and realizing perfection are no longer enough. Today, reaching an objective and then standing still is a failure. The moment a company considers its product or service to be fully realized is the moment it sits back – and the process of exploring new designs, applications, and alternatives for meeting the needs of customers ends. That’s not success. It’s how innovation falls into irrelevance. It takes vigilance and energy to overcome the presumption that in achieving excellence, one’s work is done.

Designing For Success? We’re Not Done Yet.

Technology, Yes. But Also Context.

Waterfall to agile. Dialoguing to ethnographic research. Real-time design to prototyping and testing. Lean start, fast fail. Even as the phrase “design thinking” has become widely known and is so in vogue and relevant now, it’s useful to be reminded why it works. We’re at the point where we can look beyond the phrase to what it signifies. Design thinking is a process of fostering human innovation. It’s human-based, and it’s generative of ideas. It’s iterative and cumulative. And it’s never over. That’s why design thinking is critical. Our conception of what is excellent today can be eclipsed in a heartbeat because of what technology enables. Simply put, the bar for realizing perfection will keep getting raised because the barriers to entry are so low. Technology is not only progressively more powerful and less expensive, but it is also a great leveler: All innovation builds on previous breakthroughs, and the process is blindingly fast. That’s not all. The de-capitalization of technology, its economic democratization, and its globalization is allowing for new forms of innovation that allow us to anticipate, express, react to, and even help shape cultural nuances that matter. What does that mean? It means changing behaviors and new paradigms, and it means new expectations on the part of consumers. Take instant messaging services. These days, we don’t pick up a telephone in the hopes that a friend or colleague will answer, or plan to leave a message if they don’t. Instead, we send a quick text message to learn if they have time to talk. Not only has communication technology evolved, but human beings have also moved beyond preexisting technologies. A member of the millennial generation considers it almost an affront to receive a phone call while they’re working without first checking on their availability (I’ve seen them roll their eyes). It’s not that technology has evolved. It’s that human behavior has evolved because of technology. The concept of excellence in communications has changed – and will continue to change. The bar keeps moving. Up.

This doesn’t mean achieving excellence is unattainable. It does mean companies can never stop striving. Companies like Apple and Tesla are the poster children for everything that has worked well in the last decade in technology; but you can bet they are not only looking for the Next Big Thing (like everyone), but are maniacally focused on continual improvements to their products, services, and cloud-based “infotainment” ecosystem. It’s not about technology, it’s about how people interact with their products, services, and brand experiences, and what they enable us to do. Similarly, take the directional application which allows drivers to guide others to the best route through their devices. Use it to drive in any large metropolitan area today, and you can easily come to appreciate an app that is constantly checking all the traffic. Where the choke points are, where the potholes and accidents are. (And, yes, even cops with a speed gun.) It’s real-time data that tells you the best way to go. Waze defines excellence by how it can remove friction in a situation where there’s a lot of it: real, physical, sticky friction that slows us down, frustrates us, wears us out, and makes us late. But in actuality, Waze creates moments of delight. By removing friction, it makes us feel superhuman. The app sits at the intersection of technology capability, data-gathering, processing power, and social interaction. Together, these create contextualized information to meet real human needs.

The Challenge? Which Waze Forward. That is how best to present the challenge to today’s companies, both large and small. The challenge of constant innovation – a pursuit of excellence, even perfection – is how brands create magic, but the work is never complete. There’s always another step based on how humans interact with technology and design. That’s why ongoing efforts to develop technologies like wearables and virtual reality are evolving so rapidly: As new ideas emerge, they have to be proven to work in the realm of real human use. Studies are showing that the rate of adoption for wearables, for example, is very high; but the abandonment rate is extremely high as well, with most adopters dropping the technology in 60 to 90 days. That’s human behavior, demonstrating the success of their interactions with technology by voting with their feet, as it were. So, the work is never finished. And that’s why the cycle continues, because brands strive to achieve excellence and strain for perfection. Perhaps they should never be convinced they’ve gotten there at all. //// Theo Forbath is global vice president, digital transformation at Cognizant Technology Solutions.

editorial excellence award winning insight, foresight, and design 2016 FO LIO: E D DIE A N D OZ ZIE A WA R D S EDI TO R I A L T E A M O F T H E Y E A R (W IN N ER) B-TO-B – FE AT U R E D ESIG N U N D ER 10 0,0 0 0 CIR C U L AT IO N FO R T H E FU T U R E AC C O R DIN G TO W O M EN (W IN N ER)

We are honored to receive the 2016 Folio: Eddie and Ozzie Award for Editorial Team of the Year. MISC continues to strive for excellence in journalism and design, pushing formal boundaries and providing a platform for innovation’s most thoughtful and provocative voices. In addition to being named Editorial Team of the Year, MISC has been recognized for the high-quality content and design of our features, The Future According to Women and The Collapse of the American Family Ideal. The MISC editorial team would like to send a heartfelt thank you to our contributors and readers. It’s you that we serve in our continuous pursuit of editorial excellence.

H O N O R A B LE M E N T IO N S B-T O- B – SIN G LE A R T IC LE I N

B-T O- B – SIN G LE A R T IC LE FO R

D ESIG N/A DV ER T ISI N G/M A R K I N G FO R

T H E C O LL A P S E O F T H E A M ER ICA N

T H E FU T U R E AC C O R DIN G TO W O M EN

FA MILY ID E A L

Why Are We Here? In the research-based pharmaceutical industry, we strive to translate scientific knowledge into effective therapies, and to do that better than anyone else. The transition of a drug from discovery and development to its commercialization involves many talents in the marketing and sales discipline. The goal is to have as many patients as possible be prescribed a drug, who will benefit from its effects in a medically rational way. Helping patients in the context of a profitable business that invests in future therapies and cures is a very admirable vocation. In the process of the marketing and sales activities, there is a desire to achieve, for example, excellence in a marketing campaign or selling methods and skills that justify a waving banner. Sales strategists may lose focus, however, identifying a plethora of often-inward competencies expected of a salesperson. In fact, many competencies are administrative in nature, with some believing that there is more effort in measuring competencies than developing those that may count to the customer. Product knowledge and selling skills are an important part of business; but gilding the lily to the point of insanity really has no place. The customer is almost abandoned for a checklist of introspective selling traits. While efforts to get physician feedback are indeed quite prevalent, it is important that what is being evaluated in these surveys is truly relevant in what will meet physician and patient needs.

Observations from Pharma: Developing Excellence as an Outward Trait

There is no shortage of the use of the word “excellence” in the pharmaceutical industry. Often descending from corporate headquarters onto operating units like a religious ceremony (that some HR colleagues like to label “change management”), organizations are introduced to expensive consultants who will transform it to the promised land of excellence: “Sales Excellence,” “Marketing Excellence,” “Centers of Excellence,” “Executional Excellence,” and so on. In my personal experience, and of those of whom I interviewed for this article, some of these initiatives were actually well thought out and all had the best of intentions for the organization. But that was exactly the problem – the focus was always inward.

// Product knowledge and selling skills are an important part of business; but gilding the lily to the point of insanity really has no place. //

PHOTO: VICTOR TORRES

B Y D R. T E D W I T E K

Who is the Customer? The primary customers whose perception is most valuable are patients, physicians, and payers. It is through their eyes that excellence matters most, but what matters most to each of them differs – with the exception of the commonality of health and happiness. For example, the patient wants to feel well; the physician wants to contribute to that feeling in the most efficient manner; and the payer wants that endpoint achieved with the most value for their dollar. Very often, the pursuit of excellence in pharma organizations misses all three of these due to a faulty inward focus. As one of my most respected colleagues, Jeff Huth of Boehringer Ingelheim, has cautioned, “the industry far too often views the patient as the person in our clinical trials, the person who swallows our pill, the person who watches our commercials on TV. What we keep missing is the opportunity to apply extraordinary industry competencies to truly close gaps in care, with our medicine as the hub of these efforts. Most attempts at patient engagement over the past 30 years have been both a waste of time and money.” The answers are not easy but should not necessarily be complex. Perhaps involvement in social determinants of healthcare, such as more basic needs like food, housing, transport, and relationship gaps, will provide necessary wellness foundations needed prior to implementing complex and often expensive technologies and therapies.

The Emergence of Outward Excellence The ability to view excellence through the scope of others may be seeing signs of life through some recent examples. One involves the ever-increasing number of effective chemotherapeutic agents being developed in the pharmaceutical industry. The healthcare system is left to absorb this expansion of agents and their indications and combinations. In Canada, for example, waiting times for chemotherapy were suboptimal with limited resources for additional clinics and caregivers. The objectives, as described in a summary report in Healthcare Quarterly, were to treat more patients, have them wait less, and not increase staff or clinic size. Despite developing effective drugs, one company, Roche Canada, went above and beyond their drug development expertise to help integrate their care by arranging for and funding a medical process engineer. It was found that the root cause of most patient flow bottlenecks was the closely linked, linear nature of the pre-treatment events. Temporal decoupling of these linear and dependent events (by placing patients on alternate day treatment schedules so that most upfront procedures, like drawing blood, were complete before scheduled treatment) suggested more efficient use of physical and human resources, smoother patient flow, and more satisfied patients. This is an example of outward directed excellence by pharma. Another example is found in an April 2016 press release describing the updated pricing policy of Kalobios, a company with some tarnished elements that needed polishing. Their pricing foundation is now based on patient and payer affordability, stakeholder transparency, and reasonable return for the organization that was taking the risk of development. Acknowledging no original research on their drug, they will now forgo any R&D premium and instead set the bar for reasonable profits with transparent stakeholder input and price increases limited to inflation. For most external stakeholders, this is a model of excellence and its fruition and implementation of the model will be refreshing to observe when it happens. Who knows, maybe other industries will follow.

Excellence: What Is Heard from Customers, Not What Is Told Despite the good intentions of many organizations to wave a banner of excellence, few programs have truly closed gaps in care – despite the development of some very exciting drugs. Only when one looks outward can they truly apply both good intentions and unique competencies to implement therapeutics into heath systems. Otherwise, it is celebrating excellence at halftime – and no one should drink champagne at halftime. //// Dr. Ted Witek is a professor and senior fellow at the University of Toronto and senior VP of corporate partnerships and chief scientific officer at Innoviva.

B Y M AYA B O R I T Z A N D CHRISTINA DOYLE

It has been predicted that, by 2030, Denmark will have no citizens with Down syndrome. Advances in prenatal screening mean that signs of the genetic condition, which is caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21, can be detected more easily, less expensively, and with less risk. According to The Copenhagen Post, upon discovering this extra chromosome, 95–98% of Danish women choose to terminate their pregnancies. In North America, this rate is not far behind at 90%. If these trends continue, Down syndrome will soon cease to exist. So, what do we, as a society, lose when people with Down syndrome disappear?

Robb Scott is the father of Turner, a 5-year-old boy with Down syndrome. In a tearful video that recently went viral, Scott speaks about how his son’s condition has been life changing. “Down syndrome is literally one of the most beautiful things that has ever happened in my life,” he tells the camera. “It’s fun, it’s brilliant, it’s amazing, it’s funny, it’s kind, it’s loving, it’s cuddly. They’re great teachers, people with Down syndrome. It’s not an illness. It’s not even a disability.” Karen Gaffney, a long-distance swimmer, public speaker, and woman living with Down syndrome, wonders if there “will be a tomorrow for people like [her].” In a recent TEDx talk she gave called “All Lives Matter,” Gaffney talks about people living with Down syndrome who are “accomplished musicians and artists… golfers, dancers, models, actors, and public speakers, as well as good employees making significant contributions to their companies and communities.” An advocate for the inclusion of people with Down syndrome and other disabilities, Gaffney concludes that, “Down syndrome is a life worth saying yes to.” And yet, through a series of individual choices being made by many families, we are marching ever closer to a world in which Down syndrome does not exist.

PHOTO: SLAVA BOWMAN

In the Shadow of Excellence: Exploring the Dark Side of Progress

The idea of building a healthier, happier, more “perfect” society is not new. Since the beginning of human history, we have systematically tried to control, shape, and enhance our interactions with the environment around us. As we become more advanced in our knowledge of the world, assisted by science and technology, we augment our ability to design and optimize a growing number of variables. We are on the cusp of an era where we can influence and improve every aspect of our lives – including ourselves. According to Dr. Yuval Noah Harari, author of Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, striving for something better is fundamental to human nature. “Humans are rarely satisfied with what they already have,” he says. “The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more... Success breeds ambition, and our recent achievements are now pushing humankind to set itself even more daring goals.” Harari argues that what we are setting our collective sights on is overcoming death and hardship and upgrading humans to have god-like powers. “If we ever have the power to engineer death and pain out of our system, that same power will probably be sufficient to engineer our system in almost any manner we like,” Harari explains. But as humans gain the power to achieve this apex of excellence, what do we give up in return? What sacrifices are we making along the way? What lies in the shadows of our ongoing pursuit of perfection? As we design the future of humanity, we must make a point of understanding the implications of our choices. Genetic selection isn’t the only advancement that raises ethical questions; autonomous vehicles are becoming a divisive topic as well. Business Insider predicts that by 2020 there will be more than 10 million self-driving cars on our roads. Fueling the current adoption of this technology is an emphasis on public safety and protecting people’s lives. A recent New York Times article, “Self Driving Cars Gain a Powerful Ally,” reported that government and auto safety regulators are embracing self-driving cars due to the belief that “the nation’s highways will be safer with more cars driven by machines and not people.” This belief is well-supported by research: over 90% of car accidents are due to driver errors, while auto accidents result in 40,000 deaths each year, according to the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Regulators predict that self-driving cars could save tens of thousands of lives a year. After all, these machines don’t drive drunk, fall asleep at the wheel, or text while driving. But then there are the other 10% of car accidents – the ones that are due to environmental factors like bad weather, mechanical failures, and unexpected events that even self-driving cars cannot avoid. These accidents bring to light inevitable ethical dilemmas. Let’s say you are in a self-driving car and the brakes fail. The car can either slam into a wall, killing you and the other passengers in the car, or it can swerve and kill a group

of nearby pedestrians. Which people should the car be programmed to harm, and which should it protect? Should the algorithm controlling the car always act in a way that minimizes the number of people killed? Does it matter if one or more of these people are children? What if one is a doctor, while another is a criminal? These types of dilemmas were addressed by a group of researchers in a study published in Science and on an accompanying website, Moral Machine. In their study, Jean-François Bonnefon, Azim Shariff, and Iyad Rahwan examined how people thought self-driving cars should behave when faced with a range of hypothetical accidents that would result in the death of either a car’s occupants or pedestrians. The researchers found that most people believed the cars should be programmed to behave in whatever way minimized the loss of life. Yet the study also found that most people would not want to purchase one of these cars themselves. Instead, they preferred to purchase a car with an algorithm that would protect them and their family as passengers at all costs. As this study illustrates, and as Dr. Harari argues in Homo Deus, there are many significant ethical issues to unpack as society begins to delegate authority and decision-making to machines and their algorithms. As we advance further in perfecting our lives through technology like self-driving cars, environmental systems (such as food production) are also ripe for disruption. With global food security issues a focus of the Millennium Development Goals, the scientific community has directed attention to the promises of synthetic biology, or “synbio.” Many scientists believe synbio might hold the key to creating equity and sustainability in food access. Although food security has made great strides in the last decade, the United Nations reports that in 2015, more than 793 million people across the world remained undernourished. Many different factors affect access to food, including a country’s economic growth, environmental issues, and political instability; thus, access to food remains inequitable in many countries around the world. While genetically modified organisms (GMOs) may offer opportunities to alleviate world hunger, research has sparked contentious debate on the many risks involved with GMOs, including studies from the UK Council for Science and Technology in March of 2014. Although GMOs and synbio products are often conflated, GMOs borrow highly desired genetic features from one organism and integrate them into another to produce resilient, high-yield crops, while synbio uses original genetic sequences to create new food options altogether. According to MIT, there are two distinct differences in synbio – specifically, the design of novel biological components and systems, and the redesign of existing ones. Synbio has been hailed by many as the next industrial revolution. This method of engineering new life and products has offered the hope that we may come to

// As humans gain the power to achieve this apex of excellence, what do we give up in return? //

explored many of the potential dangers of synbio, from bioterrorism to unintentional negative impacts of new organisms on the natural ecosystem. Still, the report concluded that where synbio can offer a greater margin of excellence, it should be considered as an alternative to current approaches. By deselecting certain genes in the interest of creating a genetically-optimized society, delegating driving to machines to save thousands of lives, and moving away from modern food production practices in favor of more efficient and science-driven ones, we are carving a path toward what we imagine to be a better, more perfect future. However, there are implications and consequences for these decisions – including those that are unintended and unknown. As technology advances and we evolve along with it, we are at risk of losing meaningful parts of our society. Now is the time to understand both what we are trying to achieve and what it might cost us. Our desire to achieve excellence and mastery of human life requires more critical dialogue and thoughtful exploration into the shadows of our well-intentioned pursuit. //// Maya Boritz is the VP of customer experience and innovation at SAMETRICA. Christina Doyle is an innovation strategist at Idea Couture.

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PHOTO: NATHAN ANDERSON

understand the complicated living systems around us and be able to subsequently transform life on earth altogether. Allied Market Research predicts that synbio will comprise a $38B market by 2020, with engineering of new products directly impacting and improving medicine, food, and environmental systems. The World Bank estimates that more than 37% of land is dedicated to agriculture around the world; synbio applications could allow much of this land to be used for other purposes. The United Nations estimates that the global population will increase by 2 billion people by 2050; as a result, we are likely to experience a completely different food production and distribution system in the future. A new lab-based system – one that is not premised on the use of inefficient and environmentally straining agricultural practices – could help reduce the use of freshwater, pesticides, and fertilizers currently required for food production. But how will we regulate and minimize the potential negative effects of this new system on the ecosystem? What trade-offs will be required to embrace design excellence in eating and food production? Many in opposition of synbio are putting pressure on policymakers to ensure a well-advised system of entry. The European Commission, in their response to the increasing possibilities of synbio applications, delivered a report on the risks synbio may pose to the environment and biodiversity. This 2015 report

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Simplicity

≠

Our Fascination With Simplicity Is Clouding Our Understanding B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y

I’m going to be meta for a moment. This article is going to be an example of exactly what I’m advocating for you to stop doing. By which I mean that this article is going to be a simple, easy to understand statement of why simplifying complex ideas is a bad thing. The business world is surprisingly fixated on the idea of simplicity. A cursory browse through some Google results or an Amazon search will yield a number of articles, blog posts, ad copy, whitepapers, and business books explaining how simplicity is the key to success. But the breadth of the different meanings of “simple” that you find across these articles makes even the idea of simplicity almost impossibly complicated. Some of them suggest that business needs to be simple because complexity is confusing. Most talk about simplicity as the antithesis of good business. This is the general theme of a blog I found at the top of my search using the terms “simplicity business.”1

The link immediately under the blog is a Forbes.com article from 2014 by Victor Lipman titled “Why Business Needs a Chief Simplicity Officer.” Lipman’s beef with complexity seems to be grounded in the fact that it is the opposite of lean – the business world’s utopian goal. This version of simple is quickly followed by a Harvard Business Review article about simplicity management by Ron Ashkenas. In his article, we have a statement about how complexity kills good business. So far, these are fairly innocuous, but they are really more about how companies are structured and how best to manage them, despite having simplicity in the title. There is little to complain about except the fact that all of them seem to not actually be about simplicity. Where it gets a bit murkier is down at the bottom of the page, past all of the links that a lazy scholar writing an article will examine in the name of “research.” Lurking down here are all of the blog posts and white papers from business gurus, agencies, and management consultants decrying complexity in all its forms. While you should replicate this search at your own risk, I’ll sum up what I found so you don’t have to. It seems that many people believe that simplicity is the key to excellence. By reading most of these publications, we learn that complexity is bad and simplicity is good. We are told that human behavior is

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Excellence

reducible to basic principles; we find that these principles are easy to master, but are also for sale at a very reasonable price. Additionally, we learn that complex ideas can be boiled down to their essence and be put to use as the foundations for good strategy, good product development, and good business. However, like a pile of unworn socks described in Marie Kondo’s Spark Joy, I recommend you throw out this idea and get on with your life. First of all, we have to realize that all problems or ideas cannot be simplified to a collection of levers that can be manipulated. For instance, it is problematic to assume that human behavior can be reduced to drivers and emotions alone – this being the most common statement. This is because neither of these two categories is big enough to encompass the complexity of human behavior. The idea behind the term “drivers” is that there are things in the world that affect human behavior. These can be identified, codified, and then embedded in new products or services that will engender the second term, “emotions.” This is an oversimplification of human action and thought. It also ignores the issue of the emergent properties of human social action. People are social beings, which means they exist not as individuals who can be understood alone. We are better understood as nodes and linkages in a great network that is both defined by the individuals and that also defines them. We do everything together, even when we are alone. Moreover, people are not determined by what acts upon them. They are in dialogue with it, and this dialogue is complicated. Yes, emotion plays a role in all of this, but it is not the only aspect of non-rational human action. The pairing of drivers and emotions creates an easy-to-use model to explain a small part of decision-making, but it does not serve to explain how or why people do anything. Understanding human behavior in these terms is too simple to address what is actually going on. This is not an excellent way to understand consumers, customers, users, or any other subdivision of human. In his book Sophie’s World, Jostein Gaarder makes a fantastic statement that clarifies the problems of oversimplification. He says, “If the human brain were simple enough for us to understand, we would still be so stupid that we couldn't understand it.” There are two ways to read this. The first is that if our brains were simple enough to be understandable, they would not be very good at understanding much of anything. The second is that even if we can reduce things to the point where we can understand, we are not good enough at understanding to grasp what is going on. I prefer the first interpretation. But that means that I have to contend with the impact of what it means. There are many things in our world that are quite complicated. We may have to be satisfied that we will never be able to understand them fully because their complexity and propensity to change defies any attempt to do so. What that means is that we have to do the best we can. To get incrementally closer to this impossible goal, we have to learn about things as

we find them, and not try to reduce them to simple analogies or models. To understand human behavior, for instance, we have to put aside the desire to know everything and be satisfied with engaging them in a way that we can appreciate the complexities of interconnectedness and emergent meaning. We need to be in dialogue with our object of study. We also have to avoid describing these objects of interest in reductionist terms or caving into requests for oversimplification. Someone once asked me, “Can you just translate all of the big words in this document into simple language and not change the meaning? Thanks.” My answer was, “Well, no, but I can help you understand.” I believe this is a model for how we move forward. To achieve excellence in understanding, we have to resist the urge to be simple. We need to become more comfortable with the complexity of ideas. We also need to avoid using models to simplify issues, largely because the models themselves are actually a complicated way to do irreparable damage to a beautifully complete idea. As I mentioned before, this is an overly simplified statement of something much more complicated. Don’t do what I just did. //// 1

Google being Google means that my browsing history has edited and personalized my search results. Your results may vary. This doesn’t mean your search won’t be fruitful.

Dr. Paul Hartley is executive director and cofounder, Institute for Human Futures and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

You’re the Actual Worst: How Being the Worst is Actually Not the Worst

“It was okay.” The statement has more interpretations than a loosely defined Rorschach, but none of them good. “Not bad, though. Just mediocre. Average. Par for the course.” We say it all too often – after a Michael Bay sequel, a Red Lobster dinner, a middle school rendition of Guys and Dolls (probably to a spouse, unless you're a fan of the whole “honest parenting” route), and beyond. Yet, when it comes to a multimillion-dollar ad campaign, the sentiment can be a poison pill inadvertently swallowed by a brand. Because, as to be proven, being the worst is not actually the worst – being mediocre is. Safety nets are sinkholes, supposed sure footing that look to achieve moderate brand growth and “awareness” with as little offense and award merit as possible, before you realize you’ve dropped a $5M barrel full of Kobe beef into a swimming pool of vegans. Risk-averse marketing executives look to run the same heuristic that anointed them the title, for fear of approving a “crazy” idea capable of denting a once-great brand. But bad advertising works. Bad advertising works significantly better than 7/10, run-of-the-mill work. And no, not just in regard to those deliberately bad car dealership, Shake Weight, and “why am I up at 3 a.m. watching Rosanne?” ads, but ads that actually aimed for glory and ended up falling woefully short.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

BY JOHN WITHER

Bad Things Rule

Criteria for Being Bad

Plan 9 from Outer Space. “Retro” diners. Chuck Tingle’s gay erotica. Bad things give us something to talk about. Bad things light a fire in our psyche – an irritated excitement that drives us to a point of definition. Bad things are worth discussing. In an era of digestion for discussion, it’s more important that a piece of media allows us to express any opinion as opposed to simply a positive one. To offer a point of complacency is forgettable; average is the death of all. A piece of work must be worthy of an opinion – on one side of the fence or the other. Evidence for this theory can be found through work conducted by Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger and Stanford’s Alan T. Sorensen and Scott J. Rasmussen’s work on why bad reviews can boost sales. The trio analyzed the sales patterns of nearly 250 hardcover fiction books four weeks before and four weeks after reviews were released. Good reviews, as expected, increased sales between 32% and 52%. More interestingly, bad reviews caused sales to rise an average of 45%, with more extreme negative criticism garnering even more significant results – some books even quadrupled in sales. But what about advertising? Take what Vice proclaimed as “the worst advertising campaign ever” – Andrex’s “Scrunch or Fold” campaign. The UK toilet paper brand looked to start a national debate over how consumers wiped their nether regions – whether via delicately folding their two-ply paper or crinkling it like a feral wolf. Suffice it to say, much excruciating content can be found for your sadistic pleasure online, but the most surprising thing about the campaign isn’t its subject matter – it’s the 22% sales increase that resulted from it. Or how about Mountain Dew’s nightmare-inducing “Puppy Monkey Baby” for its Kickstart drink? The Frankensteinian spot was voted #55 out of a possible 63 Super Bowl ads, and in less than 24 hours it garnered 12 million views on YouTube, was the second-highest trending topic on Twitter, and caused sales volumes to spike 34% in the first quarter. All of this went against companywide carbonated soft drink volumes dropping 3.1% in 2015. Examples aren’t hard to find: Buckley’s (“It tastes awful. And it works.”), Marmite (“Love it or hate it.”), Ryanair (notoriously anti-consumer), and even Charmin (mentioned in the ad bible Hey Whipple, Squeeze This for the brand’s simultaneously loathable yet brand-defining talisman) – it’s how and why it works that counts.

You can’t already be good.

You can’t try to be bad.

You’re probably average.

You’re still “on brand.”

// In an era of digestion for discussion, it’s more important that a piece of media allows us to express any opinion as opposed to simply a positive one. //

John Lewis is not allowed to make bad Christmas ads. P&G is not allowed to make bad Olympic ads. Old Spice is not allowed to make bad anything ads. They’re already too damn good. So, if you’re already making great ads – keep doing it. We all thank you for it.

Like every Ogilvy book tells you: “The consumer isn’t a moron; she is your wife.” The “so bad it’s good” route works as well as watching every episode of Happy Days and showing up to school on Monday in a leather bomber with too much pomade tickling your tips. Because, if you’re honest with yourself, you’re deep down wanting to make something that’s actually good, so why not just cut the pseudo-act and focus on that?

If you’ve been rolling sevens since sitting at the Fortune 500 craps table, chances are you’re more than due for a brand overhaul. Even brands beyond the ones mentioned above who have released blasphemous ad content (see point 4 and examples such as Coke, Victoria’s Secret, and Microsoft) have returned to parity with little effort due to the invisible hand of the people who “have better things to think about.” So, take a riskless risk and avoid the first idea presented to you in your ad agency’s latest pitch deck.

The reason bad advertising still works is that it speaks, at a fundamental level, to the value proposition of both the brand and product. It doesn’t engage in taboo or wildly insensitive topics (a list is not required) in order to sell a brand of GMO-free vegetable crisps. It arises from a human-centric insight that speaks to the functional and perceptual benefits of the product, synthesizes it into a 30-second spot or piece of digital content, and does so in an entirely misdirected way – which, as suggested, is perfectly fine.

Embrace the Worst All to say: taking a risk on that “wild” idea is inherently less risky than pursuing a “safer” option. Mediocrity is the only surefire misfire. In an age of unrivaled abundance, limited schedules, and frequently divided attention, producing a piece of content that fails on so many levels actually warrants both attention and marketing spend. In a world where the spectrum has always seemed absolute – tens, to sevens, to fours – those both briefing and producing content have the ability to reimagine the flow of failure by swapping sevens for something worthy of a customer’s time – rubbish or otherwise. //// John Wither is a senior innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

The

Crisis

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

While organizations are facing different types of crises, the very idea of management itself is actually facing a bigger crisis. There is a commonly accepted idea that every living practitioner is the prisoner of a dead theorist and his ideas, and it’s true – especially when organizations are facing numerous crises, including those of competition, economy, disruptive technology, job creation, social development, sustainability, and trust and credibility in capitalism. Some of these are more pressing than others, of course; the natural resources crisis is certainly a higher priority than the economic growth and geopolitical crisis. There is also an increasing complexity in the interconnectivity of organizations and individuals. It’s difficult to fully understand the sequence and system-level behavior, which makes the true risk exposure of any organization very difficult to assess. The increasing complexity of organizational design and increasing use of AI or cognitive computing in enterprise decision-making is escalating our challenges to a point where people will wonder what the new role of management is. The question becomes: Are we ready to hand over management to machines? Or will management become a human-algorithm combination – will we have “humarithmic”

managers? Many still live in a world of offsite meetings, massive PowerPoint decks, and terabytes of quantitative data. But the reality is that most executives cannot articulate the value creation strategy, scope, and competitive differentiation of their company in a simple statement. Here are a few data points to consider. From research conducted with Fortune 1,000 companies, 53% of executives (CEO 1- and 2-level) cannot state their strategy. Ironically, 68% of them can identify the top three most disruptive trends that could impact their future, and 73% believe their strategies are not addressing those threats directly. 64% of those respondents feel they don’t have the time or even the tools to talk about these future threats. And a shocking 92% of respondents said their company did not have a rigorous and disciplined process for senior management to think about the future. In general, these planning teams are doing a lot of things that are often mislabeled as strategy – but it isn’t strategy. It’s just a lot of directionless movement easily mistaken for progress. The core of different management theories needs to be questioned. Leaders are looking for something robust to grasp onto in order to prepare for a future of uncertainty and opportunity for strategic innovation. They also look for something that can prepare them for a new era – an era of infinite possibility, driven by purpose.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

of Management Apple’s Tim Cook believes that a company’s higher purpose is not about “improving your own self. It should be about improving the lives of others as well.” He’s probably right. What powers strategic innovation is not strategic planning – it’s applied strategic foresight. Our modern societies have evolved beyond just being market economies; today, we are organizational economies, and value creation depends on our organizational design and how we use technologies to connect. We are the actors and shapers advancing our economic progress by fostering this complex connectivity. Strategic foresight management is more than just looking for the latest trend, creative forecasting, dreaming up new products, brand extensions, or technological inventions – it is a systematic way to engage the complexities of the future in order to inform the // organizational design What powers strategic that determines the innovation is not strategic scope and scale of a planning – it’s applied business. Strategic strategic foresight. foresight, along with design thinking, is //

used to unlock hidden value or create new value. Strategic foresight is not about being a better forecaster or a crystal ball reader, but rather about helping executives be less hidebound and stuck within older frames. The de facto design of management is not designed to ask managers to see the future or to think about disruption, but to deter managers from doing the wrong thing or taking risks beyond the calculated ones. Managers create new value for both shareholders and society by answering to customers’ unmet needs or anticipating their needs that are yet to exist – not by defending existing legacies and outdated business models. Managers also need to develop new approaches for strategy planning without discriminating between the present and future or treating them as two separate worlds. It is critical for them to link the two and to create a path to that future. With all that in mind, we need to ensure we are not being consumed with the operating challenges of today, leading us to fail in applying strategic foresight to create the future. Perhaps it is time to unfollow those dead theorists, and time to put their theories where they belong. RIP. //// Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture.

More than Profitability: Understanding Startup Excellence

BY ROBERT MERKI AND CHRISTOPHER NEELS

Startups are not necessarily what come to mind when one thinks of business excellence. Known for their high failure rates and dubious futures, startups are associated more closely with risk and uncertainty than they are with excellence. While large corporations are often deemed “excellent” thanks to their years of consistent financials, large and stable customer bases, and double-digit market shares, startups – by their very nature – have no hope of meeting these marks. Can the very concept of excellence, with its many connotations of consistency, dominance, and financial success, even be applied to the ambitious but uncertain world of the startup? Using quantitative measures of success as the only indicators of excellence means excluding startups from consideration. But surely there is more to being excellent than achieving tangible success. A successful company didn’t start out being profitable – but who’s to say it wasn’t always, in some way, excellent? At the core of the search for excellence is a desire to identify and better understand the intrinsic qualities that make a company excellent and that therefore lead it to success. With this in mind, we spoke with Robert Merki, Director of Product at cognitiveVR, a virtual reality (VR) startup. Merki told us about his organization, about identifying and building excellence within startups, and about the characteristics of excellence he believes hold true. Our conversation helped us glean some insight into the role excellence plays in the ever-evolving world of startups.

So it seems that excellence, or the degree to which a company succeeds, requires very different qualities depending on whether a company is large or small. What is your philosophy on what the end goal should look like? To me, the difference between being excellent and being mediocre is deciding what to do when you’re climbing a slope and reaching the local maxima. You’re on an upward trajectory, but to avoid mediocrity, you have to make a leap of faith to an ever-steeper slope. As painful as it is, that steeper slope is often the path to excellence.

What does cognitiveVR do, and what is the history of the company? cognitiveVR builds analytics-backed tools for VR developers. In layman's terms, we give developers data to help them make better decisions for creating superior VR experiences. The company started out as a pure data solution for other visualization softwares, but we moved into making our own visualization software when we realized that traditional 2D visualization techniques were insufficient for capturing the nuances of 3D experiences. Now, we display data in 3D to capture action as it happens in VR.

Why do you think it’s important to make these leaps of faith when they often carry a large amount of risk and speculation? Many companies have made huge bets that haven’t worked out. I’m willing to say that there are many more companies that have not made bets, and those companies have remained exactly the same and faced the inevitability of being wiped out over time. There’s the case of John Antioco, CEO of Blockbuster, rejecting the sale of Netflix for $50M in 2000. That purchase would have been a leap of faith, but it wouldn’t have been fatal to Blockbuster if it had failed. Making leaps of faith often requires overcoming stakeholders and traditional analysis; companies need great leadership that’s willing to push forward with such leaps. To be excellent is never comfortable. I don’t think there are any great painters, great musicians, or great writers who felt comfortable about what they were making. It’s not a comfortable experience to make something truly great; no one has ever made something great by working at it from nine to five, then going home and not thinking about it. To be excellent is painful and scary; if you’re not feeling those things when doing something, you’re comfortable, and you’re at risk of being surpassed by someone who is fearless.

There are many different ways to look at excellence. There’s the perspective that emphasizes outcomes, which focuses on making great stuff. Then there’s the perspective that emphasizes quality, which focuses on the characteristics that help with the creation of great products, services, and experiences. How would you define excellence in the context of a small company? It’s not really an outcome or a specific quality. When you’re very small, the forces required to change directions are minimal and less

PHOTOS: IDRIS MOOTEE, COGNITIVEVR

How do we detect the intrinsic qualities of an excellent company before it is successful?

painful than the forces required when large companies, like Google, pivot their business. For us, excellence has been about being able to adapt to different demands and avoid anchoring current hypotheses and assumptions. We’ve seen several companies in the VR space that have pivoted their products without changing their philosophies and assumptions, which ultimately put them right back in the same place they started. Excellence is the fearlessness to pursue new products that are potentially perpendicular to previous assumptions about how this new space evolves. For startups, movement is not just about excellence versus mediocrity – it’s about the life or death of the company. Many people think all startups are flexible and agile. I don’t agree. I think that successful startups turn out to be flexible and agile, and the ones that don’t have these qualities end up dying.

If you were an executive or a venture capitalist wanting to do business with a startup, how would you identify the rare, great partners to work with, given that most startups are likely to fail? Most new companies are destined to fail because they have founders who are not high quality and not ready to be burdened with leading a startup. If you’re an executive at an established firm looking to work with, acquire, or have any relationship with a startup, you have to bank on that startup being able to solve a problem for you. A startup is, by definition, a hack. Any due diligence will uncover massive gaps in the architecture of the startup, whether in business

or technology, and those gaps will seem scary to a company that has an established structure. You need to have a lot of faith, but the rewards can be astonishing if you select a startup with a belly full of fire that inspires and motivates your team. You need to find a company that creates something amazing, despite their tiny team. What role do you think empathy plays in problem solving? The best startup ideas come from a pain that the founders have felt. If you work in an industry and feel a huge pain, you’re well positioned to start a company that fixes that pain. Your job in a startup is to feel as empathetic as possible to make sure you’re building the right thing. To build empathy, you have to go out and truly experience what it is you’re solving for. If you start a drone company designed to move boxes in a warehouse without having set foot in a warehouse you’re building the product for, you’ve already lost. Experiencing empathy is critical to building the right things. What was cognitiveVR’s approach to building empathy and confirming hypotheses? Many members of our team have either built or tried things in VR, and we’ve found in many cases that we spend half our time debugging performance issues. It’s a pain we’ve directly felt, and a pain we’ve been able to confirm with developers. We’ve been fortunate to have developers who could try out our betas that solve some of their problems. This approach has guided us into making our current set of developer tools. What is your reaction to Peters’ and Waterman’s original set of qualities that define “excellent” companies? The list of qualities is very relevant to us, even today. One thing that our CEO, Tony Bevilacqua, does very well is he listens to every idea and immediately acts on the good ones. If it’s a dumb idea, he’ll tell you; if it’s a great idea, he’ll mobilize the company to work on it. This makes the team not afraid to speak up at any time. The quality of being hands-on is especially relevant. It’s clear in the VR industry that there are some executives who haven’t immersed themselves in the technology, but who have instead opted to invest because it’s the “next thing” on Gartner’s hype cycle. You can get a lot done with just a few quality employees – you can’t build a scalable solution, but you can quickly build out good ideas and quickly kill the bad ones. //// Robert Merki is director of product at cognitiveVR. Christopher Neels is a senior innovation analyst at Idea Couture.

An Intimate Look at the Dorchester Collection Hotel Group

BY DAV ID B R A ID AND ANA BRANT

Resting in the mountains of Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan, sits what many believe to be the world’s oldest hotel – Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan. Established in 705 AD on the banks of a natural hot spring, its foundational magnetism came from healing and relaxing baths that, over the centuries, attracted many notorious figures, including samurai, famed shoguns, and military men. While humble, it was a true luxury of the era, a place of escape. As time charged on, this flicker of repose remained relatively unchanged. Quiet. A place of generous hospitality, simplicty, and the promise of retreat. It is, to this day, still in operation, a family heirloom that has been passed down generations – 52 generations, to be precise. It’s a remarkable demonstration of longevity, upheld by the secrets of family trade, but it’s an anomaly by today’s measures of luxury. Where is the Michelin star restaurant? Where are the palatial suites? Where’s the wifi-enhanced 24-hour fitness facility? While luxury seekers are looking for many of the same outcomes from their stays (such as escape and relaxation), there is no longer singularity in how this should be fulfilled. From the high-powered executive to the privacy-seeking celebrity or the adventurous retired couple, there are multiple expectations of what encompasses a luxury hotel experience. And yet, in many big name hotels, there are limited expressions of luxury. Across brands, you’ll find the same service practices, uniformity of amenities, and conformity to predictable luxury standards. While this results in consistent, homogenous value propositions, does this actually fit today’s luxury consumers? More importantly, in all this sameness, how can luxury hotels cater to the individual when the system is designed for an assumed version of luxury en masse? One hotel brand is taking a different approach to inspiring luxury experiences by centering around the individual (and what they define as luxury) rather than relying on the property and amenities to inform the experience. With iconic hotels in Europe and the US, Dorchester Collection is forging new ground in its customer-centric efforts, powered by insight and made real across the front line. The following brings to light three of Dorchester Collection’s global initiatives and how they’re impacting the luxury traveler’s experience.

Luxury Is How the Consumer Defines It While it’s easy to segment business from leisure travelers, it’s a lot more challenging to know what an individual may desire and the kinds of experiences that they will equate with luxury. It may be a bother-free night of rest for the busy executive, anonymity for the discreet celebrity, or an unexpected surprise for the visiting couple. In these terms, luxury is not defined by a majestic entrance, grand salon, or a members-only room, but by how the hotel (and more importantly, the staff) responds to the guest. Despite the best intentions and carefully designed service patterns, if it’s not couture by design – the right type of service interaction, at the right time, and for the right type of consumer – the service will miss its mark. Context is what defines luxury service. Insight at an individual level enables deeper understanding, thereby informing how the hotel should act. To this extent, Dorchester Collection has incorporated empathy training into its learning and talent development academy. As part of the onboarding process for staff, training is enriched with personas that reflect a human-centered approach to staying at the hotel, rather than focusing on categories on a spreadsheet or broad standards of service necessitated by the industry (but not necessarily by the consumer). Going beyond classic business vs. leisure distinctions, staff are trained to recognize, understand, and anticipate guest expectations on a more contextual level, from travelers like the female professional to the bucket-lister. Ultimate service delivery isn’t benchmarked by traditional markers of luxury service – such as saying a guest’s name three times at every interaction or ensuring that bags are whisked away upon arrival – but rather on what is most suitable for the individual within the present context. Furthermore, in the perpetual campaign to better understand different types of luxury consumers, it’s important to draw the distinction between feedback and insight. While guest comments and feedback are critical to help sharpen services to razor precision, they will rarely point to service gaps. Insight comes from looking beyond what’s reported and instead hunting for hidden meaning among the many pieces of data. For example, Dorchester Collection identified that across their hotels 80–90% of breakfast orders were modified, marking an overwhelming, unspoken indication that breakfast menus were dispensable. It is unlikely this insight would have ever come directly from a guest. As a result, Dorchester Collection has been experimenting with menu-less breakfasts, offering a “made to measure” experience where guests can order whatever they like.

PHOTO: DORCHESTER COLLECTION

Designing a New Class of Luxury

// Staff are trained to recognize, understand, and anticipate guest expectations on a more contextual level. //

Build a Relationship Between CX and EX

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

From online review sites, travel blogs, Instagram snaps, comment cards, and Twitter posts, there is an exponential amount of data being generated about hotel experiences. Much of this data highlights what the hotel does incredibly well or mishaps that have been captured for all to see. Individually, these sources of data provide a one-sided story, an extreme brought to life, while the average experience is less likely to be reported as explicitly. Assembling the big picture requires aggregating all the pieces and uncovering the relationships that connect the data. This is no easy feat, with data coming in from multiple formats, from a myriad of sources, generated by the minute. Even for the most seasoned analysts, it’s an inhuman challenge. So don’t leave it only to humans. This is the thinking behind Dorchester Collection’s decision to integrate AI into their data mining strategy. Working with machine learning software Metis (from a San Francisco startup, of which Dorchester Collection is a founding first client), correlations can be extracted across words, images, and sentiments, from any number of sources. For example, in reviews for Dorchester Collection’s Los Angeles location, Hotel Bel-Air, guests frequently spoke about the hotel’s outdoor spaces and wood-burning fireplaces, using terms like “haven,” “secluded,” and “oasis.” Upon further investigation, it was discovered that Hotel Bel-Air is the only hotel in Los Angeles with woodburning fireplaces, yet this is not a prominent selling point on the hotel’s website. By rooting out these relational links and emotional bonds that guests are forming with their experiences, it’s possible to design better services and spaces that fit their desires rather than making assumptions about what guests need.

PHOTOS: DORCHESTER COLLECTION

Connect the Dots Across Data

While data can provide meaningful insight into consumers and inform directions to evolve the hotel experience, it ultimately relies on the people delivering the service. Many hotel brands have gone the route of standardized rulebooks for staff to adhere to, regardless of whether they are in London or Los Angeles, so that the guest experience is uniform across the board. While this can create a cohesive brand experience, it leaves little room to celebrate what’s special about local cultures and customs. Furthermore, for some hotels, efforts to regulate brand are contributing to the brand’s commoditization, as the hotel experience is symmetrical from city to city. Taking a counter position, Dorchester Collection has purposefully chosen to design and operate their hotels independently of one another. For example, the services and staff interactions (and even bed sheets) at Le Meurice reflect its unique Parisian flair and differ from Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan or Coworth Park in Ascot. Autonomy has enabled each hotel to develop guiding service principles that reflect its character, culture, and locality. Looking one step further, through analysis of employee feedback, Dorchester Collection has identified a high correlation between the employee experience and the guest experience. While it’s not surprising these two go hand in hand, it creates a compelling argument that evolving the guest experience means evolving the employee experience in step. Dorchester Collection is experimenting with ways to foster this. For example, their Beverly Hills Hotel has recognized that the iconic red carpet that delights guests can have an equally positive impact on their staff, and has fitted the employee entrance with a replica. At the Dorchester in London, the staff canteen has been transformed into a restaurant, providing staff with their own bit of luxury. And while they may be seldom seen, mobile phones are becoming an increasingly important part of the job for cross-team communication and immediate response. While there are lots of charging plugs for guests, few hotels have infrastructure for their staff, leading Dorchester Collection to experiment with employee “juice bars” to ensure a dying battery is no longer a source of stress. As an organization, Dorchester Collection believes that their employees are the curators of the experience – the hotel is merely a building.

Enabling a New Class of Luxury While personalized service done at scale seems like the silver bullet to combat standardization, commoditization, and devaluation of luxury experiences, it’s no easy feat. It’s not a matter that can be solved simply by implementing greater data collection, increased marketing budgets, or better staff training. It’s a far more complex, interconnected, systemic challenge that touches all parts of the business. The starting point for many organizations may be rewiring the metrics, measurements, and KPIs to align with what the consumer would measure, rather than the industry. Consumers generally aren’t checking that they’re being greeted within 30 seconds of arrival or evaluating the breadth of the wine catalogue; these are measures set out by regulators, ratings, and ranking agencies as markers of luxury (unless these things matter to that particular guest in that particular location). Coveting stars has dominated what defines the luxury experience, to a point where many hotels are aligning strategy to meet checklist criteria rather than focusing on what’s ultimately important to the consumer. But we’re seeing signs that this may be evolving. The proliferation of formal and informal sharing channels is shifting the power balance. As this continues, the next class of luxury may not only be defined by surface-level standards, but instead be driven by incorporating what’s most important to the individual and their own expectations of luxury – rather than relying on the industry alone to set the expectations. It will give a whole new meaning to earning those stars. //// David Braid is a senior innovation strategist at Idea Couture. Ana Brant is director of Global Guest Experience & Innovation at Dorchester Collection.

Intelligence Delivers Excellence

BY R O B ER T E VA N S AND GEMMA ROGERS

The 21st century has been characterized by an interconnectedness that impacts every aspect of business and society. This level of connection itself is not new, especially in business, where there have always been long, connected chains of actors, actions, and goods. Two key forces have increased this global interconnectedness in recent years: the globalization of business and society in all forms – including friendships, cultural influence, criminality, and terrorism – and the rapid development of information and communication technology. A new set of assumptions is emerging about operating in this technology-enabled, interconnected financial services environment. Actions and relationships are expected to be fast (if not instantaneous), and they should be rendered both transparent and permanent by the information and

communications technology that enable them. Moreover, regulators’ expectations of what one needs to know about the connections within any given financial system have also increased. In 2016, a large-scale leak of client data from Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca revealed details of offshore companies and transactions, some of which were alleged by investigative journalists to involve criminality in various forms. The response from global government bodies was to request information from financial institutions almost indiscriminately – even the governments themselves did not know which actors and activities were illicit or licit. Financial institutions faced a choice: investigate every actor and transaction with a potential link to Mossack Fonseca, or explain to government institutions what they knew about their exposure to Mossack Fonseca and their understanding of the financial crime risk associated with that exposure. Though the latter choice was manifestly less labor

PHOTO: RANDALL BRUDER

Why Adopting a Threat-focused and Intelligent Approach to Financial Crime Will Help Drive Fintech Success

intensive, it required companies to know, in detail, who their clients were at any given point in time. This was the only way they could state with confidence whether their business with various clients fell within or exceeded the company’s desired level of risk. In other words, companies needed to know who their clients were, what they were doing, and what they were expected to be doing – they needed good intelligence. Academic debate on the definition of intelligence continues to rage, but for the purposes of this article, we regard it as the ongoing process of gathering requirements (a need for information, a need for a service), collecting information pertinent to those requirements (market data, customer profiles), and analyzing and assessing that information to draw out conclusions. This, in turn, drives the next set of actions (product development) or requirements (more research). Intelligence in practice is a constant iterative cycle of activity that matures as a company learns and gathers more information.

The concept of applying an intelligence process is not new for fintech or financial services companies on the product side of business. An examination of how successful firms build and iterate their products is enough to illustrate that the ability to generate good intelligence already exists within the core DNA of how fintech companies operate. The methods they apply to product development are a great example. Fintech companies identify a market opportunity or process that is prime for disruption before collecting supporting data, planning a method or solution, producing a product, issuing it to customers, and then learning from their feedback. They are continuously iterating at pace. In fact, many good fintech CEOs state that they value the feedback loop with users most, as this feedback allows them to identify areas for improvement and focus on the things customers really want and are willing to pay for. Donald Gillies, CEO of PassFort, a rapidly growing technology firm that provides anti-money laundering

// Developing intelligent processes and working to fill the void of information created by known unknowns will drive excellence across all fronts. //

(AML) and know your customer (KYC) solutions for regulated business, elaborated on this: “For companies that are truly innovating, there is no more valuable commodity than engagement and feedback from customers. It’s more valuable than revenue. More valuable than funding. It’s feedback and, more specifically, the learning that results from it that allows you to deliver excellence. Minimizing the time between feedback being given by a customer, that feedback being understood and evaluated by the product team, and evolving [that feedback] into tangible product outcomes enhances process credibility. Enhanced process credibility increases customers’ willingness to devote time and resources to contribute more feedback. In such a set up, more feedback leads to better product outcomes.” Gillies goes on to state that “excellence itself is where such efficiency and desirable outcomes are achieved repeatedly. This ability to repeatedly deliver excellent outcomes is what enables businesses to scale quickly and efficiently – no matter what line of business they operate in.” It is this innate mindset and thirst for knowledge and feedback that positions fintech firms to have an exciting opportunity to build the same intelligenceled concepts and associated excellence into the financial crime controls they develop. There is huge potential commercial benefit as these companies build proportionate, progressive controls that foster trust across customers, partners, and regulators while also addressing the complexity of interconnected, diversified, and evolving global financial crime risks. In February 2002, then US Secretary of State for Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, stated the now globally recognized words: “There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know.” This phrase has become synonymous with the often explored and debated issues around intelligence and analysis, but its sentiment also rings very true in the battle against

financial crime. The application of a very static, compliance-only financial crime risk-management methodology will always enable a company to identify and deal with the known knowns. However, in most cases it is not the known knowns that cause debilitating consequences. These come more often from the left field of known unknowns. However, our work with fintech firms has brought an interesting trend to our attention: an increasing appetite for and ability to look for known unknowns. This development is probably being driven by the personality type of those working in fast-paced fintech firms in combination with increases in access to data and technical knowledge. This new trend is exciting and has the potential not only to effect positive change in how the financial services industry addresses financial crime, but also to delineate additional areas of competitive advantage for fintech. Developing intelligent processes and working to fill the void of information created by known unknowns will drive excellence across all fronts: it will enable competitors to disrupt existing structures, processes, and services; it will allow them to see opportunity in risk and manage it proactively and intelligently; and, crucially for startups in the financial services space, it will allow them to drive customer trust through their effective and frictionless financial crime risk management practices. In the context of globalization and interconnectedness, intelligence and excellence are a powerful combination. This combination can rebalance the complex equation behind the efficient management of financial crime without hindering the exciting commercial and social potential of disruptive financial services. Fintech can lead that charge, as they already have the inbuilt personality traits, data, and technical capabilities to think intelligently about financial crime controls. And, in this sense, intelligence leads to excellence. //// Robert Evans and Gemma Rogers are cofounders of FINTRAIL, a global provider of financial crime risk advisory services.

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Perfectionism: The Enemy of Excellence

The end is not the means. Excellence is the outcome we aim for in innovation, but applying the same standards to the journey we take to get there risks miring the process in unnecessary fine-tuning and decisionmaking, as well as encouraging a narrow focus that unintentionally precludes unexpected sources of greatness. Innovation is a journey that involves many points of reflection and decisions on how best to proceed – whether or not you have a formal stage-gate process in place. Therefore, great innovation has many hurdles to pass before an idea ever comes into existence; there are multiple opportunities for judgment that can kill something great before it has a chance to live, as well as multiple opportunities for delay while the concept is tinkered with to help it survive the next milestone. An innovation process that overly relies on subjective judgment certainty builds in the conditions for failure at worst, and delay at best. Time and effort are expended on internally focused efforts to please and persuade management,

PHOTO: CHRIS LYNN

BY CHARLES ANDREW

rather than on developing and exploring options in a more open-minded way. Some readers will, only too painfully, recognize the intensive process of copywriting (and rewriting), management sign offs (and suggestions), trade-offs, and redesigns that can go into preparing an idea for the harsh light of customer research – and all because if we’re given one shot to succeed, we need to first make sure it’s perfect. But it’s not perfect; it’s just taken a long time and lots of effort, merely reflecting various internal judgments on what the best answer is. The solution is to invert the idea of optimizing a single “perfect” concept along the innovation journey and replace it with a rapid prototyping methodology. Rapid prototyping, as the name implies, prioritizes speed over lengthy consensual decision-making and rough, “have a go” development over fine-tuning. It also allows you to play with, and learn from, more variations and options in contrast to pinning all hopes on a highly crafted best guess. This approach was recently used by a highly respected consumer goods company with global brands in multiple categories. They asked themselves what would happen if they reduced the time taken for a typical product testing process by 75%. The solution did not only save time (allowing first mover advantage to be extended by many months) – it also led to a more consumer-relevant final design because of what they were able to learn and build along the way. At the heart of this new approach was a rapid build-learn-rebuild mindset that also placed the product development team up close with the consumers who were using and feeding back on their prototypes. Rather than having to divert their energy into creating a product that senior managers would judge to be ready for testing, they created rough products that were “good enough” for consumers to experience, and worked more collaboratively with those same consumers so that they were able to give deeply constructive feedback rather than simply condemning a (deliberately) imperfect product for being imperfect. The outcome was not just another incremental innovation in their product category, but one that built a whole new benefit based on what they learned about how consumers could be encouraged to use the product in nontraditional ways. This example highlighted two benefits of rapid prototyping: On the one hand, the process allowed the original consumer idea to evolve and improve fundamentally (what came out was more than a fine-tuned version of what went in); on the other hand, the team also learned quickly about physical product design challenges and solutions, so that when it came to operationalizing the new product, valuable time was saved. The first of these two benefits points to the use of rapid prototyping well beyond the tangible product design challenges of innovation; it can be as much about the underlying concept, such as its purpose, benefit, how it fits into the lives of its intended audience, and its “story.” Because this is about the audience as much as the concept, this is where rapid prototyping needs to be integrated into qualitative customer

research methodology. Indeed, it involves a more open and collaborative relationship with research respondents, compared to the more traditional approach of simply evaluating a set of (often highly finished) concepts. This changes the research conversation from something akin to “Would you buy one of these?” to “Here are a range of early options and alternatives; let’s build together from here.” By going into qualitative research with ideas that are less highly finished and offering more low-fi variations to explore, the outcome is greater precision in defining exactly how that innovation should be executed and how its story should be told. This stems partly from the way that rapid low-fi prototyping gives the research participants more opportunities to see how the core idea can be improved on, and partly from the way it changes the relationship with them and encourages them to develop rather than evaluate. Rapid prototyping is therefore far more than asking the product development team to work more quickly. It is a holistic philosophy that impacts the whole innovation journey. It becomes more customer-centric as a productive interaction through research is encouraged. It favors effort spent on expanding the range of potential improvements to the concept rather than “polishing the diamond” too early in the process in order to fit the subjective prejudices of internal decision-makers. It accelerates the entire innovation journey, as the “build-and-learn” approach avoids costly dead ends further down the line. And, in the end, it gets you to an outcome that is closer to perfect, even if the journey there was a little rough around the edges. //// Charles Andrew is senior client partner at Idea Couture.

// The solution is to invert the idea of optimizing a single “perfect” concept along the innovation journey and replace it with a rapid prototyping methodology. //

new photo

When Innovation Labs Don’t Work What You Really Need Is a Foresight Studio We won’t waste time here arguing something that most readers already accept: innovation labs don’t work. Let’s instead acknowledge that the entire construct of an innovation lab is fallacious. How do you justify calling it a lab – invoking a place where science is done, the laboratory – to fabricate a sense of scientific rigor where there is none? Labs are places where tests are performed; they are controlled environments for experimentation; they contain instruments for measurement. Let’s call it what it is: A corporate innovation lab is just a bunch of designers and developers hanging out in room with cool furniture.

PHOTOS: IDRIS MOOTEE

B Y R O B E R T B O LT O N A N D I D R I S M O O T E E

Now, before you tell us yours is different… At their best, innovation labs produce iterative improvements, out-of-the-box ideas that will never make it to the market, or another idea for a magical app that fails in execution. What an innovation lab won’t do is alert you of the next disruptive force affecting your industry, show you your imminent irrelevance before it’s too late, or shepherd you toward your next big growth opportunity. For that, you need a foresight studio. Innovation labs aren’t built for the contemporary pace of change. Online music streaming happened while somebody’s five most creative employees were hanging out in the ping-pong room, dreaming up new features for an mp3 player. That’s the innovation lab – always busy solving obsolete problems. Most formal innovation labs aren’t productive and can even hold a company back from innovating. That’s why, though we hear a lot about them these days, innovation labs are closing just as frequently as they’re launching. Big ideas just don’t happen in that tiny space. You may cite examples – “What about Bell Labs? What about PARC?” Those two are fundamentally different; they are technical labs set up for scientists and inventors to experiment and work toward innovative products. Technical innovation labs continue to be important sources of both iterative progress and new growth for many companies. But the contemporary corporate innovation lab, the one with the fuzzy walls that looks like a kindergarten nap room, is merely a place for brainstorming. It’s lip service to innovation. The foresight studio, on the other hand, declares that a company is serious about managing its future. It’s not just a room; it’s a practice. If you want to avoid being blindsided by change, you need to build a strategic radar. That’s the promise of a foresight studio – dedicated space, time, and energy focused on studying your business and industry in the context of its changing environment and shifting user behaviors. We are at a point in history where every company needs a robust, real-time intelligence radar. Organizations today face an increasingly complex, ambiguous, and often disruptive environment. Social, technical, economical, and political variables are interacting in unpredictable ways that defy conventional empirical analyses. Business leaders need to be trained to avoid underestimating the implications and velocity of change – because by the time your team of consultants finishes their market analysis, everything will already be over. One challenge facing most large organizations is learning to handle the ambiguous nature of their existence. These volatile and uncertain times call for a rethinking of knowledge management, a function that exists in some organizations, but often with an unclear mandate. The foresight studio is a place where teams are trained to make sense of relevant data from diverse sources, construct speculative worlds, and test the tenability of strategies. Set up to help firms prepare for and manage uncertainty and equivocality at an institutional level, the foresight studio is where the unobvious becomes obvious. In any corporate setting, implementing strategic foresight involves elastic thinking, switching frames, rethinking the parameters of your business landscape, taking stock of the recently possible, reading deep and wide across industries and disciplines, detecting weak signals of change as they emerge, dialoguing and debating, challenging industry assumptions, wind-tunneling your strategies, planning what you want to happen, and preparing for what you don’t. The foresight studio practices those activities on a continuous basis. It’s a sophisticated business intelligence unit designed to help organizations absorb the velocity of 21st-century change.

// Unlike traditional competitive and consumer research, foresight is based in critical and creative thinking (aka design thinking). //

While it may not be a science (not any more than management or marketing or innovation anyway), foresight is grounded in evidence. It starts with scanning the extreme present – looking at the events and movements happening in the world today and identifying which ones are likely to have a significant impact on your business in the future. But unlike traditional competitive and consumer research, foresight is based in critical and creative thinking (aka design thinking). Foresight strategists gather and analyze salient information, synthesizing it into clear strategic perspectives and narratives about the future. The foresight studio is comprised of researchers, technologists, creative strategists, business strategists, and expert storytellers who can communicate the complexity and dynamics of multiple possible future scenarios succinctly to executives. It’s where strategic planning happens. As The Economist proclaimed: “Precisely because peering into the future is harder today than it was a year ago, managers should be using every available means to gauge what the world could look like in the coming months and to establish targets using this analysis.” The foresight studio can be described as a place for managers to engage in acts of sensemaking to better understand the weak signals they encounter – finding cues, fitting them together, and fleshing out hunches to create meaningful worlds where strategic options can be explored. People who work within a foresight studio not only need to think broadly, but also be able to draw connections between seemingly unrelated things. To sensemake the future, the foresight studio needs to be filled with artifacts of the extreme present, the contradictory signs and messages of a changing world. If you think your organization needs an innovation lab, perhaps what you really need is to embed an innovative mindset across the organization, and foresight is the curiosity-fueled intelligence engine that’s going to drive that transformation. The sign on the door should read: “Wait and Think = Wait and Die.” And please don’t call it a lab. //// Robert Bolton is head, foresight studio at Idea Couture. Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture.

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OF Alex Knox

DESIGN DIRECTOR, DYSON

Julie Lythcott-Haims

AUTHOR OF HOW TO RAISE AN ADULT, FORMER DEAN OF FRESHMEN, STANFORD

Louise Murray

CONSULTANT, FORMER VP OF WALT DISNEY PARKS AND RESORTS CREATIVE ENTERTAINMENT

Beth Viner

GENERAL MANAGER, KICKSTARTER

By Mira Blumenthal Will Novosedlik Esther Rogers Feature Designer Lena Rubisova

Barry Hughson

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA

Vincent Stanley

DIRECTOR, PATAGONIA PHILOSOPHY

EXCELLENCE For 35 years, mentioning the word “excellence” in a business context has called one name to mind: Tom Peters, author of the 1982 bestseller In Search of Excellence.

Selling more than three million copies in its first four years, it went on to sit on more shelves than any other business book in the years 1989-2006. Peters of course went on to become a sought-after keynote in the business world and a very prolific author of some of the most colorful management literature yet seen. Looking back through the years from our perspective in 2017, the question arises: Does excellence still mean what it did in 1982? Is what Peters defined as excellence still relevant in a world that looks as little like 1982 as 1982 would have looked to someone in, say, 1942? What started out infamously as a two-day, 700slide presentation to a bunch of Siemens executives was eventually boiled down to eight overarching themes, things like quick decision-making, staying close to your customer, fostering innovation, nursing champions, treating employees as a source of quality, walking the talk every day, and encouraging shop-floor autonomy while adhering to centralized values. To find out if these definitions are still considered the KPIs of excellence, or if the word means something else now than it did then, MISC talked to leaders from a variety of fields: the arts, apparel manufacturing, industrial design, crowdsourcing, academia, and entertainment.

Across the organizations covered here, some of Peters’ original themes are still considered relevant. Barry Hughson of the National Ballet of Canada speaks of artistic director and former prima ballerina Karen Kain’s nursing of champions; Patagonia’s Vincent Stanley reveals the importance of walking the talk when it comes to the company’s mission; Louise Murray, formerly of Cirque du Soleil and Disney Parks, passionately addresses the importance of fostering innovation. Then there are new perspectives, some the result of how things really have changed since 1982, or more importantly, how quickly and widely they have changed. For instance, two of the six organizations we spoke with are registered B Corps (benefit corporations) – a designation that did not exist until 2010, and one which defines excellence as a set of corporate goals that include a positive impact on society, workers, the community, and the environment, as well as profit. No one in 1982 saw that coming – not even Tom Peters. All in all, these conversations illustrate that, while our current definitions of excellence may be colored by the changes and disruptions that are reshaping the commercial, cultural, and institutional landscape, the notion of striving for the best possible outcome in any given situation is still a driving force in the human enterprise.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Dyson’s process seems to be iterative and incremental. Is this a key tenet of your innovation process and how Dyson aims to achieve excellence?

Alex Knox

At Dyson, we solve problems in a methodical and logical way, one step at a time. We use the Edisonian approach of making a series of small iterative changes aimed at isolating small problems, finding solutions, and ultimately improving a machine. By changing one thing at a time, you understand exactly the impact of the change you have made – what works and also what doesn’t. We consider every aspect; we prototype and test every single part, from the geometry of the brush bar that beats the carpet down on the floor, to the strength of the handle you hold.

DESIGN DIRECTOR, DYSON

What are your other key values?

The idea of function over form. We don’t worry about what a machine is going to look like. The way our machines look is derived from the way they work. Each component contributes to the overall performance and usability of a machine. Nothing extra. This way, we’re able to make everything quite lean.

Bladeless fans, powerful vacuums, innovative hairdryers – Dyson has been reinventing our humble home appliances since 1991, when British inventor and industrial designer James Dyson launched his eponymous brand after tearing the bag from his sluggish vacuum cleaner and replacing it with a cardboard cyclone. Through his experiments, Dyson created the first suction vacuum cleaner and, 5,127 prototypes later, rolled out Dyson’s DC01 vacuum in 1993.

You’ve said in previous interviews that efficiency is essential to good engineering and sustainable design. What other criteria would you consider essential for excellent design?

Alex Knox is Design Director at Dyson and one of the longestserving members of the company. He has worked as a design engineer on nearly every machine created by the brand, and he continues to lead the design and development of new Dyson products.

AN INTERVIE W WITH ALE X KNOX

Efficiency is absolutely essential to good design, but that is not to preclude us from figuring out the best way of making something efficient, and failing along the way. From the very beginning, James Dyson encouraged us to make mistakes and learn from our failure. In fact, it’s a philosophy that’s quite literally written on the walls at Dyson. We put young graduates in positions where they must make decisions early on, and we don't expect them to get things right the first time. When you see failure, you can see where the limits are and just how far you can push a certain technology. Some of our best technology is born from these failures.

When you see failure, you can see where the limits are and just how far you can push a certain technology.

According to The Telegraph, Dyson has been undoubtedly successful at turning somewhat menial household appliances into luxurious objects of desire. How do you plan on continuing this success in the coming years as smarthome technologies continue to advance?

We don’t necessarily look to make our technology “smarter” just for the sake of it. We want to introduce truly transformational technology that betters lives in some way. Our purifier, for instance, tracks pollutants in the air in your home, works to automatically remove them, and reports it all through an app so you can begin to understand the air pollution triggers within your household. But this is just the first step – eventually, machines will be able to intelligently monitor all kinds of disturbances in your home environment and automatically respond to them, perhaps before you even notice them. But I’m afraid I’m already giving away too much!

Aside from technologically, how can Dyson push the envelope and excel with its design in order to stay top of mind in the years ahead?

We aren’t bound to any methodology, which releases a new type of thinking. James calls it wrong thinking – having an idea so off base that it rockets, until you hit on something that just might work. It’s this kind of freedom – which is of course compounded by the fact that we’re family owned and operated – that pushes Dyson to the next level. We have nobody to answer to but ourselves and our ideas.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

What motivates our desire as parents to intervene in ways that prevent our children from achieving excellence on their own?

Julie Lythcott -Haims

We don’t [actually] know we’re intervening in ways that undercut their excellence. What motivates us as parents are two things: fear and love. We love our kids fearfully, and we’re terribly afraid of what awaits them in the world. If we have enough means, we’ve decided we can actually control and engineer outcomes to try to ensure that they have a successful future. What we’ve only just begun to realize is that this control, this effort to engineer, this effort to always be there, is effectively supplanting us into the role our kids must play for themselves. It not only undercuts their chances to achieve excellence, but it undercuts their mental health and wellness and ultimately deprives them of having the chance to live a healthy life.

AUTHOR OF HOW TO RAISE AN ADULT, FORMER DEAN OF FRESHMEN, STANFORD

A lawyer turned educator turned writer, Julie Lythcott-Haims has a particular passion for helping young adults break the mold that their parents have crafted for them. For Lythcott-Haims, parenting is not about constantly protecting and overseeing children, but rather helping them become adults who find success in their own ways, have opinions to share, and are not afraid to fail – a key component to achieving excellence in any given thing. She has combined her expertise in parenting (or rather, not overparenting) and education to help the students she mentors explore the world for themselves.

A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H J U L I E LY T H C O T T - H A I M S

Do you have any hypotheses or insights on why being an “excellent parent” has somehow evolved into this state of fear and love?

Julie Lythcott-Haims spent a decade as Dean of Freshmen at Stanford University, where she received the Dinkelspiel Award for her contributions to the undergraduate experience. She is the author of How to Raise an Adult, mother of two teenagers, and has spoken and written widely on the phenomenon of helicopter parenting.

My first answer is peer pressure. When we have children and we look around our community, we see that parents are very involved. Parents are on top of everything, whether it’s homework, a playdate, an after-school activity, or tutoring. Parents know about it, they’ve organized it, they’re taking their kids to and from it, they’re hovering and observing, and they’re there in case any question needs to be answered. There’s tremendous peer pressure; we are judged if we don’t parent that way. How we got here, however, began in the 1980s. There were five important things that ended up resulting in changing childhood. The first was that the playdate was born. Kids used to play freely, but around 1984, kids began having play organized for them. Parents decided what children would play with and how to make sure the play was enriching. That was a brand new concept. Second, there was the emergence of the self-esteem movement. During the same period of time, right here in California, we began applauding kids for every little thing. Certificates, ribbons, trophies, awards just for playing soccer – not for being any good at it. And this lexicon of “perfect, great job buddy!” was new

back then, but is now common place. The third thing was “stranger danger,” which was born in 1983. A wellpublicized case of the thing we most fear – a stranger abducted and murdered a child – became a made-for-TV movie [called Adam]. It was seen by more people than almost any other television show in America, and our fear that a stranger was lurking around every corner was born. We also became very safety-conscious in the mid 1980s. Seat belts, car seats for kids, bike helmets – all of these laws came into effect in this timeframe. Parents were ensuring that they were always there, always around to ensure safety and desired outcomes.

What are the metrics that we can use to measure success if it’s not about achievement as it is currently being defined? Is it instead about not having metrics at all?

We’re measuring the wrong things. We think success equals a degree from Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, or a job with an investment bank, or a corporate law firm, or in the operating room of a hospital. The “right” college, the “right” career. And I might have once felt that way. I am a product of schools like that myself. What I’ve come to learn from living it, from being a parent, and from being a dean, and then writing about all of this, is that we’re measuring success incorrectly. It’s not getting the degree from that school, it’s what are your habits around hard work? What is your mindset? What are your philosophies? What can you do when you put your mind to it? How good are you at persevering? It really comes down to your work ethic and your character.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Whether we are successful or not ought to be something we can derive a sense of internally, rather than looking for external markers of it, like the applause and approval of others.

Our current metrics for success are problematic. We’ve got kids in Palo Alto jumping in front of the Caltrain because our definition of success is so out of reach. I would rather us refocus on the fact that each one of us is here for a precious number of years, and we’re all relatively ordinary. But that doesn’t mean we don’t matter, it doesn’t mean we’re not successful, it doesn’t mean we’re not worthy of love – which is what we all crave. And the more we can just get content with, “This is what I’m good at, these are my skills, these are my strengths, this is what I love,” then we can live this exquisite life, even if we don’t make a lot of money or people aren’t giving us awards or clapping as we walk down the street. Whether we are successful or not ought to be something we can derive a sense of internally, rather than looking for external markers of it, like the applause and approval of others.

So how important is the experience of failure in one’s ability to achieve success and excellence?

I think experiencing failure is an essential component of the path to a successful life. I’m based in Silicon Valley where, as a rule, our engineers and designers and tech people all know that failure, or the willingness to try and fail, is an essential component to generating the best ideas and solutions. They have built-in design thinking; you come up with ideas, you ideate, you prototype, you iterate. The expectation is that the first couple of ideas are not the best. But with trial and error

and tolerating that failure – not just tolerating it, but demanding it, knowing its value in the process – you ultimately get to the right solution or outcome. Each struggle that we emerge from teaches us that we have strength, that we can bounce back, that the sun still comes up the next day, and we’re still worthy of love. It’s essential, and that’s at the heart of what’s wrong with what I call the “checklisted childhood,” which is a furtherance of that narrow definition of excellence or success. Us parents are trying to prevent our kids from ever falling or failing, whether it’s academically or socially, so that we can lead them to this destination that looks like success. But they haven’t had the right building blocks along the way. They’ve been deprived of the chance to develop the stronger selves that would have emerged if they’d experienced some failure.

Is success the same as excellence, in your opinion?

It’s funny, you have been using the term “excellence,” and I don’t tend to use that term. It’s not by choice, but just because I’ve probably been reacting to the definition of success that’s out there. Is success the same as excellence? To me, excellence is mastery. Whether it’s a biology course, or the ability to be a public speaker, or to be a dancer, or to be a kind human. It’s a skill, an ability, or a set of characteristics that you have mastered, whereas it’s important to have an internally derived sense of success.

A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H J U L I E LY T H C O T T - H A I M S

Society decides if you’re successful these days. It’s society saying, “Oh, she has a job at such-and-such,” or “Oh, her salary is this,” “She’s won this award,” “She’s got a lot of followers on Twitter.” Success seems to be kind of a societal standard based on the norms at any given point that determine what matters.

What do you think the future will look like when it’s run by adults who have had to depend on parental support and encouragement to achieve success?

I wrote my book, How to Raise an Adult, because, as a dean, I felt tremendous compassion toward the young adults on my campus who had been overparented. They seemed to be lacking a sense of self, lacking a voice. They looked sort of wilted or wimpy as humans. They were really content to text or receive texts from parents telling them what to do and how to feel. So I wrote this book because I cared about them, but heck, I wrote this book because I was worried for the sake of us all. If, effectively, the newest generation of adults cannot take the mantle of leadership from the prior generation, what’s to become of our corporations, our schools, our governments, our families, and our nonprofits? What happens when they don’t know how to “hashtag adult?” So I think it’s an ominous, looming question.

I was giving a book talk the other night, and a parent asked me the flip side of this. He said, “Won’t corporations just adapt to the way employees are?” We see it in Silicon Valley with Google and LinkedIn, who offer an employee every bit of food they want (farmraised, local, organic), and playgrounds in the work environment. They clean your clothes, wipe your nose, bring your parents in for visiting hours. Aren’t we just seeing corporations adapt to a set of young adults who are used to being micromanaged and coddled? But I can’t imagine the economy at a meta-level or institutions at large yielding and bending to this. At some point, the real world is going to say – if only for economic reasons – this is financially inefficient. We can’t have you need to be constantly coddled and checked in with and helped. You have to be able to be the adult in your own life and consult your internal resources around problem-solving and choice-making instead of texting your parents and having them figure it out for you.

I think experiencing failure is an essential component of the path to a successful life.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Your use of “hashtag adult” and “adulting” is a really pregnant signifier. It’s the semiotics of that term, the fact that we have a generation of people that have been coddled for so long that they have come up with the term “adulting” for what it means to simply be a grown human. Do you see any signals of a shift in another direction?

Yes. You know what the signals are? I get direct messages on Facebook from strangers who are twentysomethings or in their early thirties who say, “I think I was raised this way, what do I do?” I get strangers reaching out to me and asking for help. There’s this fundamental thing that humans need, which is to discover their own existence. Psychologists call it self-efficacy, which is not self-esteem. Self-efficacy is, “I know I exist. I am a being. When I act, there are results. My actions have outcomes.” That’s self-efficacy, and we’re depriving them of that. When a human discovers this and feels that they are weak in an existential sense, they either fold completely or say, “What the hell is this?” They finally want to shake it off and live life and make a choice and live with the consequence. Even if it’s an imperfect consequence, at least it’s the direct result of their own actions. That, to me, is a sign of a shift.

As millennials come to an age of maturity and discover as they raise their own kids – as they’re now the adult in someone else’s life – I think they’re coming to all kinds of different realizations about what was good about their upbringing and what was a little off. The open question is: How are they going to raise their own kids? How will they go about reclaiming or finally inhabiting that adult self that they should have been taught to cultivate throughout their childhoods?

To me, excellence is mastery. Whether it’s a biology course, or the ability to be a public speaker, or to be a dancer, or to be a kind human. It’s a skill, an ability, or a set of characteristics that you have mastered.

Louise Murray CONSULTANT, FORMER VP OF WALT DISNEY PARKS AND RESORTS CREATIVE ENTERTAINMENT

As an expert on large-scale live entertainment, Louise Murray knows how to maintain the traditions of wellestablished brands while still striving for excellence and innovation. For her, excellence is a product of pushing your brand to reinvent itself constantly and allowing yourself to relish in discomfort. Above all else, Louise understands the power of the creative. She sees creatives not only as catalysts for change, but also as the ones who can inspire others to experience media and entertainment in a deeper way.

Louise Murray is the former VP of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Creative Entertainment and the former VP of Tour Planning and Partnerships at Cirque du Soleil. She is widely respected as a leader and creative partner within the entertainment business industry, and she has been running her own consultancy since September 2009.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

When you think about your work in creative, how do you define excellence within that?

I’ve been very fortunate to work with highly creative people. One of the best things that I’ve been able to do in my career is learn to live with both the discomfort and the freedom that you need when you have brilliant minds around you. Once you learn how to do that, you come to intuitively understand how excellence is addictive, just like creativity is addictive. It’s like being a high performing Olympic athlete but performing with your mind. The beauty of creativity is you can do it on your own, but if you align your idea with another person’s, everybody walks away with more than one idea. So, when I think of creativity and excellence, the human component is at the forefront, because everyone becomes intertwined and they feed off of each other. It’s everybody’s willingness to live with discomfort and let the best solution emerge. The discipline required to remain uncomfortable is tremendous and taxing, and it’s never linear. You need to be able to live with that discomfort no matter what sort of curves you encounter. But the outcome is incredible.

You mentioned the similarities between professional athletes and creatives. Can you elaborate on that? What motivates creatives?

Just as there is physical pain involved with Olympic athletes when they push themselves to the limit, so too is there pain involved in the creative process. Athletes monitor and evaluate themselves constantly. Many use visualization techniques, where they put their bodies through what they might experience while performing at the Olympics or in another competition. For creative people, they not only need to visualize – they need to push it further. They are producing something out of thin air; they are bringing an idea to fruition that is not even whole yet. When you’re dealing with the mind, it takes a lot of belief and faith in both yourself and the people around you to achieve success. This is where the discomfort comes in. There’s a lot of self-doubt and questioning involved: “Did we really do this? Did we think about it right?” I think this doubt is just a symptom of having to go through the process of bringing to fruition whatever has been envisioned.

The idea of excellence for an athlete is very much tied to winning. What is that end point of excellence for creatives?

You get an excellent result once the thing that has been created takes on a life of its own and its intended audience engages with it and makes it their own. Or perhaps it’s in the testimony that what you were envisioning has reached its purpose. It’s even more meaningful when whatever was thought of answers a need. When it answers a need, it just falls into place and it is welcomed. Although high-performing athletes have winning on their minds, their constant pursuit is to be able to better themselves. And then timing comes in. It’s all about being able to blossom at the right moment so that every talent that you have and all those long hours that you put in come to fruition with a win. It’s the same with intellectual or creative work. Creatives have been training for so long and at some point it becomes a sort of mind game.

A N I N T E R V I E W W I T H L O U I S E M U R R AY

Excellence is addictive, just like creativity is addictive.

The idea of filling a need and cultural acceptance is so interesting; it’s a tie between a person being a creative and their measure of success being defined by how much the material they create resonates with a larger audience. But some artists only experience this later in life or are ahead of their time. How do you balance this idea of being futurefacing and having a good sense of what’s culturally acceptable and desired today?

They always say that hindsight is 20/20, and this brings me back to the idea of discomfort. When you’re on a creative journey, you may see some of the dots that you need to connect. The great part is taking the leap toward another dot or creating a new dot that will get you to your goal. But the creator needs to be able to live with the discomfort that exists between dots. The discomfort of having other people join in, interpret, and re-evaluate your work. When an audience gets to engage with that level of artistic work or that level of creativity, they walk out of that exhibition or performance like they’re more intelligent. They feel like they were fed; it brings them fuel. And I can only imagine that they feel this way because the people who have been working on bringing this creative thing to fruition have, themselves, been fueled by the creative process.

Tell me more about the places you have worked. How do you, as a leader, balance the size of a corporation like Disney or Cirque du Soleil with their desire to be creative and innovative?

Both Cirque and Disney are iconic organizations, and when you’re dealing with an icon you have to think that, in order for it to remain iconic, it has to be willing to constantly reinvent itself. Everyone comes into an organization with different creative DNA and expertise. The thing with Cirque and Disney, however, is that the brands themselves have long tenures, so when someone comes into that kind of organization with a different mindset, they are joining a group of people who already have a well-defined culture that they embody. This might cause miscommunication or resentment, but they need to take the time to listen to each other in order to be successful. Once they’ve acquainted themselves with their new culture, they can help others understand what’s going on outside of their day-to-day microcosm. Because in order to be able to reinvent itself, an organization needs to look outside, beyond itself, and not rely on what was. An organization should see its past successes as milestones, but also be able to define what should be done next. Again, this can bring about a lot of discomfort (and sometimes leaders need to face the brunt of that to keep their team going). But, again, excellence is addictive. Once your group has experienced success, they will continue to generate ideas and seek out excellent solutions. And once the public has engaged with your brand in a way that goes beyond the creators’ original plans, it belongs to the people who are consuming it, enjoying it, reworking it, and living it in their daily lives.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Throughout our conversation you’ve touched on two notions of excellence. One is about leaders helping to foster an environment of excellence, which involves both discomfort and bringing in outside stimuli to encourage depth of thinking; the other is about what it means to be excellent as a creative and be able to connect dots and provide value for your audience. The former is about the environment in which creatives work, and the latter is about the people themselves.

Exactly, and both are about accepting diversity and discomfort and everyone’s different ideas and aligning on a common goal. After that, the results can be extraordinary. Your team will continue to pick up speed and achieve greatness, and once that has happened you won’t be able to live without it anymore. I think this ability to be speedy and keep up with the pace of change is one of the greatest challenges that corporations are facing right now. But you can only go faster if you have the right minds and mindsets on your team who are able to look at things differently and be one step ahead. Always trying to figure out what’s next is key; it’s more important than digging through loads of data. Imagining a variety of futures can really move an organization, change an organization, and be extremely profitable.

Imagining a variety of futures can really move an organization, change an organization, and be extremely profitable.

You mentioned the idea of excellence being addictive and that success is not just about personal success but also about how the audience views something. So how do changes to the audience’s makeup, shifts in technology and culture, and other variables change the way people consume entertainment and how they define what excellence is?

These days it’s all about transmedia, because now people are their own media, and that’s awesome. It means that people really get to engage with what they’re consuming. The audience feels enabled to participate in whatever has been created. And this can apply to live entertainment just as much as it can apply to other CPG offerings. Because of the personal computer and the way that we are constantly connected to the internet, the audience can not only find data on you, but can make your product their own and customize the experience they have with your product on many different levels. For live entertainment, this emanates from storytelling. During my time at Disney, I challenged a lot of things. But one of the major things I pushed against was asking the audience to turn off their phones during performances. I thought, “Don’t we want them to be recording and sharing their experiences?” That way, the work we do lives on even longer and the viewers get to customize their experience. They get to be aspirational, feel inspired, and express themselves. Of course, we don’t want people in the audience infringing on other people’s freedom to enjoy the performance, but we do want them to experience it on a deeper level.

Beth Viner

GENERAL MANAGER, KICKSTARTER

Fostering a culture online where creatives feel empowered and autonomous is no easy feat – but that’s what Beth Viner, General Manager at Kickstarter, and her team have set out to do. By encouraging an ethos of authenticity, generosity, and bravery, Kickstarter has practically become synonymous with the concept of crowdsourcing, but they want to do more. In our conversation with Beth, she discusses the company’s roots, how they’re vital to their future plans, and what types of campaigns they consider to be excellent.

Beth Viner is the General Manager of Kickstarter, leading the Communities, Marketing and Events, Brand, International, and Education teams. Before joining Kickstarter, Beth served as the CEO of Interbrand New York and San Francisco and spent almost a decade at IDEO, most recently as the Managing Director of their New York office.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Excellence in innovation is intrinsically and implicitly tied to that idea of independence.

AN INTERVIE W WITH B E TH VINER

In some ways, Kickstarter is behind the times in terms of its marketing. But as we continue to build these efforts in the future, I’m certain that our marketing will continue to come from an authentic place. It will be based on the belief system that is embedded into our organization, which is fundamentally based on the ideals I outlined earlier.

Have you seen a correlation between how genuinely a Kickstarter campaign presents itself and how successful it is?

The beauty of Kickstarter is that it’s an inclusive platform – practically anyone can post a campaign. That also means, however, that there are perhaps a few silly campaigns on the site in addition to all the cool ones. How do you reconcile that with excellence?

At the highest level, Kickstarter is about leveling the creative playing field. Our goal is to dramatically shift who has access to funding for their creative ideas. We stand for creative independence, and finding independent funding is a piece of that. But it’s also about creative control. Those two things coupled together – that open creative playing field and that shifting access – is how we think about excellence. Our goal is really to encourage people to come forth with creative ideas that can be big or small, ambitious or whimsical, kind of silly, or something that’s been sitting in the back of their head for decades. The idea is that they move forward and they put it out there. At its core, Kickstarter supports bravery. Because people are being vulnerable and putting themselves out there, they are opened up to the potential for amazing, great, and excellent outcomes. But no matter what the project is, at the end of the day it’s less about the outcome and more about the journey. Our goal is to get people to discover how they can find an audience who believes in them. We want to bring creators and backers closer together so that they can determine what excellence is for them. We’re just a platform in the background that facilitates that connection. Our backers vote with their pledges for what they want to see come to life and which ideas they really think are amazing, inventive, or even beautiful.

So how do you define excellence within creativity and within innovation?

Excellence, for us, is defined by four characteristics: bravery, independence, generosity, and collaboration. Excellence is found in creative ideas and projects that represent that ethos and those ideals. When people are able to take that leap and really make something different, joyful, weird, or exciting – that’s excellence to us. Another key component is autonomy and independence. Not only are the people who use Kickstarter creating these amazing ideas, they’re also retaining as much financial freedom or creative control as they want. So excellence for us has to, at its core, also involve the idea that creators have the ability to make choices for themselves. Excellence in innovation is intrinsically and implicitly tied to that idea of independence.

As a brand, how do you walk the fine line between contrived messaging in campaigns and actually being genuine?

I think there’s a difference between building a brand and running a campaign. Campaigns can have great storylines, but if they don’t actually come from a true, authentic place, then they’re empty. For me, the most important thing is the commitment that goes beyond the campaign’s story.

For us, excellence in a campaign may be about how engaged the creator is with their backers and audience, or about the fact that they put an idea out in the world and it’s not just their friends and family who back it. In terms of authenticity, we find that backers are most engaged with the process and the journey of the people who are telling a clear, genuine, and authentic story. If we look back at the Anomalisa campaign, which was nominated for an Oscar this year, it was originally supposed to be a short. But one of the backers on the campaign reached out to the creator and said, “I think this should be a full-length feature.” And they wrote them the check to make it into a full-length feature! For us, it’s those kind of meaningful connections that truly make these creative projects excellent. It’s less about how much money they raise. Of course there is a goal, and we hope that the projects hit their goal, but it’s also about much more than that.

We want to be an institution that supports creators for decades to come.

How does Kickstarter’s position as a benefit corporation position it for excellence in the future?

We have a commitment as a public benefit organization. We serve arts and culture in addition to serving innovation and technology. We’ve always been a missiondriven organization, and we’re constantly looking at how we can provide value and questioning what we believe in as a company. So becoming an official public benefit corporation doesn’t actually change the way we work or operate on a daily basis. But what it does do is it makes our mission hard-coded as part of our contract with those in our ecosystem, whether they’re our investors, our employees, or our audiences. Those values are implicit and they’re in our DNA, and it’s a long-term commitment. Kickstarter is not an organization that wants to be around for two or three years and then go away. We want to be an institution that supports creators for decades to come. We’re not here to go public, we’re not here to find other ways to take money out of the system or charge our creators for other things – those aren’t our goals. Our goal is to help support creators and bring audiences who really want to be on that creative journey with them. I’ll be honest; maybe it’s seen as “cool” to get on the corporate social responsibility bandwagon, and of course it’s hard to stay that path when everyone around you is moving in other directions. But I think the difference for us is that it’s not a line item under our pursuit of profits: it is our pursuit. We believe that the world will ultimately head in this direction, where business goals and priorities will shift. These kinds decisions are not always easy, but I think that’s what makes this a really interesting place to be.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

The heart of excellence is about bringing together the best and the brightest.

Barry Hughson

You keep using the world “best.” Is this term seen as black and white within a form as technical as ballet?

One of the challenges in ballet is that we have international ballet competitions, and there’s great debate within our field about art as competition, because technique is not what makes an artist. It’s part of what makes a great ballet dancer a great ballet dancer, but it’s only a part of it. If you look across our company, obviously they all have very strong technical skills, a minimum requirement to work in a company of this stature. But above and beyond that, what Karen’s trying to find are really interesting artists. That’s ultimately what distinguishes the company.

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, THE NATIONAL BALLET OF CANADA

How do you define excellence in the arts, a field where a red circle on a blank canvas can be defined as an excellent piece of work? With so much relying on personal taste and opinions, ballet stands out for the sheer technique required by its dancers in order to be considered “excellent” – but does that actually mean these dancers embody true excellence in their field? Barry Hughson, Executive Director of the National Ballet of Canada, discusses his views on excellence in the arts, and how the company is embracing both old and new – classic methods and technology – to remain relevant and work toward their own definition of excellence, a definition based on two far more important notions: authenticity and integrity.

A N I NTERV I E W WITH BA RRY H U G H SO N

How do you feel that the National Ballet embodies the notion that excellence in the arts stems from authenticity and integrity?

Barry Hughson is the Executive Director of the National Ballet of Canada. He has worked in the performing arts field for 23 years and previously served as Executive Director of the Boston Ballet and the Atlanta Ballet. He is also an award-winning dancer and choreographer.

For me, the heart of excellence is about bringing together the best and the brightest and not compromising on those two principles. When Karen Kain became Artistic Director about 10 years ago, she articulated a very clear strategy. Her first priority was to ensure that the company was populated with the best artists that we could train or find, and she spent the first few years of her tenure building the company, investing in rising talent, and bringing new talent from around the world. Then, her second priority was to use those dancers to attract the best dancemakers in the world; over the last several years, we’ve been working with the likes of Christopher Wheeldon, Alexei Ratmansky, Wayne McGregor, and Crystal Pite. Finally, her third priority was to take these new works and bring the company and the brand around the world, reintroducing the National Ballet of Canada as an international brand.

Still, you can argue that ballet is very traditional as an art form in a lot of ways, so how do you push something that is considered so traditional to challenge excellence?

What we’re trying to do is get people to redefine what they think of the word “ballet” and what it might mean today and into the future. We’ve recently done a project with a Canadian choreographer named Robert Binet in partnership with the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), where we commissioned Robert to create a new work with 12 of our dancers in a gallery in the AGO, inspired by the work of painter Lawren Harris. It was a completely new way for an audience to engage in what we do. People were able to experience the performance as if they were moving through a gallery. There was no seating; they could engage, and there were three separate stages. It was a unique opportunity to reimagine how people might consume our art in the future. Our businesses are still built on a proscenium theater model, where the art is on a stage and the audience sits on the other side of the proscenium. But we have to continually break down and experiment with new ideas and new ways of engaging the public. That’s where the future lies for the art form.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

We talk about living in the experience economy. How does that influence the work you do?

Over the last few decades and with newer generations, ballet has gotten a reputation for being on the – we hate to use this word – boring side. How do you challenge this viewpoint?

What I always say about ballet is that it’s not a museum it’s a living theater. So while we have a commitment to preserving the canon of great classical ballet works, like Sleeping Beauty, Giselle, and Romeo and Juliet, we’re also really interested in reimaging what those ballets might look like going into the future. We’re going to preserve the past, but we’re also going to challenge ourselves to reimagine these works in new ways.

Sexuality and gender is such a hot topic now, especially among younger people. Have you considered casting different genders for classic roles – say, two Romeos or Juliets?

I think there are a number of players around the world that are experimenting with those kinds of concepts. Matthew Bourne made an all-male Swan Lake, probably 20 years ago now. What we believe is that whatever we do has to come from a place of authenticity, not simply trying to be reactive to whatever the conversation of the moment is. It can’t be a gimmick and it can’t be pandering. It has to be done with the right intent and for the right reasons. That’s something we talk about all the time as we explore new ways of thinking about ballet. It’s important to note that the great classical works are still great classical works, and if you look at the National Ballet’s box office revenues, Swan Lake, which is one of the oldest ballets in the classical ballet canon, still sells more tickets than anything else we do (with the exception of The Nutcracker). There’s still a great appetite and hunger for great classical ballet. The reality is that the classical ballets are what drive the box office and allow us to invest in more cutting-edge, contemporary work. If we weren’t doing the Sleeping Beautys or Swan Lakes, none of the other performances would be possible. What makes them fresh and relevant today is having them interpreted and performed by today’s artists. That’s what keeps them exciting and what keeps audiences coming back.

Having an audience is arguably necessary for keeping any art form alive. How do you push engagement with your audience?

Social media has really been transformative for our industry. We’re very aggressive now on social media platforms, especially in terms of trying to humanize the artist. There was a time when we had these creatures that we called ballet dancers and we kept them as mysterious and distant as possible. Today, we have to actually humanize the dancers. Social media has given us this incredible platform to create interactive dialogue between artists and audiences. We had World Ballet Day on October 4th, 2016, which was a 20-hour live-streaming event with five major companies around the world. It started in Australia for four hours, then moved to the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow for four hours, then to the Royal Ballet in London for four hours, then to the National Ballet in Toronto for four hours, then it finished at the San Francisco Ballet. All of the companies chose a dancer to blog or respond to questions in real time throughout the 20-hour live-stream. We were inundated with questions. It was incredible; there is such an appetite to know all kinds of things about the dancers, not just simply about the work they are doing, but what their lives are like – everything from the spiritual to the mundane. And in terms of live performance, opportunities to engage an audience in a really new and unexpected way, like our project at the AGO, is going to be really important as we think about the future.

A N I NTERV I E W WITH BA RRY H U G H SO N

You go to a restaurant on date night, and you sit and look around, and everyone is sitting with their iPhones – not talking to each other, but looking at this little screen. For me it’s disconcerting to see that lack of human engagement. But, in a way, I think it actually drives our desire to engage with humans again. There was a lot of fear that technology was going to get to a place where we’ll watch virtual reality ballet performances on a computer screen. But the reality is that people want to be together. People want to gather for a collective, shared experience. I’m actually quite optimistic about the future as it relates to live audiences and live performance. I think we have to be brave in exploring new ways to engage with the art, but I don’t think technology can ever replace a live human experience.

The performing arts should be at the front in the field of technological innovation and audience engagement through technology.

Admittedly, it would also be interesting to see what a VR experience of Swan Lake would be like, being able to stand with the dancers right in the middle of the stage. Maybe it’s good to have both?

And that’s the reality, we have to embrace both. We have to leverage the incredible advances in technology that bring more people to the art form. It took a long time, particularly for the live performing arts field, to embrace that idea, because there was great fear about one replacing the other. But we know enough now that we shouldn’t fear that. The performing arts should be at the front in the field of technological innovation and audience engagement through technology. But always, again, with integrity and authenticity.

Along with a push toward excellence, could you say?

When you’re working in an art form that continually needs to bring new people to it, it’s incumbent upon us to be bold and to really be in the lead. There is no model to duplicate. There is no “best of show” or best standard. We’ve got a handful of big ballet institutions in the world, but no matter what our size is, we all have to strive to be the best and to create the next best practices for our industry. That’s how I try to lead the institution, and that’s what Karen believes in. We want that to be inherent in the National Ballet brand. We’re creating our own future for the art form, right here. You can’t inspire audiences, you can’t inspire philanthropy – you can’t inspire with mediocrity. Excellence has to be a core value, and it can’t just be a glossy page in an annual report. It’s got to be authentic and it’s got to be felt through the entire institution. That’s where the future lies: authenticity and integrity in the pursuit of excellence.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

Patagonia’s mission statement is: “Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, and use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis.” How do you intend to uphold these promises as our environment and technology continue to evolve?

Vincent Stanley DIRECTOR, PATAGONIA PHILOSOPHY

With fast fashion running rampant and major retailers only dipping their feet into sustainable practices (think H&M’s Conscious – Sustainable Style collection), Patagonia stands out for their unconventional business model. Instead of an offshoot sustainable line, they base their entire business practice on how they can not only reduce their impact on the environment, but how they can give more back to nature than they took in the first place.

Vincent Stanley is the Director at Patagonia Philosophy, an author, and a visiting fellow at the Yale School of Management, as well as a visiting executive at INSEAD in Fontainebleau. His work as a poet has appeared in Best American Poetry.

A N I N T E RV I E W W I T H V I N C E N T S TA N L E Y

We’ve had that mission statement now for 25 years. The good news is that the company is better at living out its mission now than it was in 1991, before our switch to organic cotton, the introduction of recycled polyester or neoprene-free wetsuits, the expansion of our clothing repair center to become the largest in North America, or the taking back of all worn out Patagonia products to be recycled or “downcycled.” The hard news is that reducing harm incrementally is insufficient for dealing with the magnitude of the environmental crisis. We will have to all reach the point, sooner rather than later, where we give back to the planet as much as we take from it and transform our economy into one that works for nature and for all people, not just a few. So while we work hard to reduce the social and environmental harm we do, we’re also working to do some positive good. We work in several ways to stay true to our mission. A year ago, we introduced what we call the Footprint Council, comprising all the operational heads of the company plus those working most closely on environmental strategy and on social and environmental work with the supply chain. That council meets monthly to address new problems or information and assess our progress against short- and long-term goals. Everyone who works at Patagonia has, and feels, the responsibility to keep the company true to its purpose. We also work with third parties – B Lab, bluesign®, and the Fair Labor Association – to garner independent assessment of our performance. We helped found the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, which works to improve environmental and labor standards for the apparel and footwear industries. We also subscribe to production standards for down and wool, which involve animal welfare, that exceed industry standard; third parties vet and verify our practices.

As the first company in California to become a benefit corporation, how do you think Patagonia has set the standard and led the way for other corporations to do the same?

It’s helpful for companies who want to operate with social and environmental values at the core of the business to have colleagues and feel a sense of community and be able to share stories of success and failure with like-minded enterprises. It’s also important for these companies to have an impartial eye on the process (and the progress), which B Lab and its biannual assessment provide. We are both a legally defined benefit corporation in California and a certified B Corp. The legal designation provides us the long-term benefit of ensuring that, should the ownership change, any future stockholders would have to abide by the values stated in our charter and articles of incorporation. It’s important to be a certified B Corp. While many of our practices are vetted by independent organizations – for instance, bluesign® for textiles, dyes, and finishes and the Fair Labor Association for legal pay and good working conditions in contracting factories – only the B Lab Assessment views all our practices holistically in light of our stated values and holds our feet to the fire. We counsel like-minded companies to become certified B Corps, especially entrepreneurs who start off on the right foot.

Everyone who works at Patagonia has, and feels, the responsibility to keep the company true to its purpose.

IN SE ARCH OF EXCELLENCE

With Patagonia Provisions, you've taken your learnings from the fashion industry and applied them to food. In what other industries do you think your learnings could apply, and how could this knowledge be made actionable for consumers?

The beauty of Patagonia Provisions is the opportunity to do good. In the clothing business, we’ve had to unlearn (where we can) some bad industrial practices. With food, we’re starting from scratch. We don’t make a product that doesn’t represent a positive change. We’re also excited about the potential for regenerative organic agriculture in general. Where farmers restore soil to health by reducing tillage and planting deeper-rooted crops, they also drastically reduce the need for chemicals and irrigation. And there is strong evidence that healthy soil has the capacity to sequester carbon – to help make up for our loss of forestation and the acidification of the ocean. This is where we see the potential to give back to Mother Nature as much, or perhaps more, than we take. And more and more people care about food, about the quality and healthfulness of what they eat. We’re not planning to get into any other businesses now, except as an investor through our Tin Shed Ventures in like-minded enterprises involving clothing, food, energy, water, and waste.

Transmitting clear, simple, but not dumbed down or “greenwashed” information to consumers is a worthy challenge.

Special Thanks Emma Aiken-Klar Taylor Dennis Emily Empel Ashley Perez

Sustainability is often discussed in academia and around boardroom tables, but how can brands make this information accessible and digestible enough so that consumers can actually act on the ideals and values they align themselves with?

Transmitting clear, simple, but not dumbed down or “greenwashed” information to consumers is a worthy challenge. It is still our hope that, for clothing and footwear, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition will develop a consumer-facing index so that you can hold your cellphone up to a hangtag on a pair of jeans and get an industry standardized 1 to 10 or 1 to 200 rating on its environmental and social performance. Consumers are becoming familiar with a number of standards, including FSC for forest products and LEED for commercial construction. The challenge for the industry is to continually improve these standards.

How does Patagonia balance its strides in innovation with its responsibility to remain socially and environmentally conscientious?

The great thing about where we are now is that environmental and social responsibility at Patagonia is intrinsic to long-term design and product innovation. And we aren’t the only ones who think this way. If some new technology or process involves an environmental setback, it isn’t that hard to give it a pass and keep looking. We don't have to go very far. There are so many possible innovations now that will bring less rather than more harm to nature – and to people as a part of nature.

IN SEARCH OF EXCELLENCE As can be seen in the preceding conversations, the concept of excellence in the organization of human activity is still a powerful performance motivator. What is interesting to note, however, is how the theme of excellence was, in many of these conversations, so closely aligned with the principles that underlie innovation. For example, entertainment consultant Louise Murray’s insistence that excellence demands “the discipline to remain uncomfortable” could just as easily be about innovation. Dyson’s Alex Knox and Stanford’s Julie Lythcott-Haims both asserted the acceptance of failure as a prerequisite for success – again, a core principle of any innovation practice. And foresight – something that Tom Peters did not address in his 1982 book, but which is a critical component of creating innovative product and service experiences that will be relevant three, five, or ten years from now – was a theme espoused by

both Louise Murray and Patagonia’s Vincent Stanley. If the search for excellence devolved into an obsession with operational efficiency in the turbulent years that followed Peters’ text, it would appear that the organizations cited here have taken it to a richer, more holistic place, a place where excellence is indeed synonymous with themes of constant reinvention, incremental iteration, and a lack of methodological orthodoxy. While Peters’ eight themes still resonate, the paradigm shifts that have occurred since 1982 have infused the search for excellence with a more urgent thirst for the new, and the most effective ways to quench it. And although Peters’ exhortation that a company should stay close to its customers is a tenet that goes even further back than 1982 to Peter Drucker’s dictum that the only goal of a corporation is to make a customer, it wasn’t until the early noughties that customer experience design became a distinct discipline.

Mira Blumenthal is an editor and writer at Idea Couture. Will Novosedlik is AVP, head of growth partnerships at Idea Couture. Esther Rogers is the managing editor of MISC and a creative writer at Idea Couture.

02 Targets

Primary Decision-making process

01 Stakeholders

Learning

Deciding

Acting 03 Measures

Secondary Project deliverables

Framing

Scanning

Futuring

Visioning

Designing

Adapting

Timeframe and specific outcomes

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We live in a time of bottom-line obsession. Numbers, measurements, and results count. Big data analytics suggest even more accurate numbers, heralding a potential return to “Tayloristic” performance measurement with ever greater precision. Surely foresight, as an emerging discipline seeking to “catch on” and be successful, should align with this. Be Romans in Rome? Frankly, I hope not!

A bottom-line approach to measuring successful foresight outcomes suggests far more precision than is reasonable to expect. The timeframes are long – often outlasting those involved in the work. Some attempts have been made to estimate the net present value (NPV) of ideas produced using foresight – suggesting a focus on being measured by the number and value of the ideas we produce. But there are so many factors involved along the foresight journey that it is intellectually dishonest to go down this path. Of course, you cannot ignore or avoid the numbers, but imposing a bottom-line-focused performance metric on your foresight work would simply be inaccurate. Rather, you must seize the initiative and proactively frame the question of success in foresight, just as good futurists should. Foresight is often tolerated by upper management, with a somewhat vague suggestion that it has a chance to prove its usefulness – but with no clear sense of what its usefulness is. I urge futurists to take the opportunity to suggest to both their bosses and clients how foresight ought to be evaluated. Fill the vacuum by proactively stimulating and framing a dialogue around successful outcomes for the integration of foresight. You might be wondering, “But how can I implement this for my own foresight team?” Enter the Foresight Outcomes Framework. This framework is based upon a key assumption that the goal of the organizational futurist is to influence the decision-making process. What it’s really trying to do is help our organizations make more informed decisions about the future. It draws on the view of Pierre Wack that scenario work is ultimately aimed at influencing the mental model of decision-makers. He suggested that effective scenarios “change the decision-makers’ assumptions about how the world works and compel them to reorganize their mental framework of reality.” In simple terms, we deliver “better decisions about the future.”

01 Gathering and discovering information/ knowledge (learning). 02 Making choices when given several options (deciding).

PHOTOS: IDRIS MOOTEE

Framing Successful Foresight

This simple framework is intended to provide organizational futurists and champions of organizational foresight with a mechanism for initiating and framing a discussion of what useful or successful foresight is, in terms of what kinds of outcomes are reasonable to expect. The decision-making process is defined here as the process of making a decision that involves:

03 Taking action, since without acting it’s not really a decision in operational terms (acting).

At the center of the framework are the three components of decision-making: learning, deciding, and acting. Learning is placed before deciding to represent the process of gathering and discovering information, knowledge, and options to aid the decision. Acting completes the decision-making process, and, of course, can feed back into learning and continue the process. These three components are directly related to the six key activities of foresight work, which were recently captured in the Foresight Competency Model developed by the Association of Professional Futurists. The idea is that futurists ought to be doing what they’re good at – the six competencies – that, in turn, are connected to outcomes useful to the organization: learning, deciding, and acting. A win-win. The framework notes that stakeholders are involved in the conversations about outcomes. There are indeed appropriate measures, but there are no impossibly complicated bottom-line calculations. What we can measure is how the foresight work is being done. Terry Grim’s Foresight Maturity Model (FMM), for example, provides a systematic approach to measuring how well foresight work is being done within an organization.

This article has assumed that readers of this magazine would agree that making greater use of foresight is a good thing and that weaving foresight into the fabric of an organization is even better. But without a clearer notion of what success is, it’s reasonable for organizations to be hesitant. Of course it’s always easier to stick with the known than risk a new thing, but let’s seize the initiative, armed with the Foresight Outcomes Framework, and get a better handle on what success looks like from the client perspective right from the start. Here are five dos and don’ts to get your thinking started: / Don’t let success be defined for you. / Don’t let bottom-line numbers be your only performance metric. / Do initiate conversations about success with key stakeholders. / Do keep your focus on making better decisions about the future. / Do measure how well the work is being done. Integrating foresight into your organization’s day-to-day may seem daunting and intangible, but with a little risk taking and a little creativity, many new possibilities can be imagined and acted on. //// Dr. Andy Hines is program coordinator and assistant professor at the University of Houston’s graduate program in Foresight.

Toward an Applied Medical Design Anthropology

PUSH TO TRANSFORM YOUR BATHROOM.

B Y D R. M A R C L A F L E U R

Medical anthropology and design may seem like strange bedfellows. At best an esoteric discipline not well understood outside of university departments, applied medical anthropology has a lot to offer various efforts to employ design and design thinking to understand and solve all sorts of health problems. Like design thinking with its user-oriented focus, medical anthropology places the person (rather than the patient) at the center of any health experience, relying on the narratives of those people and social and cultural analysis to unpack, understand, and ultimately to orient solutions against. Design thinking, on the other hand, provides kinetic scaffolding foreign to social science disciplines that allows us to take what we understand and move it intentionally through a process that progressively shapes it into something; something that intervenes, redirects, reshapes, or ameliorates someone’s experience for the better. In the sticky, complex problems that we encounter in health – where structural, institutional, and systemic forces intermingle with issues of human frailty, vulnerability, and sometimes profound and confounding questions of philosophy and morality – medical anthropology offers something important to the activities of design and design thinking. In tandem with design thinking, medical anthropology lends a critical

skepticism of the established truths at play in health, leading us to question and re-inhabit uncomfortable spaces of disease and illness, ultimately allowing us to redefine them before offering solutions to them. This piece acts as a statement of aspiration and as an introduction to the possibilities inherent in knitting together these approaches. Some work has already been done in this regard. Wendy Gunn and Jonathan Ventura articulated in a conference paper the possibilities of a “medical design anthropology” from which I was inspired and borrowed the seed of the issues addressed here. In that paper, the two authors put forward a convincing argument for the value of medical anthropology as it pertains to product design in medical devices particularly. The possibilities get more exciting as we zoom out from this perspective and start to look at the possibilities of design more broadly through medical anthropology, and vice versa. What does a discipline that exists between the two practices look like? I recently got a glimpse of the possibilities at a design jam with students from the Transdisciplinary Design program at the New School in New York. Students were asked to “hack health” and take an idea that redefines a healthcare problem and introduce an innovative solution. What became clear was that the ideas that were compelling to students – who were asked to have both

a data and a digital element to their ideas – were the experiential qualities of people within the system, issues like suffering, hopelessness, stigma, and translation. These are issues that medical anthropology is uniquely positioned to provide insight on. More than this, however, medical anthropology offers a powerful means to deconstruct problems in ways that are valuable to designers and to the design process. The perspectives anthropology provides both enriches and emboldens design thinking in health and healthcare in ways that not only offer new and unforeseen perspectives on complex local and global problems, but offer pathways to better care based on the prioritization of human needs and values, radical forms of empathy, and enhanced cross-cultural understanding. Anthropology and design have been in conversation for many years. Recently, as this conversation has begun to find material form in the emergent articulations of design anthropology, we have begun to wonder what applied medical design anthropology might look like. How might we, through medical anthropology, see the problems of health, the complexities of the illness experience, and marry them to the kinds of interventions – services, products, experiences – that design and design thinking can bring to life? //// Dr. Marc Lafleur is VP, medical anthropology at Idea Couture.

PHOTO: MARKO MILANOVIC

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In 1973, a group of psychologists conducted a study with preschool children who had a particular affinity for drawing. The researchers divided these children into two groups – one group was promised a reward for completing their drawing, and the other was not. They then recorded the amount of time these children spent working on their drawings during their free time. Interestingly, the children who were promised a reward spent significantly less time drawing and showed significantly less interest in the task than those who were not promised a reward. In other words, promising children a reward reduced their desire to do something they previously enjoyed doing.

Similar patterns of behavior have since been observed in college students. In one study, the promise of a big monetary bonus led to worse performance on a series of problem-solving tasks, and in another study, it led participants to report enjoying the task significantly less than those not promised a monetary incentive. Such external rewards also hamper motivation in real-life contexts. For instance, smokers who are actively trying to quit are more likely to relapse if they are promised a reward for quitting.

While these findings seem counterintuitive, they are robust and have one thing in common: They suggest that introducing an external or extrinsic reward significantly hinders motivation and performance. This is because individuals begin to focus solely on the extrinsic reward as their source of motivation rather than focusing on their intrinsic drive for success – a far more vigorous mechanism. Indeed, intrinsic motivation is the most effective kind and can explain why Joe, who is exercising with the goal of losing 10 pounds, is far more likely to fall off the wagon than Jane, who is exercising because she genuinely enjoys being active. If a measureable and tangible reward is introduced to Jane, however, her “intrinsic fuel” will likely become displaced and will cease to efficiently operate. So is it the case that rewarding success and excellence is counterproductive? While these findings might seem like bad news for organizations that motivate their employees primarily through bonuses and promotions, not all hope is lost. It seems that not all rewards are futile, and that the key to creating a team of engaged and innovative employees lies in rewarding excellence “in the process” rather than when there is an excellent result. This may seem like a murky concept, but companies that have begun to act on this philosophy are reaping the benefits. The philosophy is based on adapting a growth mindset, or a “culture of development,” where mistakes and failures are seen as necessary steps to success, and where effort, creativity, and risk-taking are valued. In opposition, a fixed mindset or a “culture of genius” places emphasis on results and values talent and intellect. In a culture of genius, you either have what it takes or you don’t, whereas a culture of development fosters the attitude that people can grow and improve. On a very basic level, failure and making mistakes are an integral part of the learning process. Psychological

PHOTOS: CATHERINE MACBRIDE

B Y D R. R I M M A T E P E R

studies have investigated how one’s mindset or attitude influences the way in which the brain processes errors. These studies have found that individuals with a growth mindset are more likely to attend to their mistakes on a neural level than individuals with a fixed mindset. In other words, these individuals’ brains are picking up on and registering the mistake – they are making neural connections. And this is precisely what leads to better performance in the long term. When companies look at mistakes in this new way – as stepping stones to success, rather than as failures – they can begin to foster an environment that not only accepts mistakes, but also encourages them when they manifest as risk-taking, experimentation, and creativity. Conversely, when companies value talent and focus primarily on the end result, this generally steers individuals away from risk-taking and causes them to fear messing up. But if making mistakes and learning from them is the key to excellence in the long run, it seems that propagating a culture of genius is actually a maladaptive strategy. So does instilling a culture of development actually work on a practical level? Extensive research has been conducted with Fortune 1000 companies and has found that companies who adopt a culture of development have employees who are more committed, innovative, collaborative, and display less unethical behavior in the workplace. In short, rewarding excellence in the process, rather than rewarding excellent results, produces more engaged employees – it is a well-established precursor to organizational success. These corporations also typically hire employees in a

more nuanced way. Rather than scouting out sheer talent or skill, they look for individuals who love challenges and are constantly developing and building on their strengths. It seems as if it may be time to redefine what an excellent employee is and what excellence in the workplace should look like. Because, ironically, the companies who reward an excellent process are the ones that come out with an excellent result. //// Dr. Rimma Teper is a resident behavioral scientist at Idea Couture.

// Rewarding excellence in the process, rather than rewarding excellent results, produces more engaged employees. //

Closer Than Ever

// [Taking] time to think and build off previous knowledge is more productive in the long term for creating paradigm shifts than throwing out the rulebook altogether. //

Finding Excellence in Innovation Under Our Feet

Excellence in innovation is often seen as creating new technologies that anticipate demand – and doing so before everyone else. In order to meet this goal, companies provide their teams with unlimited resources in order to meet fast-paced demands, with Silicon Valley exemplifying this model. And yet, examples exist that demonstrate how unlimited resources, speed of entry, or a rejection of tradition are unnecessary for excellence in product development and innovation; in fact, a lack thereof may actually help innovation flourish. As it turns out, time to think and build off previous knowledge is more productive in the long term for creating paradigm shifts than throwing out the rulebook altogether. Looking to unlikely markets, it becomes clear that innovation is still borne out of necessity and that the best ideas come from those who have time to develop them.

PHOTO: MARCEL

B Y D R. M IC H E L L E S W I T Z E R

Excellence in Innovation Due to Necessity

Excellence in Innovation Over Time

While advocating the benefits of a decades-long trade embargo would be reckless and out of place, the US embargo on Cuba has nonetheless created an opportunity for innovation to flourish in response to the limited resources at hand. Borne out of what is called “The Special Period,” following the collapse of the former Soviet Union, Cuba’s farming system was implemented as a way to counter food shortages in the country as imports of food staples dwindled. Today, Cuba is home to about 10,000 farms. In Havana alone, 35,000 hectares of land have been used for urban agriculture, including 8,000 small plot gardens, setting it up to be the envy of any North American hipster enclave. This has turned Cuba into a model for many countries looking to achieve greater levels of sustainability despite the economic challenges facing the island nation. And urban agriculture is not the only field in which Cuba has thrived. In March 2016, The Huffington Post reported that, in addition to being home to some of the healthiest and longest-living residents in the world, important medical breakthroughs have taken place in Cuba’s labs. CIMAvax, for example, a drug used to treat lung cancer, attacks a growth factor in cancer cells, inhibiting the spread of the disease. Not only is it effective, but it also only costs $1 per shot. Not bad for a country whose economic resources pale to those of a major player like the US. In addition to CIMAvax, Cuban scientists and researchers have also developed three more cancer drugs, one to target head and neck tumors, and two that may be effective against all cancers (which are still being tested), as well as treatments for diabetic foot ulcers that help patients to avoid amputation, called Heberprot-P. Over 100,000 patients worldwide have been treated with CIMAvax and Heberprot-P.

In 2013, Peter Higgs, whose work on the Higgs boson (known colloquially as “The God Particle”) garnered him a Nobel Prize in Physics, has argued against the fast-paced knowledge production required of many academics in order to survive the institution. Having published less than 10 papers since his major breakthrough in 1964, Higgs told The Guardian in 2013 that the high demand, “publish or perish” world of academia wouldn’t afford him “enough peace and quiet” to complete his work. Yet, there seems to be a practice among industry leaders that excellence is, in part, about creating a product quickly in order to be the first. This constant need to produce something new at a rapid rate leads to products sometimes coming to market before they should, putting speed and novelty above excellence and quality. Thus, rather than turning to Silicon Valley for a model of innovation, Eric Weiner suggests looking to Florence, Italy. The cultural center of the Renaissance, he argues, can teach us what long-term investment, such as patronage and mentorship, can do to help talent flourish. Rather than looking for a quick return on investment, artists like Michelangelo and Da Vinci were given the time to develop their skills and style with steady guidance and funding, with impressive results.

Excellence in Innovation Through Tradition Innovation is often seen as being synonymous with a paradigm shift. However, this idea of “out with the old and in with the new” ignores the fact that many long standing family-owned businesses – usually built on notions of tradition – continue to thrive even as the client base evolves. Using the concept of “Innovation Through Tradition” (ITT), Alfredo de Massis, Chair in Entrepreneurship and Family Business at the Lancaster University Management School, shows that, rather than leading to inertia or obsolescence, turning to tradition can open possibilities for something new. ITT challenges the assumption that the value of something (ideas, products, design, and so forth) is lost over time. Instead, industries with an ability to draw on a long history of knowledge are better positioned to create a new product that can best respond to an enduring need while using its established identity to imbue it with a sense of distinction and uniqueness that cannot be replicated. A number of family-run businesses in Italy provide excellent examples. Lavazza, the coffee manufacturing company established in 1910, continues to innovate its products while sticking to its roots. The company has created the first coffee pod system designed to work in extreme conditions (including in space) while still using traditional methods to blend their coffee. They’ve also partnered with Illycaffé to uncover the genome sequencing of the Arabica bean. And they have done this all while keeping in mind the principles of sustainability and social responsibility within their production process.

Embracing the Unexpected The lesson that can be drawn from these examples is that there is more than one model for successful innovation. Just as the engineers and designers of Silicon Valley changed the tech sector by rethinking how we could live and work with digital products and services, so too must we remember how incredible innovation can emerge from the most unexpected places – often from the very ground we stand on. //// Dr. Michelle Switzer is a resident anthropologist at Idea Couture.

Future Food Service in the Age of Digital Convenience

QSR Excellence B Y R O B E R T B O LT O N AND KYLE BROWN

Since the founding of White Castle in the 1920s, the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry, with its value proposition of delivering a consistent service experience that prioritizes taste, price, convenience, and quality, has scaled to the $570B global industry that it is today. Credit for that tremendous growth is owed to an innovation agenda focused on standardization and speed. The basic design brief (“How do we serve the most burgers of a consistent taste and quality at the lowest price in the shortest amount of time?”) has led to significant innovations in various fields, including food science; supply chain efficiency; business models, marketing, and merchandising; food preparation; service; and point-of-sale technologies. From a consumer perspective, however, the fast food experience feels as though it has remained relatively unchanged over the past few decades. It’s as though we hit peak convenience with the advent of the drive-through. Meanwhile, the digital age has given rise to new expectations; consumers have grown used to the instant gratification of apps. Standardization is giving way to personalization. People’s perceptions

of quality are evolving. And health and sustainability concerns have become critical factors in how people make purchase decisions. Consider too that commodity prices and labor costs are bound to go up, posing margin challenges. Couple that with competition from casual restaurants pursuing greater market share, and it’s innovate or die time for the world’s biggest fast food chains. We’ve performed a rapid foresight exercise (“fast futures”) in which we synthesized signals and drivers of change in order to generate a series of conceptual opportunity spaces. The concepts are not predictions, but rather explorations intended to provoke and inspire. How is the QSR of the future transformed by the myriad of emerging digital technologies today? The Internet of Things (IoT), wearables and distributed sensor devices, artificial intelligence (AI), augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR), and next-generation robotics are all coming together in unique configurations to redefine food service in the digital age. The next generations of value and convenience don’t need to come at the expense of quality and variety. By applying the principles of design thinking to harness emerging digital capabilities, the industry can design itself out of its current state of mediocrity and usher in a new era of QSR excellence.

Fast Futures: Nine Opportunity Spaces to Provoke Food Service Innovation

2 3 Post-Menuism: New Frontiers in Decision Engineering

Anticipating Demand: Breaking the Arc of Uncertainty

Shifting from a franchise model to an open-source platform, the new franchise ecosystem provides flexible hardware, software, and standards, which enables a network of vendors to compete and cooperate while innovating new ways of serving customers at natural touchpoints in their daily lives. The transition toward mesh restaurants makes them more mobile and dynamic – no longer limited to the fixed storefront, but embedded and distributed within the local environment. Consumer experience with brands has shifted from being location-specific and time-determinant to liquid and ubiquitous. This involves unique partnerships and strategic alliances that act as vehicles for greater brand extension.

In a hyper-connected world, new decision-making mechanisms help consumers navigate information by eliminating options and redundancies so that better, more intentional choices are made with reduced transactional complexity. Consumers maintain their agency, defining broad outcome-based parameters – like a desired emotional state, particular health and wellness ambitions, or specific flavor profiles. Armed with a combination of big data and microdata, brands are poised to intervene at the most value-added touchpoints; they are the trusted advisors and expert curators for entire consumer segments. By analyzing desires, managing nutritional needs, and optimizing delivery for individual social and biological rhythms, post-menuism reduces decision fatigue and relieves the problem of option paralysis in the overly cluttered food world.

Convenience is contextualized as an interconnected network of devices exchanging and interpreting data that can predict, process, and fulfill consumer demands as fast as those demands are consciously realized. Anticipating demand involves the development of solutions that focus on harnessing contextspecific data and developing the appropriate digital channels and analytical tools to boost consumer engagement and improve the shopping experience. Leveraging the user’s full environment through sensors, unobtrusive tech, software agents, smart environments, and wireless infrastructures, interactions will be reinvented to meet needs with frictionless speed and efficiency. It is about using integrated smart systems and processes to elevate the user journey in real time.

Mesh Restaurants: From QSR Chain to QSR Network

Drivers: / Network Society / Acceleration and Complexity / Democratization / Technology Development / Sustainability Signals: / Kalundborg Symbiosis Kalundborg Symbiosis is an industrial ecosystem in Denmark where the waste products or excess resources from one organization are transferred or sold to another, in a closed circuit. Organizations exchange resources to optimize economic as well as environmental efficiency, and they work closely on innovation initiatives to improve efficiency. / Zappos Holocracy Holacracy is a comprehensive practice for structuring, governing, and running an organization. It replaces today’s top-down predict and control paradigm with a new way of achieving control by distributing power. It is a new operating system that instills rapid evolution in the core processes of an organization.

Drivers: / Acceleration and Complexity / Technology Development / Demographic Shifts / Polarization Signals: / Pizza Hut Subconscious Menu The Pizza Hut Subconscious Menu – which features images of 20 ingredients commonly found on Pizza Hut pies – can determine what you’re craving in exactly 2.5 seconds by recognizing which ingredients your eyes have been looking at longest. / Minamishima Minamishima is a Melbourne-based Japanese restaurant with no menu that operates on the traditional principle of omakase – “I’ll leave it to you.” Similar restaurant concepts in Australia and elsewhere are now providing patrons with only a list of fresh, seasonal ingredients that they select. This subsequently empowers the chefs to creatively and intuitively blend the ingredients in a customized dish.

Drivers: / Technology Development / Individualization / Acceleration and Complexity / Post-materialism / Sustainability / Commercialization Signals: / Amazon Streamlined Retail Amazon recently patented a new retail concept in which visitors to the store can shop, pick their items, and then leave without having to stop at a cashier or automated checkout. Customers would be identified via a system of cameras, sensors, and radio frequency identification readers throughout the store that would be able to detect when someone enters, what they pick up, and when they exit the store. Upon leaving, a message would be sent to the customer confirming what they purchased and the price, while payment would be automatically made via the customer data collected. / IBaround IBaround is a contextual marketing company that pushes the right product at the right time by delivering real-time optimized promotions based on contextual and other sales-based data. Contextual variables, like weather, traffic, or crime, can influence consumers’ purchasing decisions. Contextual data can be a powerful tool for retailers to make informed decisions and act in real time to make modifications; subtle changes in a set of variables can impact inventory, payment methods, promotional strategies, and brand perception.

4 5

// It’s innovate or die time for the world’s biggest fast food chains. //

Centaur Management: Zero Mile Dining: Dissolving the Hyperlocalism With Human-Machine Interface Supply Chain Certainty

Drivers: / Technology Development / Post-materialism / Acceleration and Complexity / Economic Growth Signals: / Moley Robotic Kitchen Moley has created the world’s first robotic kitchen. It features an advanced, fully functional robot integrated into a beautifully designed, professional kitchen The robot can cook with the skill and air of a master chef. Recipes and dishes are recorded by amateur and professional chefs using sensor technology and motion capture, before being uploaded into an open, decentralized database for others to use. / Freestyle Chess A centaur chess player is one who blends human intuition, creativity, and empathy with a computer’s ability to remember and calculate a staggering number of chess moves, countermoves, and outcomes. Combining the two together produces a chess player that is better than either entity on its own. These same principles can be applied in management and service contexts.

In a world that places sustainability and accessibility high on the agenda, brands have been required to focus their innovation efforts on smart logistics, supply chain management, and waste stream efficiency. Narrowing the production radius and bringing the farm to the table through alternative farming and other progressive food manufacturing initiatives – like synthetic biology, cellular agriculture, lab-grown proteins, and 3D printing – has allowed brands to become more transparent, sustainable, and locally embedded, and to operate with a higher degree of supply chain efficiency and certainty. Zero mile dining reflects the transition from freezing to growing. Things like sky farms and underground agriculture creatively and intuitively combine aquaponics, aeroponics, and hydroponics. Tiered retail food structures with spaces for food production, dining, food exchange, and learning have emerged as the new normal for hyper-local, sustainable restaurant ecosystems. Drivers: / Technology Development / Sustainability / Democratization / Post-materialism / Acceleration and Complexity / Demographic Shifts / Health Society Signals: / 3D Oreos At SXSW Interactive, Oreo created 3D-printed cookies using location-based Twitter hashtags to feed festivalgoers on-site and on-demand. The #EatTheTweet campaign offered hyper-personalized and localized snacks based on real-time data collection by reducing the complexity of the value chain. / Farm Underground Growing Underground is a startup out of London which has created the world’s first urban underground farm system by converting disused World War II tunnel infrastructure into a hydroponic agriculture system. Located less than two miles from the city center, it promises ready-to-eat produce in less than four hours.

PHOTOS: ELSIE HUI

Following the realization that humans and computers work better together, organizations have been continuously challenged to rethink how to best integrate AI and automation technologies with human resources. The fast food industry achieves management excellence by making use of human creativity and empathy powered by data analytics at machine speed and scale. Smart sensing and targeted feedback help managers get the most out of their employees – and also cause a huge boost in operational efficiency and customer service. Empowering employees with the support of smart, digitally enabled technologies allows them to intervene at the most value-added touchpoints along the customer journey to create an excellent service experience.

6 7 Mood Meals: Curated Food Playlists With Dynamic Pricing

Food 2.0: Modularization for Peak Flavor and Performance

Emotional analytics – monitoring and measuring emotions, then analyzing the data – has emerged as a means of understanding, responding to, and influencing people’s behaviors. The more brands know about the moods, emotions, and behaviors of consumers, the more empathetic they can become. Advances in the affective sciences have created new opportunities for brands to reinvent their service models to include algorithm-driven food, pricing, and experiences that coincide with the mood and emotional wellbeing of consumers at both the individual and collective level; for example, QSRs can now offer patrons targeted food playlists with tailored pricing. Empathic brands are more aligned with the needs and expectations of users and are able to connect with individual consumers on a more granular level. The ability to provide an improved, efficient experience and deeper engagement has led to more relevant outcomes for users and improved brand loyalty.

In a society that values productivity and efficiency, consumers increasingly expect products with clear and distinct functional benefits for their energy levels, immune system, mental acuity, physical fitness, and holistic wellbeing. Molecular-level flavor technologies and data-based insights are breaking food into its constituent components and enabling new interactions between form, function, and flavor. Shelf-stable, portable, protein-packed, nutrient-rich, and function-specific foods and food components in the form of gels, powders, and vapors have also increased transportability and operational efficiency, reducing stress on the supply chain and limiting the environmental impact of the industry. Applying modular principles to food has allowed for rapid assembly on-demand and empowered users to create new food creations that swing between the poles of functional benefit and pure creative exploration. Users want brands to provide them with the platforms, tools, resources, and modules necessary to experiment within a given set of parameters in order to create their own products and service solutions.

Drivers: / Technology Development / Network Society / Democratization / Post-materialism / Individualization Signals: / Teatreneu Club Teatreneu is a Barcelona-based comedy club that is experimenting with emotional analytics by incorporating it into its business model and charging users per laugh by using facial-recognition technology to track how much they enjoyed the show. The software is installed on tablets attached to the back of each seat in the theater and charges patrons through micro-payments. / Snickers Hungerithm The Snickers Hungerithm is an algorithm that analyzes the mood of the internet through social listening and adjusts the price of its candy bars in 7-Eleven stores accordingly, in real time. The more upset the collective internet is, the cheaper the candy becomes in order to make everyone happier. The software is built on a 3,000-word lexicon and analyzes around 14,000 social posts a day. Prices are updated more than 140 times a day and can drop to as low as 82% of retail cost.

Drivers: / Technology Development / Acceleration and Complexity / Health Society / Demographic Shifts / Democratization / Individualization Signals: / Note-by-Note Cooking Note-by-Note Cooking is a new project by renowned chef and one of the creators of molecular gastronomy, Hervé This. He deconstructs foods into their essence of flavors and textures to create shelf-stable powders that can be combined with real foods (or water) to create new forms of food. / Coke Freestyle Coke Freestyle is a touchscreen soda fountain that features 165 different Coca-Cola drinks and custom flavors. The fountain allows users to select from mixtures of flavors of Coke products, which are then individually dispensed.

8 9 New Communal Consumption: Areas to Recharge, Refresh, and Reconnect

Digital Artisanship: Edible Perfection Through Tech-driven Craftsmanship

In a time of social darkness and sensory overload that is characterized by more autonomous and anonymous rituals than ever before, QSRs have emerged as the spaces that prioritize the value of human relationships and let users recharge their devices while re-energizing themselves. The quantified self in a contemporary context demands more spaces that enable people to be people without compromising their digital and data-driven existence. Retail and food service spaces have been transformed into critical touchpoints of the human experience that are defined around convenience, comfort, and collective gathering. Brands are now increasingly responsible for building communities and manufacturing intimacy by providing the platform for these interactions to occur, both online and offline.

Hybrid human-machine systems and processes have led to a new wave of digital artisanship that is characterized by speed, scale, sensibility, and clockwork consistency. While driven by fundamental human solicitude, a big part of this reinvigorated love for craftsmanship and precision has come from advancements in technology; the tools of a master artisan are no longer paintbrushes and chisels, but 3D printers and apps. Digital technologies have found their way into the crafting of food and beverages, whether it is butchering meat, brewing beer, or mixing cocktails; there is now a new cultural reverence for the digital craftsperson. With people and technology working in concert, brands can obtain new pinnacles of perfection for mass markets through accelerated craftsmanship that blends quickness with quality and a careful attention to detail.

Drivers: / Globalization / Acceleration and Complexity / Network Society / Demographic Shifts / Post-materialism Signals: / SEYMOUR+ Space SEYMOUR+ Space in Paris offers a technology-free experience for busy urbanites. It consists of five rooms where visitors can reconnect with their intuition, creativity, and subconscious selves. Internet connections and mobile phones are not allowed, but neither are books or magazines; they are left in lockers in the entrance lobby. / Nissin Noodle Cup The Nissin Noodle Cup is an instant ramen that comes with a digital date. When you start eating the noodles, you can scan the code on the packaging and get connected with another person in order to have someone to eat with.

Drivers: / Technology Development / Post-materialism / Economic Growth / Demographic Shifts Signals: / Laser Bacon Laser bacon was the outcome of a techno-culinary experiment in a makerspace in Tokyo. By using scanning software and an industrial laser, the creators were able to precisely fry only the fat on the meat and create perfectly cooked bacon. / Sonic Decanter The Sonic Decanter is a wine decanter that uses ultrasound technology to age wine and whiskey in 20 minutes and improve the taste and aroma. It’s the result of decades of designing and engineering products for space, industry, medical uses, and consumer beverages. //// Robert Bolton is head, foresight studio at Idea Couture. Kyle Brown is a senior foresight strategist at Idea Couture.

The whole point of robotics is to make our lives easier. Designers aim to increase the ease with which we complete daily tasks (from driving cars to prepping meals) by transferring responsibility to a machine of some kind. In theory, this setup sounds ideal – the more mundane tasks we can transfer to robotics, the more time we have to focus on leisure and passion activities. However, in reality, every technological advancement seems to be taking away the things that give people a sense of purpose, however mundane those things may be. Moreover, as robotics advances further and further and takes ownership of increasingly complex and important tasks, we confuse and lose sight of what it means to be human. I recently had a conversation with someone about their predictions around the thing that would cripple humanity – not necessarily destroy the whole world, but create a big enough problem that we would be forever changed. Surprisingly, when my own question was turned back on me, the word that came out of my own mouth was “robotics.” This was funny to me, since I’d always subversively mocked Skynet believers and doomsayers who heralded the day our own AI turn on us and enslave or kill us. I love the field of robotics and feel it to be one of the most important pursuits of the 21st century. However, even a robo-enthusiast like me is able to see some looming implications of the transfer of agency we’re currently amidst. My prediction, however, had nothing to do with a mass

// With each child born into a world that expects them to find meaning in a vocation or task that is a part of an increasingly shrinking list of things that humans are supposed to do, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. //

PHOTO: LUCAS SAUGEN

BY SHANE SAUNDERSON

cull or global catastrophe. Instead, I envisioned robotics leading to a slow erosion of humanity’s sense of purpose and meaning that would ultimately cause an epidemic of depression and suicide, the likes of which would force individuals to question the very fabric of our society. While this all may seem a bit doom and gloom, the reality is that the always-connected, everything-automated lifestyle we’ve grown accustomed to is already cited as a source of mental health challenges – and we’re only just scratching the surface of what’s possible. It may be difficult to imagine that anyone will lose much sleep over a robot that unclogs toilets or proofreads newspapers, but the reality is that, of the roughly seven billion people living on this planet, everyone finds meaning and purpose in something different. Every time we take another task and automate it, we not only have to worry about someone losing their job – jobs are easy enough to retrain and evolve – but we potentially have to worry about taking away someone’s passion. That passion could be fighting basic legal battles, writing a book, building or driving cars, cleaning the home, composing music, crafting a unique cocktail, or scheduling events – all tasks that we have taught machines to do in recent years. Of course, just because a robot can do something doesn’t necessarily mean that a human can’t. In ten years, there will still be people who drive classic cars as a leisure activity even if the roads are 95% self-driving. By 2035, there will be rare instances of live, organic concerts even if the bulk of society is listening to computer-generated pop streaming into their inner-ear. When I reach old age, I’m sure I’ll still spend the odd night cooking a retro meal with a loved one even if every other day we eat according to our perfectly personalized and automatically prepared nutrition calendar. Robots will never prevent us from doing any of these things; yet, in the name of practicality and efficiency, it simply won’t make any sense for us to keep doing them. When the list of automated tasks becomes so long as to nearly be exhaustive, what will be left for us humans? A rare subset of the population may find solace and value within extremely specialized skills, such as robotic development or technology R&D, but how long will it be before we can even advance to the point of automating our advances? Taken to the extreme, the robotic and AI movements paint a picture of a world where there is nothing left for humans to do but sit and enjoy ourselves. But how long will that last? We’re a species of struggle. We thrive off conflict and the ability to problem solve. We love a good challenge. Our purpose in life is to overcome the obstacles around us and survive long enough to make the world a bit better than what we inherited and potentially leave someone behind to continue our work. But we are running out of challenges. Not only have we left no stone unturned – we’ve built stone-turning machines so that newcomers can see either side at the push of a button. We are slowly but surely converging upon completion and leaving nothing left for future generations to worry about. This continual rounding of corners, posting of warning signs, and automating of anything that requires effort is heralding implications both short and long term. In the short term, we are rearing new generations with terrible resilience. By being raised among technologies that automatically offer up an

instantaneous response to any request, we indoctrinate a culture of low effort and high expectation. This generational helicopter parenting perpetuates a frailty in our society, where we have become too reliant on the technologies around us while still being told to find meaning and value in a task and calling it what we love. In the long term, we are witnessing the end of purpose. With each child born into a world that expects them to find meaning in a vocation or task that is a part of an increasingly shrinking list of things that humans are supposed to do, we are setting ourselves up for disaster. Will new jobs emerge along the way? Yes, but not nearly at the rate of the evolution of technology and automation. We’ve entered an era of exponential technological advancement, and for each step forward that people take, technology takes a running leap. Play this game out long enough and we will see a dark utopia where you and I have nothing to worry about, nothing to fear, and absolutely nothing to do. More and more I believe that robots will be the end of us all, though not through some militaristic takeover or “killbot” infestation. No, we will simply back ourselves into a corner of uselessness. And though I believe that it will ultimately be us who pull the trigger on humanity, it will be the robots that make us the gun. //// Shane Saunderson is VP of IC/things at Idea Couture.

// When the list of automated tasks becomes so long as to nearly be exhaustive, what will be left for us humans? //

Rethinking Excellence for the Imperfect Consumer BY ESTER MOHER

When a product doesn’t do well in the market, the company selling the product may break down its different aspects to understand why it did poorly. A bank might wonder whether a credit card’s fees were too high, whether the rewards associated with the card were too low, or whether the card was simply not valuable to the customer. The assumption underlying these possibilities is that consumers are rational and have time to think through each decision they make.

Companies that view their customers as rational tend to design better products at lower prices based on the assumption that this will sell more units, often forgetting that consumer decisions are governed by so many other factors that are anything but rational. Herein lies the conundrum that serves as the basis for behavioral economics (BE): The human-use aspect of the product is just as important as product quality when thinking about an excellent product experience. BE encourages companies to think about how customers actually make decisions rather than only considering how customers should make decisions. Humans are not always rational consumers. We often pass through stores on our way home from the office, when we are distracted by conversations we had during the day or by planning dinner. We do not approach each decision with a clear mind, sufficient cognitive energy for calculating costs and benefits, or unlimited time. In such circumstances, we make decisions under “cognitive load,” meaning that our minds are already busy and we must multitask – so we often make decisions based on heuristics or rules of thumb.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Example 1: Status Quo Bias (Good decisions aren’t good forever)

Example 2: The Hot-Cold Empathy Gap (Emotions change our view of the world)

Example 3: Anchoring (Paying attention to the wrong numbers)

We may think about the products we use as ideal simply because they are the ones we currently have. This is called the “status quo bias.” For example, the process of re-enrolling in a mobile phone plan each year is typically fast and effortless. However, the status quo bias often leads people to stick with decisions even when their situation has changed. As a result, people tend to keep the same mobile phone plans for years, even though phone companies change their offerings regularly. The current understanding of why people stick with the status quo is multifaceted. In part, we don’t like to spend time remaking decisions that we have already made (we are a bit lazy in that way). We can also be fearful of change; we may wonder if a new product will be as good as the old one. Finally, we have a bias for things that are more familiar to us, which helps to reinforce the idea that older, well-known products are better. While companies might think that their customers’ tendencies to stick with the status quo always works in their favor, the status quo can sometimes lead to poor customer satisfaction. For example, when customers become dissatisfied with their mobile phone plans, they may choose to switch mobile phone providers rather than just switching plans; this can obviously be costly for providers. One way companies can prevent this from happening is by providing offers that allow customers to switch to new, less-expensive plans, thus maintaining customer satisfaction.

As consumers, we often rely heavily on our emotions when making choices, but we are not good at recognizing when emotions become the primary force behind our decisions. Sometimes, our emotions can obscure our long-term goals, which can, in turn, disrupt our overall happiness. This is known as the “hot-cold empathy gap.” When we are in a relatively non-emotional “cold” state, we are generally bad at predicting how we might behave when we are in an emotional, angry, or tired “hot” state. For example, dieters often set healthy goals when sated. But when a meeting runs late and they are ravenous, they are much more likely to grab the fastest lunch option available – even if it isn’t a quinoa bowl or a salad. Similarly, when we are in an emotional state, we tend to be less aware that our behavior is being driven by our emotions. Who hasn’t said something in the heat of an argument that they later regretted? One example of using this empathy gap to link people’s cold goals to their hot actions can be seen in the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) advertisement campaigns. Even though people know that impaired driving is wrong, when they are inebriated and need to get home, they sometimes elect to drive. MADD’s advertisements focus on bringing the viewer into the hot state by showing the potential consequences of impaired driving (such as car accidents) and pairing them with common phrases used when inebriated (“I’m just buzzed”). This campaign encourages fewer impaired driving incidents by helping to ensure that people’s behavior aligns more closely with their long-term goals.

When people try to estimate something numerically, they base that estimate on a number that they already have in mind. This existing number is called an “anchor.” Using an anchor can be very helpful. If you want to estimate how tall your friend is, for example, you can think about how tall you are and then adjust up or down. But this way of thinking can sometimes compromise how customers feel about new products. Take the introduction of the iPhone, for example. The iPhone was a new type of mobile phone that was loaded with novel features – but it was also very expensive. Initially, there was outrage over the phone’s price, because consumers were comparing the price of the iPhone to the price of other cell phones (i.e. the anchor). To combat this anchoring problem, Apple highlighted the iPhone’s newness and novelty, which reminded consumers that the anchor they had previously set – the price of cheaper, older phones – was not a good point of comparison. Today, consumers are (relatively) happy to pay the steep iPhone price, because they now use the prices of older iPhone models as anchors rather than using other mobile phone prices. Because it has helped to remove some of the pain from the purchase, re-anchoring to a higher price point has improved the customer experience.

// Companies looking to design an excellent product or service are living in the dark when they try to design with the perfect consumer in mind. //

So, how can we benefit? Companies looking to design an excellent product or service are living in the dark when they try to design with the perfect consumer in mind. It would be wise for these companies to instead begin thinking of their customers as humans who are susceptible to biases and who live in a complex world. The three heuristics and biases explored here are just a sample of the many rules of thumb that shape our everyday decisions, impacting how we think, act, and make decisions. By designing around these heuristics and biases, companies can work to improve customer satisfaction, increase sales, and improve customer retention. Designing an experience that accounts for the nuances of imperfect decision-making can help companies move closer to developing a truly excellent customer experience. //// Ester Moher is a resident behavioral economist at Idea Couture.

BY TIMOTHY JASON

Measurement allows us to better understand both the world and ourselves in relation to the world. It also shows us whether or not our endeavors are successful, making measurement very useful – particularly in competitive environments that value distinction and innovation.

To take advantage of measurement, businesses must first define the attribute to be measured and then develop a strategy for how to measure it. Measurement can only occur if there is clarity and consensus regarding the attribute: What is it, exactly? What are its core elements, and how do they fit together? Indicators can be used to map the attribute’s elements onto observations made in the real world. For example, an indicator of height could be the use of standardized measurement units, like inches. But identifying such indicators becomes more difficult when attributes, such as theoretical concepts, are poorly defined or conceptualized.

In addition to these measurement methods, there is a range of models and indicators of excellence often used as benchmarks to evaluate business performance (e.g. Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence and the EFQM Excellence Model). Arguably the most well-known model of excellence was introduced in Tom Peters’ seminal book on business performance, In Search of Excellence. In it, Peters and Robert Waterman propose the following eight principles to achieve excellence in business: a bias for action, staying close to the customer, autonomy and entrepreneurship, productivity through people, clear and compelling organizational values, focusing on what you do best, operating with a lean staff, and finding a balance between having enough structure without getting stuck in it. These principles, among others, have since been incorporated into strategic plans and used as operational performance measures. But the business world has changed dramatically since Peters’ and Waterman’s ideas were published, and it continues to change faster than new concepts can be defined and measured. Meanwhile, excellence is often still regarded as a finite attribute that can be defined, measured, and evaluated, much like height.

// How do we quantify something that we cannot concretely define? //

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Business Excellence: Prized, but Poorly Understood

“Excellence” is one such poorly defined concept. As with other abstract ideas, each individual’s conception of excellence is subject to their individual experiences, values, and interpretations. Because excellence is essentially an idea, it is neither observable nor well-defined. In contrast to ideas, observable objects are identifiable and easier to define because they are perceived through our senses and experienced through our actions. This concreteness allows us to adopt a fairly uniform and coherent understanding of their core properties and functions. We can also evaluate and compare these objects with other things – a task that is much more difficult with concepts like excellence, which do not exist beyond human thought. Despite this ambiguity, the concept of excellence is the third most popular core value among Fortune 500 companies. Some of these companies refer to it as a “quality,” while others include it among “performance” measures; none assign it a concise and consistent definition, however, nor do they include measurable objectives or outcomes to help understand and track their achievement of the “value” of excellence. Excellence is listed as a core value even though companies do not know how it may influence their business operations. This failure to clearly define and understand excellence can lead to inconsistency and ambiguity in the messages companies are relaying to their employees, who are left confused. What are they trying to achieve? How do they know when they have achieved it? Why do they care? In an attempt to resolve the ambiguity surrounding excellence as a business standard, there have been many methods proposed for measuring excellence. These have included Deloitte’s Global Competitive Manufacturing Index, just-in-time manufacturing, best practices to follow, Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, the Agile movement, process improvement, business transformation, and lean thinking. Perhaps one of the most common methods is TQM, which aims to cultivate a culture within an organization of high-quality production. But TQM is severely limited by its lack of clear standards, well-defined elements, or even key guidelines for implementation. Six Sigma, another common method, utilizes complex statistical operations to identify process deficiencies, as well as rigorous control procedures to support improvement. However, this approach has its limitations as well, including challenges in sourcing sufficient quality data for the analysis, high costs and complexities, and time constraints. The goal of the above methods is to ensure work is done the right way. But what is the right way? Is the right way definable and consistent across multiple organizations, or even across one large organization? The glaring limitation of these methods is the attempt they make to pin down and standardize that which perhaps cannot be standardized. Without a clear understanding of the concepts behind excellence and their application to innovation and growth, these methods of measurement can be irrelevant and potentially wasteful if implemented.

This is a problematic and false perspective. To measure and evaluate excellence, we must start with a clear definition that individuals at all levels of an organization can understand and realistically achieve. But the subjective nature of excellence as a concept precludes the use of such a one-size-fits-all approach. So, how do we quantify something that we cannot concretely define? Unlike the definition of excellence, the solution here is clear. Prior to adopting strategies, methods, and models for measuring and evaluating abstract concepts, we must consider the following questions: Can this concept be defined, measured, and used to enhance our business? Will others adopt the same definition? How is this idea best conceptualized – as an outcome, or as a process? How can we build this concept into our innovation strategies? If these questions are not properly addressed, businesses may end up with “excellent” performance while experiencing declining sales and high employee turnover – not such an excellent prospect. //// Timothy Jason is a quantitative research specialist at Idea Couture.

Notes on Excellence

Excellence is a slippery concept that is both overused and underused. It’s a North Star at the center of business life. There are centers of excellence in almost every large enterprise. There are excellence initiatives designed to give companies and businesses of all sizes a strategic edge. There are long lists of books

focusing on excellence and how to achieve it. And yet, with all of this attention, the true meaning of excellence often escapes companies. Why? It slips out of their hands because they forget that it depends more on human excellence than on institutional, processual excellence. It is achieved through individual and social action and not through process alone. It is essential to understand the human element in all of this to fully comprehend that excellence is defined more by human connection and action than anything else.

PHOTO: DANIEL GHIO

B Y D R. PA U L H A R T L E Y AND IDRIS MOOTEE

// Excellence is what happens when humans collaborate in a valuable way. //

“Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.” — Tom Peters The above quote from Tom Peters offers us a vision of something really great: excellence through a happy, interested customer. But while this quote is laudable in its intentions, it actually carries within it one of the major conceptual failings in contemporary

business. It suggests that there is a divide between businesses (or business people) and customers. It also suggests that value is something objective that stands outside human exchange and collaboration. He should have left it at “excellence comes from human beings doing things of value.” While we understand Peters’ intention, his problem begins when he places “human beings” on one side and customers on the other. This drives a wedge between the two groups of people who have to come together to create and agree on value. In doing so, he gives all the action (“doing things”) to the business person, and universalizes the concept of “value,” rendering it as simply true rather than a decision made collaboratively with customers (the other humans in the equation). All the customer is doing in this equation is consuming and being impressed. Because it’s exclusionary, it’s not really excellent. You might ask, why be so pedantic? Because excellence in business – or anything, for that matter – demands us to remember that we are all human beings. People on both sides of the equation are the same. Bringing them together in collaboration and agreement is where excellence is forged. Forgetting this allows us to lapse into many of the bad habits that are inhibiting excellence today. Value itself is something that we agree upon after dialogue, exchange, and achieving a common understanding. It is something that only exists when most people in a system of exchange agree. With this in mind, we can already state that excellence demands dialogue and exchange. It is forged through collaboration. So, if we take excellence as the human act of defining, creating, and agreeing upon value, we can begin to see that excellence is about connecting humans in the right way. Excellence in business requires three things: foresight, insight, and strategy. All of this depends on a shared sense of humanity. While it is possible to conduct business without any of these things, it would be difficult to call it “excellent,” as many outcomes demonstrate. It could be said that the innovation industry as a whole has been there to inject these elements into places where people have forgotten that being strategically competitive requires excellence in these three areas. In fact, insight, foresight, and strategy are really nothing more than a way to activate the kinds of dialogue and collaboration necessary for humans to engage with other humans in order to define and grow value. Insight teaches us about the world we live in; foresight helps us see the world in a new way; strategy provides the structure for better interactions and collaborations with those who inhabit the world with us. With this in mind, Peters’ statement might be better put as this: Excellence is what happens when humans collaborate in a valuable way. Now that we have a functioning meaning of excellence, we need to return to the fact that excellence as a concept is overused in business, and realize that it is actually our new definition that is underused. Businesses tend to focus on internal excellence and forget about collaboration. This is something that needs to change. Excellence through collaboration should become the strategic principle that all businesses striving for excellence adopt. That is where we’ll find the most value. //// Dr. Paul Hartley is executive director and cofounder, Institute for Human Futures and a senior resident anthropologist at Idea Couture. Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor-in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture.

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Searching for the Wrong Things

BY SCOTT FRIEDMANN

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

I often ask myself what famous founders were searching for when they started their companies decades ago. It’s easy to see what drove Steve Jobs or still drives Mark Zuckerberg, but the history of business suggests that the initial search can’t be sustained – even when executives seem to align with the eight themes that Tom Peters outlined in his 1982 business classic, In Search of Excellence.

I imagine a famous retailer who was on a search for scale, a search to replace small community stores, a search to sell cheaper products, a search to enable consumerism, fast fashion, and disposability. A brilliant billionaire on a search for efficiency who believed windows in an office encouraged employees to daydream. Is this excellence? Is this the millennial workplace of the future? Is this a culture of empowered retail employees, or a zombie mix of low paid employees in a sea of neon lights who can’t be bothered to care? Is this the temple of the deal or a previously famous retail science experiment that is no longer relevant?

If excellence is defined through the eyes of shareholders and stock performance, then there is no doubt that excellence has been achieved. But weighed in a much larger historical context, does this form of excellence address many of the things consumers are looking for today? Does this search for excellence account for changes in technology and this little (BIG) thing called ecommerce that didn’t exist in 1982? Even grocery stores, the last bastion of traditional retail, seem to be moving online. Is excellence in customer experience possible in massive stores that erode convenience? Does this excellence support the return to local craft manufacturing? Over time, will consumers even want to be in these temples of low priced retail plastic? All of these questions force us to ask an even larger question: Is this vision of “Best Run” excellence sustainable? Can we be on a search for excellence when we are simultaneously looking for profits from a business that may suddenly become less relevant? Does quick decision-making, learning from “today’s customers,” staying with the business you know, centralized values, and employee autonomy drive sustainable excellence, or do we need to update our assumptions? I would argue that a focus on today’s customers often leads to tunnel vision, where management teams fail to identify new customers and their emergent needs. Companies see the business of today, but fail to anticipate technological change and the disruption it can cause. Fostering innovation needs to be infused with a heavy dose of foresight so that companies are investing in the right things and not just

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shape your future.

// Values are important, but only if they are balanced with a new perspective on the changing value chain. //

what’s cool? Are they trained to find the next cool thing or just to look at sales, performance, and profit data that speak to the obvious? Ironically, the firm felt that quantitative measures were critical to the credibility of the analysis in the book and narrowed the initial list of 62 companies down to 43. Where are they today? In 2002, a 20-year look in the rear-view mirror indicated that companies listed in the “Excellence Index” (at least the majority of the 32 that were public) generated returns of 1.9% more than the median indexes. But were they “excellent and innovative” as the analysis concluded? Were Wang Labs, Atari, Amdahl, Raychem, Digital Equipment, Kmart, Kodak, and Hewlett Packard “cool”? Maybe at the time, but they are certainly not today. Some aren’t even in business anymore. Even a company like Intel, once a leader in the pack, failed to take advantage of the post-2002 shift from computer chips to mobile phone chips. But this misses the point. Regardless of how successful a company is today, the future needs to be driven by creative leadership that can integrate a new set of themes that Peters and the team at McKinsey failed to fully consider. Even if these companies were excellent in their day, it’s hard to stay excellent if your executives are searching for the wrong things. //// Scott Friedmann is chief innovation officer, EVP at Idea Couture.

PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

building a vast innovation engine that spins its wheels and never commercializes success. Values are important, but only if they are balanced with a new perspective on the changing value chain. One example would be the impending soda taxes. It signals that happiness will be sustained through a search for a new kind of sweetness, something that replaces the all-evil sugar with a more natural alternative. But is this a search to reduce diabetes, obesity, and death, or an attempt to rediscover excellent shareholder returns? Can a soda company have creative leadership that powers up an innovation funnel of healthy drinks and snacks and design-centric thinking alongside a core product that some describe as a legal drug? Can sweet margins be sustained in an era outside the core competency of soda and its unparalleled margins? Time will tell, but one thing is for sure: The search for excellence changes over time and many companies can’t sustainably hold the line. Peters has been unbelievably honest and transparent over the years. When asked how he first built the initial list of “excellent” companies outlined in the book, he stated, “We went around to McKinsey's partners and to a bunch of other smart people who were deeply involved and seriously engaged in the world of business and asked: ‘who’s cool? Who's doing cool work? Where is there great stuff going on? And which companies genuinely get it?’” Since when are McKinsey partners able to discern

IMPACT is a foresight board game that teaches you how to think critically and imaginatively about the future. Created by futurists, strategists, and designers at Idea Couture, IMPACT is based on the core principles and tools of strategic foresight, a discipline for exploring and understanding change and uncertainty.

O R D E R I M P A C T: A F O R E S I G H T G A M E AT W W W.I D E A C O U T U R E.C O M / I M P A C T

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Okay. But not too hard.

BY IDRIS MOOTEE

Throughout my long career as a leader, manager, and mentor of young designers, fresh MBAs, and motivated managers climbing the ladder in their corporate careers, there has been one common piece of advice that I always give: Don’t try too hard. Of course, this seems contradictory to what we usually hear, especially when the greatest B-schools and D-schools in the world are encouraging their students to try their best and push beyond their limits. Every day they are asked to try harder, to achieve excellence and perfection. That’s the academic world. However, perfection is nearly impossible in business. Most of the time, emphasizing perfection acts as an obstacle to progress. And over-focusing on excellence acts as a barrier to getting to a creative solution. As a result, many high performers develop a pattern of thinking, assuming that they have to try extremely hard in order to have the best solution. This is not the case. Trying your best is a good thing, of course, but that is different from trying too hard. Similarly, thinking hard and strategically calculating every option and scenario is critical – but that is different from overthinking. This goes for strategists and designers alike. When designers try to improve an asset by putting more and more on it, they tend to forget the very core of the design and its essence. Over-strategizing and overdesigning are synonymous with trying too hard. There is a point at which you need to realize that either you simply don’t have enough information to understand the situation, the information you’re using to make decisions is inaccurate, or the problem is simply beyond your intellectual and professional capacity.

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01 Surround yourself with others. Whenever you’re dealing with complex problems and know you need to be in a new headspace in order to be productive, provide that for yourself. Finding the right people to exchange ideas with is the most effective way to do so. Allow dialogues to flow freely and easily – like art – and new ideas will eventually emerge. Don’t force it.

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Stop trying to tell yourself that you’re creative.

Try to be more visual. Use diagrams to help you along the way. Nothing gets an idea across faster than drawing it out and then drawing it again, but differently. It doesn’t matter how bad of a sketcher you are – it’s all about the idea behind your sketch. It is a process to express your thoughts. Think of it as sensemaking, not as creating an outcome. PHOTO: IDRIS MOOTEE

Achieving excellence is about trying hard.

Here’s some advice to help you avoid trying too hard:

The matter of whether or not you’re truly creative is not the issue. A lot of people try too hard to show, talk, pose, and act in a way that proves they are creative. The more they do it, the less creative they become. Truly creative people don’t force themselves into a creative mode. There is no switch to flick, no creative thinking hats to put on. Real creative people get into a flow by going through visual artifacts, data, and other resources. Then, when creativity becomes more effortless, they move forward at an amazing speed during which time itself will cease to have meaning. This is the best mindset that will allow you to be the most creative, the most thought provoking, and produce meaningful creative solutions.

Mess things up and mix things up. Another good way to be more creative is to play at the intersection of the bad, stupid, wrong, and impossible. Mix and remix your ideas and let them mess with your mental models and allow you to look at things in very different ways. The notion that something is bad, stupid, wrong, or impossible is a cultural construct. Think about something that you consider a “right.” Most people forget that rights are not laws of nature. Whereas nature enforces its laws absolutely, rights and rules can be broken and revoked. Philosophers have been vigorously arguing over rights for thousands of years; they cannot be self-evident. The minute you take assumed rights away, you can see the many sides of a problem and its possible solutions.

Avoid the paralysis analysis trap.

Walk, run, and jog – just don't sit.

Many consultant teams spend way too much time pulling data when building hypotheses and make the mistake of thinking that the more data they have, the better. They end up spending 90% of their time and energy looking at that data, forgetting that they are dealing with a disruption threat to which less than 1% of data is relevant. Often companies get stuck and drown in a sea of data, unable to come up with any useful explanations. This is a sign of reaching the stage of paralysis. Looking at past operating data offers little help in seeing a new industry that is about to be reinvented. The key is to limit your analysis. Instead, take down all the pieces of the value chain and reassemble them – just like playing with Lego.

This is a simple one. Get away from your desk and out of your office. As cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz explains in her book On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes – which chronicles her walks around a city block with eleven different experts – we all have our own incomplete experiences which we call “reality” and we use this “adaptive ignorance” to ease our minds and focus on specific problems. But sometimes the problems we’re looking at may not be the problems we’re meant to solve. By looking at the world with fresh eyes and in a new way, we can become fascinated by things that previously went unseen. So take a walk.

// Thinking hard and strategically calculating every option and scenario is critical – but that is different from overthinking. //

By pushing yourself in new and creative ways rather than relying on the common misconception of “the more, the better,” you’ll be able to break out of the inclination to try too hard. By striving forward, remodeling your view of the world, and developing new patterns of thought, you can achieve excellence, without being an overachiever. //// Idris Mootee is the publisher and editor- in-chief of MISC and CEO of Idea Couture.

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PHOTO: SOHO HOUSE BARCELONA

Experience

Soho House Barcelona How to Eat Your Way Through Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s West Loop Travel Essentials Le Labo Nolita Virgil Abloh On Creative Excellence

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Soho House Barcelona BY ESTHER ROGERS

If the other Soho House locations (which include South Beach, Istanbul, New York, and more) weren’t enough to convince you to get an Every House membership, then their newest location in Barcelona will make a very persuasive argument. The iconic members-only venue is setting up shop in a 19th-century building in the scenic Duke of Medinaceli Square, overlooking the Port Vell marina. With design overseen by founder Nick Jones, in-house design team managing director Vicky Charles, and European design director James Waterworth, the Barcelona location expertly weaves a modern aesthetic with

traditional touches from the region. The overall feel is rustic and warm, with a touch of art deco – and the result is both inviting and inspiring. Not every private club can claim to be an ideal place to hold a business meeting, finish a manuscript, or relax on vacation, but the Barcelona club has been perfected on all fronts. The rooftop features both sea and city views, a heated pool, and a bar and lounge area, while the Cowshed Relax spa is an indulgent space open to both members and non-members. Renowned restaurant Cecconi’s brings Italian flavors to the mix, and the local speakeasy, the Green Room, is open until 3 a.m. In addition to all of this, they packed in 57 bedrooms, a gym, and a 36-seat screening room. So whether you’re entertaining an important client, finishing up a creative project, or looking to relax (siestas are encouraged), Soho House Barcelona has got you covered. With a beautiful aesthetic and packed with amenities, this may be one of Soho House’s best locations yet. Time to start booking those flights to Spain!

PHOTOS: SOHO HOUSE BARCELONA

Experience

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Experience

How to Eat Your Way Through Chicago’s West Loop BY MIRA BLUMENTHAL

Who says a night on the town needs to be constrained to just a single restaurant or bar? We found ourselves in Chicago's West Loop, hungry and overwhelmed by the selection of watering holes. So we decided to create our own restaurant tour. Here are the highlights:

Stop 1: Girl and the Goat Undoubtedly one of the best eateries in the Windy City, Girl and the Goat is a comfortable yet stylish place to try something new. Co-owned by Rob Katz and Kevin Boehm with Top Chef champion Stephanie Izard in the kitchen, this place serves up interesting and delicious fare like goat carpaccio and calamari bruschetta with goat milk ricotta and goat bacon.

PHOTO: MAUDE’S BAR

PHOTO: GIRL AND THE GOAT

Stop 2: Maude’s Liquor Bar Known for its dainty cocktails and delightful seafood, stepping into Maude’s is like teleporting to Paris in the 1920s. This dimly lit and intimate bar is home to some of the most delicious and freshest oysters we’ve ever tasted. The bartenders were not only knowledgeable and friendly, they were open to concocting anything our hearts desired – which included an elderflower and gin drink we made up on the spot!

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Stop 5: Au Cheval

The barkeep at Maude’s recommended this place, so we knew it had to be good. As we turned down an alleyway and spotted a sign reading “Champagne” with an arrow pointing to the speakeasy-style pub, we knew we were in the right place. The champagne cocktails were delightful and the lobster deviled eggs were unique, but the romantic candlelit atmosphere was what upstaged it all.

The final stop on our food tour was Au Cheval, an institutional diner cum old-school Jewish deli. Despite an almost two-hour wait, our late night meal was out of this world. (Seriously, the “Flapper” made from gin, black pepper, lemon, honey, and fernet was one of the most unusual and amazing cocktails we’ve ever had.) The down-home, all-American cheeseburger was perfectly greasy, the fries were just salty enough, and the bread and butter pickles were crunchy and delightfully vinegar-y. We can’t wait to go back and try their matzah ball soup.

PHOTO: ANTHONY TAHLIER, FOUR CORNERS TAVERNS

Stop 3: RM Champagne Salon

We told our bartender at RM that we were doing a culinary tour of the neighborhood, and his suggestion to visit Federales immediately took our night from tranquil to lively, especially since their key feature is a funky beer garden that houses a big metal bell. Patrons are challenged to drink tequila from shot glasses made of ice and throw the “glasses” at the bell to make it ring for all to hear. If you’re looking to let loose a bit, this is the place to pop by – and the tacos were are good too.

PHOTO: AU CHEVAL

Stop 4: Federales Tacos & Tequila

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Travel Essentials

Traveler by TOMS in Florentin Matte Ombre Well-known philanthropic shoemaker TOMS has branched out into eyewear. These trendy shades are perfect for combatting the blazing sun or simply adding some flare to your outfit, all while helping someone in the world get assistance for their own vision, be it an eye exam or sight-saving surgery. $78 USD, toms.com

W&P Design’s Carry On Cocktail Kit

Raden Luggage Their slogan rings true: Raden’s smart luggage is the case for better travel. It features a Bluetooth tracking device to give you peace of mind; an ergonomic handle that doubles as a scale; and a charging pod with two USB ports. All three features connect to an app that gives real-time updates, so you can rest assured your luggage made it onto your connecting flight. $295 USD (A22 Carry) and $395 USD (A28 Check), raden.com

Mix yourself a G&T, Bloody Mary, or Moscow Mule thousands of feet in the air with this cocktail kit that fits in your carry on luggage and won’t give you a headache at security (the next morning, however, is debatable). Pack one of each flavor for long flights. $24 USD, wandpdesign.com

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Travel Essentials

Gucci Princetown Loafers The epitome of luxury meets comfort, these loafers are like little pillows of heaven for tired, achey feet covering a lot of miles. Kick them on and off with ease on a long flight and enjoy all the benefits of wearing slippers â&#x20AC;&#x201C; while still looking like a million bucks. $995 USD, gucci.com

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Travel Essentials Frank and Oak Travel Accessories

Rikumo Binchotan Charcoal Toothbrush in Black This charcoal-infused toothbrush will keep your mouth extra fresh on the go. In addition to preventing bad breath and removing plaque, the antibacterial properties in the charcoal purify the bristles after each use. It’s a must for that red-eye. $7 USD, frankandoak.com

Master & Dynamic Noise Isolating Headphones Block out the noises of your office, jam-packed subway car, or airplane drone with these snazzy noise cancelling headphones. They are specifically tuned to provide a warm and rich sound quality, and are beautifully designed too. $400 USD, frankandoak.com RIMOWA Electronic Tag

Frank and Oak Cello Backpack in Black Whether you’re commuting to work or heading out on a quick weekend getaway, this practical yet fashionable leather backpack will comfortably hold all of your essentials. No need to get squeemish about cramming it under the seat in front of either – this backpack is as durable as they come. $325 USD, frankandoak.com

In partnership with Lufthansa, RIMOWA has developed the first digital and fully integrated mobile solution for airline luggage. This Electronic Tag is intended to replace the conventional paper travel tag with a digital data module that is integrated right into the suitcase, offering travelers the ability to check into their flight – and check their luggage – on the go. $890-$1610 USD, rimowa.com

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Nolita’s Le Labo: Finding a Fragrance for Life BY ESTHER ROGERS

The perfume industry’s niche market has become anything but niche as customers increasingly move toward minimal bottle aesthetics and complex (but uncomplicated) scents. Le Labo has been reaping the benefits of this shift, with stores and retailers now open in every corner of the world. We recently paid a visit to their Nolita location in New York to get a firsthand experience of the brand.

The first thing you notice is the bar where all the fragrances are mixed on the spot when purchased. The only pre-bottled options are the discovery sets (5 samples for $30, or 15 for $80), but everything else is made to order, ensuring freshness. Their line of 15 fragrances are placed opposite the bar, some under “femme” or “homme” – though technically the entire collection can be treated as unisex. There are the bestsellers – Santal 33 and Rose 31 – as well as more unique fragrances, like Oud 27 and Thé Noir 29. A 100 ml bottle will run you $260, but the emphasis isn’t to buy a lot. Instead, creators Edouard Roschi and Fabrice Penot want customers to discover a scent that means something to them personally and that they will wear for a long time, not just as a fragrance of the month. If you’re looking for something other than perfume, Le Labo recently released a unique home diffuser

($590), complete with Edison bulb and reclaimed wood, and a more expected selection of candles, body oils, and shower gels. They also offer refills – several customers came by to top up their bottles in the short time we were there. Although many perfumeries can be overwhelming due to the sheer amount of choice and senseoverload, it’s surprisingly easy to spend a good part of the day hanging out in the small but cozy Nolita shop, testing out fragrances and chatting with the knowledgeable perfumers. No one is trying to convince you to purchase anything on the spot – instead, you are encouraged to explore at your own pace, picking a scent that might become your trademark for life. Or not. Visit Le Labo Nolita at 233 Elizabeth Street, New York, NY 10012. Other locations can be found at lelabofragrances.com.

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Virgil Abloh On Creative Excellence B Y R O B E R T B O LT O N

Virgil Abloh is the visionary behind the high-growth, high fashion clothing and furniture collection Off-White. He is equally well known as the long-time, trusted creative consultant for Kanye West. Recently, at a small event at the Canon Creator Lab in Toronto, Virgil spoke with his friend, photographer and filmmaker Fabien Montique. To a roomful of digital native artists, designers, curators, filmmakers, DJs, musicians, and social media somebodies, Virgil expounded his secret rules and tricks to the pursuit of creative excellence. The following is part recording, interpretation, and creative response to the conversation and gems he dropped.

Think Free

Make It Yours

“Culture moves at the pace of music.”

The pursuit of creative excellence:

I started going back to the 17-year-old version of myself, looking at culture like skateboarding, Wu Tang, and Kurt Cobain, taking what I loved and putting it like it was 2017.

When you think about a brand like Margiela, you know exactly what it is. You can imagine what any product would look like. You can imagine what a Margiela coffee cup would look like.

You idolize the people you love.

02 You duplicate.

To nudge culture, find when everyone is doing one thing. Do the opposite… really well.

Pace & Output

An innate ability to lurk is the best skillset.

ASK: What is the most you can get out of a day?

You realize you idolized them because they were being themselves.

Stop finding a reason not to create. People have non-competes; you can break those.

PHOTOS: OTHELLO GREY, NEVA WIREKO ILLUSTRATIONS: PAVEL IOUDINE & ROBERT BOLTON

“Why would I say no to a project? It’s not like I don’t have enough time. I can just solve it on the spot.”

04 You make it yours. You make it new.

Media

Fabien is like an Instagram filter. Any content he captures becomes part of his style.

Where do I want my work to go? On the hoodie or the hologram?

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THE FUTURE OF DRIVING WILL ALWAYS INCLUDE DRIVERS. BMW VISION NEXT 100: A FUTURE YOU CAN DRIVE.

THE NEXT 100 YEARS

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The Ultimate Driving Experience.®