Week Two

In week one of my thoughts on the Innovator's DNA I discussed the first part of the book and the first discovery skill in associative thinking.  This week I read about the next three discovery skills.  Namely:

• Questioning
• Observing
• Networking

The Questioning section was very interesting   In my professional life  I work as a second level support for Optical network equipment at Ciena.  Often one of the hardest parts of the job is getting an accurate problem description - and based on this book, it seems like this problem is wide spread.  We've taken courses on decision making and determining what the real problem was.  The main initiative was through Kepner-Tregoe  This book echo's the approach of questioning to the void to determine what the true problem is.  Oven problems are like onions, and you have to peel back the many layers until you understand the root of the issue.  Oven in the heat of an issue or discussion it is easy to get lost in the conversation and not take the step back to truly understand what the issue is.  The book also highlights a large conundrum with  questioning - that is - how does one question without coming across as difficult or worse.  A good tip for this was to introduce yourself and simply mention that you will be asking a lot of dumb questions to ensure that you have a good understand of what the idea or issue is.  This sets the stage for questioning and hopefully avoids any confrontational discussions.

Observing was up next.  The book takes a slightly more meta approach to observing.  Most people when they observe, really only observe with their eyes. They don't engage their other senses.  In some instances this may not be possible, but more often than not there is more to the interaction then just watching it.  Observing a phenomena is so much more informative than just discussing or reading about it.   Again, where I come from professionally, we can see issues in the analysis of logs in our systems, but to actually go in an see the issues, to reproduce them, to understand the steps in them gives a much better understanding of the issue.  Often to do this it takes a lot of observing of how our customers and software are interacting 

The last chapter for this week as networking.  The most interesting aspect of networking was the question "who else has solved this problem".  I think this is one of the most important questions which can be asked.  Too often do we spend huge amounts of time solving issues which have already been solved.  At work we devote a signification amount of time to knowledge sharing to avoid two people trying to solve the same problem on different days.  By sharing our knowledge we can become more efficient and ultimately serve our customers faster and more accurately because of it.  The book highlights how this can be difficult to do without infringing on intellectual property, but gives ideas around it.  I especially like the idea of networking and observing outside of your own field to other fields which may have had similar issues.  For instance a lot of newer optical technology was first developed for wireless systems and is now being applied to fiber optics.  

Lastly from class looking at where the creation of ideas comes from was pretty interesting.   The main ideas were:

• Personal Pain
• Team/Exertise
• Market Gap/Need
• Client Access

There were lots of examples of Personal Pain - most notably from the founder of Shopify because he couldn't create his on-line snow board store easily

Being a former Nortel employee I've seen businesses start when entire teams at Nortel were laid off and they reformed a new company doing something very similar and because of their severance they had the time and money to invest.

Looking at a market gap or need seems pretty straight forward - this to me would be where a lot of franchises or other types of business starts.

Lastly client access seems a bit like serendipity to me.  For this to happen one must have an expertise  and a large network.  Then they have to be in the right position in the right time where somebody in their network thinks of you to solve a problem for them.  Although one could create the seeds of this by maintaining a healthy network and staying up to date on trends, there is a certain amount of luck in this.

See you next week when we discuss experimentation as a discovery skill.  I don't think this means using drugs to be more creative, but only time will tell.