Hunome – new venture
Shift from intrapreneur to entrepreneur – again
Once a change agent always a change agent. I had a good run with that at CSC and now it is time to pull all my paths together into Hunome, a business which has been brewing for a very long time. It combines my experiences and passions in developing novel approaches to understanding people, my mobile/cellular background over the last 15 years and my Internet biz and foresight expertise.
….and I am very excited about it….and a fantastic team has come together to take a journey with me.
stay tuned.
Vignette ‘how to’ on foresight – modules of goodness
MODULARIZE OUTCOMES–KEEP THE GOOD AND DEAL WITH THE BAD
Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a self-defeating reaction to negative outcomes. Organizations need to think in degrees of gray. They require an ability to sort thinking into modules, and know what to keep, what to get rid off, and what to deal with immediately. For example, when a product is launched and fails, the organization should aim to understand the components of this failure. When the root causes of a failure, or a success, are understood, it becomes clear that what actually failed or succeeded were discrete elements of the process. This learning enables the organization to preserve and build on valuable information or experience–which is present even in a disastrous initiative–not throw it away because it was part of a larger failure.
Key steps
When assessing an activity, the first step is to identify and assess modules in the larger activity. What were the key elements or actions? Next, interview the decision-makers and other active participants representing each of the modules. The analyst can help build a constructive culture into the interview process by making clear how the information will be used going forward.
Next focus on the modules that appear to contain the issues, and build a deeper understanding of what actually happened. For example, was the market not mature enough? Were the technologies not mature enough? Which ones? Was this offering too much, too soon? Was the organization unprepared to support it? Was the ecosystem not ready for it?
Analysis of the interview results can be sorted into the “good” and “bad” modules, and communicated to the organization. Thus, the entire activity does not to be deemed a failure. Conversely, even successful activities will have their dysfunctional or “bad” elements that can provide opportunities for learning.
A better approach, of course, is to avoid getting into the situation in the first place through greater understanding of the market fundamentals of and organizational readiness. What is emerging in the organization’s external context? What is shifting in the ecosystem? How are technologies shifting? What else is changing? It is not as simple as knowing it all and hence making all the right decisions. It is more about knowing more, and hence making wiser decisions, about the key alternative directions possible and their potential outcomes.
Benefits
The benefit of “keeping the baby” is preserving the good and learning from the bad, which can help the organization gain benefits from good modules sooner than others do and avoid pitfalls that others may experience. The downside of not doing this well is that the repercussions tend to be huge. Misunderstandings abound, and people draw all kinds of wrong conclusions and use those in their decision-making, to the detriment of activities to come. The activity is forever viewed through a myopic lens of failure/success, which can kill benefits that would be clear to those with a broader outlook.
Example
An example is the Apple Newton. The Newton was a pioneer of the “do-it-all” personal digital assistant (PDA), and defined many aspects of future PDAs. Yet Apple stopped its production in 1998. Post-mortem, the market’s actions and numerous articles on the event suggested that Apple made a huge deal of the failure internally, burning many of the people involved. Once burned, twice shy: it became difficult for anyone at Apple to propose anything similar. The baby was tossed out with the bathwater!
What really happened? At Apple’s core is a simple premise of user-friendly products, quality design (technical and industrial), and good purchasing experience. What was lacking in the organization’s processes to enable it to understand the market better and handle the failure better? Judging by the “toss the baby out with the bathwater” framework, there was no module analysis designed to transparently keep the good from the experience and learn from the bad.
Now, the iPod brings new hope. The iPod represents many elements that could have been learned from the Newton project. Did Apple conclude that Newton was too much, too soon, not connected enough to the ecosystem providers, and based on immature technologies–and use that knowledge to strip the iPod down to a palm-size simple solution?
Further reading
Kahney, L. (2002, August 29). Apple’s Newton Just Won’t Drop. Wired.
Marsh, N., McAllum, M., and Purcell, D. (2002). Strategic Foresight: The Power of Standing in the Future. Melbourne: Crown Content.
This vignette [1 of 6 I wrote] first appeared in “Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight”, edited by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop, published in 2006
Vignette ‘how to’ on foresight – people knowledge central
MAKE THE SOCIOCULTURAL CONTEXT CENTRAL
Make the human context central to any strategic foresight activity. Do not be overly enamored with industry analysis, technology, or business trends and forget or overlook the role of people. Many activities produce impressive reams of data but haven’t thought through how the people affected would react or respond in the proposed future. Considering different sociocultural contexts can help the organization respond to a wider range of needs–be they demographic, sociological, ethnographic, physiological, psychological, etc.
Key steps
The analyst can help the organization see the importance of the sociocultural context and how it provides the baseline for understanding emerging needs and opportunities. Some leading organizations are forming Consumer or Customer Foresight/Insight programs. For example, Nokia has for about ten years been proactively using consumer foresight inputs in its development processes. These inputs are woven into the product development, design, and foresight/insight programs. This approach has been cited as one of the fundamental elements in Nokia’s improved position in the mobile phone market in the 1990s. (Steinbock, 2001)
Consumer-centered programs start with identifying trends in the cultural, sociological, psychological, ethnographic, and demographic arenas and exploring their implications for various organizational activities. In other cases, organizations hire firms to help them get a feel for what is going on, ranging from very deep explorations of the cultural context, using tools such as Integral Futures (Slaughter, 2003) or Causal Layered Analysis (Inayatullah, 2004), to the more surface-level approaches epitomized by “cool hunting.”
Several steps need to be followed in providing a cultural context for foresight work. A multidisciplinary “SWAT team” could be established with the skills to understand people, decision-making contexts, and the output context. The team collects trends either by searching themselves or working with one of the many capable brokers of trend information. Next, they analyze and prioritize the impacts of these trends. This information can then be communicated to the critical business processes where it is needed.
Benefits
Grounding the activity in an understanding of human behaviors and societal drivers is an underutilized approach. “Mainstream economics today views production as valuable primarily as a means to satisfy the needs and wants of consumers, but has taken a simple–some say, simplistic–approach to identifying those needs and wants.” (Goodwin, Ackerman, and Kiron, 1995, p. 31). Or as Farrell (1998, p. 14) suggests, “In business, waves of demand must be actively surfed, with an acute knowledge of whether the wave is building up or moving into churning, energy-wasting whitewater. The essence of a good ride is knowing when to get in and out and maximizing one’s advantage along the way.”
Understanding emerging needs as an element of the organization’s business system is crucial to right-timing its outputs and hence benefiting commercially. A challenge is that sociocultural inputs tend to be sourced with traditional market-research methods, which mostly highlight existing norms, values, and thoughts and overlook shifting contexts.
Example
The Beta vs. VHS competition among videotape manufacturers highlights the importance of correctly interpreting the sociocultural context. The Beta format focused on superior technical quality, while VHS focused on the usability of the technology in the broader context of the media industry and its customers. VHS won that battle. One fundamental problem with Beta was that it could not accommodate the length of a movie.
Another good example of inadequately considering sociocultural trends was the case of Nike and its production facilities in less-developed nations. After some of its contractors were found underpaying workers and using child labor, Nike suffered a media backlash and a slew of legal cases. The company’s phenomenal growth in profits in the late 1990s took a hard hit. Consumer backlashes can have devastating consequences, as Nike found.
Further reading
Beyer, H. and Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Oxford, UK: Morgan Kaufman.
Farrell, W. (1998). How Hits Happen. New York: HarperBusiness.
Goodwin, N., Ackerman, F., and Kiron, D. (1997). The Consumer Society. Chicago, IL: Island Press.
Inayatullah, S. (ed.). (2004). The Causal Layered Analysis (CLA) Reader: Theory and Case Studies of an Integrative and Transformative Methodology. Taipei: Tamkang University Press.
Marsh, N., McAllum, M., and Purcell, D. (2002). Strategic Foresight: The Power of Standing in the Future. Melbourne: Crown Content.
Slaughter, R. (2003). Integral Futures: A New Model for Futures Enquiry and Practice. In Futures beyond Dystopia: Creating Social Foresight. London: Routledge. (Available at www.foresightinternational.com.au)
Steinbock, D. (2001). The Nokia Revolution: Success Factors of an Extraordinary Company. New York: AMACOM.
This vignette first appeared in “Thinking About the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight”, edited by Andy Hines and Peter Bishop, published in 2006
