Earlier this week, Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO quoted the legendary designers Charles and Ray Eames on the role of connections in design and innovation: “Eventually everything connects—people, ideas, objects...the quality of the connections is the key.”
The connections that Brown was referring to are largely conversational, and the quality of these conversations are the outcome of managerial choices that we all have the power to influence. If ideas move the world, conversations move ideas. Ideas at rest add no value; only ideas in motion have a chance of becoming innovations. Conversations, of all sorts — face to face, asynchronous, electronic, analog; any way you can think of for putting two or more minds together — are the motors that we rely upon for moving ideas around, keeping them in motion, and hopefully adding value. It’s happening all around us, or not, in the organizations of which we are a part, in the communities of knowledge to which we belong. Some do it better than others, of course, but if you observe the conversations around you, you have a good starting point for improving your chances for more successful innovation.
Imagine being at the creation of Cubism and being able to overhear the conversations between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, working together to change, forever, the way in which we artistically represent, and see the world around us. This was a relationship so intimate that Braque characterized it as being similar to that of “mountaineers roped together'', and their early paintings are so alike that they reflect the power of this paring, one with the other. They are the products of great conversations! Before them, in 1888, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin spent nine weeks together in Arles, trying to work out of the artistic slump that they each found themselves in. Conversations, experimentation, reinforcement all took place in a form that neither had experienced before, and the results made history.
Similarly, the now ubiquitous graphical user interface, which has made Apple’s products so inviting, was the direct outcome of a conversation that occurred when the young Steve Jobs met Doug Engelbart, at the Palo Alto Research Center, and changed the way in which we interact with all smart technical devices today. After all, if you can make the personal computer inviting, why not a phone or a watch? Conversations have the power to short-circuit time, to share tacit knowledge that is not to be found in reference books, or online; to change the world, or at least the way we think about the world.
Nicolaus Copernicus, a canon in the Roman Catholic church and amateur astronomer, had originated a theory that literally had the power to change the way we think about the heavens, but it took a conversation to put it into play, 29 years after it was originally written. In 1539, 25-year-old Georg Joachim Rheticus, a professor at the very epicenter of Protestant reformist thought, the University of Wittenburg, made his way to Frauenburg, in Prussia, to meet the very Roman Catholic Canon Nicolaus Copernicus. It was a difficult and dangerous journey, but it was successful and turned out to be one of the great conversations in human history. It resulted in moving Copernicus (who moved the Earth) into finally publishing his revolutionary [puns-intended] ideas. Conversations can move the world!
So, what is it we should be thinking about if we wish to improve the way our conversations work? To start with, here are four very simple managerial choices to consider:
- Who’s involved? Jim Rohn is credited with the observation that “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with,” and the argument here is that your ideas are improved, or diminished, by the company you keep. What does your network look like? Rock and Roll history was made on an auto trip across Lake Pontchartrain, when Huey “Piano” Smith was traveling with Bo Diddley and Fats Domino and one of them observed “there’s a lot of water out there,” while the other replied “Don’t you just know it,” and Smith had a hit song as a result. The question you need to ask yourself is “who am I hanging around with?” and what is the result? The first place to examine is who are the typical attendees at your idea-meetings, who sets the agenda, and how is the conversation conducted?
- How do conversations within a meeting work? How do participants sit? Who sets the agenda? Who runs the conversations? A few small tweaks to conversational etiquette can change everything. At IMD, we have relied for years upon “buzz groups” — occasional punctuation of traditional front-to-back classroom conversations, rearranging them into many simultaneous, parallel processed conversations at separate tables, where ideas fly in any and all directions — in an effort to engage many minds and broaden our idea-horizons. Comfortable? Often not at all, but MIT’s Hal Gregersen has observed that high-performing leaders often deliberately put themselves into uncomfortable conversational situations, and that they leave time for others to respond to things that they say, so that challenges can arise. They become, what he calls, catalytic questioners. One way of ensuring that this happens is to invite “naive experts” into a conversation to introduce different and difficult questions into the mix. Think about the meetings that you are a part of, how does this work there?
- Is the meeting space conducive to honest and frank give and take? Place and space matter when it comes to better conversations. Many of the most memorable conversations have taken place in uncomfortable spatial arrangements, where evasion is difficult and where energies are focused on the topic at hand. The fabled B-52 bomber was created in 1948, when six Boeing engineers worked for a weekend in a hotel room to produce a 33-page proposal, which included moving from turbo-prop to jet engines, and accompanied this proposal with a balsa-model prototype. A prior column cited this as illustrating the virtues of cramped quarters and intense physical intimacy among project team members in an effort to have faster conversations and to harvest every brain cell possible out the assembled virtuoso performers! It was Thomas Edison who built the one, large room at his Menlo Park laboratory in pursuit of such faster conversations, and IDEO founder David Kelly who, in turn, borrowed this idea for his Palo Alto headquarters.
Of course, some conversational partnerships are such that physical space is not necessary. Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn conducted a partnership of nearly three decades where they seemed to converse in sequences that came together, as if they were modules.
- Are you managing the opportunities for surprise? Chance encounters appear in so many stories of great innovation that the best advice one can give is that serendipity is too important to be left to chance! Of course, we cannot plan such good fortune, but we can raise the probabilities of it occuring by when and where we time and locate our conversations, what sort of idea-collisions might occur and who might be added in to give a conversation a bit more spice? Chance conversations are all around us and they can have a profound impact on how we work, progress and partner, if only we let them. One of the most notable of these took place in 1878, when John Watson, MD, in search of lodgings, was introduced to Mr. Sherlock Holmes at St. Barts’s hospital in London. The meeting went well and they agreed to share a flat. The conversation that changed the world, however, took place several weeks thereafter when Holmes told Watson that he had “a turn both for observation and for deduction”, and that he was actually making a living at it as well. Fiction? Of course! But not fictitious. Celebrated for how successful the resulting partnership was, the real conversational reengineering question should be "why did it take so long"?
