During a conversation with Denis Dutton (of the always good Arts and Letters Daily) he pointed me to a fascinating article about the formation of the current paradigm that surrounds popular thinking on diets and heart disease. There’s a great extract which gets to the heart of the matter (excuse the pun – which you’ll understand if you read the article) :

We like to think that people improve their judgment by putting their minds together, and sometimes they do. The studio audience at “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” usually votes for the right answer. But suppose, instead of the audience members voting silently in unison, they voted out loud one after another. And suppose the first person gets it wrong.

If the second person isn’t sure of the answer, he’s liable to go along with the first person’s guess. By then, even if the third person suspects another answer is right, she’s more liable to go along just because she assumes the first two together know more than she does. Thus begins an “informational cascade” as one person after another assumes that the rest can’t all be wrong.

Because of this effect, groups are surprisingly prone to reach mistaken conclusions even when most of the people started out knowing better.

So what does this lead to?

The informational cascade morphed into what the economist Timur Kuran calls a reputational cascade, in which it becomes a career risk for dissidents to question the popular wisdom.

What “popular wisdom” will you question today?

Bruce Nussbaum has a great quote on his blog which – in the field of innovation – resonated strongly with me.

“Blogging is intellectual prototyping.” Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.

The HBR is publishing excerpts from Gary Hamels latest book. It’s an interesting read, especially when he starts discussing management innovation.

Not all types of innovation are created equal. When focused on big, chunky problems, management innovation possesses a unique capacity to create difficult-to-duplicate advantages. Why? Become some heresies are more heretical than others. You, for example, would probably find it easier to adjust your fashion preferences than to transpose your religious beliefs. Similarly, most executives find it easier to acknowledge the merits of a disruptive business model than to abandon the core tenets of their bedrock management beliefs.

This discussion leads naturally to how you break paradigms. In my experience across a number of sectors this is extremely hard to do. As Gary points out, it’s akin to challenging religious beliefs. However once you do change a management system, the results can be very powerful – a conversation with Ricardo Semler would be proof of that.

You can’t tell people to change a paradigm, especially when they are not even aware that they are stuck on one. If you take the view that most people in senior management are intelligent and capable of learning, then you have to lead them on a path of discovery. First hand exposure to new business models, discussions with people outside their sector and experiential learning are all methods that I’ve found very effective. It’s possible to kick start the thinking in a three day event (just don’t call it an ‘off-site’), and then support it over a longer period. Once you see the changes starting, it’s extremely rewarding (on many fronts).

Over at Endless Innovation Dominic points out that GE, “the very company that gave birth to the light bulb is scaling back its light bulb business,” as energy efficient bulbs take over.

Dominic points out that as a symbol of innovation, the light bulb is completely overused, and I thoroughly agree. He poses the question – if GE is killing the lightbulb what is the new symbol of innovation?

Here’s my suggestion – the Daffodial.

Now those of you who aren’t thinking – “Damn – that’s brilliant!” , are probably saying “What the hell??”

It’s quite simple really – there’s so many parallels between innovation and daffodials :

1. Daffodials are bulb flowers that get planted in the ground with a lot of energy and fuss, and then forgotten about for a while.
2. Because they’re planted underground, people can quite happily walk over them until something starts to appear.
3. Some of them die off when they are still deep in the ground, but nobody worries too much – it’s part of the process.
4. When they flower, people smile.
5. Flowering daffodials attract crowds.
6. When they do flower, they look fantastic, and people gather around to make sounds which generally include the letters “a” and “h”. As in “Aaahh, don’t they look great.”
7. Some people try and pick some of the flowers to take with them hoping that they will have a little of the magic. They forget about the months the plant spent underground.
8. Daffodials come from bulbs, bulbs were the old symbol of innovation and so….well…you get the idea.
9. Daffodial flowers look great. Almost as good as the margin created when an innovative product disrupts a market.
10. And last but not least, too much manure will kill the daffodial.