by Roger Dennis

Shell Technology Futures

From 2006-2008 I spent the majority of my time working alongside the Shell Gamechanger team in The Hague. It was a fascinating exercise on many fronts.

Firstly I was based in New Zealand and working for Innovaro in London for a client which although had some of it’s team in The Hague, could meet anywhere in the world.  Inevitably London and The Hague worked fine for us, although Houston or Bangalore would have equally fine. Personally Europe worked well for me as I could regularly visit Singapore on the way – a city with a firm view on the future (but that’s another story).

Secondly, as an organisation Shell is arguably the best user of scenarios in the world. Innovaro’s Technology Futures programme dovetailed into – and fed – the scenario development.  Innovaro ran the programme in 2004, again in 2007 and there should be another update in 2010.

The Technology Futures programme built a view of the impact of technology on society in the next twenty years. To construct something that was robust  – but still captured enough leading edge thinking – was a detailed process.  the summary is as follows : identify which adjacent sectors can impact upon the core business (either postively or negatively), seek out the subject matter experts in these sectors, gather them together for a week and then synthesise the output of the sessions.

We assembled a huge variety of people – from those who are pioneering the creation of life from scratch, to Mars roboticists and architects that are designing massive new green cities in China (the workshops are held under Chatham House rules which means that I cannot name the people or organisations that were represented). The conversations that resulted were compelling, intriguing, confronting, dynamic and never dull.

From the discussion we created a view of the world in twenty years time.  What is interesting about this view is that we can track everything back to a spark in a peer reviewed journal, or the commentary of a world expert in a certain field.

In this instance there were a series of outputs, the most visible being the book I co-edited and breathed into life (along with Barry Fox of New Scientist fame).  The book is also the only publicly accessible output from the programme, and you can download it here (5MB PDF).

The book is also the only publication to leave Shell without being edited by the PR department and as such is an untouched view of the Technology Futures programme.

The Innovaro Futures programmes are a proven way of seeking out white space opportunities for organisations looking to find new high-growth businesses, but they are also applicable at a macro level.  Innovaro has been talking to Governments about the possibility of running the programme at a country level, and this would be a natural fit for the process.

People get intrigued by the programme, but in the interests of blogging brevity I will close this post.  Howewver if you are interested to know more, please drop me a mail (now *at* rogerdennis.com)

by Roger Dennis

Seeking alternate viewpoints

Further to my posting about the McKinsey article about seeking contradictory opinion, there’s an interesting new book on Amazon.  It’s called “The Deniers” and contains articles from scientists challenging the paradigm of climate change.

Note that I say that the theory of climate change is now a paradigm. People that challenge paradigms are often ridiculed and professionally ostracised.

Before you get hysterical and start hyperventilating, it’s important to point out that I’m not a climate change sceptic. Please don’t try and burn me at a stake, or stone me.  That would ruin my day.

The difference with the theory of climate change is that the stakes are too high to ignore it.  If we disregard the theory – and it is a theory – then the planet as we know it will be a distant memory.  That’s not a risk worth taking, no matter how highly regarded the nay-sayers are.

Why is this interesting from an innovation point of view? Watch the comments that this book receives, and see how much anger and disbelief it attracts. Paradigms are not easily changed, and assumptions not easily challenged.

Disruptive innovation tackles paradigms and assumptions head on.  There will always be the sceptics, the doubters and the critics. Sometimes – but not always – the most ardent of these will be the ones you need to convince.  In the majority of companies they’re usually the ones that site in the C-suite of your company.

by Roger Dennis

Indicators of the future

It’s one thing to spend time talking about where things are going, it’s another when you encounter some of those things. Sometimes even I fail to mentally move things from the  theoretical world to the real world.  Two recent examples:

1. Most people know about the potential for hybrid and electric vehicles, but not many extend that knowledge to a business context.  I now use hybrid taxis where ever possible, and have some fascinating conversations with drivers. Each one tells the same story about fuel consumption: in a petrol taxi they would spend up to $80 every two days. In the hybrid they spend less than this each week. It’s a quantum shift in the economics of transportation.  Note that it’s economics and not the feel good factor that drives cabbies to move to hybrids.

2. On a completely different note (if you’ll excuse the pun) I was listening to an interview with David Byrne (ex-Talking Heads singer).  He said that the last music-superstore just closed down in New York, and now it’s no longer easy to buy CDs in this type of retail environment.  People know that digital music is the leading format, but it’s not until this sort of shift happens in the real world that you start to see tipping points.

Here endeth the lesson for today…

by Roger Dennis

Cisco and innovation cycles

From the Dec/Jan 09 issue of Fast Company magazine comes a great article about Cisco.  Several paragraphs of note including:

Get ready for the upturn. “What’s our vision for where this industry is going with or without us?” That, [CEO John Cambers] says, is a five-year horizon. “What is our differentiated strategy within that vision?” That’s a two- to four-year plan. “How are we going to execute in the next 12 to 18 months?”

Chambers is convinced that the role of the CEO has to morph. He recalls a lesson he learned working for An Wang of Wang Laboratories, whom he has often called one of the smartest people he’s ever known: “One person cannot anticipate a market transition. At Wang, we transitioned four times, but we missed the fifth, from mini computers to PC and software. If you don’t catch them [all], you leave your company behind.”

It is Ron Ricci’s (Cisco VP) job to translate Chambers’s ideas into action — as he puts it, “I’m John’s scaling machine” — and he was the chief architect with Chambers of the new quasi-socialist Cisco. They were inspired in part, Ricci says, by management guru Gary Hamel’s ideas about the need to democratize strategy and distribute leadership in order to stimulate innovation.

Full article here.

by Roger Dennis

Corning is the new 3M of innovation

More from my very backdated pile of Fast Company magazines:

Seventy percent of Corning’s revenue today comes from products that did not exist five years ago.

Corning must have a very robust innovation process in place for making this happen. What’s the advantage of such a process?

By bringing out new products constantly, and killing off older ones, your margins remain high. By the time a competing product makes it onto the market (usually at a lower price) you’ve got a whole new set of high margin products coming out.

by Roger Dennis

Breaking groupthink helps decision making

From a recent McKinsey Quarterly comes this interesting tidbit:

A recent survey by McKinsey asked about decision-making practices and compared them with decision outcomes. Decisions that were made after a company’s executives sought out contradictory evidence and opinion were more likely to turn out well.

By getting away from the groupthink that pervades many decision making processes – and seeking out opinions from a diverse range of people – you get better outcomes. The takeway from this?  Broaden your thinking, embrace different mindsets and seek out fresh trains of thought.

by Roger Dennis

The Future of Futurists

Over at Relevant History  Alex Soojung-Kim Pang of the IFTF has one of the most interesting things I’ve read for a while about foresight and futures thinking.  It’s a work in progress as he admits, but there were two paragraphs that immediately caught my attention:

…This could have profound implications for futures. It would shift the profession from one that communicates through texts, mainly influences leaders and elites, and influences strategic processes, to one that communicates through things, influences large number of people, and informs everyday decision-making. But this is an essential transformation, as it would give us the ability to help solve the critical problems of the 21st century– problems that, I contend, futures as it currently is practiced is ill-equipped to confront.

This is something that resonates with me.  I’ve always maintained that black and white documents composed on A4 paper are generally useful only for a small subset of people who love having an office full of filing cabinets.  For the rest of us, they’re about as useful as a rubber cheesegrater.

Give people a document and they’ll file it (a few – if you’re lucky – might read it)

Give people an experience and they will live it.

However I don’t entirely agree with the second paragraph that caught my attention :

To make the consequences of specific actions immediately visible, we will communicate primarily through things rather than texts, through interfaces rather than scenarios or stories. Finally, our work will need to be crafted to continuously reshape small behaviors, rather than grand strategy.

Good storytelling is something that has been proven to work throughout history.  You can tell stories through interfaces, but the stories are the key.

I look forward to seeing how the discussion develops…

by Roger Dennis

GE and “white spaces”

Over the holiday break I caught up on some very long overdue reading.  Quite a bit of it in fact.

One issue of FastCompany magazine had a fascinating article about GE and how the company uncovers new opportunities. It appears to be very much in the vein of the work that we do at Innovaro:

Immelt and other top GE strategists love to talk about the opportunities presented by “white spaces” and “adjacencies” — corporate-speak for untapped markets that the company wants to develop, and for expansion opportunities that one GE business unit can pass along to another.

Given the article was written in the middle of 2008, in the current economic climate it would be very revealing to see if this type of strategic foresight is still going ahead at GE, or if it has been cut back.