Chris Writes.

How does one not find themselves inspired and transformed by the way the folks at the Beal Institute approach everything, from the rabidly artistic to the disastrously technical. During my recent and altogether too quick trip to Toronto, I was lucky enough to spend two consecutive mornings with a half dozen members of the Beal research team to discuss the strategic direction, tactics, and future of the Specialized Riders Club, a project I’ve become indelibly tied to, along with a long list of indispensable other smart people.

These two 3-hour consulting sessions revealed a great deal. We discussed the future of social networks that exist both online and offline. We discussed the ways in which people actually interact with others when they tip the scales and become a community, and we applied a great deal of the insight towards the current and impending community elements found on the club site. And within the club itself, beyond the website and the internet. What we’re talking about here is a community of people who share a passion for riding, and that passion is enabled by the online interaction, but is realized in a real life setting, with air and sunshine and sweat and wind and other real things. And those things are beautiful. Check out the club if you haven’t already.

So I just returned from a very short, very action-packed trip to Toronto, where I attended the launch of The Imagination Challenge, a book written by Alexander Manu. I was privileged to introduce Alex to the crowd of 200-something in the atrium of the Rotman School, relating meeting him for the first time when he was a guest lecturer in a class I attended.

A paper I wrote for that class ended up becoming chapter 14 of this book, with some additional work on my part, and some expert editing from Alex and his brilliant team at the Beal Institute for Strategic Creativity. To be in such esteemed company is rather overwhelming.

I could wax poetic about the brilliant hour-long talk that Alex gave (attend one of their show&tell sessions, you’ll see), or about the gravitas of holding the book in my hands and seeing my name in print, but for now, I think I’ll just suffice it to say that I think it all feels like a good start.

More photos can be seen here. Some in this set are from a visit I was able to make to the Beal Institute, which I’ll write about next. Because it was truly inspiring, and deserves its own chapter.

My previous post, and Tim’s comment, got me thinking about cycling infrastructure. Cell phones achieved massive popularity and rapid adoption in South Korea (and many other places) because of leap frogging effects. They had terrible infrastructure for land lines so when cellular became available, the adoption curve of this new technology was awesome. Lots of pent up demand. And it’s those same copper cables in North America that are often blamed for the cell phones, cell phone services, and VOIP options that we read about, but cannot buy until sometimes years after their introduction elsewhere. Sometimes never. We’re still largely tied to the antiquated technology tied to the copper cables. I realize I’m oversimplifying this a bit, but I don’t think that will damage the point:
Basically, lots of other countries (many of them poor) actually do better than North America with cell phones because they don’t have pre-existing infrastructure to tie them to old habits.

When a cycling advocate suggests that we need to build better cycling paths and safe cycling routes, I wonder if it is, like cell phones, irreparably hindered by the existing infrastructure that exists around us. Maybe we need to reconsider the strategy of trying to build around what exists. I think it will take something more revolutionary. We can’t approach this in an evolutionary way.

So what about a country like Holland that has bike paths that exist alongside roadways? The development happened at the same time. It’s like they laid the bicycle equivalents of copper cables and cell technology at the same time. They were engineered to get along from the start.

So to look at Holland and say “hey, North America should just be like that”, I think that it might just be too late for that strategy to be possible to execute upon.

Tim Jackson from Masi recently asked on his blog, which I read on occasion, what the next big thing in cycling would be.  The comments bat around ideas including the obvious (commuter bikes), the not-so-obvious (niche bikes), the dubious (more cheap bikes), and the insightful (more bike infrastructure).  Reading through this thread,  I think it’s suffering the typical brainstorm problem: starting with the wrong question. I’d suggest that it’s not “What is the next trend that will bring [excitement] to the bike industry?”, but rather, “What is the next innovation that will increase the number of people on bikes, and/or the frequency that people ride?”.

Growth does not come from some percentage of cyclists buying a second bike. Growth is when a golfer becomes a cyclist, and converts all his golfer buddies. Or when a couch potato heeds his doctors advice to exercise, and then chooses a bike over a gym membership, and tells everyone he knows.

People will ride more, and the industry will grow, when we start realizing that 3D Violet parts were not a growth opportunity. They were a distraction, infighting that was an overall net loss with no sustainable benefit.

The answer, I think, lies here somewhere: when is the last time you got someone else stoked on riding? What was it that made you talk about riding in a way that was so compelling so as to change someone else’s behavior? The more we can do to make cycling (all forms) accessible (people can find it), conversational (people have a reason to talk about it in the context of a normal day), approachable (people, especially women, aren’t intimidated by it), and interesting (people care about it) to a wider range of new people, the better off we will be.

Dare I say it, but his blog and my blog are perfect meta-examples. No one decided to become a cyclist because of what’s here. When cyclists talk to each other like this, we can easily forget that we’re all converts. And we probably all have a cross bike already. Hell, maybe two.

What we’re doing at Specialized with the new Riders Club feels more like what the industry needs, though I admit fully that we’re a long way from critical mass just yet.  Building cycling communities, whether they’re built around a brand like our club, or built around a shared interest, or built on a simple forum like www.mtbr.com are ways to actually change behavior.  We have to make this sport look on the outside to be as much fun as it is on the inside.  I think we do a pretty shitty job of that, overall.  And I don’t hold myself blameless by any means.

Larry Keeley’s list of the top innovations of all time:

1. Weapons

2. Mathematics and the number zero

3. Money

4. Printing

5. Free markets and capital markets

6. Domesticated animals and agriculture

7. Property ownership

8. Limited liability

9. Participative democracy

10. Anesthetics and surgery

11. Vaccines and antibiotics

12. Semiconductors

13. The Internet

14. Genetic sequencing

 Notice that each of them is a platform, not a product.  I think I would add the following:

15. Exercise

16. Alcohol

I’d probably also extend “Printing” to the more-inclusive “Recording”, thus not leaving out digital media, music, and video.

Larry Keeley

Co-Founder and President, Doblin Group

Adjunct Professor, Illinois Institute of Technology

One of the most polished and engaging speakers I’ve seen on this or any topic. Larry started by pointing out that Thomas Edison did not invent the lightbulb. He perfected it. It had been invented years previous, but there hadn’t been a suitable filament material discovered. Edison took the time to try thousands (including, apparently, cheese). In a very non-linear sense, he was in fact saving the whales, since the light bulb would replace the lighting in upper-class homes that currently used lamps fuelled by whale oil.

Interesting premises to start his discussion: 1. Sometimes things change, and 2. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. This second point he illustrated using Helsinki, Finland. It’s one of the darker places in the world. So, as the future of lighting goes, it’s already arrived there. Same with mobile phones and South Korea. Or (arguably) fashion and Milan. Places like this, faced with some collection of attributes and/or allocations of things/conditions/etc, become the early adopters. Helsinki didn’t really invent anything to do with lighting, they just adopted things first. Some balance here of courage, and desire to change since conditions were pretty bad.

This touches on that “Endowment Effect” that I heard about at the office 2.0 conference – we overvalue what we have by 3x and we undervalue new stuff by 3x, so something new needs to seem 10x better than what we have to get adopted. If you don’t have much to overvalue, it sure makes it a lot easier to accept the new stuff as being better.

Keeley also poked some holes in conventional wisdom surrounding Ford – apparently they nearly went bankrupt 5 times before getting off the ground. And then, when GM came in to build cars that catered to individual tastes, Ford shut down for 2 years to restructure around this new competitor.

A big (and I think very important) part of Keeley’s discussion was focused around a single word: Platform. The example was everyone’s favorite, the iPod. It’s a Platform because everyone can build upon it to expand the value of the platform. He later went on to outline a list of what he felt were the best innovations of all time, and all of them were platforms.

#1 on the list was weapons. By chasing new platforms, instead of new products, the value of innovations really increases exponentially. Put differently: how many people will rely on your innovation as a starting point from which they can be innovative themselves? And are you designing it that way? If not, why not? If it’s easier and more profitable for someone to use your innovation as a platform, rather than copy your product, then they’re likely to do exactly that. This isn’t about changing people’s motivations. It’s about swapping the carrot for a larger carrot. This also led to a theory of a new Pareto principle for innovation: that 2% of the projects create 90% of the value. That’s a big shift to traditional thinking, but true, if most value comes from platforms, and if platforms are the more rare type of innovation.

Keeley dug deeper in his talk and identified 10 types of innovation. The types were well structured, but it’s what he said about the collection that I found interesting. He suggested they were like musical notes: you can either be a great composer, and arrange them in a way no one has heard before, or you can be a virtuoso, and play a known song better than anyone. These are the ways to be a distinguished innovator.

David Rockwell Founder & CEO, Rockwell Group 

David spoke about shaping experiences that last in customers memories, and did a great job of communicating experience exclusively through pictures – his powerpoint slides had no words whatsoever.  Their approach to designing and shaping experiences was founded in what he termed non-linear thinking, offering the example of spa treatments: this is a private experience, but it also must be a social experience given the relatively smaller number of spa treatments that are done at home or in hotel rooms.  Their approach to designing the customer experience focuses on these non-linear (non-obvious?) elements.  

Great example provided about their GAP concept store for the 35+ women’s market.  Based on an observation that 70% of 35+ women who tried on clothes bought them, so they made the experience of trying on the clothing the highlight.  They designed social space around the change rooms, put them in the center of the store in a design lit to metaphorically represent a chandelier, and then put the clothing around the edges of the store.  

On the topic of planning and actively trying to innovate, David offered this: “All the planning is there to support the one spontaneous moment you cannot plan.”  it is the ability to react to the spontaneous moments, with wisdom and effectiveness, that can make or break success.  One other thing he said that seemed either very simple or very profound: “Simple people have less to unlearn”. 

  

Let’s just say I meant to do this a while back.  Back in November, I was able to head to NY for a conference my b-school organized.  It was a phenomenal day. 

One of the themes that came up, many times from many of the speakers, was this: Brainstorming is DANGEROUS and SHOULD BE AVOIDED in the way we should avoid PLAGUE.  I’m paraphrasing a bit, but you get the idea.  The concept here is that brainstorming sessions tend to bring out a lot of information that probably doesn’t matter.  It’s a neat idea, because great ideas rarely get formed in a scheduled meeting.  Why do we try so hard to force that to happen?  Who said we could plan a flash of brilliance, if only we can get the right heads in a room together?  And if someone has a truly brilliant idea, how often does it get dealt a death by consensus, as everyone adds their bit of flavor to it?  More from the conference coming right up…even if it is late.