Author: Scott Berkun

An Open Letter To Speakers

Posted on in Public Speakingby Scott Berkun

To follow up on my open letter to conference organizers, here’s an open letter for speakers.

Dear Speaker:

Most presentations aren’t very good. There is a reason that “to lecture someone” is meant as an insult. And since events consist of people giving presentations, who is responsible for boring events? It’s the speakers.

Most organizers know that most speakers don’t do a very good job. They’re aware of the common mistakes speakers make every year. But what are they to do?

They’re busy and rarely have the gumption to critique their speakers, or to provide coaching for new speakers, so many people who speak at events  repeat the same mistakes.  And speakers confuse polite applause with true appreciation for a job well done, which means many speakers finish their talk with a distorted sense of how good or bad they are.

Here is what you need to know.

  1. Serve the audience. You’re providing a service to the audience, not to yourself. The audience is there because they want to a) learn, b) get inspired or at least c) be entertained. Whatever your topic, find the 5 most pressing questions the audience has about it and answer them. If the audience leaves with 5 solid answers to their 5 biggest questions, they’ll be very happy, even if you have mediocre charisma and didn’t make them laugh. This simple premise often explains the best-received talks at any event. Ask the organizer for job title breakdowns, age ranges, and other demographics about who you are speaking to. Ask for the full schedule so you know what talks are before and after yours, so you can adjust your material accordingly.
  2. End early. Practice so you know how long those slides actually take, since a slide is not a unit of time. Plan to leave time so people can get to their next session early, beat traffic or the crowds at the lunch lines. Stick around in the lobby or chat room so people who want more can get it from you (provided there isn’t another speaker right after you. In which case, get out of their way).
  4. You are not Bono or Beyonce. It is an honor to be invited to speak somewhere, but you’re not a rock-star. There are likely other speakers and the organizers have to attend to their needs as well as yours. Even if you are keynoting, it’s not your event (unlike a U2 concert). You are an invited guest. Treat the hosts, speakers and other guests with respect. If you have a long list of requests, prioritize them and the make the requests early. Some speakers have large egos, and often it gets in everyone’s way, especially the audience’s.
  5. Your mistakes are YOURS. When on a stage, you are a performer: professional performers don’t blame their tools. If your laptop flakes out, or your movie won’t play, you are responsible (at least as far as the audience is concerned). If you have special needs, say a laser light show or dancing bears, let the organizers know early and ask for a rehearsal. If you can’t get one, simplify your plan. If at the rehearsal the tech guy is high on drugs, or the organizer seems overwhelmed, simplify. It’s your show and you will be judged regardless of where you point fingers. Practice and prepare accordingly. Have a simple 5/10 minute fallback version of your talk you can do even if the there’s no electricity. Even the worst speaking situations can be handled if you are prepared.
  6. Drop your bio – you are already credible. If you are on a stage the organizers have granted you more credibility than nearly anyone else at the event. And 95% of the time your bio is on the event website. The audience can get it if they want it, right there, on their phone, at any time. If you must, 30 seconds is enough time to say your name, profession, and why you care about the topic. Anything more is likely wasting their time (See How To Write A Good Bio). Let your host introduce you, as they can provide social proof you can’t.
  7. Being nervous is normal and can be managed. Our bodies respond with fear to being in front of crowds. It’s ok. Even experienced speakers and performers get nervous. But there are things you can to do minimize and compensate for this particular kind of fear. If you practice, get exercise the day before, and arrive early to the room, you’ll cut down your fears dramatically.  See Attack of The Butterflies for a run-down on the science and practice of managing speaking fears.
  8. There is nothing inspiring about winging it. If you paid $100 to see a Broadway musical, would you want to see the actors and musicians making it up as they went along? You’d call them unprofessional. It’s not only disrespectful to fail to prepare, your gamble is likely obvious to everyone in the room.  Why speak if you’re only going to do it half-assed? Say no instead.  All good speakers practice more than you think. Their carefree vibe is the result of hard-work, not the lack of it.
  9. Honor your commitments. The dog did not eat your homework, nor your slide deck. The organizers know all the excuses and they’re embarrassed for you that you need to make them up. If you are a professional, treat your deadlines professionally. If you need more time ask for it advance, not a day after the deadline has passed. Don’t double book and bail last minute as it’s a sure-fire way to never be invited back again.
  10. The organizers have more power than you think – treat them well. Event organizers are often producers of the show – meaning they can make speakers look very good or very bad. Be nice to them. Make it easy for them to help you.  In a pinch, they are the only people who can find the tech guy, fix the lights, or a thousand other little things you won’t realize you need until the last minute.
  11. Get there early.  You can learn much from watching the speaker before you. What is the energy like? How filled is the room? More important perhaps, organizers need to see you and know you’re OK. They have many things to worry about, why make them worry about you? Get their cell # and send a text when you arrive or if you are running late.  And stay around after your talk. People will want to ask you questions, and often you’ll learn insights that will make your talk better next time.
  12. Be smart with your slides.  Make them simpler. Always simpler. Avoid small fonts: no one can read them (in rehearsal, put up your most text-heavy slide and walk to the back of the room. Can you read them?) Avoid dense slides (or go without them entirely) – no one will understand them anyway. If you insist on dense, complex slides, put them online before your talk so people can choose to follow along. Reading off a screen is much harder than you think, doubly-so if someone is lecturing at the same time.
  13. Put your contact info up twice: at the beginning and at the end. In large type. And leave it up long enough for people to copy it. You want people to contact you. They will tell you about typos, references, stories and books that you will find interesting. If they found your work valuable your contact info lets them recommend your work to others. It’s one of the payoffs for all the work you put in.
  14. Honest feedback is hard to find. If you are not very good, audiences are unlikely to boo you off the stage for fear of appearing rude. And after you finish, few people are mean enough to seek you out in the hallway just to tell you of your incompetence. Most speakers confuse polite applause, and respect for being brave enough to get on stage, for true appreciation of a job well done. Organizers have little reason to go out of their way to inform you of your bad habits: they’ll simply not invite you back. If someone says “good job” respond with “Thank you. What could make it better?” which establishes a positive frame for suggestions.
  15. Use this Checklist For Great Talks.  There are many little things to do, and they’re easy to forget. Work from a simple checklist to help you prepare, perform and follow-up after your talk.

If you enjoyed this, you’ll like An Open Letter to Conference Organizers. Or my bestselling book, Confessions of a Public Speaker.

[Minor edits: July 17, 2017, Sept. 26, 2019]

5 Dangerous Ideas for Designers

Posted on in best-of-design, designby Scott Berkun

I recently spoke at the Design Management Institute’s Make it Happen event. As an experiment, with the permission of the organizers, I wrote my talk at the event, inspired by things I heard other speakers and attendees say. Here’s a short essay on those ideas. The slides and video (from a reprise AEA event) at bottom.

1. Everyone is a Designer

“Everyone is an artist” is what Joseph Beuys famously said. He didn’t mean everyone’s work should be hung on the walls at the Louvre. Instead, he was calling attention to how creative acts, however small, are in everyone. Designers often hate the phrase “everyone is a designer” as they take it as a threat to their profession, but that’s not what I mean.

Consider that I make a living writing books. But I know many people in this world write more words in email than I’ll ever publish. Are they not writers? Of course they are. Most are not as good as the professionals, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t writing. Designers need to have the same attitude – all people design something, or at least believe they do – and we should be open to good ideas regardless of their source. If you see your coworkers as designers, just untrained ones, you’re far more likely to find ways to collaborate, teach and persuade them than if you see them as ignorant adversaries.

I quoted Victor Papanek, one of the great design leaders of the 20th century:

All men are designers. All that we do, almost all the time, is design, for design is basic to all human activity…

Any attempt to separate design, to make it a thing-by-itself, works counter to the fact that design is the primary underlying matrix of life. Design is composing an epic poem, executing a mural, painting a masterpiece, writing a concerto.

But design is also cleaning and reorganizing a desk drawer, pulling an impacted tooth, baking an apple pie, choosing sides for a backlot baseball game, and educating a child.

Victor Papanek, Design for the Real World

All designers should think of themselves as ambassadors of good ideas, recognizing that good ideas can come from anywhere, from people with and without design training, and we should be welcoming to them. If they are going to learn about design it’s only going to happen if we teach them. There is no one else. Think of the word ambassador: how often is this how people would describe you when you’re the only designer in the room?

2. You have no power

It’s OK not to have power, provided you don’t act like you have it. What decisions, as a designer, are truly yours? There is probably a small set of decisions you can make without implicit approval from someone else. And if you want more of your ideas to make it out the door, you either need more power, or to get better at borrowing the power of others to get things done.

One bad way to try and obtain power is jargon. It’s an attempt to change the playing field of language, which only people with less power tend to do. I’m convinced the people who use the most jargon have the least confidence in their ideas.

Designers and UX experts rely so heavily on methods, taxonomies, and words like affordances and personas. If this is effective for you, that’s great, but if you’re trying to convince someone who has more power than you, you are going to be more effective if you use their vocabulary, their methods and their goals to make your arguments.

At a minimum, if jargon is a necessary evil to survive at the companies we work for, can’t we speak plainly and directly when we’re talking to other designers?

3. The generalists are in charge

Whoever you report to has a more general role than yours. You work for a generalist. If you want more power, you need to either: a) take on a more general, or cross-discipline, role or b) get better at influencing people with more power than you.  Any designer can go get an MBA, or learn to take on general management tasks, if they are so inspired, as the skills aren’t that hard to acquire (And consider how many VPs there are who have none of those skills anyway).  But few designers do it, as they don’t want the annoyances, and the stress, that comes with power. Designers fear “not being a designer anymore”, but yet are constantly annoyed by how many important design decisions are made by “non-designers.” Forget the job title: whoever makes the decisions that define the design is a designer.

If we mostly just complain about those in power, who’s fault is it really that we’re unhappy? We have to either lead or follow. If we don’t want to lead, we get what we deserve.

We have to admit there is no alternative – if you want more power, and to be fully in charge of design, you will need to be in charge of other things too.

4. You are in Sales

Creative people look down on salespeople. We like to think what we do is more noble. But we forget we sell all the time. Every pitch and prototype is a kind of sales tool for your ideas. And sales is a failure prone activity. Talk to any screenwriter or actor about how many pitches and auditions they have to do to get a single gig. No one is immune. If you are a designer, you are a salesperson. You should aspire to be an ambassador of good ideas, which includes knowing how persuade others to see their value. To get more of your ideas out the door demands getting better at sales more than any other single skill. And building the thicker skin necessary to push your ideas through.

5. Creativity is Risk

The bigger and better the idea, the harder it will be for people to follow. If you are a creative, taking risks comes with the territory. But when something stupid is being proposed in a meeting, who raises their hand? Who has the courage to speak up? How often do you put your reputation behind an idea? Or are willing not to take credit for something, if it helps the idea survive? What big pitch have you made recently? If you’re not taking risks, and everything you do is reasonable and sensible, how creative do you really think you are? What dangerous idea should you get people in your world to not just discuss, but do something about?

Watch the talk

I presented a similar talk at An Event Apart, and they were kind enough to record it and publish it.

Or view the slides. Credit for DMI image here.

What are your dangerous ideas for designers? Leave me a comment.

Why you should donate blood

Posted on in goodwillby Scott Berkun

Few people think about blood until they’re at the hospital in an emergency, and learn the only thing that can save their child, husband, or themselves, from death, is a transfusion of blood.  But where does the blood come from? It’s shocking, I know, but blood comes from PEOPLE. People like you and me.

I joke, but given my sordid history, I’ve been the recipient of many blood transfusions. I know first hand without the donations from many good people I will never meet, I wouldn’t be here.

Recently a reader of mine had a tragedy – their son, Jonathan Kwiatkowski, was murdered. And because of how he was killed, he was not granted his wish of donating his organs so that others can live.

On July 8th, which would have been his 22nd birthday, they are planning a special blood drive event in memory of their son. You can join their Facebook page here and at least drop a note wishing them well in what they’re doing.

The event is centered in Racine, WI, but they are encouraging people to donate blood at any Red Cross Donation Center throughout the US.  Visit www.redcrossblood.org or call 1-800-733 2767 to find a location near you.  When you donate, please mention that you are donating in support of the Jonathan Kwiatkowski Blood Drive and mention the Sponsor Code 4643.

FAQ on donating blood:

  • Step by step walkthrough of what the experience is like, from the Red Cross
  • Every three seconds, someone needs a blood transfusion.
  • One pint of blood from one donor can save up to three lives.
  • It’s free.
  • You get free  juice, donuts and cookies. Yum.
  • 20 percent of blood recipients are children.
  • Giving blood is 100 percent safe. It is not possible to get AIDS or any disease by donating blood to the American Red Cross. A new sterile needle is used for each donor and discarded afterwards.
  • About 60 percent of the population are eligible to donate blood, yet less than 4 percent do.
  • At least 500 pints of blood must be collected daily to meet the needs of most hospitals.
  • The U.S. imports more than 20 percent of our blood supply.
  • It takes 10 minutes to donate blood (30-60 minutes for the entire experience).
  • The average adult body has 10-12 pints of blood. Doctors say that healthy adults may give regularly because the body quickly replaces the blood you donate.
  • (Sources: give2life, Bloodcenters)

Please visit and like the Join the Jonathan K. Facebook page.

Arrogance vs. Confidence: what’s the difference?

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

A long running debate in my own mind is the difference between arrogance and confidence. Here are two definitions:

An arrogant person only feels smart if someone else feels stupid. Their sense of themselves depends on thinking less of someone else. They insist on correcting other people’s grammar or showing them their flaws, as it’s the only way they can feel an approximation of confidence. Arrogance is about intent: its when ability (or perceived ability) is used to look down on others.

A confident person feels competent from the inside out. They use their talents to genuinely try to be of use, or to succeed at the task at hand. They might seek external validation, but they don’t depend on it to define their sense of their ability or nature.

In some cases an arrogant person may have more skill than a confident person, but the confident person will tend to wield whatever abilities they have with more calm control than an arrogant person can.

What do you think?

Why Great Ideas Fail

Posted on in Creative Thinking, history, Innovation, Managementby Scott Berkun

I ran a session at FOO camp on Why Great Ideas Fail. The goal was to leave the room with a list of reasons and here it is.

The crowd was tech/start-up folks and the list is shifted towards those pursuits. Fascinating how many of these are opposite pairs of each other (e.g. gave up too soon vs.stayed with same idea for too long).

Why Great Ideas Fail:

  • Killed idea too soon
  • Launched idea too early or too late
  • Death (of person with the idea)
  • Someone got their first and stayed in front
  • Not willing to experiment to find audience
  • Unwilling to change direction
  • Willful ignorance of economics
  • Not knowing target audience
  • Unable to overcoming organizational inertia
  • Not understanding the ecosystem the idea lives in
  • Inability to learn from microfailure
  • Fighting the last war
  • Stayed with idea for too long
  • Giving up
  • Chindogu – solution causes more problems than it solves
  • Factors beyond anyone’s control (market, wars, competitors, natural disasters, etc.)
  • Failed to pitch or communicate well
  • Underestimated marketing
  • Not taking the idea far enough
  • Taking the idea too far too early
  • Underestimating cultural limits
  • Underestimating dependencies
  • Failure to balance  how world is vs. how world can be
  • Failure to balance wants vs needs

Thanks to Val Aurora, I also got a list from attendees of personal reasons great ideas failed. Wide range of levels of specificity, but still interesting,

Specific failures people listed as their own:

  • Forcing something on people they don’t want
  • Not controlling distribution (e.g. Tivo vs. Comcast DVR)
  • Not doing post-mortems
  • Not eating our own dogfood
  • Building something ‘powerful’ but too complicate for the average user
  • Force change earlier. It won’t happen on its own.
  • Launching a product before it’s ready – unreliable performance
  • Not killing a project/startup faster (i.e. spinning wheels for an extra year instead of getting it out the door)
  • Trusting before researching
  • Not trusting my gut
  • Not considering political capital within a large organization
  • Trusting my gut too much
  • Juggling between being your greatest supporter and your greatest critic
  • Voice version of twitter circa 2005
  • Built an Airbnb before Airbnb, but didn’t see it through

Thanks to @jessykate for the photo of the whiteboard, from which these notes were transcribed.

What I learned at FOO Camp ’11

Posted on in On Tour, Teaching/Trainingby Scott Berkun

I was invited back to O’Reilly’s FOO (Friends Of O’Reilly) camp, an unconference weekend event held at O’Reilly Media’s HQ in Sebatapol, CA. It’s a privilege to go and every year I’ve written what I’ve learned to share some of the goodness, and force myself to review my Moleskine and digest.

If you’re new to FOO: ~250 people are invited to camp on the lawn at O’Reilly Media HQ and spend a long weekend together. Most people camp in tents, a few stay in offices or hotels. Big schedule boards go up Friday, with room for 10 or 12 sessions to happen concurrently- anyone can organize one on anything. No restrictions. It’s that simple. It works amazingly well because of the openness of the event (see below) and the quality of folks who are invited to go. The weekend is endless series of entertainments, provocations, challenges and wonderments.

The range of sessions is entirely self generated and that’s part of the fun. There is a strong tech bias, but many of the folks here have non-profit or cultural ambitions, and that’s reflected in the sessions they choose to put on. And since the board has a huge number of slots, people come up with ideas for sessions late in the day, often as a result of a conversation that took place in a previous session.

I have a little ritual I do at the event: I get there early, go the picnic table and bring a few cases of beer. As people walk by, soon one or two ask for one, which I provide, and we chat. Soon others see this and come over, and join. And boom – by the time the event starts, there’s a nice crowd of happy people chatting with a positive vibe. It’s these sorts of little contributions that people are drawn to offer at FOO and often they’re unannounced. Thanks to Jeff Potter, Laurel Ruma and Brian Sawyer another O’Reilly friend whose name (but not face) I’ve totally forgotten, helped carry the beer and kick it off. (Mary Treseler, you were missed, my friend. And yes, I did have some lesbian beer).

Here’s what I wrote in my little Moleskine this year:

  • The Productive Geek: The irony of a session like this is the people there are amazingly productive, but feel unproductive, leading to the suggestion the problem is not technological but psychological (e.g. we need therapy, not technology). I heard a few people mention  time off as a boon to productivity (first day back after a 3 day email/information fast is very productive). I suggested  productivity is measured in quantity, rather than quality and that’s a large part of the problem.
  • The Secret forces of cities: Not sure this was the actual session title, as I dropped in late, but it was applied urban planning and an exploration of the many layers of ideas, mostly hidden, that define why a city block or a public park end up being designed the way they are.  Favorite quote: “City as an invention is a force multiplier” . I ruffled feathers by claiming urban planning is more of a navigation of bureaucratic problem than a design problem, which few seemed to like. From what I’ve read, there is a huge gap from urban planning as theory (which is what most of the popular books are about), and urban planning in the real world . This begs for a session on “Design thinking vs. Bureaucracy” or something, which I didn’t think about until right now.
  • It was a mellower FOO. I chatted with some other folks who had been invited before, and we agreed things were more chill and laid back than past years, which was actually quite nice. Part of it was the move of the Make team upstairs – further away from the core hallway. Fewer folks built things or brought zany equipment (although there was the flaming keyboard, pictured at right. Which was awesome. And the Bloody Mary Foobar. Also awesome). I didn’t see, nor participate in, as many zany late night shenanigans as in the past.
  • Why Great Ideas Fail: I ran a session with this title and had a lively chat with ~20 people on different reasons, cases, stories and regrets about life experiences working with ideas. I will post notes from this eventually. Val Aurora kindly passed around a list for people to write down their own pet theories, which was cool (sadly, I don’t have everyone’s name. If you were there, drop me a ping). Memorable quote: “To be a great idea, it has to have a risk of failure”.
  • The Simple life FTW. I had a nice chat with Craig Mod about writing, living and the  power of living simply. Somehow I assume most of the tech crowd has an ethos towards complexity (whether they acknowledge it or not) and it was refreshing to talk to someone who actively defended his time by simplifying other choices in his life. And like me, he has one foot in technology and the other in writing (Check out this beautiful book of his). We both missed the FOO session on sabbaticals, which I suspect we’d have resonated with.
  • Design of Religion: I didn’t stay long here, but did catch this gem: “If you stop mutation, you increase longevity, but reduce evolution”.
  • Innovation through Accessibility. Had a long chat with the awesome  Wendy Chisolm about Universal design, and the idea that sometimes thinking about better design for special cases often creates opportunities for breakthroughs in general cases.
  • The Future of Email. I totally missed this one, and I’m looking for a writeup. I find it endlessly entertaining that despite all the things we’ve adopted, email still dominates the working life of most of us, and it’s often the bane of our existence.
  • Chats by the fire. It never fails that despite all the great stuff all day, I have the best time sitting by the fire late at night. It’s interesting to note how little technology is used by people throughout the weekend – very few sessions have slides or demos. Few people blog or tweet. It’s mostly tools centuries old that get used (if you shoehorn whiteboards as being version 2 of blackboards, this is quite true). Somehow the ancient bonds of sitting in a circle by a fire always wins for me. Especially if I get something potent to drink in my hand.

Randomly Interesting Quotes I heard

  • “You are a really bad person, and I approve”
  • “Fail harder” / “You are useless to me until you fail 3 times” (as told by Renny Gleason)
  • “I could patent that, but then I’d have to kill myself”
  • “To be a great idea, it has to have a risk of failure”
  • “What is in your soul? And why?”
  • “Trash into treasure’  – Wendy Chisolm

Coolest startup discovered

Craziest working idea heard

Random Polls I conducted

  • A) “What percent of people are assholes? B) What percent of people are awesome? (Was curious if these numbers tended to match for people. They never did).

Meta – Observations

  • Some people like to hear themselves talk. I found myself thinking about this in several sessions, and wondered if anyone else in the room had the same thought i did. I fantasized about tapping them on the shoulder and whispering, “Yes. You are very smart. Possibly the smartest person in the room. Now, can you please stop being so annoying?” It’s the downside of unconferences, in that some people will insist on dominating the floor, despite being in a room filled with 20 or 30 people, some of who are just as smart and notable on the subject as they are. Facilitation is still a lost art (I’ve written about facilitating unconference sessions). I myself had a hard time at times in my session on Great ideas. Maybe there needs to be a session or an article on “How to impress people (at FOO)” which explains that trying hard to impress people often has the opposite effect.
  • Split opinions on the round the room opening exercise:  A tradition at FOO is after Tim O’Reilly and Sara Winge give opening comments, a microphone is passed around to everyone in the big tent and they get to say their name and three words. Some people love it, some hate it. It takes about 60 minutes to do the rounds with 250/300 people. As I’ve been to FOO several times, I tend to wander off and talk to other people who have wandered off (forming our own affinity group). Those that love it like the serendipity, and like matching names to faces (and the board in the main hall with pictures of every attendee, and their interests, affords this too). Overall, the event is packed with great people, and serendipity is, by definition, everywhere, so I’d easily trade 1 or 2 good 1-on-1 conversations, over doing a group exercise. It seemed women like the exercise more than men do, but that’s entirely anecdotal data.
  • The elimination of pretense always wins. I say this every year, but putting people in tents, and having no keynotes or plenaries, flattens the vibe in a great way.  Everyone  has something interesting to offer and because it’s so flat and friendly it’s up to you listen and be curious, rather than being a network jerk, looking for angles in every conversation. It’s amazing how after often at FOO, after talking to someone for 10 minutes, I realize “Oh my god, this is THAT guy”. Very humbling and empowering in many ways to spend a weekend in an environment like this.

If you liked this writeup, I’ve written summaries for past years as well.

Q&A from Innovation webcast

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

As promised, here are answers to all of the questions from Yesterday’s Webcast on Innovation.

mFree chapters for The Myths of Innovation are here, or go crazy and just buy the book, 70+ amazon reviewers can’t be wrong.

The recording recording of the entire webcast can be found here (ASX)

Q: You talk in the book about innovation not happening in a vacuum. What is your take on user centered design and involving users in the innovation process?

If you made a friend a meal, wouldn’t you ask them what food they like? What allergies they have? That’s a (simple) kind of user centered design. No maker of things can do well if they don’t study the people they are making things for.  The trap is not to involve them too much. Most users will only have feedback on what already exists, and if you only follow ideas that comes from users, you’re unlikely to break new ground.

Q: When a new idea looks strange, how do you tell a great one from stupid? Try them all and see what works, or select one and push it as far as you can?

You can’t tell just by looking. You have to put ideas into action. Make a prototype. See what happens when the idea meets the world. Sometimes keeping a strange idea around and poking at it now and then is simply good exercise. It keeps your creative muscles working, so when a weird idea that has the potential to be great comes along, you’ll be patient and persistent enough to discover its potential.

Q: What was the full name of the razor principle?

Occam’s Razor. You can read all about it.

Q: What do you think are the best examples of the maverick principle: that there is a group-think conducive to incremental innovation but not significant positive change, but that outsiders, free of such group-think, are the more likely source of outstanding innovation?

I think incremental innovation is one of those terms that should go away. Just call it work, progress, improvement. The phrase “incremental innovation” is about as silly as “gradual explosion” or “partial death”. Either something is big or its small. If you’re not sure, call it small. Be humble, as being humble lowers the odds your ego will get in your way.

Democracy is not a system designed for change. Individuals will always be the drivers of change in the sense that if they are working alone, they have fewer people to convince of their ideas. If they need 10 people in a room to agree to follow an idea, progress is very hard. This explains why so many big ideas are developed by entrepreneurs.  They are taking on the burdens of risk in exchange for more autonomy.

Q: Seems to us as a small group of clean energy inventors, that when the nature of our innovations inspires (or even dictates) a business model innovation as well, it gets far more difficult to push the process and recruit support.  Any thoughts?    Really looking forward to your book, although we’ve already created something we’re trying to commercialize as a non-profit.

Support is always hard. Chapter 4 of the book is all about the many horror stories of lack of support that happened before the “overnight successes” of many famous ideas. One of my favorites is the story of Chester Carlson, who, after enduring many hardships and much isolation, would go on to invent the copy machine.

Business model innovations are macro: they take time for people to understand, and people will need more faith to follow. All I can say is, be glad your ideas don’t require political system innovations, or metaphysical innovations, as those are even harder to get support for.

Q: What are some of the best online tools you’ve found to help people collaborate and give them a platform for experimentation?

I’ll probably sound like a jerk for this one, but if a person can’t collaborate on the web today, I don’t think lack of tools are the problem.  The web, and software in general provide one of the cheapest formats ever in history for developing ideas and sharing them with others. For a few hundred dollars you can build a website, sell a product, and on the day you launch it will be available to anyone on the entire planet. Edison, Newton, Tesla would all have given their right arm for a platform of experimentation as powerful as what you have right in front of you.

Q: Suggestion on how to become at convincing people your idea rocks?  books, how to practice?

Start with my essay, How to pitch an idea.

Q: do you have resourcse that allow development beign able to persuade people

That’s not a question, so in response, this will not be an answer.

Q: please show the simple plan slide again, the four points of the simple plan

Sure. The slide said, to increase goodness (when teams are not creative):

  • Make the team smaller
  • Give it more authority
  • Increase trust and cover fire
  • Choose adventurous people

Q: People make a distinction between innovation and invention. Can you share your thoughts on this?

Definitions are funny. You can find many different ones for any word, and people who argue for hours about this sort of thing are falling into the talk is cheap trap. You do not need to have a name for something in order to do it.

But in this case I’ve heard a useful distinction. Invention is the item itself. If I invent a better web browser, but only show it to my dog Max, it stays an invention. But if I make it into a product, and it gets adopted, and changes the world in some way, it’s an innovation. This definition of innovation is based on the effect, and the word invention is limited to the thing that (possibly) creates the effect.

Q: Love the inspiration around Innovation but need advice on how to navigate the red tape/resistance  by Corporate America encountered when trying to present innovative ideas.

The book is largely designed for you, so start there. In short: pick your company, your role and your manager. Some industries are more focused on change than others (say, software companies vs. your local bank). Then, consider your job. A janitor at a bank is not being hired for creativity, so his grand ideas won’t be welcome. But if gets a job as a product designer, or a lead developer on a website, people’s expectations for his creative contributions will be larger. Lastly, some bosses are much better than others at creative environments for creative people to thrive. Seek them out. They’re hard to find, but they’re there. A great manager in a mediocre company might be a happier and more productive place, than working for a mediocre manager in a great company.

Q: It seems like it’s often the case that the person/company who generates a truly new idea/technique/process/design is not ultimately the same person/company that benefits finacially or gets the recognition. Why is this the case? Has access to internet technology changed this?

In race car driving, the car in 2nd place can draft behind the lead car, using the lead car as a shield against the wind. Same is true in the business world. Whoever is first has the burden of proving a new idea. Once it’s proven to some degree, whoever comes second has, in a sense, less work to do. The barriers of entry are lower. Also, entrepreneurs have less resources than Fortune 500 companies. A late comer can out market and advertise whoever was first.

Q: Is the book on listening CD?

I don’t know what a listening CD is (aren’t all CDs for listening? I mean is there a chewing CD somewhere? A toasting CD?). A recording of the webcast is online here (ASX).

Q: How do you best pursuade people who are antagonistic towards something new?

Understand their goals, and think about how your idea helps do what they’re trying to do. Also read How to pitch an idea.

Q: How can we find worthwhile problems to solve in the first place?

How about poverty, crime, war. Those are all worthwhile. In your industry or company, simply find smart people who are complaining and start there.

Q: Fantastic presentation!!

Thanks! Not a question, but in this case I don’t mind! Hopefully soon I’ll stop using exclamation points!

Q: Every once in while you hear people talk about planning innovation. What do you say to them?

I say hooey. They are planning product development or how they’re going to develop ideas, but unless they are going to bet their salary that the result will be a great idea that changes the world, I’d suggest they use less inflated language.

That’s it. If you were there and have more questions, leave a comment. Otherwise, free chapters for The Myths of Innovation are here, or go crazy and just buy the book, 70+ amazon reviewers can’t be wrong.

 

Should I Keep “Readers Choice”?

Posted on in this siteby Scott Berkun

For awhile now I’ve done readers choice posts – and I used the now defunct slinkset.com as a way to let you guys suggest topics and vote on them.

I’ve enjoyed it (did you?) and want to continue – but I need a new way to run it.

I imagine there is a) another service I can use for the list & voting b) A WordPress plugin –  but I’ve looked and haven’t found good candidates – suggestions?

 

 

When is good data impossible?

Posted on in Culture, Philosophyby Scott Berkun

I was thinking recently about skepticism in small sample sizes. How its wise to doubt big claims based on scant data.

But  what things in life can never have large samples? Some ideas or beliefs will never be shared by many people no matter how useful or right they are.

The scientific method is based in part of repeatability. That an experiment should produce consistent results and that’s how we know a discovery is true. But what about things that are true, but are simply hard to repeat? To be provocative, what if perpetual motion is possible, but only once every 100 years? Or if UFOs exist, but they have equipment to ensure they only appear when crazy people with bad cameras are around?  Sure, these things are very unlikely, but are impossible to prove.

The lack of data about a premise does not guarantee it isn’t true, it only guarantees it hasn’t been proven to be true. And my point is, some things that are true will always fall in that gap.

More specific to my half-baked line of inquiry: What situations in life have no possibility for good data, yet demand we make decisions anyway? I think there are more of these situations than we realize.

Free Webinar: The Myths of Innovation, live

Posted on in Innovationby Scott Berkun

Update: You missed it. It’s over. But you can read the Q&A and watch the recording here.

Thanks to the folks at GoToMeeting, I’ll be doing a reprisal of my remixed talk on the Myths of Innovation – stories about sliced bread, the making of star wars, why managers fail at leading creativity, how to take risks and more great stuff. Anyone who works with ideas or manages people who do should tune in.

It’s online, it’s free, and will be provocative and fun.

When: Thursday, June 9 at 11 AM (PDT) / 2 PM (EDT)
Where: wherever you are

Free registration here

Please help spread the word!

The death of death? (the premature cliche of killing an idea)

Posted on in Cultureby Scott Berkun

To say an idea, or a technology, is dead, mostly reveals an ignorance for how ideas work. If you look at the history of so called “dead things” you’ll find big surprises, as ideas rarely die completely. Radio, printed books, paintings and even blogs have been decried as dead in headlines for years, decades or centuries, yet are doing quite well. The word death is provocative and makes for easy clickbait, which explains why the formulaic headline “Is this the death of X?” will live on forever.

An idea may fade from popular attention, but you don’t need popular attention to survive, or thrive. Niche groups and specialized problems often find elements of older technologies that work better than modern “replacements.” And even if something is dying, it can take years or decades before it’s truly dead.

In technological history, the introduction of a new technology often forces champions of the old technology to figure out what their older idea does best, and possibly better, than the news one do. Television clarified the focus of talk-radio and talk shows, a format perfect for people driving in their cars (FM radio even threatened AM for a time). Photography freed painters from photorealism, and gave birth to abstract and modern art.

It’s often more accurate to say “X is in decline” or “X has settled into a stable base of regular users.”  Often the truth is merely “X is less interesting to people who like to think they live on the cutting edge despite its sustained or growing popularity.” To notice the market share of a product dropping is important, but if 5% of a market still contains millions of customers, to call it dead is a grand misnomer. That is still far more popularity than most inventions ever see.

Having something you’ve made or done  proclaimed as dead is a hallmark of having been successful. No one will trumpet your failure unless they’re trying to borrow from your success to draw attention to themselves for proclaiming your downfall.

For fun, here are some supposedly dead things that seem to be doing just fine:

What other things, from ideas to technologies to people’s careers, have you seen proclaimed dead, yet still live on? Leave a comment.

Live version: How to write 1000 words (time lapsed video)

Posted on in Writing Wellby Scott Berkun

Here’s the live version of my Ignite talk on writing, where I give voice commentary over 30x time-lapsed video of me writing an essay about writing:

Below is the original version posted (40000+ views /  background on how it was made here), with an audio track recorded in the safe confines of my office. Both are worth a listen as the commentary (and vibe) is different:

The actual essay created in the time-lapsed video is here.

Comment of the week

Posted on in Culture, design, x of the yby Scott Berkun

A privilege of  having a popular blog is sometimes smart people come by and calmly, warmly, without a hint of snark, straighten me out.  This post from Ian both identifies all my missteps in an earlier post about design and the 9/11 memorial (where I moronically jumble various contexts and points) and offers a recipe for how I could have more clearly made my point.

Here’s Ian’s comment:

It seems like the argument here rests on a couple of ideas:

1) The concept of name adjacencies on the memorial is a weak concept.
2) The memorial was delayed because of the difficulty of executing this concept.

And the conclusion is that because it’s a weak concept, it wasn’t worth delaying the memorial.

The first is your opinion, which of course you’re entitled to. I have no way of disproving it, but if you do a search for ’9/11 names’ on Twitter you’ll find a lot of people declaring themselves very moved by it, for example Linda Tischler of Fast Company saying it was the only press briefing that she’s ever cried at. Again, just opinions.

The second premise is something that the NYer article could certainly lead you to believe, but really when you look at the overall project, the names arrangement was a smallish part of the overall complexity of the memorial and had no effect on delaying its construction. Consider that the memorials are waterfalls, each the size of the footprint of the WTC towers, and they are built on top of a 120,000 sqft museum.

I think this problem with this post is that it’s trying to make a general point about project management, most likely in the context of software given your bent, but fails to take into account what this thing is. It’s not a website. It’s a permanent memorial to one of the greatest tragedies ever occurring on U.S. soil. It will become a part of the city and if the city is still there in 100 years, so will the memorial. It was worth it I think to go beyond a purely functional organization of the name and try to express something that makes the memorial more moving. If being moving isn’t the core requirement of a memorial, I don’t know what is.

My response is here.

Thanks Ian.

Open letter to college graduates

Posted on in open letter, Philosophy, rantby Scott Berkun

Dear college graduates:

I will share what no one told me when I graduated: live for yourself. Do not make life choices based on what parents, girlfriends, boyfriends or buddies will judge you for doing or not doing. Be wary of people who tell you about regrets – they are projecting theirs onto you. At 21 it is far harder to figure out how to live for yourself than you think. You probably haven’t yet discovered that you don’t know who you are.

Eventually you may find living for yourself hinges on living with and for others, but you’ll need to live for yourself first to find that out. Spend an hour a day believing nothing – it will be good for you. Some of the best things about college are what you unlearn.

Make bets. For every day since you entered kindergarten there have been safe choices waiting for you. Go to elementary school. Go to high school. Go to college. You’ve done all the safe choices already. Don’t die with a headstone that merely says “was safe”. Make some bets. Expect to lose some, and be open to surprise about which ones. Your profit in all outcomes will be to figure out who you are. If  you were good at playing it safe, your mistakes and failures will be the first things in your life that are truly your own.

Move. Escape your house / town / state / country for a time. Every year that goes by in a career makes it harder to ever wander again. Work as hard as you have to, doing shit jobs, if it lets you get out of your hometown. See something else. Don’t complain about your old stomping ground as if it were the world. You’re still a kid – go see something before you decide anything. If you go somewhere you hate, you can always move somewhere else. That’s the upside of learning how to move.

Stay in touch. The surprise of my degree was  the people I met – my education could have been obtained elsewhere, but the collection of insane and wonderful people I met would be hard to replicate, many of whom I’m friends with today. Had I been less of a fool, I’d have stayed connected to more of them. Don’t be shallow – don’t use people. But do stay connected with the people you have bonds with. You’ll lose most,  but you can help pick which ones you’ll keep.

Accept the Paradox. The confusion you feel about what to do or where to go may never leave you, and that’s OK. Don’t wait around expecting it to resolve itself. Graduation does not guarantee clarity. Most people twice your age don’t know what to do with their lives either – why believe you should have it all figured out now? Certainly try, but know the odds. Make commitments and work for goals, but never believe their utility is persistent or guaranteed.

Believe in work. All things equal, those who put more in, get more out. If you can’t find the job you want, make it. Do it for free, and do it better, and you’ll find someone who will hire you.  It may not be easy to get what you want, but if you swallow your pride and put in more passion than the slackers, you’ll be rewarded. Not by the universe, but by your self-respect.

Best wishes.

Movie Review: Winters Bone

Posted on in movies, Recommendedby Scott Berkun

There’s something captivating about movies where you don’t know all the rules, but care to stick around to find out. This is why I like some foreign films, the ones that aren’t too weird, in that they grab your attention and mind in ways American films rarely do. They are actual artifacts of drama, instead of exercises in  “guess which cliché will happen next”.

Winter’s bone is about a young woman in Missouri who, to save her family, has to take on many hardships and risks. And at its core as a quest driven narrative it works well. But what makes the movie so engaging is how it captures the sense of a place, and a people. All of the characters feel like a part of the world being filmed (and it turns out, many of them are locals), and there’s a patience to the dialog and the plotting that lets the fears of this world, and the questionable nature of the characters, stand in relief.

It’s not an easy film to watch – but it is a fantastic and heroic film.

Watch on Netflix, imdb listing here.

How to ruin a design: the 9/11 Memorial

Posted on in Creative Thinking, design, Managementby Scott Berkun

Update:  After a great comment, I changed my opinion about this.

I rarely use the word requirement – it’s a weenie word. But I know if you royally screw up requirements, regardless of what you call them, no designer’s power can save you. Case in point: this story about the design of the 9/11 Memorial in NYC.

The specific problem in question was how to organize the names of all those who died:

In 2006, Mayor Bloomberg… suggested that people be loosely grouped according to their location that day. And so Arad [the architect] created nine categories. Around the south pool, he’d list everyone who died in the South Tower and at the Pentagon, along with the first responders and the passengers on Flights 175, 77, and 93. Around the north pool would be those who died in the North Tower and on the plane that crashed into it, along with the six who died in the first World Trade Center attack, in 1993.

As is often the case, it’s an executive who issues the problematic requirement, unchallenged by more practical minds, that sends the project into a tailspin.

Chronological is what worked well for the Vietnam memorial (and many others). But they passed on that. So alphabetical perhaps? Noooooo. Too easy. Perhaps by specific incident (Tower 1, Tower 2, Pentagon, etc.)? That’s where they started, but that was too simple  – here’s what they did instead:

But how to group these? Arad and Daniels settled on the idea of a distribution that would seem random, reflecting the chaotic and arbitrary nature of the event itself, but that would have some kind of underlying logic, reflecting the bonds that preceded or came of it. “One of the biggest messages of the memorial and the museum is that the people who got up and did whatever they did that morning, and then died doing it, were no different from the rest of us,” Daniels said. “They were us, we are them.” In 2009, the foundation sent out letters to the victims’ families, soliciting “meaningful adjacencies”—that is, the names of others with whom each victim should be listed.

Random, as a goal? Really? And getting everyone involved in creating requirements? Can you see where this is going?

By the end of that year, the foundation had received twelve hundred requests for adjacencies (and these didn’t include the self-contained adjacencies, such as, say, Ladder Company 7 or Cantor Fitzgerald, which, with six hundred and fifty-eight names, represented the biggest, and most challenging, adjacency block of them all) The reasons for these requests were varied. Sometimes the victims were cohorts, or best friends. In other cases, the families knew, from last phone calls, whom their loved ones had been with in the end—in an elevator, on a ledge—and wanted those people listed together. A same-sex couple and their three-year-old son all perished on Flight 175; their names, certainly, belonged together.

These are moving stories of course. And stories that should be shared. But why did these stories need to define the design of something as simple as a name list? On a project that’s been delayed for nearly a decade? Every other war memorial in the history, including the great ones, didn’t need to go this far.

At this point it was probably too late to simplify, as all the victims had already made their requests. How could they be turned away? But as any good designer knows, if it’s this hard to figure out or explain, odds are no one who visits the place will make sense of it either. But they pressed on:

At a certain point, the foundation recognized that this job could use the assistance of a computer. Even so, the first few computer scientists and statisticians the foundation got in touch with said that it couldn’t be done. “It really did seem insurmountable,” Daniels recalled. But then his chief of staff called Jake Barton, the principal at the media-design firm Local Projects, who took on the assignment, and, with a data artist named Jer Thorp, designed an algorithm that could sort the names in keeping with all the overlapping requests. Before long, they had a distribution designed to please everyone, including Arad.

I’m certain many families would be better honored by finishing the memorial sooner, and making it a welcoming and calming place for all visitors, rather than the micro details of how exactly names are grouped, or not.

I haven’t seen the latest plans for the complete memorial, and I admit the entire experience is unlikely to be ruined by this small set of issues. But I’m also confident the time spent overthinking the list of names earned much more effort than it was worth.

Requirements is a maligned word among designers, but for anyone who sees my point – pick up a copy of the wonderfully potent Exploring Requirements by Weinberg. It will forever improve how you think about problems, designs and working with clients through them both. Had Bloomberg or Arad read it, it would have saved all the victims and NYC much wasted time.