Innovation Games

The words “listen to the customers” get sprinkled on product builders like magic pixie dust. After a while, it’s hard not to smirk when somebody even leans toward the line. Certainly there is no lack of trying by sensible product builders, however the mantra and intention belie the fact that engaging customers and users is a subtle process and that there remains a shortage of simple clear techniques that work well in real business settings with their inherent constraints and realities.

Along has come the new book, Innovation Games, by the ever-energetic Luke Hohmann with a new and powerful approach. I first met Luke when he was VP of Engineering at Aurigin, one of Inxight’s early customers. Luke was the rare customer who gave me no choice but to listen. And our products (and I personally) benefited greatly from the experience. And thus, though not a complete surprise, it is deeply satifying to see that Luke has crafted a suite of ideas and techniques that draws out in others the same spring of enthusiasium and creativity that he naturally channels himself.

The magic in Innovation Games lies in the power that play has to get the voice of customers speaking in real ways about real stuff. It completely busts the typical experience in the shallow “listen to customer” approach of Ask, Tell, Show. Asking a customer for their requirements more or less gets silence. Telling them their requirements to see if they agree gets shoulder shrugs. And showing them a prototype, gets a “hey, this doesn’t meet my requirements.”

In the continuum of methods from customer surveys and visits at one end, and outsourced analyst/marketing studies and focus groups and disciplinary research methodologies (for example, ethnographic studies of complex work environments) at the other, Innovation Games sit somewhere in the middle in structure and weight and maybe floating off the plane like a puck on air. Innovation Games are about drawing customers into a playful setup with disarming materials and structured facilitation.

Games—group activities in general—need the right structure to maintain focus and development toward a goal while leaving a degree of open-ended-ness to create pull and participation. The twelve Innovation Games each achieve this balance with varying sweet spots and uses. Choosing the right game for the particular objective is an important step, and fortunately the book provides the foundation and the specific guidance on this step as with other steps in using these games. Some games are best suited to identifying new product opportunities or guiding the process of product or product line evolution, while others are more suited to painting a picture of the customer environment and context or discovering powerful messages.

These last two uses are particularly good areas to leverage customer voices. People, when they feel they are being listened to, do indeed want to speak about the real things going on in their lives and they often speak in ways that inherently resonates more with others like them than anything devised by even the best devisers of lines. In fact, many qualititative research methods produce excellent results in these two areas. The relative power in Innovation Games comes from how quickly the game setup can get people into the right state, and skillful use can draw out positive collaboration and competition, while mitigating suspicions and cautions. Of course, a lean dose of risks and danger can create a necessary sense of reality and something at stake, the kind of subtle point that comes through across the book.

Though the book is quite complete in all the practical materials and procedures of a how-to nature, it also delivers a solid account of the principles and nuances of the approach and each game. Though the games can be applied as described, the foundation here invites a flexible and well, playful, adaption of the ideas and techniques. Such a combination of soundness and openness can only come from one place. Luke has been pursing methods for helping himself and others build great products all his career and he directly engages people in all directions as much as anybody I’ve ever met.

Innovation Games is not just another disconnected idea executed well, but a brilliant development in a long quest to engage people ultimately to be sure that they are served well. Most lately, Luke has been applying Innovation Games through his product consultancy, Enthiosys, to support his customers, real-live product teams in engaging their users and customers. Though it may appear that the games are too heavy or structured for small organizations or in early early stages of new product concepts, and too loose and perhaps too playful seeming for larger organizations and later stages and processes, the methods appear to have considerable range as designed even before considering the possibility of remixing the ideas. In fact, by now, the Innovation Games have been applied succesfully in many small and large companies, including Enthiosys clients Qualcomm, Emerson Electric, SAP and Trend Micro, and toward many of the different ends.

That said, however, all-in-all, I think the Games now really begin as the book is gaining attention. I’m excited to watch the action unfold. Heck, it’s time for me to join the play, so I’d love to hear ideas on this. And of course, you should approach Luke himself with ideas and possibilities, big or small, doesn’t matter, but a twinkle in the eye and a snap in the step does.

Quick jumps: Buy here. Read excerptshere and here. Other Reviews on official book site, and here , and here. Search blogs here

Vox for the private, personal, and playful

Over the years of toyful blogging, I’ve resisted splitting the flow of this blog into separate blogs for the “personal”, other, and off-topic. Certainly, there has never been much more than a trickle to split, but it was also a sense that a percentage personal was an intrinsic and a goodness in this genre of conversational writing. However, it’s clear you shouldn’t let the air to fuel ratio get out of whack. Recently there’s been a knocking to the personal here, not suprisingly, given my recent combustions.

Never thought of myself, as exactly headed toward MySpace or LiveJournal, but in a fashion, perhaps the time has come for something like that. During this transition, a series of fortunate events, now see me with another blog, that hardly anybody can see, but it may yet poke out above waterline.

• I found myself writing, talking about what was up to many different people—friends, family, reconnected colleagues, new people fast becoming new friends. Lots of emails, fair amount of IM-ing telling bits and pieces of the story over and over, even as it was developing, eventually a notification email notifying hundreds in my address book … and so of course, this led to thoughts of how best to communicate about not just the personal, but in the full range of widely and narrowly, of openly and privately.

• I listened to a podcast capture of Anil Dash’s MeshForum talk in which he shares many observations from the LiveJournal experience. Much of what Anil observed about the contrast between the professional blogging of Typepad users and the social blogging of LiveJournal users really rang true to me … and was timely.

• Not long after, I got my requested invitation to the Vox preview, and in August I started an experiment by inviting a small set of my longest, close friends, all that go back before there was any professional or career to me. Almost all registered to read what I was writing, but none have posted. I started postings about family, a remodel, sharing the experience of the “squeezing through a straw” of this period. So far, mostly the kind of stuff that many people write in those annual letters they enclose in their holiday greeting cards, nothing deeply revealing, but tending toward the private.

Now I’m beginning to think that my Vox blog, though now all private, may indeed perhaps pull the mostly personal across and also create a space for the comfortably-shared off-topic and playful. Vox is now launched, and certainly, Mena and Ben are proud as they explain the vision of Vox. And David Hornik, is also proud as Sixapart funder and one who really does the professional/personal wavicle split blogging thing quite well.

And they all ought be proud. I’ll certainly raise my big thumbs-up to the long line of impressed. For the moment, I’ll just add two main points of feedback:

• Given the large ratio of readers to writers (even in this space of personal), private friends should be able to read my entry w/o registering. The Open Identity systems like in fact the OpenID system that has come out of the Sixapart people itself could/should be just the right mechanism for this. (Note a commenter on David Hornik’s post also makes this point.)

• I’m personally already wishing for a bit more control over privacy levels. Right now, you can post for family, friends, both, or public. And though the design point of Vox really demands absolute simplicity and it’d be to easy to suck here, the current switches feel big to me. Though it may take a few years for a signal from a broad and full user base, I wouldn’t be surprised to see it come quickly, given the great nuance most people do have on levels of how open or closed they are in different settings. With all the complaints about Email, many little things do work with it quite well, including the quite powerful and simple mechanism of allowing you to choose exactly the To, CC, and subtle BCC.

Knots Intertwingled

Sam Ruby’s entry Knot Theory really gets at the essence of what he finds interesting. And I’m right there in my own taste and interests. I’ve always admired his “intertwingly” address, though I believe it comes from Ted Nelson’s quote:

“Intertwingularity is not generally acknowledged, people keep pretending they can make things deeply hierarchical, categorizable and sequential when they can’t. Everything is deeply intertwingled.”

Though I agree with Ted Nelson so far as it goes as a theory of reality, I start to disagree with it as a design stance. The resolution is not to make things only hierarchical, categorized, or sequential, but rather to decide when and where to arrange them in these ways. Therein is the art of placement and composing of systems.

Esther's Weakness or Strength

It's easy to fall into characterizing certain design aspects, like visual features or fixed structures, as if they cater to human weakness. Even if you're Esther Dyson, and you know better. Esther says I am weak; give me a little struGture please!. There's nothing wrong with visualness, nothing wrong with rigid structures. In themselves.

These features leverage capabilities we had before we were born. They are resources for memory, for supporting long running activities, for allowing us to move without thinking about moving. And people are resourceful. (Gotta love Esther's "delete and browse in trash" move.)

Do you think anybody really means it when she apologizes for her messy office? Here's a picture of Esther in her office that I've used for near ten years [thanks to Stu Card from his early Web foraging.] Certainly she's not thinking she's weak.

She looks perfectly happy in there, she can find recent documents and ten year old documents. She can find authoritative sources, she can find her phone (maybe). My, my, she's even found a place to rest her bare feet. And Work gets done. Release 1.0 went our every month (almost). Now that's an office. Usually people would see the picture and think I was going to talk about the problem. Information Overload. And I do, but then I get to a line like why can't Microsoft Office be more like Esther Dyson's office?