I get it; we are easily distracted. Ideas are addictive. This post explores how to make the most of the more mundane phases of innovation.
Category: Innovation
5 Idea Characteristics to Increase Traction and Adoption
How to give your idea the best chance of success
I enjoyed the responses to this tweet from Nick Parker.
A whole range of technologies was shared, here are a few interesting examples:
“The idea of IoT (Internet of Things) in general. Not a single tipping point but a convergence of: (fairly cheap) sensors everywhere, better network bandwidth, better batteries, and the cloud.” ⟶ Tweet from @seanmfdineen
“Accurate mechanical timekeeping — Took 500 years to get from the first mechanical clock to Harrison’s first sea clock. A lot of technical innovations, as well as a lot of public and private investment, were needed to get to that point.” ⟶ Tweet from @AGMonro
“Maybe mundane, but LEDs suddenly passed some sort of cost/performance barrier a few years ago and went from being the little diodes on stereos to changing the way cities look.” ⟶ Tweet from @snillockcirtap
“Shipping containers … first used in the 1760s … became mainstream in 1960s/70s” ⟶ Tweet from @davegentle
It got me thinking about the tipping point or critical mass of innovation and its usefulness for understanding the broader theories of change.
For a long time, I think education has focused on the wrong part of innovation theory.
Diffusion of Innovation
Before we get into talking about the pattern or curve of adoption that a new idea takes, it is worth reminding you of the work of Everett Rogers.
Back in 1962, he wrote The Diffusion of Innovations, where he looked at the rate at which an idea spreads through a community.
Although telecommunications and digital technology later co-opted this model to explain why your Dad doesn’t use a smartphone, the original innovation Rogers studied was in agriculture.
He looked at the shift from farmers using particular variants of crops and livestock to more widespread adoption of a new way of doing things.
What encourages the adoption of a new idea?
Rogers proposed five main factors that contribute to the rate of adoption.
He hypothesised that there is a direct relationship between the characteristics of the innovation (relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability — how easy it is to try out) and the percentage of people who adopt it over time.
It is these characteristics that I find the most fascinating and which are often overlooked:
#1 Compatibility
Why would your father want to have a smartphone? Because his friends, family and colleagues already do! Technology has to be a good fit for people’s lives and interests. Innovation must be compatible enough with existing beliefs, values and practices.
#2 Trialability
The ratio of effort it takes to try something out versus the benefits gained from doing so. In an interview exploring these ideas, Rogers stated that “the more convenient a test is for you, the less involved or complicated it is to get into a trial, the easier it is going to be for you to make up your mind about trying a new idea”. This suggests a threshold effect — you’ll try something if there’s little risk and the benefits outweigh whatever barrier might exist between thinking about trying and doing it.
#3 Complexity
The more complicated the idea, the more time and effort to try it out. If there is a choice of which new thing to try out, this factor suggests that people choose the more straightforward option. Rogers says that an innovation will be adopted when it is “simple enough to understand and use, but complex enough to offer challenges”.
#4 Relative Advantage
This one also gets considered in behavioural economics through concepts such as loss aversion (people are far more risk-averse when it comes to losing something than gaining the same thing). This is probably the one we most want to understand of all the factors. It is, after all, the idea that anyone adopting a new technology must have more to gain than they have to give up.
#5 Observability
I find this factor fascinating because it suggests that whether people take up the idea depends less on its benefits than how easy it is for them to see other people using it. This one is fascinating in the context of education. We all know that using the latest technology in class isn’t enough; people also have to see it used well and learn how to get started with it themselves.
Adoption Curves
Rogers proposed that a new idea or technology would typically follow a bell curve to diffuse through a community. This is referred to as the S-curve, adoption or diffusion curve. The emphasis was on members of a social system and our labels for them.
There was a time when every education keynote — yes, even mine — provoked an audience to think about the different groups of people that adopt an innovative idea.
The segment names directly illustrate the group’s propensity to adopt an innovation.
- Innovators
- Early adopters
- Early majority
- Late majority
- Laggards
Over time, these groups adopt an innovation at different rates and represent different community proportions.
While this pattern of adoption is not universal, it happens often enough that we can use it as a general way of understanding how people will accept new things.
Focusing on labelling people and their response to the idea is a dead end. It is much more helpful to think about the characteristics of your idea that might be changed to encourage adoption and acceptance.
Your Talking Points
I have two key provocations for you to ponder and reflect upon.
- Within the theory of diffusion, we are not attempting to change a person’s label from one to another. It is not people that change but the innovation itself as, over time, it improves, changes and diffuses throughout a system.
- Identify a new programme you are starting this year — your innovation — and score it according to the five essential characteristics: relative advantage, compatibility, observability, complexity and trialability. How could it improve?
3 Mental Models From Economics For Educators To Enhance Your Innovation
Enhance your innovation efforts with these three concepts.
Build your cognitive toolkit with this trio of mental models from economics and explore their relevance for innovation in education.
- The Network Effect
- Sunk Cost Fallacy
- Compounding
We will look at each model and consider ‘How does this connect with education innovation and leadership?’
The Network Effect
A commodities’ value grows with the number of people who use them.
This is labelled the positive network effect. As more people use something, more people are also motivated to join.
Think about the mobile technology that we use. Any person with an iPhone can communicate easily with another iPhone owner.
The network effect has helped Apple’s growth, but there is also the benefit to us. We perceive and gain more value from a phone when others are part of the network or technology ecosystem.
The Network Effect breaks down to another level of influence.
- Direct network effect
- Two-sided network effects
- Intra-personal network effects
Take a look at Apple’s Success and Network Effects to find out more.
How does the network effect connect with education innovation and leadership?
The network effect is all about how people’s acceptance of an idea or innovation.
Take any new initiative or programme you plan to establish at your school. It could be a new structure for professional learning, reading comprehension routines, assessment expectations, or a design approach in your curriculum.
Have you got an example in mind?
Great, now think about how you might share stories of success within the initial phase. A few reports of success at a staff session might help kickstart the network effect.
Sunk Cost Fallacy
If you have ever ordered too much food and then attempted to get your money’s worth by eating too much, you have experienced the sunk cost fallacy.
Sunk Cost Fallacy is a cognitive and behavioural bias that sees us continue an endeavour due to previously invested time, money, effort or resources.
The sunk cost is part of the experience we can’t change, yet we continue onwards as if we have no other choice.
I have never had much appetite at breakfast, but I miraculously eat all sorts when I have a buffet breakfast at a hotel. I hear myself say, “I may as well.” This behaviour is the sunk cost fallacy.
Here’s a thought experiment from Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman:
Imagine that you have two tickets to tonight’s NBA game in your city and that the arena is 40 miles away. But it’s begun to snow, and you’ve found out that your team’s star has been injured and won’t be playing. Should you go or throw away the money and skip it?” To answer that question as an economist would ask yourself the following question: Suppose you didn’t have tickets to the game and a friend were to call you up and say that he has two tickets to tonight’s game which he can’t use and asks if you would like to have them. If the answer is “you’ve got to be kidding, it’s snowing, and the star isn’t playing,” then the answer is you shouldn’t go. That answer shows you that the fact that you paid good money for the tickets you have is irrelevant — their cost is sunk and can’t be retrieved by doing something you don’t want to do anyway. Avoidance of sunk cost traps is a religion for economists, but I find that a single college course in economics actually does little to make people aware of the sunk cost trap. It turns out that exposure to a few basketball-type anecdotes does a lot.
Taken from Richard Nisbett’s article in This Will Make You Smarter.
How does the sunk cost fallacy connect with education innovation and leadership?
I often wonder if we have commitment issues in schools.
I have witnessed lots of irrational reluctance when it comes to abandoning ineffective programmes, which is the sunk cost fallacy at play.
We want to keep every programme running, rather than clear space and resourcing for an innovation that might be more appropriate.
My challenge to you is to consider your school programmes that are still running, despite the ineffective impact they create.
If you want space for innovation, you have to stop putting energy, resources and time into ineffective alternatives.
Compounding
Compounding is all about how small habits over time make a big difference.
When we think of compounding, we typically think of finance and positive returns, as in “good compounding.” But compounding just reinforces what’s already happening — good or bad. There is no judgment. And compounding works outside of finance. So while we can compound money positively and negatively, we can compound ourselves as well. ~ Shane Parrish
This email is the 237th time I have researched and crafted about 700 words in a weekly issue.
In terms of knowledge, mindset and skillset, the gains from such a habit are not just increasing linearly. The improvements would be an example of exponential growth.
But we find it difficult to wrap our heads around longitudinal exponential or non-linear growth.
Consumer psychologists Craig McKenzie and Michael Liersch showed that people could not accurately estimate the outcome of such non-linear processes. Instead, they believe that savings will grow linearly and underestimate how much their current savings will be worth in the future.
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them. They seem to make little difference on any given day, yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous. It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent. ~ James Clear — Atomic Habits via FS
An element of this mental model that has piqued my curiosity lately is that the compound effect is neutral.
It works for negative and positive behaviours, choices and habits. It is making me think more carefully about which personal or professional routines I have on repeat.
How does compounding connect with education innovation and leadership?
Innovation does not have to be at a pre-defined scale to be worthy of our time.
Implementing a novel idea that adds value can be at a small scale or a whole organisation level.
I am talking about scale because to establish a routine and habit that compounds a positive outcome, we need an achievable output.
Reflect on the scale of your school’s innovations and consider how these might break down to more minor actions or micro-commitments.
For example, a leadership team might be planning to redefine the meeting structures and transform their impact.
Yes, we need to think about the whole programme of change. Still, to take advantage of the compounding effect, we might consider one question at every meeting or a single protocol for collaboration as a starting point.
What small innovative commitments can you make that will compound into a significant change?
Your Talking Points
Three mental models, so I leave you with three summary provocations for your educational innovation efforts:
- Who can share a story of success? [Network Effect]
- What are you going to stop doing? [Sunk Cost Fallacy]
- What could be part of an innovative micro habit? [Compounding]
31 Days of Reflective Journal Prompts
Speaking of habits and routines, I have a new Reflection Workbook on sale.
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How You Can Stick With A Tough Problem – Key Lessons From Cognitive Science
David Badre shares some ideas about working on complex and challenging projects
David Badre is a professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and author of On Task: How Our Brain Gets Things Done.
I have edited some of the authors’ critical points about practising problem-solving habits and added some keyword labels in bold.
In general, we can get better at structuring hard problems with experience. This is one reason that practice makes us more efficient and successful at hard tasks and that experts outperform novices. Finding work habits that encourage this process helps us to stay focused.
- Stay with it. Finding the right structure often takes time. [Persist, Stamina, Effort]
- Be open to reconceptualising problem structure. [Disposition, Curiosity, Perspective]
- Take breaks. It’s not helpful to insist on trying to get everything done at once if it just isn’t working. [Pace, Time, Incubate]
- Interact with others. Just like taking a break, interacting with others can help us conceptualise a problem in new ways. [Collaborate, Share, Connect]
I find the idea of being open to reconceptualise problem structures one that resonates with my current facilitation.
I am paying attention to moments when I shift perspective. This is often during group design and development sessions.
For example, during a recent curriculum design workshop, I asked a group of teachers:
If some of your students were here with us, what might they share about the ideas we have developed so far?
This is a deliberate facilitation move to change the perspective.
The problem structure [learning + curriculum design] was shifted [from curriculum] and seen from a different vantage point [student].
This propelled us in a different direction and led to some new ideas.
#227 Inspired By Nature
This week I enjoyed reading about a new surgical instrument that a parasitic wasp inspired. Not so much the parasitic wasp part 🐝, but the origin story of the innovation.
Biomimicry
A team at Imperial College London are rapidly developing a robotic, flexible needle that can bend to reach difficult locations. The mechanism is inspired by female parasitoid wasps, which use a bendable needle-like ovipositor to bore into wood to lay eggs in hiding host larvae.
Serendipity is a beautiful thing! I stumbled on the unique qualities of this particular wasp when Professor Julian Vincent, who is a friend and colleague, explained at a dinner how the curved ovipositor worked. Suddenly, I wondered whether we could mimic this attribute in robotic medical technology to improve the delivery of treatments. … we now have a medical-grade, clinically sized working prototype, which we hope will ultimately improve outcomes and recovery times for patients with brain diseases.
Dr Ferdinando Rodriguez y Baena, Imperial College.
This is an example of biomimicry. Might you be more familiar with the classic Velcro invention story? The hooks on plant seeds that help them disperse inspired George de Mestral to create the first hook and loop fastener.
Did you know that Velcro is a portmanteau of “velvet” and “crochet” (literally, “hook” in French).
Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges — and find hope along the way.
Biomimicry Institute
Drawing inspiration from natural solutions requires a mindset ready for serendipity. The following mental model explains the reason why we often miss these moments of inspiration.
The Streetlight Effect
The Streetlight Effect can explain one block to new ideas and innovative solutions. You might have heard of this observational bias, demonstrated in the story of the drunk looking for his keys:
A policeman sees a drunk man searching for something under a streetlight and asks what the drunk has lost. He says he lost his keys and they both look under the streetlight together. After a few minutes the policeman asks if he is sure he lost them here, and the drunk replies, no, and that he lost them in the park. The policeman asks why he is searching here, and the drunk replies, “this is where the light is”.
The Streetlight Effect
Sometimes people look for the next breakthrough idea in the most accessible place. They filter for ideas closely related to their work or too similar to their context. That search is doomed to mediocrity. At best, it was a marginal alteration and not the breakthrough they were hoping for.
It may be easier to look at what the school down the road is doing, but that limits what is possible.
The streetlight effect is a helpful bias to reflect on when we develop potential solutions.
What more can we do to counter this bias?
Explore Beyond Your Industry
The strategy that might be the key to your next breakthrough is to explore beyond your industry.
A lovely example that I often think about is the emergency doctors who consulted with Ferrari F1 mechanics to improve their intensive care unit handoff practice. The doctors at Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital had their moment of serendipity whilst watching the motor racing.
Another healthcare example is Rotterdam Eye Hospital, which implemented six aviation industry innovations such as black box recording, risk analysis, patient taxi service, and valet parking.
Observations indicated that the innovations positively affected quality and safety in the hospital: Waiting times were reduced, work processes became more standardised, the number of wrong-site surgeries decreased, and awareness of patient safety was heightened.
Diffusing aviation innovations in a hospital in The Netherlands.
Let’s have a look at some actions to make a start with some of these ideas.
Your Next Creative Step
To explore beyond your industry or analogous idea exploration is a powerful technique.
It encourages you to:
- remain open to possibilities and inspiration from unlikely sources,
- avoid the baggage of precedents and escape old ideas,
- reflect on the problem with a new perspective,
- clarify the impact you want,
- adapt and create new alternatives.
The next time you are at the idea generation stage, hit the pause button and recognise the bias of looking for inspiration in familiar places. Identify and explore similar experiences.
You might need to break out of your industry to find breakthrough ideas.