Designing for Innovation

This post is adapted from a keynote address offered at the University of Michigan School of Information QuasiCon on February 22, 2020:

Thank you so much for having me here today. I especially want to thank Joe Muller for the invitation, and my other UMSI interns: Kendall Lehman, Julia Maxwell, and alums Garrett Morton, Sophia McFadden-Keesling, and Lauren Seroka as well as Professor Paul Conway for being my connection to this community. I also want to call out that my boss, Suzanne Wones, Associate University Librarian for Digital Strategies and Innovation at Harvard Library is also a UMSI alumna, so I’m indebted to the program as a whole for having such a great impact on my career, despite the fact that I got my library degree from Drexel.

Ok so why am I here? Well I’ve been in my role for about 3 years — and it was a new role at the time I joined — focused primarily on implementing the HL digital strategy. But you see there’s that other word in my title — in our department name, and it’s a word that I feel particularly challenged by and interested in unpacking.

This idea of “innovation” — what is it? How do you do it? How can you build an innovative mindset? How can you inspire people or organizations to be innovative? I think one of the things we have to start with is defining that word.

The concept of innovation is not synonymous with a thing that we do — to be innovative is not necessarily to create a new technology, or to make something bigger. One of the first tasks I had in my role was to try to develop an implementation strategy for something called “game-changing discovery” — well that sounds like something “bigger” doesn’t it? Game-changing discovery was a term that library leadership had developed and for some folks it meant machine learning or AI, for some others it meant shared collecting or integrated catalogs, still others thought of reimagined library spaces — with technology at the center rather than stacks of books. For a lot of people it was a dedicated discovery platform for digital content — more on that later …

But I had this feeling that what we needed in order to empower “game-changing discovery” was the same type of thing we needed when thinking about “innovation” — it was a change not in what we do, but how we do it.

So here’s where I’ll draw on an example. When we think about disruptive technology — we might think about Uber or Lyft — ride sharing disrupting the taxi industry. But they didn’t really make something new or bigger. Drivers — in cars — taking people places. What they did was think about how that happens. Questions like — what if you knew up front what it would cost? What if you knew how long you would have to wait for a driver? What if you could choose the type of car you wanted or needed?

Here’s another example — one of my early favorites: Zappos. Now there was nothing particularly novel about ordering shoes online when Zappos first launched. People had been ordering things online and having them shipped. Some of us even remember ordering from catalogs over the phone, or even before that, filling out a form — pen and paper to order from a catalog. Ok but what was different about Zappos? The difference was that they focused on the customer experience — 2 day shipping, seamless returns. Sounds familiar now, and we can talk about how Zappos has changed since they were acquired by Amazon, but at the time you had people who had become used to certain constraints when ordering online or from a catalog and now they are able to have a different experience — go ahead, order two sizes, because you know how easy it will be to return the size that doesn’t fit. You have to run your organization differently if that’s your focus.

Ok last one and my personal favorite: Spotify. Early days of Spotify was about recreating a record store experience. We’re going to have all the albums all the artists at your streaming fingertips and our search is going to work perfectly — you’ll be able to search for your favorite song, see that song on different albums, playlists, maybe even different versions by different artists. But then a group of developers who had been working on search accuracy instead formed a small team and went in a different direction — they created the “made for you” playlists — early on called your “daily mix” — they looked at user behavior, what songs you were searching for, playing, and how the algorithm could pull similar songs together for you — introducing you to music you may have never thought to search for. It’s been a personal game changer for me — as someone who used to buy a cd (or tape) and listen to it over and over, having these compilations brought to me and refreshed on a daily basis has changed my music listening experience.

Alright — but how do we do it? How do we set out to do things differently? The theme for this year’s QuasiCon is Innovation & Design, so I pose the question: How can we design for innovation? How can we build in practices, both personally, and at the organizational level that are going to unlock that potential within all of us to do things differently? How can we inspire curiosity, creativity, passion, progress, collaboration? There are three key concepts that I want to use as the pillars of support today: openness, a team-based approach, and a bias toward action.

Openness

So what do I mean by openness? Do any of you have a favorite place to study? A favorite spot in the library or (it’s ok to admit it) a local coffee shop? A place that you go when you’re ready to do that type of work? What about music? Do you like to listen to music when you’re writing? I definitely do. I’ll turn on a soaring movie soundtrack when I’m ready to sit down (with coffee) and get some writing done.

I think it’s the same with innovation — you need to be ready to think about things differently — we can’t context switch from a morning of checking tasks off the to-do list and then think we’re going to just generate some innovative concepts. We have that mental model of someone in the middle of using their quill, writing in the ledger, running out of ink and shouting “there’s got to be a better way!!!” but we can’t wait around for a-ha moments, at least not when innovation is in your job title.

So let’s make the time — let’s set the context, let’s put that time on our busy calendars to say at this place, and at this time, I’m going to be open to innovation. Last years UMSI interns know exactly what I’m talking about because we did just that. We called it Thursdays at 3.

Ok so to be clear, this is not an actual photo of Thursdays @ 3, but yes, this is a rooftop bar in Cambridge where we had our first session, and no, I am not endorsing drinking alcohol while on the clock.

The point of Thursdays @ 3 was to schedule some unstructured time each week to set aside the task list at hand and adopt a mindset of divergent thinking. We thought about the circumstances and conditions that encourage us to think and act creatively — being outdoors, fresh air, for the most part no technology — we were setting ourselves up for divergence from our normal day-to-day office structure. For those unfamiliar with the concepts of divergent versus convergent thinking, picture a typical brainstorming session.

Traditional brainstorming sessions try to do both divergent and convergent thinking in the same space, which is often a recipe for disaster. If you’re already thinking about converging on a solution, you can’t also be completely open to the full spectrum of ideas that the team might generate. Divergent thinking, by contrast, is about rapid idea generation without the desire for a solution in mind. More akin to the concept of brainwriting, where people add to and are inspired by the ideas of others, we are not attempting to narrow a focus or path forward or even to generate action items or to-dos.

This might feel very foreign to people who have worked within library committees, where people come together and focus on developing a list of action items or next steps. Here we were asking questions and offering ideas with the only intended outcome being more questions and more ideas. The question I asked the interns at the first session was based on an activity called the headline game in which you ask people to write the headline they want to see about themselves in five years. I asked them to think about the moment (not too far around the corner now) — when they would be graduating from UMSI — what did they want people to say about their work at Harvard — what would they put on their resumes to describe their experience of the internship?

It’s not a question with a clear answer or even one where we could consider an answer’s accuracy by any measure. They had been at Harvard for less than a week at that point, but those answers would generate ideas as to how they felt about their time, what they might accomplish, what their expectations might be — and allowed me the opportunity to think about doing things differently at Harvard Library.

Team-Based Approach

The second concept that feeds this design for innovation is a team-based approach. When thinking about Thursdays @ 3, for example, these weren’t 1:1 check ins between me and each intern individually, we operated as a team. So how does a team-based approach lead to innovative thinking?

Part of the answer may feel intuitive — we are nowhere near as effective in generating new ideas when we are alone as we are when we engage with other people — even the most introverted among us benefits from sharing their ideas and getting feedback from others. A team-based culture also promotes a feeling of safety among the individuals who make up an organization. If we are part of a team, we are not alone, if we are sharing our work and ideas openly with one another, we can reduce the fear that comes in the form of critical feedback.

Innovation dies in silence — in the siloes that can build up around individual contributors who may have deep expertise, but in only the context of their own experience. And the challenge for management is to consciously create teams that can work toward a common goal. The team is not the goal, however, the team is not the product or project — the team is the people who are working with one another, and every time there is a new person introduced into the work, it becomes a new team. We have to model inclusivity and acknowledge the chemistry of each team. I like this analogy in the context of change management: you can’t step in the same river twice, not just because the water is flowing, but because you’ve changed. Your step, your foot, you are not a constant.

So when a team takes on work — it is just as important to figure out who the team is — what their culture will be — what protocols they will keep in place, as it is to figure out what the team will be working on — what their goals or outputs are. So I want to share a recent example of my own work in this area, which again — I consider to be innovative despite the fact that the output was seemingly quite ordinary business work.

Harvard University recently adopted a new digital accessibility policy which meant that all of our public-facing library systems needed to be made to conform with WCAG criteria. So I pulled together a team of motivated individuals from across the Library. The people who make digital content for our users are not just in the Library IT group — they are also reference librarians creating libguides and academic technologists supporting faculty, and experts from our special collections who are making digital exhibits. I wanted the task force to be as diverse as the groups of people who would be responsible for improving the a11y of our interfaces (at the code level, the usability level, and the content level).

This was not a group of people that normally worked together, and none of the people outside of my department would consider themselves “experts” in digital accessibility — but when this team came together, we reset the foundation of shared knowledge. We use a series of high-performance team protocols that reflected our commitment to each other.

The reason I mention this is that I was keenly aware of the emotional labor involved — this work has a significant impact on people’s lives we were also reviewing and documenting issues with systems and content that people in the room had created themselves — we were reflecting on our own ability to do our jobs better. I wanted to give the team a sense of support and autonomy — the fact that they were engaged in this work at all meant that they had just as much expertise as anyone else in the library to carry it out.

But more than that I also wanted to demonstrate that we could form teams differently — remember I mentioned that this felt innovative despite the output being quite ordinary. Library committees and working groups are historically formed by representing a department structure that is meant to democratize decision making, but reinforces the model that each person represents a distinct perspective. This necessarily reflects a zero sum approach to the work where in order for some stakeholders to benefit, others have to lose. Committees are often tasked with finding common ground or the best possible outcome. They are not expressly empowered to create a shared understanding or chart a new path.

To truly prioritize a high-performance teams approach is to commit to an active, creative energy, driven by the members of the team as a group.

Bias Toward Action

That leads into the last of the 3 pillars — a bias toward action. There are a couple of drivers here, but the one that I always come back to is the concept of self-efficacy. The best way to prove to ourselves that we are capable of achieving a goal is to take the first step — any step — and then reflect. The enemy of innovation is inaction. We have all seen this as analysis paralysis, but it is much deeper than that. If we don’t act, we are depriving ourselves of the learning opportunity associated with reflecting on our actions.

It is only with that reflection that we can be informed as to the next step and the next. This also brings to mind the other challenge we all face — letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Acknowledging that we have what we need to take the first step can be terrifying — but if we give into that fear and stop ourselves from moving forward, we have failed without even trying. Our fear of failure can in fact guarantee that we will fail.

Acknowledging those fears and instead biasing ourselves toward action gives us the opportunity to learn from, build on, and enhance our work quickly — our failures become part of the work, not obstacles to it. And personally, I wanted to share a fear I overcame when launching a product I touched on earlier in the context of game-changing discovery: Harvard Digital Collections.

Harvard Digital Collections provides access to all the publicly available content in Harvard’s digital repository — over 6 million items — using an API that gives access to records at the item level (not just through the collection-level metadata searchable in the library’s catalog). The idea for Harvard Digital Collections had been batted around in working groups and committees since 2013, and we even had a working prototype, so what was there to fear? Well we hadn’t actually put it into production — this was a completely new platform, and we were terrified at the idea of putting something so big and so new out there without knowing if it would work. The only way for us to see if the platform would be useful was to start using it — so we decided to launch our Alpha version after just 6 weeks of development. We decided to be biased toward action despite all of our fears — because it was those same fears, when we met them, that gave us the information to take the next step.

There were many issues with the first launch — some design, some architecture, but we put the Alpha version out there so that we could see how users would respond, figure out if the work we thought still needed to be done actually needed doing, and to demonstrate that library platforms are not static interfaces. We were able to move from Alpha to Beta after two additional sprints (4 more weeks). We conducted active user testing on some of the most prominent features during those phases and yes, we broke it. We broke it a lot. For us it was a great opportunity to test out the impact that this new product was having on our digital infrastructure.

But by working out in the open — we were able to address issues as they arose, to test continuously, and adapt transparently as a team. Our developers weren’t simply executing on predetermined requirements — we were cycling through UX and design as well, the entire time. Our bias toward action was one we shared as team, and we did it openly.

What does this have to do with you?

Okay so here we are — three pillars in designing for innovation — examples of the ways in which each of these promote an innovative mindset and innovative organizational culture at Harvard Library. But what does any of this have to do with you?

Well you don’t need to wait for innovation to be part of your job title or job description to try and do things differently. You can adopt these practices as students and as new professionals in any aspect of your life. You can give yourself the space and time to think divergently — you can approach your work as part of a team and create a shared alignment — you can bias your thinking toward action and give yourself the gift of self-efficacy. How do I know? I’m a mom.

These are my three children, and they are naturally innovative — as we all are. They make time to explore and create without regard to the consequences of their actions. They’re not looking for particular outcomes — they’re curious. They also seek out and look to solve problems as a team. They want to share their work … and their feedback … constantly. They also are biased toward action — they want to try, and hopefully they learn from that attempt, sometimes it takes a few times, but they adjust — they continue to take action — they adapt.

This is Emerson. She and her twin sister Avery had to endure my wife and I as first-time parents, and there are things that i did as a first-time parent of twins that I’m not particularly proud of — things that involved a lot of yelling I never thought I’d do — but there are others that made me feel like an absolute superhero. One such thing was the commitment that I had to naptime. Naptime was sacred — nothing interrupted naptime. If it was quiet in that room — let them sleep — let them sleep as long as they can.

Well you can see where this goes. But that naptime — that quiet, peaceful time in our house wasn’t only about sleeping — it was time for these kids who were otherwise constantly bombarded with information from the loud world around them — from each other — to be alone with their thoughts. To have divergent, creative ideas, and yes … apparently to wonder what it would be like to put diaper rash cream all over your face.

Did my daughter know set out to create a new innovative skin routine? No. Did she think about the consequences of grabbing that tube from the changing table? No. She was curious — and I couldn’t help myself but laugh and document the experience.

Here again — I’m a mother to twins — they are, by definition, a team. I’m not sure that I would always consider them a high-performance team. In fact they are regularly quite unhappy with one another. BUT from their first moments they understood that it was easier to solve problems when they worked together. I’ll take you back to another naptime. This one a bit further along. They were no longer in cribs. They were in twin beds with these short mesh rails on the side to prevent them from falling out.

And I’ll admit it, I was reluctant to adapt to their changing feelings about naptime … what was once a sacred tradition became a daily battle to get them to rest. Again — I’ll admit there was quite a bit of yelling, and one day when they were playing in their room instead of napping, I went in to find that Avery had ripped the mesh guardrail off of her bed. I angrily removed the broken pieces — stated sternly and without much peace in my heart: “it is time for you girls to be peaceful and take a nap” and closed the door a little too hard.

After about two minutes of silence, I heard Emerson whisper to her sister. “Avery … Avery … break my bed too!” And just like that, they as a team had done away with the concept of mandatory naptime in our house.

Alright — last one, and this one is truly the light of the world. This is my youngest, Sloane. She is the poster child (quite literally) for her Montessori school. This is a picture of her at “work” — when she goes into her school, she gets right to it. The lesson she’s demonstrating right now is how to clean up a spill. I know that’s not exactly what that looks like, but for her, in order to do the work of cleaning the spill, she has to make a spill, and then she can clean it. And that act/reflect/act cycle is one that is definitely enhanced by the Montessori method (I too am a proud Montessori kid) but it is really about building on what is natural for her.

This is a girl who also jumps fearlessly into swimming pools, and it’s not that she’s “risky” she’s just interested in taking action. We are the ones that put the fear in her — fear that she might need to learn how to swim, or fear that if she pours the maple syrup out on the table again, Mama might lose her mind, but like her sisters, she’s creative, she’s curious, she’s innovative. We all are.

The iterative process is a natural function of human development and raising children who recognize and value the process of innovation, reflection, and iteration that is innate to them is more meaningful to me than any single workplace achievement.

In Conclusion

So to you, as students — as the future of this profession we have all chosen, I call upon you to not wait for those a-ha moments. Make space for creativity — recognize those things that help you to think divergently, and share those insights with your team — your tribe — your collaborators — whoever those people are around you that you can align with to create and meet common goals. And take the first step and then another — know that you can do this because you’ve been doing it — everything is a draft.

The innovation is not the thing you make — the innovation is the way you do it — differently. Thank you.