What Businesses Can Learn About Innovation from Cultural Anthropology

My good friend, Jeff Salz, is a fantastic speaker and a Doctor of Cultural Anthropology. Lately we have had some fascinating conversations about what businesses can learn about innovation through the study of cultural anthropology.

To get things rolling, I suggested that there were two areas where the innovation world would benefit from his expertise:

1. Studying customers through anthropological means.
2. Learning about organization culture through the study of the history of civilizations.

In this blog entry, I discuss the first point. A future blog entry will address the topic of culture and civilizations.

Anthropological Studies of Your Customers

The traditional way to get customer insight is to do one of the following:

• Focus groups
• Surveys
• Customer analytics

Although these techniques are useful, they have quite a few shortcomings.

In my article on “Why Statistics Kill Innovation,” (pdf) I suggest that if you are crunching numbers, you are probably gathering information from existing customers. This will give you insight into their buying habits, usability behaviors, and other patterns. But most likely you are only gathering data about YOUR customers. As a result you are missing the input of former customers or people who never were customers.

Another reason that these techniques – especially focus groups and surveys – don’t work, is that they tend to test the conscious mind rather than the unconscious mind. For more on this, don’t miss my article on “Are Your Conscious and Unconscious Minds Aligned.” In it I discuss a testing approach called “Implicit Association Testing” that can help test the unconscious mind. However, you can’t always get access to your customers in a way that they can take such a test.

What can you do?

Become Indiana Jones

You can don your Indiana Jones hat and do some anthropological studies.  Where possible, you can observe your customers. By doing this you can find unarticulated needs and wants.

One client of mine decided to do this. They publish text books for students and instruction manuals for teachers and professors. It wasn’t until they started to watch the teachers in the classroom that they developed some interesting  product enhancements. For example, during one anthropological study, the publisher found that teachers lugged several extremely heavy books from class to class.  This led the publisher to create a version of the instruction manuals that could be segmented.  This enabled teachers to carry only the section of the book they needed that week, and not an entire semester’s worth of paper.  Teachers never made this suggestion during surveys and focus groups.

Jeff has another interesting suggestion. He believes that the best way to understand a culture – and the unconscious beliefs – is through the stories people tell. By engaging in storytelling and listening to stories, you can uncover the true culture. These aren’t the typical business-like conversations you have in boardrooms. Rather they are more akin to the stories that you would tell while sitting around a campfire.  Jeff said to me…

Whether Neanderthal, Neolithic or New Yorker, our most important decisions are made on an ‘affective/emotional’ rather than ‘cognitive/objective’ basis. To accurately apprehend the subjective elements that drive and inform a culture – and its decision-making – there is no substitution for personal immersion. The only way to understand people is to learn their language – spoken and unspoken. Break bread, swap tales, share coffee, wine, laughter and sorrow. In the process you will discover the ways you and they are the same. From this ‘sameness’ may come not only the understanding you seek but – if your mind is fresh – a new awareness of yourself and your society as well.

Now is the time to don your fedora and see the world – and your customers – with fresh eyes.

The Magic of Innovation

In a previous blog entry, I discussed why watching “Pitchmen” (the Discovery TV show) can give you ideas on how to create more marketable solutions.  [Sadly Billy Mays, the show’s co-star, passed away the other day]

It is time to admit another guilty pleasure of mine.  I also like to watch “Magic’s Biggest Secrets Finally Revealed.” For those of you not familiar with the show, there is a “masked magician” who reveals how various magic tricks are done.

I treat this show like 60 minutes of brain teasers.

First, the trick is shown as it is seen by the audience. Then, the magician does the trick again, showing how it is done.

After the trick is first shown, I typically pause the TV (you obviously need TiVo or a DVR for this) and try to figure out how it is done. I develop several theories. I am right about 70% of the time. I find this is a great way to stretch the mind and look for solutions to problems. It is even better than lateral brain teasers. [Read my 10 lateral brain teasers to get you thinking]

What I love about the process of magic is that magicians make the impossible happen. They decide, “Hey I want to slice a woman in half,” and then they find a way to do it without killing the subject.

This is a great lesson for creativity and innovation.

Sometimes we get stuck in the mundane. We get stuck in thinking about reality and what is possible.

But what if you could become masterful at making the seemingly impossible, possible.

What if, instead of solving possible challenges, you started to solve seemingly impossible problems?

What if, instead of looking for realistic solutions to challenges, you were to look for ideas that seemed impractical?

When solving a problem, one of the first questions I ask is, “What are impossible, immoral or illegal solutions?” Of course you don’t stop there. But it stretches your thinking. From there, you can then figure out ways of making these impractical solutions, practical.

The study of magic is itself a creative endeavor. The more you think like a magician, the more you too can make the impossible possible.

Innovation Lessons from Around the House

Last night I was hungry and decided to make some tuna fish. I opened my refrigerator and found an 18 ounce squeeze bottle of mayonnaise.  As I started to make my meal, I realized that the mayo had expired 6 months ago. I guess I don’t use it very often because the bottle was still 90% full.

After throwing out my expired food, I realized that there is a lot to learn from things we take for granted around the house.  Here are just three thoughts I had this morning…

Fail Cheaply – Although Costco is one of my favorite stores, I rarely buy perishable items there because I can’t predict how much I will use. Sometimes, as is the case with my mayo, buying the smallest size and paying a premium is better than saving money on larger quantities. Smaller quantities result in less space used, less waste when things don’t work out, and lower costs all around. In business, your best bet is to become masterful at creating small, inexpensive and scalable experiments that give you insights into the real world…not just backroom-based predictions. As you gain new insights and become more confident that a new idea will work (i.e., there is greater predictability), then you can ramp up and go for efficiency.

Sell One, Make One – I debated using a different example for this… One situation no one ever wants to be in is sitting on the toilet and running out of toilet paper. The best solution is to always have a spare roll within reach. When the main roll is finished, the spare role is put into the dispenser, and the backup roll is replaced. This is an example of a simple manufacturing technique called “sell one, make one.”  To avoid running out of product, companies often produce large quantities of inventory. But as we saw in the “fail cheaply” example above, this can lead to waste. Items that don’t sell need to be liquidated at significant discounts. In the meantime, the inventory takes up space and hurts your cash flow. Instead, if you get your manufacturing process (or your innovation implementation process) efficient enough, you can make one immediately after you sell one – that is, when you sell one, you make one. You will never run out if demand never exceeds your ability to manufacture.

Lather Rinse But Don’t Repeat – Shampoo bottles are famous for telling you to lather, rinse, and repeat. I have been doing it every morning without thinking. As an experiment, I tried skipping the repeat step. No difference. I even experimented with using less than one pump of shampoo. Same result. Sometimes we take on wasteful activities because we never through to step back and question them. I reduced shampoo usage by 75% without any impact on my hair. From my experience, most companies can reduce wasteful activities simply by questioning what has always been done in the past.

Here’s something to try. Every day, find something interesting around the house…

• It could be the upside-down ketchup bottle (what took them so long to come up with that idea?).
• It could be the laundry detergent that is super concentrated so you use 75% less liquid, meaning less packaging and easier carrying.
• Or maybe it is the Clorox Disinfecting Wipes that impregnate paper towels with cleaning solution to simplify cleaning.

After selecting your innovation, see how that concept could be applied to your business.  Do not look for ways to apply that specific product.  Instead you want to apply the thought process that was used in developing the product.  For example, with the Clorox wipes, where in your business can you combine two distinct items (products or processes) to create something that is simpler and more efficient.

The purpose is not necessarily to find new ideas (although that would be nice).  Rather it is a great way to exercise your creativity muscle.

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Inc, once said, “Creativity is just having enough dots to connect… connect experiences and synthesize new things. The reason creative people are able to do that is that they’ve had more experiences or have thought more about their experiences than other people.”

Or, in my words, creativity is about “collecting and connecting” dots.

This daily exercise will help you become more observant (collecting dots).  And it will help you become masterful at connecting dots.  All of this will help you become more creative every day.

For more on my perspective on creativity, read my article on “Dot Versus Line” thinking

Listen to my CODcast

I was recently interviewed for a podcast by Jeff Brainard of “Catch Your Limit Consulting.”  His company uses a fish metaphor, hence the “CODcast” name.  Clever.

In this interview, I discuss the challenges associated with innovation – and tips for success. Enjoy.

Listen to the CODcast

Small Business Radio Interview

Today I was interviewed on “The Small Business Advocate” with Jim Blasingame. This internet radio show address a wide range of topics of interest, no surprise, to small businesses. This was my 4th time on his show, and I honestly believe that Jim is one of the best interviewers out there.

On this morning’s show, I spoke about Innovation Personality Poker. And in particular, I spoke about how to create high performing innovation teams by getting each person aligned with their innovation strength.  Be sure to listen in…

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