Sneaky innovation

A workshop for learning how to experiment better.

tl;dr: I unpack the reasoning behind a product strategy workshop I run where teams learn-by-doing four key skills of effective innovation work: Asking good questions, framing problems well, designing effective experiments, and refactoring experiments to be sneakier.

Hello friends,

Amorphous consulting is great (and energizing) when you encounter a client that gets it. I was in Chicago two weekends ago for the Specialty Coffee Association’s annual Expo, a frenzied tradeshow which offers ample anecdotal evidence that the specialty coffee market is worth $60 billion a year. I was there to run a 3-hour new product strategy workshop for roasters.

A sprawling, friendly, scrappy kinda city.

This workshop was the first piece of a larger project with Caravela, a specialty coffee intermediary that’s been buying green coffee beans from growers and supplying it to roasters for nearly a quarter century. For decades, Caravela has been working with their farmers to improve the quality and sustainability of what they grow and process.

Now they’re expanding their ambit to do more work with roasters to improve the quality and speed of new product development. The logic here is that quality-focused intermediaries and farmers sell more high-quality coffee when roasters successfully roll out new high-quality coffee products. (“Product” doesn’t just mean physical objects like cans of ready-to-drink coffee — it also includes services like ultra-quick train station coffee kiosks, and experiences like coffeeshops with #vibes that appeal to particular demographics.)

I’m helping them with this phase of their evolution, hence a product strategy workshop for roasters. I love this logical yet oblique strategy that Caravela has adopted … and not only because it is implementing many principles I wrote about in this article about how intermediaries can play a valuable role in markets that affected by uncertainty.

Good experiments and sneaky strategies

The Expo workshop was a compact version of one I developed for public service organizations that wanted to become more effective when faced with uncertainty: Unpredictable changes in the demographics they serve or the values and priorities of their stakeholders.

Government agencies look different from businesses, but the problems they face are structurally identical. When demand is uncertain, business-as-usual doesn’t work and product innovation is the only hope for survival and success. (“Product innovation” = changing what the organization provides to its customers, whether that’s a physical product, a service, an experience, or whatever.) So far, so obvious.

Unfortunately, both governments and for-profit businesses face two hurdles to doing good innovation work.

Hurdle 1: Organizations hate to fail, and innovation work is always failure-prone.

Hurdle 2: Organizations misinterpret innovation as always being big, expensive, and tech-focused — hence demanding too many resources, too much time, and exposing the organization to too much potential downside.

These hurdles make organizations either avoid innovation work or approach it in counterproductive ways.

Fortunately, I have a way to overcome them. That way is to run many small, cheap, minimal-downside experiments that are well-designed to be highly informative about what product to develop and how to develop it.

Everyone knows that experimentation and prototyping is crucial for innovation. But, for me, overcoming Hurdle 1 requires not just experimenting. It requires being strategic about experimenting well. This means designing experiments that are informative about the market and your place in it, even if the experiments fail. To do this, the experiments must be driven by well-framed problems and good questions. And overcoming Hurdle 2 requires explicitly designing experiments that are small/cheap/low-downside, and profuse in number. These are among what I call “sneaky strategies” for doing innovation work inside organizations that hate doing new and untested things. The links above unpack these concepts in more detail.

For organizations to get better at responding to uncertainty, their teams need to learn the skills of asking good questions, framing problems well, designing good experiments, and refactoring experiments to be sneakier. This is what the workshop is for.

A workshop for learning-by-doing

The workshop is a series of structured progressive tasks that participants go through in teams. At Expo, the participants were leadership teams from individual roasters — but similar workshops have worked for participant groups comprising management teams from P&L units at an investment fund or policy teams from a government ministry. Each functional team works together, separately from other teams participating in the same workshop.

For participants, there’s no pre-work other than doing some thinking about uncertainties they are facing. (At Expo, the roaster teams came in having thought about a specific customer demographic they wanted to target with a new product.) Each team then goes through a full cycle of constructing a problem around a good question, refining that problem to be more experimentally tractable, and then refactoring the experiment to be sneakier and thus more likely to be run.

This happens in a structured but intentionally low-tech way (everything happens with pen, paper, and a whiteboard) in the space of 3 hours — and each team finishes with an actual experiment that is designed to be sneakily doable that addresses the uncertainties they started with. It’s fast, situated, concrete, and practical learning of an approach to innovation work that teams can reuse again and again.

I’ll be previewing a similar-ish program for the Singapore Civil Service in May, and running another round of the same workshop in Copenhagen in July. Please send any thoughts you have about useful things to add.

Another pizza vernacular

And finally — does it seem that I left Chicago without eating what was probably too much 🍕? Think again. (I think about pizza a lot.)

Deep-dish sausage and mushroom at Pequod’s.

See you here soon,

VT